Ted Clayton

@Kevin Muldoon –

In addition to a strong interest in WordPress, I also maintain passions for sex, gardening, hiking, electronics and nuclear power. The last is the only one at which I ever made any money. That we have a passion for something doesn’t imply that our involvement with it should be monetarily rewarding.

Indeed, many of us make a private sport of seeing how many (non-paying) passions we can nominally maintain, without creating painful problems for ourselves. This Matt Mullenweg character – he plays the saxophone, and takes 10s of thousands of photographs, but he needs to go do something else for money, to financially support those passions.

And so it is with the profoundly overwhelming majority of all those who have an interest in WordPress (and other coding, computer activities … with which WP-interests are nearly always heavily intertwined/inseparable).

There are specific problems & issues that arise, when WordPress is viewed & posed as ‘rightfully & properly’ a money-making opportunity … or when a WP-related forum like this WPTavern website is held forth as a place that is more or most-appropriately about those who do or aspire to make money with WP.

For example, why should WPTavern be promoted on the Dashboard/Admin of every WP installation, shown to millions & 10s of millions of users for whom WP will never have any monetary role? To provide an august bully-pulpit for a relative handful of commercial operators? To crassly spam the masses, on behalf of (commercial) developers?

People who would like to make a living doing something with WordPress (very commonly, put in other words, hoping to avoid having to go get a real job), obviously are or become oriented to a model in which it is normal, desired & expected, that those who would use WordPress for anything, will – well, yeah – have to spend some money in order to get it to actually do so.

If the product is easy for anybody to use, and to achieve the kinds of things they have in mind to do, right out of the box … where does that leave the commercial aftermarket community?

A common pitfall of developers of Free Software, who also want to somehow make money off it (i.e., not get a real job), is to take advantage of the traditionally crappy documentation that (doesn’t) come with it. They themselves know the software inside & out, so when users find that they are unable to actually use the product, can’t understand it and have no effective learning-materials, they must turn to the experts for help. For a fee, of course.

This practice of oh-so cleverly obfuscating the “free” software-product, and then requiring money in order for users to get it to actually perform as advertised … is EXACTLY how & where Matt Mullenweg got his big break. This is precisely why WordPress was able to defeat whole genera of fire-breathing website-software dragons that formerly terrorized the user-base countryside with impunity.

Volunteers and hobbyists are the main actors who hold up & power the WordPress phenomenon. And so it is with all large, successful Open Source, Free Software enterprises.

It is a weakness and imperfection of the WPTavern resource, that its usual clientele tend to be experts, and business operators. There should be a lot more people here who are more representative of the huge cultural base who actually make the product a success.

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