 So we're here and we're all that he went introduced. Yeah, so so we've got slides on that. Yes. This is me and Yeah, this is you Yeah, do you want to tell anybody? No, yeah, they know that it's all boring What's more important is this one people and always realize this but there's actually four of us that run Yoast Omar's here in front. So if you want to bug people about things in at Yoast Omar's a better person to bug them. Yeah And actually we're on it. So Michiel who's not here, but he's watching Michiel is and I do the light side of Yoast, which means it's marketing Yoast Academy or the projects. Yeah, which makes me a no martyr dark side. Yes That's sort of works if you know us. Yeah, and sometimes people cross over Anyway, that's not what we're here for though. No, we're here to talk but usually we talk about SEO and We're not going to do that today So we're going to have a talk which is kind of a business talk or community talk Talk about open source talk about how WordPress changed my life all of that in one talk. It's going to be great so It's basically a talk about why we love open source and I'm going to tell you a little bit about why we love it so much to start with just now and then we'll also show that it's totally Able it's totally true that you can also make money with an open source project So we'll show you how we make money, but also some examples from from other companies and other stories But it's not all about making money because if you take the making money part too far It will backfire. So we'll tell you a little bit about that as well But to start why do we believe in open source? so There are actually three reasons why we think open source is so very great and the first reason is that We believe that open source is the way to new knowledge and new solutions. I Actually think it's the best way or the only way two heads are always better than one The knowledge of two people or more people combined Will always exceed the knowledge of just one person and if people especially people from different backgrounds from different companies Work together and cooperate on one project that project will benefit So in short if we stand on each other's shoulders, we become giant and we should take advantage of each other's merits and talents And the second reason why we believe in open source is because all the other all the other Ideas are just more wasteful So if you look at a website of a hospital or of a school There are millions of websites and they're basically all the same I totally get that a website needs a distinct design to make it look differently, but the functionality Is pretty much the same So everywhere around the world developers are working and making projects that are basically the same That's totally wasteful. We should not invent the wheel over and over again and with WordPress We have a wheel and we iterate on that wheel. That's just great. That's why we love it And the last or the third reason why we love open source so much is because it's an equalizer in a project like in WordPress Everybody can participate. It doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter what you come from Doesn't matter what gender you have everybody can help everybody can pitch in It's very inclusive. It offers chances to everybody Whether whether you have programming skills or you love translating or you have organizational skills Everybody can contribute Now it's up to you because it's about money So For lots of people open source is synonymous to free That doesn't have to be true But it is true for a lot of things So WordPress is open source and it's free and a lot of open source projects are also free software projects But that doesn't mean that companies creating that software cannot be profitable companies Open source does also not have to mean nonprofit There can be a lot of discussion about how you do all these things But I'm gonna show you By showing you about the growth of a company. I know fairly well How open source can be profitable So I started my own company in 2010. This was my office. It's not very glamorous I can tell you that on the left of that picture if I had zoomed out a bit more you would have seen the washing machine This was our attic and it was Just me doing consulting On the side I had this hobby project called WordPress SEO That I really did as a hobby up until like 2012 At which point my lovely wife who always says that I'm the one talking about money Said to me, this is no longer sustainable We had or I had a million users a shit ton of email and Forum support requests and everything and I was handling them on my own Because I thought that that thing had to be free Completely and that just doesn't scale So we started doing things slightly differently and we create it WordPress SEO premium now known as Yoast SEO premium and the company has grown a bit since This was our team last year at YoastCon and If you think this is a lot of people we added another 30 this year, so I mean that group creeps and growing So I started in 2010. I was on my own somewhere in 2012. I saw the light and We started hiring people This is the all the current employees at Yoast by start year To be fair, we've only ever hired seven more that have left us Two of them have returned So yeah, it's pretty good to be a yes apparently and there's now 80 of us in the Netherlands and 20 more across the world in Our support team and a couple of very notable developers So what we've seen is that freemium is a very good model for software a Freemium product like Yoast SEO where you have a free base that everybody gets to use and A premium model that allows people that want to do