I think it's really important for the independent web to have a platform, and to the extent that WordPress can serve that role, I think it's a great privilege and responsibility.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.
The web as a platform is the most powerful platform we have ever seen.
When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing.
The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.
We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.
A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.
WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.
Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.
We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.
The Web's core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people.