 I'm moving around so I'm masking. I am our mobile microphone, but we have a standard microphone also. We have people all over the place in the world at home and we also have a resident question asker right here. So. He's gonna represent the online questions, right? Yes, correct. And also, so you all know, I do not know what any of the questions are in advance. I will be hearing them all for the first time, which also means I might not know the answer. So I might pass it to someone in the audience or sometimes I just don't know. So that's what happens with these. That's my job. It's the passing. All right, so we can kind of start wherever you want. We can start with in-person. We can start with some pre-submitted. We can start with some currently submitted. We have an in-person. Looks like we have a hand right here. You might come in over to the microphone just so folks in the live stream can hear. And if you have also a question, feel free to go up and line up. We're gonna prioritize, of course, those of you who came on a train for two and a half days to be. And then I think Paul will be reading some of the ones that are coming in via the social channels, YouTube, Twitter, et cetera. So we'll have a mix of both. Hey, man. And then we'll have food and drinks. Thanks so much for the presentation. It's very exciting stuff. Looking forward to the future. My question is about openverse. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the safety measures that have been thought about or will need to be thought about in terms of the content that is uploaded there? Will EXIF data be removed from photos that are uploaded? That's my question. That's a great question, actually. So first, I do not know if we've thought of EXIF before. So you actually just raised something really great that we should write down and look at later. I will say that, so there's two things there. There's openverse, which is, think of it like a search engine. So it's crawling literally the whole web and looking for things that are Creative Commons licensed and providing a directory of them. So what people publish of their own websites is kind of the state of responsibility there, but it's kind of like a Google, but for Creative Commons licensed content. That is separate from the wordpress.org slash photos directory that we've created, which is kind of like a Getty or an Unsplash or everything, but all CC0 licensed forever and ever, by the way, we're not going to change that on you like some other photo directories have. That goes through moderation. If you want to submit to something there, you'll see that right now it says, hey, one of the check boxes there, it certifies, of course, one that you have rights to the photo, please don't upload other people's photos to it only your own, but two, that it doesn't have any human faces or other copy written material in the photo itself. So this first phase of the photo directory really focused on things that can truly be CC0 all the way. Something we've all been learning is, that's a little complicated, is with humans and like a picture of, let's say you had a picture of a piece of art, that might have a copyright embedded. So even if the image is in CC0, something in it might be copy written. And so we're working on what is an open source GPL CC0 model release? And what does that look like? And that is a very open set of lawyers working on things, but once we have it, I think that's actually really exciting. Maybe someone could license their likeness as well to be in the open verse. Maybe we generate something with GPT-3 that replaces faces in it. And then that's the thing that's open. Or maybe someone even says, maybe while I'm alive, I don't want my likeness used, but maybe on my death, I bequeath my likeness to this open commons that belongs to humanity. There's lots of different ways this could work. Kind of is fun to think about and imagine, but that's how this is working right now. We'll probably, you know what makes sense is something that maybe shows the X of day that you upload before it goes into the thing, at least for a photo directory. So just aware of everything that's being put in there. Location is actually fantastic to have. Like if I have a picture of Stonehenge, the location where I took that picture is kind of awesome, but other metadata which could be contained in the X if probably people should just be aware of, right? So we'll work on getting that added to the photo uploader. And by the way, awesome question. Thank you. Thank you very much. Strong open. A lot to think about, thank you. Did we cover everything you think is important there or anything else? Okay, awesome. Matt. Bob, before you ask your question, can you share how you got here? My train, from Seattle. From Seattle? Yeah, Seattle. That's on the other side of the country, right? Yeah, that is on the other side of the country. And spending about six days on the train, two days here. And yeah, it's been an adventure. So I've come all this way. Give me some woo for 2022. Some woo? Woo. I wanna hear what WooCommerce is gonna do in 2022 with your eyes. Sure. So woo, spelled W-O-O, for those that don't know, is a plugin for WordPress, which creates commerce functionality and WordPress. It's one of the 55,000 plugins that exist, but it is a very popular one and an important one, especially as we look at things like you saw Shopify coming up on that usage graph. WooCommerce is an open source Shopify, and we hope that it can do to democratizing commerce what WordPress has done to democratize and publishing. In terms of what's coming for WooCommerce in 2022, the thing I'm most excited about that's most relevant for this audience is I would say embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. So right now, Woo still has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the classic editor or short codes or other ways of creating like checkout blocks, products, everything like that. There are some plugins and experiments around Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg. And I think the team's been working really hard on that. It is an amazing team that both includes a lot of community and a lot of folks sponsored by automatic to work on that. And I would say that's what 2022, the thing that's most relevant for this audience that I'm excited about is more Gutenberg and Woo. We also have the CEO of WooCommerce here. Does that sound, give me a thumbs up. That sounds good. All right. Sounds