In this RedMonk conversation, Andrew Hutchings (aka LinuxJedi), a software engineer at wolfSSL, discusses what he terms “a war going on within the WordPress community” with Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. Andrew shares his journey into open source, his experiences at MariaDB, and his involvement in the WordPress.org open source community. The discussion delves into the current litigation and his WordPress Slack ban, including this so-called war’s broader implications for open source projects.

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk and with me today is Andrew Hutchings, more popularly known by his online handle LinuxJedi. Andrew is currently a software engineer at wolfSSL but has previously worked at all kinds of places including MariaDB, Equinix, NGINX, Hewlett Packard, Rackspace, Oracle, and Sun. He is extremely involved in the open source community, particularly the MariaDB Foundation. As a computer hardware enthusiast, Andrew runs a WordPress blog discussing his hobby. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me on the MonkCast.

Andrew Hutchings (00:47)
Thank you. Thank you.

Kate Holterhoff (00:48)
Alright, so let’s begin with a little bit about your background here. So talk to me about what you do. I’ve tried to give a comprehensive biography, but how do you typically introduce yourself?

Andrew Hutchings (00:58)
That’s a difficult one always, but depending. So yes, I am now an embedded software engineer at wolfSSL, so wolfSSL is a encryption library, but also we have products such as Wolf SSH, things like that, all open source. And we can make it work everything from a tiny 16 bit microcontroller all the way up to big iron servers. So I’ve even done a port for a Commodore Amiga, know, a nineties machine and things like that.

Previously, the kind of era we’re going to be talking about in my life mostly is when I was at MariaDB, particularly the MariaDB Foundation. Not many people know that MariaDB is split into two entities. There’s the MariaDB Corporation, which I think is just now called MariaDB, just to be more confusing, and the MariaDB Foundation, which is the nonprofit side. The nonprofit side owns the source code does community outreachy things, which is why I was involved in…

WordPress community in the first place. So yeah, in general, I’m an open source enthusiast, I’m a C developer, and I like tinkering, I repair retro computers, Commodore Amigas, Acorn machines, design new parts for them, so I’ve got an electronics background as well, so a little bit of everything really.

Kate Holterhoff (02:09)
Sounds like it. So how did you first get interested in contributing to open source projects?

Andrew Hutchings (02:14)
going to have to go back to around 2003. And when I started using Linux full time, and I got a job at a hosting company an ISP, a really small one in Wales in the UK. And I got really involved in making sure everything’s running. And that meant making patches for various pieces of software.

upstreaming them into communities, things like that. I ended up running a LUG there for a while, Linux User Group, for a little while over there. And that really kind of got me into these, these kinds of communities.

Kate Holterhoff (02:47)
And have you contributed to Linux?

Andrew Hutchings (02:49)
I don’t think I’ve had a patch upstream that I’m aware of. I have done a lot of patches for Linux, but usually they’re side things that the community can get for really weird things rather than something that should be upstreamed.

Kate Holterhoff (02:54)
Uh-huh.

Kate Holterhoff (03:04)
Sure. It sounds like lately a lot of your contributions have been in the MariaDB area. So talk to me about what you do for them.

Andrew Hutchings (03:12)
So yeah, I used to work for MariaDB Corporation going back, I think that was around 2016 I started there. And I was there because I have a background in MySQL. I worked for MySQL under Sun and Oracle for a while. And also I worked for SkySQL, which was what MariaDB used to be called way back. So I’ve kind of been in the companies through and worked with these people several times over.

At MariaDB Corporation, I was the lead developer and manager of the ColumnStore project, which is a columnar engine for MariaDB. And I’ve also worked on quite a few other parts of the code base. And then I took a break, did a few other things. I went to Equinix, as you said, and I worked at wolfSSL for a bit there. Came back, worked on MariaDB Foundation, and MariaDB Foundation works a bit differently. So I was chief contributions officer.

So I dealt with, I also led development in a couple of engines as well, but I dealt with taking community contributions from companies as well as Google Summer of Code, which is student-based and general community contributions and making sure that they were ready to go into the source code, assisting the community with that kind of thing, community outreach things, so making sure that open source projects worked well with MariaDB and upstreaming patches like that.

So all sorts of various things like that I was working with.

Kate Holterhoff (04:32)
What’s your experience been like as the contributions officer?