things faster or that's what we choose to choose for but that Want to do extra things in the premium plugin? But as soon as you start doing that you run into all sorts of problems You see we had this vision of Yoast and that was SEO for everyone That's distinctly different from SEO for everyone who can afford Yoast SEO premium So when we do major features that we think are important for the web and Yeah, we do think a bit like Martin We put them in our free plugin a Couple of years ago we released our readability analysis, which was a lot of work And we put it in our free plug-in with no counterparts in the premium plug-in the premium plug-in has all that But it's exactly the same as far as the readability stuff goes because we think it's that important If you're gonna need it to optimize your website, it should be accessible to everyone That's probably not the most profitable decision we ever made But at the same time keeping true to those thoughts Has helped us grow tremendously To the point where we're now a 10 million u.s. No more euros real currency A year company This is no longer about This is no longer about small companies and this number doesn't really matter But it does matter that we all realize that we're no longer just small amateurs doing small things for tiny portions of the web Wordpress is thirty two point five percent of the web We're in the ridiculous stage where we ourselves see stats where we're like four or five percent of that ten million and you Go like ouch. That's a lot It makes releasing a whole lot harder Which is why I sometimes have my opinions about that But we're not alone. There are very different models and open source that work as well. I Want to highlight a couple just to show that it doesn't have to be like this Elastic is fun to mention because they like us are Dutch They IPO'd earlier this year They're now worth around four billion on the stock market And if you read their prospectus, you would have seen that as of July 31st 2018 They had five and a half thousand customers So how you get to a valuation of four billion at five and a half thousand customers is completely beyond me But that's what the stock market does At the same time they have very high value customers We're one of them that pay a whole lot more than people pay for their plugins It's a very different model where people make money on the high end It's basically the same as what aquia in the Drupal community does they make money on the very high end of Drupal sites There's another example of magento Also got sold this year for the meager sum of 1.7 billion US dollars That's billion with a B They make money by doing two things they have their platform as a surface And they sell an a premium version of magento if you've ever tried to install it it's slightly more difficult than WordPress and I would seriously suggest if you're doing e-commerce to look elsewhere, but At the same time, it's a very profitable Well-run company. I think the most exciting of all of them is redhead a Company that really only system administrators know really well Because they make a ton of software that people use to power those servers that we all use every day They're very interesting because they have bought software companies and open sourced the software that they bought and made more Money from it than the company did before and they've not done that once but they've done that multiple times Day two got sold this year. This is how I got to my list for the meager sum of thirty four billion dollars To IDBM a couple of years ago. There was serious doubt about as to whether open source companies could be profitable And could have very high valuation There was a lot of shade being thrown over automatics valuation at some point If you look at these numbers now, it's not that weird But as Marika said earlier This is all about the money And it is not all about the money And so a few years ago actually on the first word camp Europe in line up Just did a talk about and was called the victory of the commons and I'm going to do a short Piece of that again because you didn't do it entirely correct Do it entirely correct? Yeah, so sorry So the tragedy of the of the commons is a theory a concept and it was Invented by Eleanor Ostrom with amazing economists and sociologists And the theory described how a group of people act When they share something a common pool resources And I think that story or the theory is very applicable to our work press ecosystem So let me explain the tragedy of the commons It's imagine a meadow. You can see a meadow with with little sheep Yeah, that meadow isn't owned by anybody. It's owned by a community of Shepherds or farmers And then they can put sheep on their meadow and the sheep can eat the grass and they can play and do their thing on the meadow And just be happy. So there's a community of shepherds and it's important to understand that Every shepherd can put a sheep on the meadow and the sheep will grow and it will give wool and lamps and meat and all stuff And all the benefits from the sheeps will be for the shepherds himself And this is a bit like the open source project we have WordPress is our meadow and we all read benefits from WordPress So our company by selling plugins Maybe agencies by building websites with this amazing cms What happens in this beautiful meadow is that every shepherd is motivated to add more animals because more animals in the meadow will mean more profits for him individually But an extra animal will also come with a cost The meadow will face an extra Sheep too and will there be enough grass to eat? And because the meadow isn't owned by anybody The costs of