good. So more Gutenberg. That's kind of the answer to everything is more Gutenberg. It's like a cowbell, you can always have more cowbell. You can always have more Gutenberg. Thank you. Well, that was worth 6,000 miles. Thank you. Cool. All right, shall we move to our online question? Or, oh wait, we got one in person and then next let's do an online one just to make sure we have everything from those folks. Sweet. So my question is about styles. I think the theme styles or variants, I think they were called initially is a very innovative idea that lets people paint their sites. And it's great for developers, designers, and everyday users. So I understand that. I think what could be interesting and I wonder if you've thought about this is perhaps there's a style directory, like we have a pattern directory. Is that something we're in the thought of? I know there's a couple other concerns. We'd have to have a standardized way that themes are being made, which we're moving towards already. So I don't know, I think that's an interesting way to empower people to also get back to the directory or into WordPress just like patterns. Like if you can save a pattern, can you save a style and then anybody can use that style. Is that something on the docket? I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here. It's basically science fiction. But if you could imagine us getting a really great repository of truly like CC0, creative commons, zero license stuff around images, fonts, et cetera. That opens up a lot of possibilities for creating essentially GPL compatible styles like you talk about. If you've ever watched or helped a friend set up WordPress or watched a user test or something, one of the most heartbreaking things is when someone chooses a theme based on the image in the demo. And I learned this myself. So one of the previous themes is like 2010 or 2011. There wasn't a lot of open source licensed imagery in the world. And so I just took all my photos and GPL licensed them. And so one of these old themes, I think it's 2010. There's a picture from Ireland of some sheep on a road. And we would literally do user tests where people are like, I like the sheep. So I chose this theme. And it's like, yes, I like the sheep too, but you could put any image in the world there. It doesn't just have to be a sheep theme. It's really, it's a, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Styles right now are tied to themes and it's tied to theme JSON. And so I think theme JSON is theme.json, which I call JSON. I don't know if I pronounced it, but that's how I call it. It's the number one thing. If you're a theme developer, interested in developing themes, look up that, learn as much about a theme JSON as possible. I don't know if it's specific to the theme, but over time, particularly for things like typography, which is a passion of mine, actually my very first open source code I ever created, which was a contribution to B2, the predecessor WordPress, was Texturize, which was, I had learned a ton about typography and I wanted all posts to have proper typography. So instead of a prime mark in between, like a word like that's, between the that and the s, I wanted it to be a proper curly quote. And so this first code I ever contributed to open source was Texturize. I'm very passionate about this. I would love for people to be able to see the incredible transformations that can happen to a site through updating the typography and particularly pairings of type, where you might have like a really awesome serif paired with a really awesome sans serif for the body texture, something like that. And I think how themes evolve a little bit. Actually I'm not sure entirely how themes evolve, but to be honest, but it's pretty exciting that the theme can almost be a little bit like, honestly it reminds me of jazz. I grew up playing jazz, that's why we name every WordPress release after a jazz musician. Jazz are often based on something called standards. So like a good chunk of all popular jazz songs are built on rhythm changes, which is set of chord changes, actually from I think a musical song called I Got Rhythm. I Got Rhythm, I Got Music. Really cool chord changes there, really awesome bridge, and you can, people have written lots of other songs on top of that. What's cool is the chord changes, I think I'm a little outside of my realm of expertise here, but the chord changes themselves are essentially open source, meaning anyone can use those chord changes. Now the melody you talk right on top of it might be proprietary, might belong to a specific thing, but that kind of underlying structure is open. And so I think themes become that kind of underlying structure, and then what people take on top of it, it's the chord changes, and then what people create on top of it could be as varied and unique as all the things written, people have written on top of the rhythm changes as they're called in jazz, which is incredible. Thousands of songs, countless millions of like performances and solos. So that's my hope for what happens with themes, and hopefully we can get more, like we don't have a ton of CC zero license fonts yet. So hopefully we can develop more and more of that content in the openverse slash metaverse that is available to all WordPress users. And the cool thing about openverse as well is the API is totally open. So that's available to Drupal users, Joomla users, everyone else, Wix users, Squarespace users, anyone who wants to access this content it is something the WordPress community is creating for a benefit to the world. So if you contribute to that, you're essentially contributing to humanity's repository of cool open stuff that's available for anyone to use in any way. So I'm very excited about what the future of openverse will be. We have the very first, we basically just got the code ported over and the search engine ported over and not even the audio yet that's coming in January. And I could not believe more in the mission of that. So. Sweet, thank you. Thank you. Cool. And you can line up behind her if you also have a question. But come on in. What's your name by the way? Allie. Hi Allie. Hi Matt. So I create a lot of content around WordPress for the people who are looking at WordPress in front of them for the first time looking to, you know, build something with it having never used it before. And I think a lot about the young people who are looking at WordPress as a path to something as a path to