Andrew Hutchings (04:35)
yeah, it’s kind of a developer relations type thing, I guess, but it’s hard because I don’t think there’s quite a perfect title to fit into everything that I was doing, yeah. experience was great. The community were fantastic. There’s always a bit of friction when dealing with…

us wanting to take in contributions and the core development team that worked for the corporation, maybe want to do their own thing rather than taking the community contributions in. So there’s always friction there that I had to deal with and things, that’s true of all these kinds of things. It was similar when I was at NGINX. The developers were all in Moscow and everyone else was all in San Francisco. So sales marketing that lot with San Francisco. And I was stuck in the middle in the UK.

and kind of almost working as a go-between between the two, which was interesting.

Kate Holterhoff (05:19)
you

Kate Holterhoff (05:22)
Okay, well that makes sense. So what did you actually do when you worked at MariaDB? Was this before you started contributing to the open source project?

Andrew Hutchings (05:31)
So which time, the corporation side or the foundation side in particular?

Kate Holterhoff (05:34)
Yeah, I guess I’m

Kate Holterhoff (05:36)
Yeah, I guess I’m just trying to establish a through line because I think that MariaDB relates well to talking about CMSs, which is where I’m hoping this conversation ends up.

Andrew Hutchings (05:46)
yes, yes, yes. So the more relevant bit, I think, is the foundation side where I worked with various CMSs. So I actually went to CloudFest, in Europe. So it’s a really, really, really big conference type thing a lot of hosting companies there and things like that.

Kate Holterhoff (05:51)
Okay.

I don’t. Okay, tell me about them.

Kate Holterhoff (06:05)
Alright, tell me about them.

Andrew Hutchings (06:06)
So it used to be

called Web Hosting Fest or something similar, became CloudFest. Now before the actual CloudFest, they have a hackathon. And the hackathon is very CMS-orientated. And for two years running, I’m not doing it this year, but for the past two years, I’ve led teams to develop projects around WordPress in particular, and MariaDB focused.

This is kind of how I got into the WordPress community because there’s a huge amount of the WordPress community ends up at CloudFest because of things like this. So yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (06:38)
Yeah, that’s super interesting. And then maybe just before we do jump into WordPress with both feet, when I was looking at the specs for a number of different CMSs, MariaDB is supported by Drupal as well, I noticed. So what is it about MariaDB that makes it so appropriate for this particular function?

Andrew Hutchings (06:54)
It helps that MariaDB started as a fork of MySQL. So pretty much everything that supports MySQL, particularly in the MySQL 5.x era will just pretty much just work with MariaDB. But MariaDB have added a lot of features, particularly performance related, which help a lot with CMSs in particular. And there’s some extra features they’re adding right now, the ones that we’re dealing with in CloudFest, such as

catalogs they’re working on. So catalogs is containerization inside MariaDB. So if you’ve got hosting a thousand sites on one database server, you can isolate them inside MariaDB with catalogs. So that’s something we were doing in the last hackathon. There is now AI functionality with MariaDB Vector. So you can have AI based search inside your CMSs

all inside your database. So there’s some really cool things going on, which I think are really useful for CMSs.

Kate Holterhoff (07:49)
alright so that helps me to get into the headspace of why it is that you are

such a great person to speak with if we’re thinking about what’s going on with WordPress right now. So let’s lay out the situation. How long have you had a WordPress blog?

Andrew Hutchings (08:04)
Oh, quite a few years now. Yeah, I’d have to go right back, but I think it’s got to be somewhere between 2016 and 2018 that I started this current one.

Kate Holterhoff (08:06)
Yeah?

Okay.

Kate Holterhoff (08:14)
And what does your blog usually discuss?

Andrew Hutchings (08:17)
Usually kind of whatever I want, it ends up being focused a lot on… A lot of people send me their vintage machines to repair and the really unique repair jobs that I have to do. I tend to blog about those, particularly what I found. So when there’s a weird fault, particularly some weird battery damage that is not usual. So I usually blog about that. I also sometimes blog about coding things that I do.

But yeah, in general, it has to be my vintage computer things at the moment.

Kate Holterhoff (08:49)
Amazing. And you blog a ton, I’ve noticed. I mean, I was going through the pages. You’re very active

Is that when you became interested in contributing to the WordPress.org open source community?

Andrew Hutchings (08:59)
So was through MariaDB that I was contributing that way. there was the first CloudFest I was at, we created a plugin, CloudFest Hackathon, we created a plugin to keep the MariaDB server healthy for your WordPress. So it identified issues within MariaDB that you could address and showed it on your dashboard as it were inside WordPress. So this is how I ended up with a WordPress developer account and so on.

