Matt Mullenweg: preference

Transcript context

…Planting the seed, I'm planting the seed. So I want to get into all the drama there in this world and right now, but I want to first lay the foundation of how you got into this and where this all came from. So let's talk about just the origin story of you and open source. More than half of your life, you've been working on open source, you've been working on WordPress, specifically WordPress is such a core community within the open source. What was kind of the origin story of you becoming obsessed and, I don't know, open source-pilled? I was a broke kid in Houston, Texas, and my passions were jazz. Houston has actually amazing music programs in the public schools, and so I was very fortunate to go to some of the best civil arts programs, including my high school called the High School for Performing and Visual Arts, where Beyoncé went, Robert Glasper, amazing folks went there. And so music was a big part of my life, and actually economics. So I had this fun teacher, Scott Roman, who participated in our school in the Federal Reserve Challenge, which was run by the Federal Reserve that sets the interest rates and backs the national banking system and everything like that, has this competition for high school students. It ended up being the first academic competition this art school ever won. And yeah, first year we kind of didn't get that far, second year we went all the way to nationals so I got to meet Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke was our judge, went to DC. So that was very, very exciting. And so being exposed to us having a great liberal arts education, the ideas of Frederick Hayek, Agnes Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Thucydides, all these sorts of things, that philosophy really influenced me. And combine that with that, music lessons were expensive, so we couldn't really afford them, so I would barter and trade. I'd build websites for local musicians and exchange for lessons. So these websites, I would start to put software on forums or different things and that kind of exposed me to open source. So my father was also an engineer, he worked for oil companies and things, but his world was all Microsoft, it was all proprietary. And I always kind of grew up in early days of the internet, so was Slashdots and Jeffrey Zeldman talked about web standards and all these things are really kind of the social milieu and zeitgeist that I grew up in. So combining all this philosophy I studied, it felt that open source was actually the most important idea of our generation. If the founding fathers were around today, I think they would be open source advocates. If you think about it as more and more of our lives are influenced and actually controlled by the software we use, if we don't have fundamental freedoms attached to that software, we're not truly free. So WordPress is under license called the GPL, which has four freedoms, the freedom to use the software for any purpose, so we can use it for anything, whether I agree with you or not, the terms of service is you could do whatever you want with it. The freedom to see how the software works, open up the hood, see how it works, see every line of code, you can audit it. The freedom to change it is the third freedom. And then finally the freedom to redistribute those changes so you can share them. And the GPL has a fun little hack where if you share them, you have to provide those same freedoms to who you share it with. So it's called a viral open source license as opposed to the MIT license or some of the others that aren't. k where if you share them, you have to provide those same freedoms to who you share it with. So it's called a viral open source license as opposed to the MIT license or some of the others that aren't. So yeah, just kind of decided that this was what I was going to devote my life to. And so that became getting involved with some early open source projects, WordPress was actually a fork of abandoned open source project called B2. So the code base actually started was something that was already out there that I was a user and contributor to kind of volunteer on the forums and contribute code. And then when it was abandoned, myself and Mike were one of four or five different forks that started that, picked it up and tried to continue it for our own use and then later for our larger community.…

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