an extra animal will be for the entire community while the gains will be for the individual And here lies the tragedy of the commons of the meadow says Eleanor Ostra So if every shepherd is focusing on his or her individual game They will put more and more sheep on that meadow and the meadow will get too crowded This will lead to overgrazing and the meadow will become less and less productive And if the shepherds will keep on thinking about themselves, this will continue And if people only think about their own game, they will keep doing that because everybody else is doing it anyway So it's better to have like a really small unhealthy sheep than no sheep at all So in the end This will lead to a tragedy The meadow will get ruined. It's such a tragedy So Eleanor Ostrom uses this example to show how common good projects can go wrong And I want to reassure you I don't think that that that wordpress is going this way I think wordpress is flourishing But it does demonstrate that Thinking of only of your own interests could lead to really damaging an open source ecosystem And that's because of the free rider problem I think most of you have heard about this So if people only think about their own interests, common pool resources tend to get ruined Free riders, a few free riders is never a big problem But if everybody would think that way, then a project will get ruined So this is Adam Smith He's the one of the founders of modern economics And he said for quite a while and people still believe him That if every individual does was best for him, then the outcome would be the best for everybody So if everybody would just do what's best for him, then we'll have an optimal situation Well, Eleanor Ostrom already showed Adam Smith was wrong And then this other guy This this this really awesome guy. He um, he also showed it mathematically So this is John Nash and if you've seen the movie A Beautiful Mind You will uh, uh, know whom I'm talking about and otherwise you should watch that movie So according to John Nash The optimal results will come When people do what's best for them and what best what's best for the group So the total optimal results will only come when you do what you think of yourself and of the group So a shepherd should think of their own game and of the game for the entire matter Applying that to the wordpress community would mean that you should invest in open source software As well so in in wordpress core and wordcams or stuff as well as in your individual game Because in our case when Yoast was just Doing his plugins in the attic And making very little money He well, he couldn't cope with it. You can't cope with a one million users all by yourself It was really sad Yeah, you were sad at some point. Yeah, so Yeah, because you can't answer all these questions. You can't do that And when we were making money the the project became better and everything became better So that's the that's the point I'm going to make so John Nash mathematically Prove this pretty early on in his career that And that this could be calculated so he calculates an equilibrium the Nash equilibrium So the optimal results will appear when harvesting your meadow and reaping the fruits is in the right proportion And I think now you're up So I'm not able to calculate a Nash equilibrium for wordpress If someone else here is I would like to see it but my math skills are pretty limited But matt once spoke about five percent for the future and I think more than once but he he's spoken about this idea of companies spending five percent of their resources to improve wordpress We think that's a great idea and we've been doing that for quite a while um If everybody did that And that includes everybody who makes money from the wordpress project every host every um, every agency, etc There would be a few more of us in those weekly dev chats So we do a lot of this. Um, we we put at least five percent of our developer time on On wordpress core. I have to admit in the last year We had this small project that a few more people of our team worked on so in the last year It's been about 10 to 15 percent of our total developer resources that worked on Gutenberg um But we also had other people working on other stuff that we think is important for the global project So if you've heard about serve happy Yeah, the people involved in that are mostly sponsored by us There are a lot of other things happening like uh fixes on the forums by sir guy and a whole lot of Specific things that we think need to happen to keep that meadow green and all those gates in order, etc But that's just developer time and one of the things that is so clear is that there's more than development We sponsor a lot of word camps and We speak at them. We organize them. There's a couple of people here in front who spend too many too much time at work camps That's all giving back to the community as well. And even that is very limited to this group I get excited even more when we look at our local projects when taco is teaching young kids to build their first wordpress site in our town Or when omar spends every friday morning helping unemployed people To teach them how to build a website in wordpress and how to do SEO so they get a better chance of employment That is growing our our pie And making wordpress Truly bigger But and there's a common theme in the two talks this morning We all want to keep wordpress healthy This means that if we need to help even if that does not directly benefit our company Sometimes you have to put aside your egos, which in my case is a fairly hard task But we need to think about what's good for wordpress and what's good for our individual