Epistemographer

Fascinating case that lays bare some of the fundamental assumptions (and internal contradictions) of an open source community:

• Matt Mullenweg creates Wordpress
• Wordpress gets popular and grows an open source community

• Matt makes a decision to spend some of Wordpress’ whuffie, gets caught, responds

Takehome questions – how much agency does the founder of an open source project have once the project has grown beyond his/her personal efforts? And what are legitimate revenue streams when people support a project they use not because they have to (buying), but because they want to (tipping/patronage)?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2005 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.