Beginning of October two iconic figures of the open web had a discussion on the Rework podcast about open source software and the power their leaders exercise.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Ruby on Rails web development framework which is used by his own company Basecamp to build a project management and team communication software, as well as many others like GitHub, SoundCloud and Shopify.
I’ve used Basecamp for a million projects over the last decade and a half. It’s beautiful software that has resisted every wrong trend and stayed true to the things that mattered most. Highly recommended.
Tobi Lütke, CEO, Shopify
One of the things David is least proud of, is being listed on the benevolent dictator for life Wikipedia page. He thinks that power can always be abused and therefore no single person should be trusted. He also has strong views about software monopolies and thinks if one single software has too big a marketshare, it will negatively impact diversity and innovation.
In this episode of the podcast, David is joined by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg who also happens to be on that benevolent dictator for life list. Matt’s company Automattic just raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures. David posted this on his Twitter quoting Matt from a TechCrunch article:
Matt replied to David’s tweet offering to discuss the pros and cons of outside funding and building for the long term, but although the episode is over an hour long, they never come around to discussing those pros and cons. David lashes out at both closed and open source software monopolies. Matt believes that even if WordPress will increase its market share from currently around 35% to e.g. 85%, there would still be enough diversity and innovation within the WordPress ecosystem, because the things that are being built on top of it are very diverse and innovative.
He also says that getting to «85%» is not his main goal. If that would be the result, he thinks it would be good for the open web in general, though, in contrast to David.
Highly recommended episode, although by his constant swearing David sort of undermines his own credibility. Matt’s always calm and friendly which makes it difficult to not see the advantages of a benevolant dictator for WordPress.
Matt certainly yields a lot of power in the WordPress ecosystem, but he cannot be a dictator, because there’s a system of checks and balances in place which he also needs to respect.
Which title do you think would best describe Matt’s position in the WordPress ecosystem?
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