Kate Holterhoff (09:01)
okay.

Andrew Hutchings (09:28)
maintaining a plugin, things like that.

Kate Holterhoff (09:30)
Okay. Gotcha. And so for folks who would like to contribute to the WordPress open source project, you’ve stated this obliquely, but you have to create an account to become a contributor. Is that right?

Andrew Hutchings (09:42)
Yes, officially yes. I mean, you could create your own Git repo and do your own thing and people have to pull it externally in. mean, there are ways of doing that, but if you wanted a plugin that’s in the WordPress plugin repository on WordPress.org, you have to create an account there. And then the source is hosted there as it were.

Kate Holterhoff (09:44)
Okay.

Kate Holterhoff (10:02)
Okay. And do you have any idea how many contributors there are?

Andrew Hutchings (10:05)
A lot. don’t know. Thousands I would imagine.

Kate Holterhoff (10:06)
A lot, yeah. Okay,

Kate Holterhoff (10:08)
That would make sense to me. And talk to me about how communication typically happens, because I know that you have spoken about using Slack as part of it. Is that the typical channel?

Andrew Hutchings (10:17)
Yes, so when you create WordPress account, you can log into the WordPress community Slack, which is a place where a lot of the development conversations happen. also have a lot of the teams have meetings there to go over various things like there’s a hosting team, for example. So all of the various hosting companies will have a meeting at set time on there to chat about various hosting challenges they’re having with WordPress.

All sorts of things like that. That all kind of centrally happens there. There are course other communication channels that go on. And I quite like the face-to-face things of CloudFest, WordCamp, etcetera.

Kate Holterhoff (10:56)
Yeah. I know you’ve mentioned WordCamp in some of your blog posts. Do you attend that frequently? It looks like those are global.

Kate Holterhoff (11:04)
I assume the local ones.

Andrew Hutchings (11:05)
They are global.

have been to the Athens one in particular, which is good. I’ve met a few people outside of that as well. So there’s actually a couple of contributors that live in the city down the road from me. that’s helped.

Kate Holterhoff (11:19)
All right.

So on RedMonk’s podcast, we don’t always get into drama, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to drag in a little bit here. So get ready.

Andrew Hutchings (11:28)
of course.

Kate Holterhoff (11:29)
All right. Last October, you published a series of posts about your experience migrating your WordPress site. And you allude to the fact that the reason that you’re doing this is because in your own words, there’s a WordPress war going on. So

It is well known that right now in the community there’s a lot of bad feelings. And maybe I’ll summarize it as best as I can. And you can jump in and correct me if I’m misrepresenting things. My understanding is that Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, he was also one of the co-founders, a co-creator of WordPress, the open source software with Mike Little.

He claims that competitor WP Engine used the WordPress trademark in a way that confused consumers. And he claimed that WP Engine does not pay trademark royalties to the WordPress foundation. it’s much more complex than that. A lot is going on, but that’s the TLDR as I understand it. Is there anything you’d want to add to the overview?

Andrew Hutchings (12:29)
think that covers the core of it. Obviously, I’m going to be careful what I say because it’s ongoing litigation and things like that. But yes, that’s the core of what started. Yes.

Kate Holterhoff (12:37)
Okay, thank you. And maybe just so that it’s clear, why do you feel like it is important for you to be careful with the way that you speak about this subject?

Andrew Hutchings (12:48)
I suspect with any kind of ongoing litigation you don’t want to be dragged into it if you see what I mean. I don’t want to… partly I don’t want to get things wrong because I could end up with me being litigated so I’m to preface this with everything is this is my understanding of what’s going on but I could be wrong here. But yes, I don’t want to be dragged into a lawsuit particularly one that’s not going on in my country so…

Kate Holterhoff (12:54)
I do.

Mm-hmm.

Kate Holterhoff (13:15)
Yeah, good point. All right, fair enough.

And when I’ve tried to read what you have written about this publicly, you have mentioned not wanting to be dragged in because you know people that are involved personally. And I’m trying to make that clear that you have a stake in these conversations. So I want to be respectful of how you want to talk about it.

Andrew Hutchings (13:36)
Yeah, absolutely.

mean, everything I’ve said in my blog, I’m happy to talk about, so that’s fine.

Kate Holterhoff (13:40)
All right. So we have paraphrased what the war is. We’ve explained your unique position in this space. And I want to have you talk about this quote war from the developer’s perspective and the open source contributor perspective, because I feel like a lot of times that gets omitted in these conversations.

