Jason Lefkowitz on Nostr: The irony is that there is one and only one reason WordPress is where it is, and that ...
The irony is that there is one and only one reason WordPress is where it is, and that is because, back in the Triassic Age of the web, the blogging software that everyone used back then, Movable Type, changed its license.
Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn't get in their way for a long time, because the terms of who qualified for the free personal version were generous. But when they released version 3.0 in 2004, they tweaked who qualified for which license in such a way as to make it look like lots of high-traffic bloggers were suddenly going to have to pay for a pro license.
As you might imagine, the entire blog world lost its collective shit. Lots of influential bloggers decided that the solution was to find a truly open source alternative, and WordPress, which was relatively primitive but 100% GPL, had shipped its first version the year before. A stampede off Movable Type and onto WordPress began, giving WP the boost it needed to go from Yet Another Blog CMS to a real contender. And so began the long march that led to "43% down, 57% to go. WordPress."
I eventually migrated my own sites from MT to WP too, and let me tell you, that migration hurt like hell. Because MT was better software in 2004 than WordPress was. I would argue that in a lot of ways, MT in 2004 was better software than WordPress is TODAY. But when the big bloggers fled, it dealt MT a killing blow. The software spiraled into an endless attempt to keep existing pro customers satisfied, dragging it farther and farther away from what the ordinary user needed or wanted.
All of which is to say, fortune in this market is extremely fickle. You can do everything right for years, but you only have to do one big thing wrong to send all your users running. And once they start running, they don't come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type
Movable Type was commercial software; there was a free personal version, and a relatively expensive pro version. This didn't get in their way for a long time, because the terms of who qualified for the free personal version were generous. But when they released version 3.0 in 2004, they tweaked who qualified for which license in such a way as to make it look like lots of high-traffic bloggers were suddenly going to have to pay for a pro license.
As you might imagine, the entire blog world lost its collective shit. Lots of influential bloggers decided that the solution was to find a truly open source alternative, and WordPress, which was relatively primitive but 100% GPL, had shipped its first version the year before. A stampede off Movable Type and onto WordPress began, giving WP the boost it needed to go from Yet Another Blog CMS to a real contender. And so began the long march that led to "43% down, 57% to go. WordPress."
I eventually migrated my own sites from MT to WP too, and let me tell you, that migration hurt like hell. Because MT was better software in 2004 than WordPress was. I would argue that in a lot of ways, MT in 2004 was better software than WordPress is TODAY. But when the big bloggers fled, it dealt MT a killing blow. The software spiraled into an endless attempt to keep existing pro customers satisfied, dragging it farther and farther away from what the ordinary user needed or wanted.
All of which is to say, fortune in this market is extremely fickle. You can do everything right for years, but you only have to do one big thing wrong to send all your users running. And once they start running, they don't come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type