companies And it's really okay to think about that last thing too. There's nothing wrong with thinking about yourself, but you have to think about both In order to keep that meadow healthy, we all need to give back And aside from giving back, we need to come up with some grand rules If one of us is fixing the fence on the one hand It's not really cool if someone else is opening the gate on the other end If someone wants to give some extra water here While someone else is doing nutrition there, that might go wrong A lot of these things need some work And I'll give you a very concrete example I and we as a team were not really Gutenberg fanboys from the start The thing is we heard about it in June 2017 And we were like That has some rather big implications for our plugin It more or less meant redoing half of our code Which if you have ever looked at our code base, you can imagine is a tiny bit of work But after the initial Like descent, we decided okay, we're going to step in and we're going to try and do this And we figured out, hey, we need to help make Gutenberg better because we can't really do that So we started adding APIs to Gutenberg to make it extensible for plugin authors and make it better That part is fine The problem lies in the fact that we heard about it in June 2017 And I read last week in Matt's blog post that they started developing in January 2017 So what happened in those six months? Why did we find out so late? And how could our community And how could our community communication be so poor That people were developing on a project on the one hand And we were building stuff that we literally had to throw away On the other hand And we didn't know So we need to get better at that We were literally burning some of our five percent time in those months because we were doing the wrong things so The biggest problem here is probably communication So we want to prevent this strategy and actually Eleanor Ostrom's Solution to the tragedy of the comments was communication. Just get some rules. Just get those shepherds To understand that it's important to To nourish their meadow And I think we need to do the same thing and otherwise The three reasons I started with why open source is so very very important or very very awesome They will be jeopardized Because If we're not cooperating then we're not standing on each other's shoulders Then we're doing things their own way and we will not come up with those great innovations We need to communicate in order to come up with those great innovations and news new knowledge and solutions And if we're not communicating it's really really wasteful So I see someone painting the fence on one hand and then someone else building an entire new fence And just putting it on that meadow and then all the painting has been done for nothing And we as a group have become so very big That it's very hard to communicate with each other and we don't know what we're all doing and I do not have the solution for that I just I just think that we need to think about how to make sure that people are doing things That are going in the same direction instead of opposite Because I know everybody is doing their best and it's such a waste of energy if you're doing something That's not useful in a month or so And also if we're not communicating then not everybody can participate Because then only the people who come up with a really beautiful new fence Get their way And that shouldn't be the thing it should be an equalizer. Everybody should be able To pitch in that's the beauty of open source That's what I wanted to say no you you want to say something I'm sure So we're all in this together. It's more true in this project and in a whole lot of other things Um, but I think our communication needs to level up And we need a roadmap and a plan of where are we going and not just a development roadmap but a wider thing So we own this matter together and if we want to grow it And our companies and everything that's related to it We need to lead this together too I Was very happy to see what goddess here won't get us there on morton slides I agree And it doesn't apply just to code It applies to everything in this project So let's get that discussion started Thank you Folks we have time for some questions if you have a question We have two microphones set up on either side of the room here in the aisles Please come up and ask those questions so our live stream viewers can hear you Or if you need me to bring the mic to you, please raise your hand and I will bring it over Hi Um, I'm Christina. I am both a small business owner and on the organizing team for this campus or word camp us Which has been a lot of work and More than my personal five percent perhaps and I kind of my thoughts are around How much we ask of each other when we're all coming from very different places And I think it's interesting like to hear more and say we need to do more And then you're like, oh, we all need to do more and I'm like, oh my god I've done so much And I'm a small business owner and I don't have the backing of a other company or whatever and then in my life as well I I promise this is a question I also am involved in in the wikimedia wikipedia world, which is another very big global community we're all nerds in many ways and They have a lot of thoughts about all of this governance and stuff and but I never hear any of the word press people thinking talking about How wikipedia does it or the way users like the barrier to entry is so much different in the wikipedia world than it is in the Wordpress world where you maybe have to understand slack or complicated dev things or This whole community