improving their life or brightening their future, whatever that might be. And I know that we have on the live stream right now a lot of young people watching and listening and being inspired by this. What advice would you have to those young people who are looking to inherit this world that we're leaving them? And what advice can you give them as far as using WordPress as a tool to improve what we're leaving them? No pressure. That's a cool one. In my life, one of the most influential things I ever realized was that everything I was using every piece of technology, every piece of furniture every chair, everything was created by someone who wasn't that much different from me or people I knew. And so there's crafts that can be developed when you focus on an area. And in fact, with the internet, there's more and more of this through YouTube, Wikipedia, online blogs, et cetera. There's so much you can learn about pretty much any area that you're passionate about. And I think for me, and it might be Steve Jobs, someone else who talks about this, but just this idea that the things that I use and love or created by people not that much different from me was really powerful. And that's part of what got me contributing to open source in the beginning when I was, again, I got started on the forums of B2. So B2 was a predecessor to WordPress. It had some forums probably run by like PHP BB or something. And I just, at first I was asking questions and then later I saw questions I had already asked being asked by other people and I started answering them. I didn't know anything. I couldn't, I cannot overemphasize how ignorant I was as a 17, 18, 19-year-old kid in Houston, Texas who had no formal training, no university courses, et cetera. So I think what's exciting about the digital economy is that in this openverse that we're trying to create together, it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from or anything like that, it matters what you contribute. And learning to contribute is never been more accessible and more open source, more open. The other advice I'd give is that when you're younger, you have a lot more time than you realize. And so try to invest that time if there's anyone young listening to this and what your passion is. If you feel drawn to a particular area, I was actually shocked both in my own experience and in seeing many other successful folks since then and how being a world expert in XYZ, whatever XYZ is is maybe a hundred hours of work in some areas, maybe 200 hours of work. But when you're young, you have a lot more hours than folks who maybe are providing for the family or are full-time jobs or other things. So really embrace that opportunity of both school, education, literature available to, et cetera, to try to consume and absorb as much of it as possible. I feel so much, one of my only regrets as a almost 38-year-old is that I didn't pay as much attention when I was in school. And I went to all public schools in Houston, but I had some amazing teachers. Like the text I was given, the literature, et cetera, like was free or inexpensive and was really passionate from these teachers of some of the best things that humanity's created so far. So check that out. And the code equivalent of that is WordPress in a lot of ways, meaning that, again, you can think of the other largest internet services in the world, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, et cetera. You can't go and look at how they work. You can't suggest a change to how the Google homepage works or the Facebook algorithm or anything like that. Those are all proprietary. With things like Wikipedia and WordPress, it's all open source, which means that you could suggest a change of the WP admin homepage, which hundreds of thousands of millions of people see and impacts a lot of folks. So open source for me was a huge enabler. Like a not growing up in the Bay Area or other traditional like Seattle or other traditional like centers of technology was really exciting for me. So I'll start with that. Hopefully I guess folks and maybe younger folks like something to start with. And I saw Josepha raise your hand so maybe you have something to add there. I do. I also have an additional thing. Can I introduce you really quick? Of course. So Josepha is the lead of WordPress.org. So she is all of the co-things we talked about around like the directories, et cetera. Josepha's in charge of that. So she really leads a community development of WordPress.org, everything around that. So thank you, Josepha. And now. And now this. So I think also one of the most important things, where am I looking? I'm gonna look at you Matt. I think also one really important thing to remember for people who are getting started with WordPress for the first time is that the open source nature of it does mean that we also have really active and passive ways to learn some of the most vital 21st century skills that the workforce of the future will need. We need it now, but not all of us actually are any good at it in the world. WordPressers are generally really, really good at it and there's a reason for it. It's cause we do it every day. And so like that in the immediate, in my immediate advice that I can give to people, that is the number one thing is like, observe the way that this works because it's going to be relevant from here until they're done wanting to work. Anything else in the audience? Cause we have an unusual audience here. Here we go. Do you mind introducing yourself really quickly? Yeah, I'm Michelle Farshad and I'm with SLRWP, but I also do a whole bunch of other stuff in the community, which is fun. So my question is actually off of those two, one of my responses as well is we have a ton of education out there, right? So whether it's through Learn.WordPress, whether it's people on YouTube, all those opportunities to learn about it, what are we doing to bring the next generation in to help continue to grow? I'm watching the age of people I see at WordPress continue to grow, but not a ton of people coming in with us, right? Oh, I don't know, I'm looking around. This is a very youthful group. Well, I'm one of the older here. I admit that, but... So what are we doing to bring... I mean, I tweeted last week, Olivia Bissette, she's in middle school, had a hackathon. I think I tagged you on my tweet. And she herself, with her sister, put on a huge hackathon of all middle schoolers. But that's unusual. So what are we doing to make