1. Layer one is your internal thoughts.
2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you.
3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act.
4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams.
5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer.
In 2005, being a remote-first company was anathema to investors and business leaders* at the time…
I can’t predict everything that will change over the coming decades, especially with AI making the next few years particularly hard to predict. Still, I do know a few things that won’t change: everything flows from our people, open source is still the most powerful idea of our generation, growth is the best feedback loop, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. People will always want fast, bug-free software; instant, omniscient customer service when they need it; and experiences so intuitive that they usually don’t. And once they’ve had a taste of freedom, it’s hard to return to their previous state. (For more, see our creed.)
We’re very proud to announce that Vinny Green, a former WordPress community member, has started his fork, FreeWP. We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!
In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.
That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches.
The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.
WordPress.org is Matt Mullenweg’s personal website (source: the Automattic account on X.com). Matt is also the owner of our largest competitor, WooCommerce. The conflict of interest was always there, but in the weeks following WordCamp US 2024, Matt crossed several lines that make it crystal clear that he has no intentions of running WordPress.org as an open and fair platform.
Today, those same values have driven us to leave the WordPress.org plugin repository.
We would not be supporting open source if we were to distribute our plugin from a site where Matt will lock out users for any reason or even take over complete plugins if it suits him.
It would not be purposeful work to continue using the .org site or contribute to a WordPress project that could lock us out at any time or take over our plugins if it suits the one person in control of it all.