that is confusing and foreign so I guess my question is I heard a lot of things about like the people making money But how do we live in a world when a lot of us know that this will never be profitable for us? How do we still give without driving ourselves crazy and Draining all of our resources Where what does the comments say about that? I think I think for for For this audience we're preaching for the wrong Wrong audience because you're already doing your five percent And I think if if you're not making money out of wordpress the only thing you can give is time That's it But there are a lot of companies who are making a lot of money and they should be giving back five percent money wise I guess And also I I think it's up to the wordpress project to make sure that if you're giving that much more than the five percent Did you actually have to give or have to give but but what you can do meaningfully without hurting your own business? I think the project as a whole could do more to Reboard you for what you're doing and make sure did you get new business out of this or whatever we could do to To highlight people that are doing this this stuff Because I then it becomes mutually beneficial and we can all benefit from this So I know that joseph has been working on a five percent project for like a while And then But so there's We have to find that that equilibrium a bit more and I can totally understand that Organizing a word camp like this is draining I mean we had two people on the word camp europe organizing team last year And if I look at the hours I go like dude I don't really look at the hours, but But it's like It's it's a lot of time. It's a large investment even for us So I can totally imagine that it's it's a large investment if you're an individual But thank you Hey, I'm I'm jake. I'm the founder of ten up I have a I'd like to hear more from you about the intersection between governance and commercialized solutions because I think One of the things that's unique about our open source community I think wonderful about our open source community in many ways that it spawns amazing companies like your own Is that we have a little number of What I would describe is almost canonical solutions at this point For problems that I would say are pretty critical to the mass audience Over at press the solutions that arguably maybe at some point should even be in core be a part of for other cms Is be a part of that core platform not just seo, which I think has remained to you But forms calendars events a lot of solutions that Take on massive scale. There's a lot of features in our plug-in that should be in core 100 So like I guess my question is when you think about governance and you think about Entities that are outside the core open source project in many ways in their own commercial entities Is there a role for government governance? In major solutions that a massive part of the community adapts And become almost critical to 50% of the use cases of the platform I well, yeah, but I think they've already admitted to that in a bit We this week that we started on and to end tests for Gutenberg that Activate some of the largest plugins And and run some tests to make sure that we didn't break anything in that um I I think that's I mean, this is An incredible and incredibly big ecosystem That I don't like just like Marika said, I don't have the solution to this. It's a very hard problem in many ways, but To a certain extent we have a our Mutual responsibility to make sure that we keep stuff working and we've always done that with our backwards compatibility Ideas and with Gutenberg. We've done away with some of that but not really even all that much. I think in in the end We've we've reached a pretty good state of where backwards compatibility is achieved And people can still keep on running things and all the large plugins sort of work and some better than others because some work with Gutenberg and others work in spite of Gutenberg but Well, I think it's a mutual responsibility and I I think the core team is quite aware that they if they break a big plugin They're gonna get as much whining As when they break something in core itself that not a whole lot of people use Thanks Hi, this is a question about profitability and open source and specifically the freemium model So it seems to me that the freemium model is based on a trust in the community that in giving some of your work away They will see that value and repay it But I also notice a pattern that most companies that operate on a freemium model open source portions of their code and then other portions are kept in private repositories Is that assigned to you that trust has its limits? Is that an example of like that Nash equilibrium looking out for yourself also giving back And is that the right move? It's it's hard. So some of our premium repositories are open some are closed I can't really find a difference in the two in in terms of How profitable they are or whatever? So I think that some of our in the end We will probably end up opening up most of our repositories because I think that's the easiest thing to do because even to our premium plugin people want to do pool requests and I'm fine with people giving code But No, what is happening a bit more A bit more at the moment that you see companies move to a SaaS model first for their premium offerings We've recently done that jackback has always done that So there there's more and more companies that are moving slowly in that direction because it's a little easier to control And the trust factor doesn't become as big as big of a problem There's no easy solutions in that game It's it's pretty