sure that the next generation of kids is going to want to contribute the way that the people in this room do? You stole my answer because I was gonna talk about David and Olivia Bissette. Yeah, I wonder what you do there. David Bissette, one of the most prolific tweeters about WordPress. Hi, David. I will post a lot of gifts from this talk. Olivia is his daughter. And I already started to be really active in the WordPress community. I would put that back to everyone in this room and everyone listening here as well. The old adage, you teach a person to fish, or you teach a person, you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day, you teach a person to fish, you feed them for their lifetimes. I think you just give a person a blog, or even worse, a social media account. You feed them for a day. You teach them how to create the web, which is, in many ways, in my opinion, the most amazing actualization of shared humanity and knowledge. Like how do we create something that lasts beyond our own individual lifetimes? It's the web. How do we create something that lasts beyond us, a legacy, a true legacy? It's adding to the information that's part of what hopefully goes forward for future generations and then allows us to sort of fast, skip all the mistakes, skip all the learnings to what's latest. It's upgrading the clock speed and version of humanity. So for anyone who's listening, mentoring and guiding someone younger than yourself and to participate in the WordPress community is, you get like a, what is it? A mitzvah? You get like an extra special bonus and sort of like the history of open source in the world if you bring someone new into it. So I highly encourage you. And there's so many, if you look at some of the biggest contributors to WordPress over the years, a Ryan Bourne or an Aisin, et cetera, part of their legacy beyond just all the code they wrote is all the people they brought in. And the folks who felt like, they knew a lot but they weren't able to contribute or something and they said, no, you got it. You can be a core committer. You can be someone who patches a core bug. You could be someone who translates into WordPress into an entirely new language or preserves a language for posterity. Like there's so much you can do using WordPress as the launchpad for contributing something positive to humanity. And so that is, I think, a real key. So I don't know what is perfect for the young people because I'm not one of them anymore. I was when WordPress started. But to the extent you have anyone in your lives, both here in the audience or broader in the folks watching this that has that desire to have an impact, teach them how to be involved with open source and whether that's WordPress or some other open source project, I think is the best way to contribute to the future of humanity. Thank you. What's that? More kids camps. More kids camps. Yeah, we do have some kid camps. So very specifically, we have kids camps at places like our camp, was it Orlando? Miami. Miami, Miami, yeah. Which David, this had helped organize, so. Let's all be more like David. If you have kids, why aren't they contributing? Like, no, I wouldn't put that on anyone because I know kids do the opposite of what you ask them. So like, tell them don't contribute to WordPress and then maybe they won't. So take your kids to WordPress Day. Take your kids to WordPress Day? Actually, it's an awesome idea. We'll talk later. Oh, okay, we'll talk later. Yeah. Cool. Should we do one from online? This is a question from, I've lost the name, but it was essentially, there was a couple of references to the metaverse and I think like sort of a joking way, but thoughts on WordPress in virtual reality. WordPress in virtual reality. Let's pass the mic really quick. You wanted to say something? Hey, no, we got one. We got one. Here, here you go. Again, the intelligence in this audience is far greater than what I have, so I want to push this back as much as possible. I just wanted to say WordCamp Boston did do that. If not earlier this year, it was last year. They had a virtual reality WordCamp. Oh, cool. And it was last year, thank you. Just, yeah. That's a tricky one. I don't know how to answer that, to be totally honest, because the internet is virtual reality. It's just kind of text-based. And then when you think of other ways of interfacing with virtual reality, like VR headsets or AR, et cetera, one good thing WordPress is great at dealing with contents. So don't build on top of WordPress if you're building a messaging system or a real-time game or something like that. But if you're making something that essentially is people inputting content and outputting that to the world, you should probably be building it on WordPress, whether it's real estate, records, almost anything. If it's content going in and out, that should be on WordPress. One company's nameless should talk about this idea of a metaverse. They often talk about the interoperability, this idea that contents or items that you create in one metaverse is available in all of them. If I imagine my most sci-fi thoughts of the future, science fiction, it's hard for me to imagine that if humanity interacts more and more in a virtual space, that'll be controlled by one company. I really think it'll look more like the web, like a place where people can register domains. We actually had a joke in here, I forgot to tell, so you get it now. What if there were something like a DAO, a distributed autonomous organization that managed a namespace which you could pay to own a part of and in fact, there's no gas fees for that owning part of it. The fees are borne by the merchants. That would essentially be buying a domain with a credit card or any registrar. So we have things already that any person listening to this can have true ownership of like a domain that's there like home on the internet. Internet is the best metaverse we've created so far and part of that's because of the interoperability and the open standards that these things are built on, patent-free standards as well, which I'll emphasize. To the extent that things will be, I don't know exactly what it'll look like, nothing I've seen so far is that compelling, but to the extent that there are fun content-driven things that are gonna be part of the next generations of the web, web three, web four, web five, web 10, I expect WordPress will be at the center of it. Me? We've got an in-person question. Okay. Please introduce