So from your perspective, talk to me about this three part series.

and what you shared with your blog audience.

Andrew Hutchings (14:07)
So yeah, essentially, as you said, the war started. I don’t want to get into who’s right and who’s wrong here. To be honest, most developers probably don’t really care who’s right and wrong here. They just want to get stuff done. But at the same time, I don’t want to be funding either side of the war either, which is why I migrated from WordPress.com to a WordPress.org site instead, which…

essentially means the open source version of WordPress. I installed it on a hosting company and my blog is currently hosted there instead of WordPress.com. So I’m not funding either side of this and I don’t want to be in kind of complication there. So that’s where it started. And then this whole checkbox thing happened.

To contribute to WordPress, as I said, you’ve got to have a WordPress.org account. You sign in through a sign in page, and then you get access to all the stuff such as your code contributions, your project itself. So if you’ve got plugins, there’s places, there’s forums and places to report and things like that. That’s all behind this login page. And…

One day a checkbox popped up that said, I’m not affiliated with WP Engine in any way financially or otherwise. I just had to look at my other screen to make sure I’ve got the wording right there. And you had to tick that box to actually sign in. It wouldn’t let you sign in unless you tick the box. And at the time I contributing on behalf of the MariaDB Foundation. Now I can’t say for certain

that one of the financial donors to the MariaDB Foundation is or is not affiliated with WP Engine. So, and I definitely can’t on a foundation’s budget, there’s no way could afford a lawyer to check it out. So I really wanted clarification on what was going on here. So, know, I went into the Slack, there was a conversation going on on Slack at the time about the chat box in particular and

Matt said, like the emphasize, well, the checkbox value is not stored, so you don’t have to worry about it anyway. I kind of pointed out, well, the checkbox value might not be stored, but you know, you log when people have logged into WordPress.org because you know that and you know when the checkbox has been checked, you know everybody that’s checked the checkbox. So, I mean, saying that got me banned from Slack basically.

immediately and a lot of people in the same conversation immediately got banned as well. People who asked other questions have been blocked by WordPress.org on Twitter. I know some important people in the community have recently been banned from accessing all contribution systems including Yoast quite recently, spelt.

Juiced but his name’s Yoast. He’s quite an important person in WordPress community and he’s been banned because he came up with an idea of what he thinks the WordPress community should look like going forward. yeah, and it’s… it’s… okay, I’m a small fry in this. I was maintaining one plugin at the time so it’s not like it’s a huge deal for me to get…

banned, but at the same time, what I’m questioning why the developers that just want to get stuff done, just want to make WordPress better, are being dragged into a war between essentially two companies that is nothing to do with the actual core source code itself. So this is, this is why I started blogging about it all and hoping that, you know, I always hope that my blog posts will help somebody out there.

Kate Holterhoff (17:42)
Right, and these blog posts were published in October. We’re recording this at the end of February. Have you been reinstated?

Andrew Hutchings (17:49)
I have not checked since November, but I hadn’t been reinstated in November. I suspect the ban is still there.

Kate Holterhoff (17:54)
Okay,

Kate Holterhoff (17:56)
Okay, wow. And that probably goes for the other folks who were banned as well.

Andrew Hutchings (18:00)
I know a few are reinstated, but yes, I don’t think everyone was.

Kate Holterhoff (18:03)
Okay.

Kate Holterhoff (18:06)
Okay, all right, interesting. And your experience does not speak well to how WordPress.org is treating the community instead of facilitating a dialogue or allowing a democratic process to happen.

you were autocratically eliminated and I assume that there was no explanation accompanying your ban?

Andrew Hutchings (18:26)
No, not at all. I, so I could be mistaken here, but for reading from what other people have been saying, WordPress.org is pretty much wholly owned by Matt. There are a couple of other people, I think, behind it, but it’s pretty much wholly owned by Matt. So he has the right to do whatever he wants with it, really. And that’s part of the problem. You know, it’s a, you’ve got this whole thing with open source projects. Do you go for BFDL?

Kate Holterhoff (18:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchings (18:52)
benevolent dictator for life model or do you go for more of a democracy kind of thing? it’s no model is perfect. I’ve seen good and bad in all models. I’ve worked for an open source project, which uses a voting system via meritocracy to figure out who’s going to lead projects. But of course, that can lead to a basically a popularity contest and

It’s a difficult thing to figure out. You need leaders in projects, figuring out who those leaders should be and whether they are the right people to do it, that is difficult. And the right framework to hold everything to account is also difficult. I haven’t seen many places where it’s done right.

