Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”

8 thoughts on “Open Source Impact

  1. The only part I don’t get is the credit part. I have yet to see someone who doesn’t adore WordPress when they get to use it, especially when it helps them save money for their business. A very popular answer I get when I convince people to switch to it is “how come it’s 100% free? I would easily pay for it”

  2. I use WordPress and I certainly hope that those that contribute to its maintenance get financial rewards as time goes on. It’s the right offering at the right time. It’s only weakness is the ease of spamming via the comments and registration sections, there are third party solutions for that but I would like to see WordPress integrate those solutions as without them, the “community” part of WordPress is not effective.

    If any of you are interested, I publish a daily free Open Source Everything Highlights at 10 pm eastern every day, and have also published an inexpensive pocketbook, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust — $10 at Amazon, instead of $15 retail.

    Access highlights, book page, and other stuff at http://tinyurl.com/OSE-ROOT.

    Best wishes to all
    Robert Steele
    Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog

  3. @Salvatore et al,
    The reason is simple:
    It is basically free and “anything for free can’t be serious.”
    That mantra has kept Microsoft alive for 20 years after it should have died.
    It is why Linux doesn’t rule the world – even though the Net itself would be dead without it.

    Here is a post I just made on another Matt Blog:
    Matt,
    I’ve always hated WordPress because it was so elegantly simple, it opened the Web to the idiots. I had worked so hard for years to master the Cyberbog starting with FrontPage’s precursor, (whose name I’ve forgotten – another penalty of aging).

    Finally I’ve accepted that I objected to the ease of it after my years of struggle with the mafia-like world of the Internet, where everything was made difficult.
    (Another penalty of aging: we did it the hard way, now it’s a takeaway pizza. Of course I had to hate it)

    But I’ve realised the real destruction of the world as I knew it came about by two insane children’s amusements: Facebook and Twitter which offer nothing of value to the world at all.

    WordPress is actually for serious people.
    I didn’t realise it before
    and its power is amazing for the people that have functioning brains and aspirations together (a rarity).

    I’ve just seen a few examples recently, of what can be done relatively easy for the serious marketer of ideas or stuff, like BuddyPress! Thousands of enhancements and so many free. It’s a shame it isn’t available on Linux.

    ***** But I am now an evangelist after *finally* taking a serious look at it.

    I only have one major question left:
    After the financial success of the kiddie stuff like Facebook and Twitter for the owners,
    MATT, WHY AREN’T YOU FILTHY RICH LIKE THEM?

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