yourself. Yeah, hi, my name is Bud Kraus. We've never had the pleasure to meet, but I've heard you speak at several of these. Thank you. And welcome to New York. So all I wanna know is that this is a brand new space, sorry, for the people who aren't here, but this is a brand new space. What are you gonna be doing here? And can we use it too? The people that live in this area? Yeah. So for those who are watching online, we're in this cool space in the no-ho, which means north of Houston, which is a New York incorrect way to pronounce Houston, which is the city where I'm from, neighborhood. And it's cool neighborhood. It's near a lot of public transit and it's a cool space. A company I'm involved in, CEO of Automatic, when we purchased a company called Tumblr, got this space. And so we have this until 2025. Not coincidentally, a lot more of the people working on Tumblr and everything we do have gone more distributed. So there's not many people in this particular space as they used to be, but we try to create this in a way that much like tonight could be a place that people use for events and other community things. So if you're interested in doing that for something particularly open source driven within the community, we're happy to open up this space for anything in the future. And a cool kind of aside is that all the art in this space, including what's behind me, is from people on Tumblr. And so these are all publishers on Tumblr. So all the art that'll be in this space and eventually right now we have this wall covered. We're gonna cover every single wall here. So we have many thousands of square feet to cover still. It's all gonna be people who publish on WordPress and Tumblr. And in the future, Tumblr will be powered by WordPress. So that'll happen. So it'll all be the same thing. So it's kind of cool that it'll all be artists that use open source publishing to put their content into the open first. All right. Hi, Matt. My name is Anil. And I have a curiosity question. You mentioned about Gutenberg phase three, which will be collaboration. So I'm curious, what can we expect at that phase of Gutenberg under collaboration? That's a good question. Because I talked twice as long as last year, but maybe missed that particular point. So the collaboration phase, collaboration, sorry. Phase three of Gutenberg is, imagine Google Docs. It's probably the best analogy. You know how when you're in a Google Doc, someone else is editing at the same time, you see exactly what they're doing, what they're changing. So imagine every single thing in WordPress updating in real time, as other people edit it. So there's no more version conflicts or anything like that. Literally WordPress represents the kind of real time source of truth for whatever the content, whether it's, they can post pages or other, is in real time. And then there's both a real time awareness and workflows around editing that. And so the real time awareness is kind of the easy part, actually. It's that part where when someone else is editing at the same time and you're editing it, you see what's happening. So there's no conflicts. The workflow is a little trickier. And that's what I'm actually more excited about working on, where workflow is a word we use for someone edits it, someone approves it, someone like, there's different stages of different forms of content, which is also very relevant for translation. Someone writes their content, let's say in English, and then maybe it gets translated into another language. I realized this personally to share another weird story like the economics thing. On WordPress.com we use GlotPress and allowed anyone to translate any string on WordPress.com. And for a while, on every, I forget what language it was, but let's just call it Italian. Instead of saying leave a comment on every Italian blog, hosted on WordPress.com, it said happy birthday. So someone obviously was like trolling us and said like instead of leave a comment, it'll say happy birthday. So that was actually pretty funny. Whoever did that, I'll buy you a beer. But ideally there would have been a workflow or someone else who speaks Italian would have said this says happy birthday. How do you even say that in Italian? Does anyone know? I know if they say Vellis Navidad, how do you say like happy birthday and let's say Merry Christmas? What is the happy birthday? What's that? I'm guessing when the tally. When the tally? Okay, okay. We'll go there. Someone would have seen that and said that doesn't mean leave a comment. And we shouldn't put this on the homepage of every single Italian WordPress in the world. So that workflow I think is key to phase four of Gutenberg which is why it's part of phase three. So collaboration is the fun part which will be easy and hard to do at the same time which is that kind of real-time co-editing and there's some cool new standards and browsers that allow us to do this in a decentralized way which I'm really excited about using essentially features built in the Chrome and others that allow us to like connect with people editing a page or post at the same time using just a browser and open source technology but the more like approval, et cetera is a little bit more of the later phase three. So 2023, we'll work on that. For now, contribute to open-verse, block patterns, blocks and block themes. That is the key for 2022. Again, if I get on stage next year and say there's 30, we've gone to 40 block themes, utter failure. Please throw fruit at me or something else. I hope that we have 300 or ideally 3000 of these block-enabled themes and that both that's updating existing themes and creating new ones allow people to express their creativity online through the Gutenberg editor. Again, right now, if you look what social networks do, they try to really narrow you into a very limited expression of creativity. Why? Because they want to serve ads against your profile and what you're creating. They want to target you. That's not what we're trying to do with WordPress. So we want you to create the most unique, cool stuff online as possible and blocks-enabled people do that and I'm looking forward to more and more of it. Does that answer the question? Yes, thank you. Cool, thank you. So someone stand up over here. What was that? That was just a journey. Oh, okay. You have preempted so many of the questions that were submitted. Oh, we're getting you one though. Somewhat related to what you were just speaking to. The question