Kate Holterhoff (19:31)
Yeah, and it’s an extremely challenging time for open source more broadly. We speak to a lot of folks who were affected by the Terraform re-licensing and other rug pulls. You know, this is a big issue right now. I’m thinking of Redis. So we’re in the age of forking and folks in the community are concerned about, the

control of these projects that they are stakeholders in. It’s hard enough to get folks to contribute, especially folks like you who are really successful programmers and know their way around a code base. This isn’t just like junior developers trying to flesh out their GitHub accounts to get a job or something. You are someone who can contribute in a meaningful way.

So the Matt Mullenweg situation, I think, is something that I’m seeing a lot of chatter about online.

especially if you’re poking around on Reddit, he posted what, two months ago, and I quote, what drama should I create in 2025? And that was roundly denounced by the community who were really not impressed. I guess he thought he was joking, but you these are significant issues that have repercussions on folks’ livelihoods.

I mean, you’ve spent your life contributing to open source and spent a lot of time. You’re calling yourself a small fry, but even supporting one plugin, That’s sort of the essence of open source, right? And it’s really what makes WordPress such a great community to be a part of.

That’s the success story, right? That there are all of these plugins and a diverse set of folks who are willing to maintain them. It’s a tremendous ecosystem.

Andrew Hutchings (21:05)
you raised some good points there. The fact that it’s hurting a lot of people through their businesses. A lot of people make money through selling plugins as well, selling add-ons on top of WordPress themes and things like that. So if they are locked out of the community, that can make a dent on their income, you know. And I’ve…

seen recent stats, I don’t know how real they are showing that since this is all started, there has been a drop off on the number of sites using WordPress instead of an increase. So I’m assuming based on that graph that people have started to migrate away because of this. I don’t know how real those stats are. I’d have to look more into it, but again.

that hurts the community, it hurts people and it’s all because of this ongoing battle where there is collateral damage.

Kate Holterhoff (21:54)
Yes, very much so. So I have two questions on this. Are you now encouraging folks who reach out to you about where they should start looking to start maybe their own blogs to choose a different CMS like maybe Drupal? Or do you still feel like WordPress is a good solution and can ultimately get through this drama?

Andrew Hutchings (22:12)
I definitely think WordPress can get through this. what it will look like coming out the other side, I can’t predict. I know there are ongoing efforts to, not quite fork community, guess. I mean, there probably are efforts to fork community, but at least have something like WordPress.org, which is more community-orientated. I can’t predict where it’s gonna lead.

Kate Holterhoff (22:16)
Okay.

Kate Holterhoff (22:31)
Yeah, I was certainly going to ask if you thought maybe a fork would be the answer here. In your experience contributing to open source over the years, what is your perspective on forks? Do you feel like they are ever a positive?

Andrew Hutchings (22:42)
yeah, they’re definitely, not every time. So you mentioned right at the beginning, I worked for Sun Microsystems. So I worked at Sun Microsystems through the Oracle acquisition. And I’m sure it was great for a lot of people. It was not great for me and quite a few other open source projects. So one project that did pretty well through forking was LibreOffice, which was the fork of OpenOffice.

Kate Holterhoff (22:44)
Okay.

Yes.

Mm.

Andrew Hutchings (23:06)
Who talks about OpenOffice anymore?

So there are forks that do end up being the natural successor. know MariaDB definitely wants to go that way and I think they are heading that way because there are certain things in MariaDB that MySQL just can’t do or they are doing but they’re putting it behind a paywall almost.

This is why particularly in more open source sites, WordPress, Drupal and things like that, you’ll see MariaDB used quite heavily. A lot of the new features, particularly thread pooling, things like that, know, there’s more of the accelerating type features are in the open source version, but in MySQL, they’re more in the commercial and cloud versions.

Kate Holterhoff (23:41)
Right, and on the licensing and forking note, many folks on Hacker News, for instance, who have responded to this controversy have been very outspoken in their feelings that Matt’s just looking for money. According to one post, I read, quote, he’s basically doing the same thing Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo did, but worse. He wants the money without getting the relicensing backlash, which I’d argue is worse than those other instances, end quote.

I feel like this is maybe an extreme opinion, but there does seem to be a feeling in the developer community that what’s happening on WordPress demonstrates that there is a need for change and the folks in charge of the project are not being good stewards and that the community needs to take back control so that, you know, folks like you don’t get banned and other contributors are not put in a similar situation.

