In a deep discussion around supporting essential projects in the WordPress space Tom Willmot and Joost de Valk explored the issues around the topic. Specifically how does this get solved?
As they described a particular project that you can learn more about in the full episode, it led into many paths that led to the need for change. For contributors keeping up all of these essential projects and in reality, are like saying “Hey, y’all pay up for what I’m doing for you here for free.”
Joost opened it up with this thought it it went further into who should really be stepping up.
In a perfect world….
Joost: But it also opens up a wider discussion about how do we support the tools that we use that are not like the tools that end users may be using, but the tools that we use to build those. It’s this whole ecosystem. And are we even aware of the fact that we’re using this code? Well, I think it’s a problematic thing, and I have my opinions on how we should solve this in an ideal world. Unfortunately, I’m not the one who gets to decide that.
So in my ideal world, we would have a WordPress app store where WordPress plugins, the plugin repository would not just be for free plugins, but would also be for commercial plugins. And we take a percentage of sales there and put that money to work on stuff like this and lots of other things. I think that would make WordPress better for everyone. We could how we want plugins to sell their things, and we couldn’t enforce all the proper legalities there that are needed, and we could fund the companies and the projects that we need that we all need to, well, to sustain our work.
And there is so much more…
Well, that was the perfect world for Joost. But Tom and Joost went on to talk about other ways of funding these projects and who should be stepping up. Of course, it’s not even that simple.
Listen to the full episode Funding WordPress Projects with Tom Willmot and Joost de Valk here.
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