is, so soon we'll have blocks that allow you to drag everything everywhere. We'll soon have a ton of free images, patterns, et cetera. How are we going to make all of that easy to understand and use for users? Yeah, that's our problem. So this is what it's going to be, I think the focus of core WordPress iterations over 5.9, 6.0, 6.1 and beyond is, I'll say it in an abstract sense, which is things like user tests. And we do run these and we publish them on our make WordPress.blogs, which is where we'll ask someone who's never used WordPress before, please try it out. And this is something proprietary software companies do all the time, but in WordPress we actually publish these and so you can see them, you can learn from them and you can see what someone who's never used WordPress before has trouble with using and not using. Things that might be very, very intuitive to people in this room, because we've been using WordPress for five or 10 years, might be very challenging someone entirely knew the concepts or the abstractions that we use. The other example, which I hope everyone listening to this does, because if you're listening to this, you're like a WordPress OG, is helping a friend use WordPress, right? I hear a laugh in the front row. It's like that whole thing, like friends don't let friends publish on Wix, like you take someone who's building a website and you say, all right, I'm gonna help you set this up. And while you're doing that, you're probably gonna learn a lot of things that are tough in WordPress. And hopefully that helps you then contribute a bug or an improvement or something into the core software that makes it easier for everyone else to use. By the way, to the extent WordPress, again, that's what's amazing about it to me is when you look at that 10 times larger than the second in the marketplace, by the way, Shopify is a company valued at like $140 billion. How do we do that? How do we be 10 times larger than that? It's just people helping other people. I can't put it more simply than that. It's how WordPress has had basically no marketing dollars through its whole history. It's friends telling friends like, hey, you want a website? Let me help you set it up. And then when they have trouble coming back to a core WordPress make site or something else and saying, hey, my friend had trouble with XYZ. Can I think if we move this around or change this widget or made this button or a prominent or something like that that it would be more intuitive for folks. And the beauty of a project like WordPress and there's a few other open source projects which are similar is we can simultaneously become more intuitive for new users at the same time that we become more powerful for power users. That's not easy. I think it only happened in the digital realm like an SLR camera with like 80 buttons can also become simultaneously easier for like people just taking their first photo. But in the digital world, we can do that. And that's actually really, really exciting. So that's part of what excites me about WordPress and I hope is a part of what people contribute in the future. Another from the offsite questions, let's see. This is from Sarah Gooding. What can WordPress do to protect small publishers from the threat of big tech companies to greed and hostility to the open web? Oh my goodness. Big tech companies, was it hostility to the open web? Greed and hostility. Greed and hostility to the open web. Oh my goodness. We're dealing with more than seven deadly sins. First, I'll say that there's some giant tech companies whose greed and hostility is somewhat aligned with the open web, meaning that a Google who is indexing the web is probably more aligned with the mission of WordPress than a Facebook which is trying to create an alternative to the open web or other companies filling the blank there. So that's something to keep in mind. The number one thing I think we can do is create an alternative. So it's easy to forget that someone starting a WordPress might not want the thing that wake up in the morning and think about is not like, I wanna make more open source software in the world. They might be thinking, hey, I want more customers in my restaurant. I don't want more visitors to my salon or I want more readers of my novel I'm working on. Like whatever it might be and that's beauty of WordPress is there's so many things you can do on top of it is that WordPress is a means to an end. And this is our strength and our weakness on third-party measuring services like a Quantcast or a Nielsen or something like that. Like a Facebook.com or Google.com shows up as one domain. And WordPress is in many ways like the dark matter of the web and that it's the thing that comprises the majority of the universe but doesn't show up on one domain by definition. It's across millions, tens, hundreds of millions of different domains and represents each person on the domain owning a piece of the web. It belongs to them, literally domains. I'm not, I'm gonna pitch domains here. Domains are like the most web three thing you could create. Like it really belongs to you far more than almost anything else. So I think what we can do is, well, I'll tell you the biggest thing I've learned which goes a little back to your question on what is the thing to talk about to the youth or people that are creating things. Early on I was like a slash dot reading zillet. Meaning like I was like, ah, Microsoft and Bill Gates are evil. I had a very like black and white view of the world where I saw open source is good and anything for proprietary is bad and it was binary. As you mature, you learn that things are not binary. It's gray scale. It's dual tone. And there's things that are both simultaneously good and bad and things that exist on the spectrum. And over time I've chosen to devote more of my life to things that I feel like are on the side of the spectrum that I want future generations if I ever have children or grandchildren than do experience of the web. But that the everything exists on the spectrum. I would say that for pure philosophy does not win. Meaning that for folks maybe like here in the room or some of the folks watching live stream, the idea of owning your content, owning the software that powers it and everything like that is very compelling. That's probably compelling for like one or 2% of humanity. We're at the very end of the bell curve of like folks who care about those things. For the rest, if we want a majority