Everyone just wants to see this project succeed.

Andrew Hutchings (24:30)
Yeah, no, I’ve heard a lot of different stories behind the motivation. I saw something saying that it was because financially WP Engine was about to overtake Automattic or something like that. I don’t know what the true story is that made it happen now rather than before or later.

Kate Holterhoff (24:49)
Do you feel like there’s any merit to what this particular Hacker News poster is saying that it does have to do with the money?

Andrew Hutchings (24:55)
yeah, probably, but I don’t know Matt personally, so I can’t really speak to his motivation behind this.

Kate Holterhoff (24:57)
Probably.

Kate Holterhoff (25:03)
He’s surprisingly involved in the Slack community. I mean, the fact that he was the one that was responding to all these questions, I didn’t realize the degree of his personal involvement and accessibility.

Andrew Hutchings (25:13)
I know. But you could almost, it’s probably not quite the parallel I want to make, but you could almost do a parallel to Elon Musk and how he’s always on Twitter engaging with pretty much everyone there, if you see what I mean. I didn’t want to quite make the parallel on the personality, but the parallel on the fact that they are leaders and they are accessible to their community.

Kate Holterhoff (25:27)
Yes.

Kate Holterhoff (25:35)
Right, right. I’ll make this comparison. If they don’t want to hear from you anymore, they will ban you from the channel and you can no longer talk to them. So you know there’s that.

Kate Holterhoff (25:43)
you there’s that.

Andrew Hutchings (25:43)
Yes, there is that too.

Kate Holterhoff (25:46)
All right. Well, thank you for wading in, sticking your toe in this controversy because so much of the web does run on WordPress. I feel like it was important to get some perspective on where it stands today from someone who can speak from a contributor’s perspective. When I was a front end developer, I did a lot of work on that CMS. I know WordPress well. I mean, RedMonk’s blog is a WordPress blog. So, this is a conversation that’s important to more of the community and even the non-tech community that folks may realize.

And the ripples of what happens with this are going to continue to move things outside of just the sphere that you would anticipate. So to sum up, I think it’s important to talk about and your experience is shocking to say the least. So I’m glad to have had you on here to share it.

Kate Holterhoff (26:27)
to have you on here. well.

Andrew Hutchings (26:27)
I would rather it’s me than anyone else. I

can weather it, you know.

Kate Holterhoff (26:31)
I am interested in your thoughts on the future of open source. So you have seen some things in your time. Open source is in a precarious place. What do you see as the unique challenges that are plaguing open source? And can you suggest any solutions for making open source work as well as it possibly can?

Andrew Hutchings (26:47)
So the biggest challenge is always money, really. It’s funding. Developers want to contribute and they need to put food on the table at the end of the day. You’ll get student contributors kind of drive by and things like that. But at the end of the day, funding is a thing. Now, not everyone can do the Red Hat model and not everyone can just do support and consulting on top.

Kate Holterhoff (27:01)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hutchings (27:12)
you know, and fund the entire project that way. So there has to be, there is no one size fits all. And that’s, that’s part of the problem. People see a model and just try and move to it and then realize it doesn’t work. You really have to take a look at the individual circumstances of the project to figure out what is going to be the right solution for that project. And this is why I think you see a lot of people.

try something, gave up, and then went for a source available license instead of an open source license, such as the instances you mentioned. I could think of a few more as well. But yeah, think that’s the biggest challenge. Getting contributors is not a hard thing. you have a genuine open source license, GPL, Apache 2, whatever, getting contributors is not hard because people like working that stuff, like contributing back.

getting them funded is another thing entirely.

Kate Holterhoff (28:01)
And that really reflects what I’ve been hearing as well. But it all strikes me as an unanswered question. How do we pay for it all?

Andrew Hutchings (28:07)
Yeah, exactly. like I said,

there’s no one size fits all. Every project is going to have unique circumstances regarding.

Kate Holterhoff (28:13)
So before I let you go, Andrew, how can folks hear more from you? What are your preferred social channels and are you attending or speaking at any conferences in 2025?

Andrew Hutchings (28:21)
I haven’t got any speaking booked right now. You can always reach me on Bluesky as LinuxJedi. Actually pretty much everywhere as LinuxJedi. Yeah, that’s where I’m at.

Kate Holterhoff (28:34)
Bluesky, like it. All right, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you, Andrew. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.

A RedMonk Conversation: Andrew Hutchings on the WordPress War

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