hard to to do right and to figure out a A good equilibrium that works for your company And for us, I mean it's it's it's gotten us a lot of growth And at times it's even hard to look at okay, so we want to do five percent. We've grown this much That means that we need to do this much more in the next year You saw that in Matt's recent post as well. Like he was saying that we'd add some more committers or developers because Automatic is grown. I think that's a good thing. It's over time these things Work out and everybody has to come up with their own Set of how do we do this and how does this work? And maybe over time we can even collaborate on some of that between Some of these companies Thank you Hi, Mariek. Hi, Josie. Thanks for the good talk. It's pretty inspiring The WordPress project has suffered traditionally from a bit of a bottleneck With contributors because of this kind of tiny team of committers who Have to deal with all of the contributions of WordPress How can the how can the project and the community Go about deciding on a government's model that Kind of gets rid of this bottleneck, you know this this dependency on a few small people who are sorry a small group of people who can They're all pretty small too How can the community kind of figure out a good government's model to reduce this this problem of a bottleneck So To be honest, I don't think the bottleneck of the WordPress community right now is developers I think the bottleneck lies in the project management layer just above that And Well, that needs work It needs a bit more of a as I said a roadmap It needs it needs a bit more of an idea of where we're going That is laid out in improper like posts or pages on WordPress or where I can see what we're going in and what the direction is and what we're What we're going to build and what makes sense to work on and what doesn't make sense to work on Because right now we let everybody work on whatever they want Which is I think to a certain extent fine, but we're not always going to merge everything that everybody's doing So we need to come up with a better Way of managing that and a better way of managing the expectations around it and I don't really think that the number of developers is even the problem. I think that the problem is that we We have this layer of developers that have commit rights But there's no like architectural Decisions being made In some group that then everybody works on it's just sort of happens And I would like us to have a bit more of architectural Like leads and go to a model where where there's an architectural board that decides we're going to build it like this And then another group of people probably should decide on what it is that we're going to build But these are distinct different things where you decide on what you're going to build and how you're going to build it And in every company in the world these these things are separated entities And I wouldn't mind work press being run a bit more like a global company But I mean that's my My view at it at the same time. I think we just need to have that discussion with everybody involved and see like where do we end up? Going to do that in January Apparently we're going to do that in January, but I'm open just starting today Thanks All right folks, we have time for either one more long question or two really quick ones. So we'll start right over there I've been pressured Hi, my name is Toru Miki. I came from Tokyo. I gave a talk yesterday. My question is that You've mentioned a better communication is needed. Could you possibly elaborate a bit more on that because Does it do you mean as simply more number of conversations or different way of visualizing the Discussion has been made or the summaries are made or and I also just asked this because I'm from Japan you're from, and I think you know the way people think When you get asked about more better communication They people tend to interpret a little differently. So the way you communicate What they think better communication is different from the culture to regions and Absolutely I'm well the whole the dog development is done in English, which You know my passion have no complaints about anything, but Since not hundred percent of what this uses is English language. I think it's about 50 40 something like something like that. I think Is there something to feel that gap in somewhere another You're making it even harder now Yeah, yeah, you're totally right that that's a cultural thing as well I don't know It is I I I can elaborate a lot more but let's do that offstage but I I do think that in essence it means that we have a Vision of where we want to go That is slightly more than a vision but has like okay So these are the things that we're going to build and this is the plan for the coming Year or year or two That is slightly better laid out than it has been for the last year The problem was with Gutenberg that there was a lot of thinking like that But it wasn't on paper and was very hard for people to find out what the goal was And I think that if we had gotten that a lot earlier It would have been a lot easier for a lot of people to see hey, this is actually very cool We need to step in on this Maybe democratizing publishing is a bit too broad to work on Yeah, so so I think that that's the the biggest thing it needs to go from okay So this is our vision. This is what that looks like in our vision Let's discuss those steps and then let's go from there Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. I realize it was wrong question That's all right. That's all the time we have today folks. Please give our speakers one more round of applause