of the web, hopefully I hope a majority or even like 85 or 90% of the web be powered by open source, for them we need to create the best user experience. I mean it needs to be the easiest and it needs to be the most intuitive and it needs to be the thing that gets them towards their goals the fastest. For many people that means WordPress will be invisible and that's okay. We don't need people to even know what WordPress is. If they're using WordPress, open source, open API, open data, everything to get to where they're going that is infinitely better than using proprietary software to get from A to B. So we need to create as many use cases, as many work on usability as much as possible to create that. So that is my learning and something I hope we can all work together great because even if someone doesn't realize they're using open source and making the web more open, if by creating the website, creating their restaurant, creating their online service, selling something online, they are doing so in a way that makes the web even just a smidgen more open, that's cool. That's good for humanity. That's the part I want future generations to grow up in. So thank you. Okay, we got two minutes. No, no, two questions. Two questions, okay. Well, how I taught that could take 20 minutes. We're down to 10 minutes and so I'm giving you five for each question. Okay, five minutes for each question apparently. So. Hi Matt, my name is Aaron Jorbin. I probably came the shortest distance because I live like three blocks away. A couple of times tonight you've talked about the GPL, the importance of the GPL, the importance of the four freedoms of the GPL. Over the last year there's been an effort to dual license the Gutenberg repository and thus allow people to use the WordPress code in ways that would not confer those four freedoms onto future users of WordPress. I'm wondering how that lines up with your ideas of the four freedoms and why I as a contributor to WordPress should support my code being re-licensed to remove the four freedoms from future users. That's such a good question. So thank you, Aaron, for asking that. And also thank you for being someone else who makes me not the only person in the room with a suit. Aaron looks great. So thank you very much for that. Hopefully we get that on camera. So this is interesting. So the GPL was created in the 80s and 90s and had no concept of essentially delivery over the web. So the GPL says that if you share something distributed, which was historically means distributed the source code over like floppy disks or CDs or things like that, you must confer the same freedoms. But it didn't count if you were just running a website which is good and bad. It's good in that like your password file on your WordPress site is not GPL, right? You don't need to share that to the world. There are licenses like the Feral GPL and others that say like you need to share everything but it also creates a loophole. So technically like WordPress.com doesn't need to share any of its code back to the world. It does, those folks work really hard on putting improvements back into WordPress but not required to because delivery and distribution through SaaS services does not confer the distribution in which GPL was intended with. In practice we do it but in letter of law, it's not required. Mobile apps are a whole new world. And again, there is the ideal thing and there's a pragmatic thing. Prag, ideally I would love to use a mobile device which had firmware, hardware and everything involved with it. That was fully open source. Pragmatically I need to use an Android or iOS device probably from Apple or Samsung that works, that has good battery life and everything like that. So I've always thought of myself as a pragmatic open source evangelist. Gutenberg, now how do we bring this to Gutenberg? So Gutenberg is trying to create a pan CMS or pan creation standard for things like blocks. We think, or I think, that in Gutenberg if we can create a standard interface for things like adding an image or the basic things that you do within a block interface that is good for the web and humanity. So part of that is that I would really like to see even proprietary systems adopt Gutenberg blocks. I think that would be a win. You know, I've made fun of some systems like Wix and Squarespace or MailChimp or others. I think they, I would love, I would be thrilled if they all use Gutenberg. And Gutenberg is licensed under a way that if you use it, you don't have to make the rest of your software also open source. So the way the GPL is, is this what's called a viral license? So if you use part of it, everything else that links it also has to be open source which I like for WordPress. I like for everything I do. But I also recognize that maybe, in let's say a mobile app, I might wanna have an open source based editor that uses the standards and code of Gutenberg but the rest of the app might not be open source. Maybe it's the MailChimp app. Let's use MailChimp as an example. I don't have any relation to MailChimp so I can talk about that. MailChimp's awesome, very successful, just sold it into it for like a $10 billion or whatever. If you look at what they're doing with their newsletter creator, it's blocks. If you look at what they're doing and they don't actually have a great mobile app yet. So it'd be cool. So when we took our mobile apps which means developing Gutenberg three times with the developer for the web, I was an Android which is a lot of work. We are relicensing the mobile versions of Gutenberg as MIT which means that they can be embedded in mobile apps which are not also open source. This gets into another weird thing which is all mobile apps are mediated by app stores. I don't love that for the record. But it's the reality. You're either going through Google or Apple to distribute it on an app store to the majority of humans in the world. And you have to, when you distribute your app, you kind of have to, you don't kind of, you have to agree to their terms of services and licenses which are sort of compatible with open source. Actually WordPress has been a pioneer there. Apple originally did not allow GPL applications to be distributed on the Apple store and WordPress fought for that and we won it essentially. And in fact, Apple's used WordPress code in demos. So we kind of got the unofficial blessing that like our GPL app was okay to be on the Apple store but like that's still a process which we