Last weekend, at WordCamp Europe in Sofia, Siobhan McKeown gave an excellent talk about the fundamental principles that underpin WordPress. For me, the most essential one is freedom. Being an open source Content Management System, WordPress is both “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. And while the former has probably been a big factor in WordPress’s amazing growth, it’s the latter that we should all really be thankful for.
Ownership
WordPress represents an opportunity for many to publish their work, and retain ownership of it. Your WordPress* site is yours. In an age when half the web is owned by corporate greed, this is easy to forget. Whenever you post content to Facebook, you give them control over it. Your tweets are essentially Twitter’s. Net neutrality is under siege in many countries, and in the middle of all this there’s WordPress.
Democratizing publishing
The web itself was designed to democratize publishing, and WordPress has adopted this as one of its mantras. If – in the long run – we as internet users want it to remain free, we need to support organizations and projects that strife to keep it that. Own what you create. Contribute to, and use, software that serves your goals, not those of advertisers.
20% and growing
As was mentioned in many presentations at WCEU, one in every five websites now run WordPress. It has – by far – the biggest market share of any CMS. And it’s free. It’s not controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft or Facebook. There is no venture capital**, there’s just an amazing community developing a very good piece of software. WordCamp Europe was a great event, and my personal take-away was this. Thank you, Siobhan.
* This applies to self-hosted WordPress.org sites
** See Aral Balkan’s excellent post about Ello