fight and we go for. Most famously, was it last year that it happened with the... Is it last year or later this year? It all blends together. It all blends together. I don't know like post COVID everything's a real mix but Apple issued an incredibly rare apology which Apple never does where they had sort of told the WordPress open source app they needed to do something that seemed a little outside of the requirements and the license and someone higher up realized that and walked it back. So not often that happens with a $2 trillion company but it happened with WordPress and Apple and that was exciting. So we will continue fighting wherever we can for getting these app stores to open up a little bit. We will also be pragmatic in that in reality everyone who has an Apple or iOS device we need to go to the app stores to reach them. So and I think it's actually a flaw of if we think of why Drupal or Drupal hasn't done as well I think they need apps and I've encouraged those communities to create great apps because they need them. Why we're expanding the license of Gutenberg in particular to be both GPL and MIT is that I would like WordPress blocks or Gutenberg blocks to become standards that are larger than just WordPress and there is a Drupal version of Gutenberg et cetera but I think part of that is that if blocks can become standards across every proprietary system I make fun of Wix, I think it's fair that they've earned it but if they adopted Gutenberg I would toast them and take them out to beers. I think that would be awesome. Gutenberg is something even bigger than WordPress which is basically saying how do we edit and create the web and can we get as many people both proprietary and open source collaborating that as possible. So that is the bet we've made. Maybe it's correct, maybe it's incorrect. I hope that you as a contributor still are excited about being part of Gutenberg even though it's Gutenberg and MIT which are both open source licenses but MIT of course allows proprietary licensing. I understand that. The majority of open source software in the world is well I think majority is GPL but there's a big chunk that's non-GPL. I think what we're doing, folks in this room, you and I are creating more of that open source stuff. If a proprietary people use it along the way to create more open source, I think that's great and okay. Thank you. And thank you for wearing a suit and thank you for coming tonight. Of course. Someone asked me earlier why I wear a suit and it's actually one of my favorite folks is Frank Sinatra and he talked about someone asked why they wore tux every night to perform and he said to the other band members he said, well if we were performing for the King or Queen what would we wear? We'd dress up, we'd wear tux to perform for them and he said, well every single night that this band performs, there might be someone in the audience who's saved up two months to be there or a waitress or someone like that who really worked to be there and so guess what? We're gonna dress up for them and perform for them that they are the King or Queen of England. Royalty. Every person in the audience has royalty. So that's why I wear a suit every year if you're wondering. This is like the only suit I wear during the year but I wear it because I consider every member of the WordPress community to be royalty and dress up for y'all. So thank you. All right, this is the last question. I'm so excited you bring us home. I think it's a short question. Hopefully it wasn't already asked. Can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Rachel Winchester. Most people know me as Win. Here for representing Digital Cube and I'm just curious if the topic of internet art has made it on your radar and if it's something of interest to you. Tell me more about internet art. How do you define it? Well, internet art is browser art or web-based art but it's art that uses the internet as a medium so it works with WordPress because WordPress is that paintbrush. I will also call out that you have an amazing Izzy Miyake Purse who's one of my favorite designers of all time so thank you for bringing that to the microphone as well. What do you think about the open-verse in internet art like this idea that people could maybe even contribute internet art to the open-verse? I love the idea of making publicly accessible images more accessible. I love that idea. This is, it's an interesting tension, right? Because artists create things and they want to earn a living from the things they create and people create things and want to contribute it to the commons of humanity that becomes part of what we remix, part of what we build on, part of the foundation of what creates the next generations and has versions of what happens. And in copyright law, which I would say is popularly epitomized and essentially the United States copyright law, you have an ability to do that. Rest in peace for Joe Alblot. Like we'll talk about his three-person world where he would take an existing thing, modify 3% and create something new. Incredible, right? One of the great artists of our generations in so many ways that affect the popular culture, that affect art, that affect so many things through that taking something, is this the modifying it? So, I don't know, I think that's the epitome of open source. I would say that WordPress's limitation is before, that was basically all in the code and language realm. It was all about the plugins, the theme, a little bit of design and the translations that were open source. If you had to define what's next for us, it's expanding through the openverse, through things like that are more content-driven, images, video, audio, art. I'm a photographer, my username is Photomat, so I consider photographs to be art. And I hope to put more and more of the art I create and hopefully others into that commons, so that is the basis for what generations create in the future. So, thank you so much. I appreciate the question. And with that, I think we might be, I mean, Joseph has come up- I've got two notes for everyone, because I would, naturally. Number one, there were a lot of questions that were asked beforehand and also in the live stream chat that we did not get to. But just like last year, we will have a blog post up where we can get those answered for y'all, don't worry. And my final, final thing, let's have a round of applause for the folks who put this event together and for our excellent slide makers.