DHH & Open Source

Asides

I might have a new prayer: God, give me confidence of DHH claiming his proprietary license is Open Source.

37signals/Basecamp has a great new product called Fizzy, whose brilliance and innovative qualities are being distracted from by its co-creator David Heinmeier Hansson’s insistence on calling it open source. “One more thing…  Fizzy is open source and 100% free to run yourself.”

Thanks to Freedom of Speech, DHH is free to describe his proprietary software as Open Source, a form of greenwashing, and even though he wants to “Well akshually” denigrate those saying why this is BS, we as free citizens are free to explain why, despite how fast he talks and confident he sounds, he’s not always right.

Myself and other “Actually Open Source” leaders (including DHH) who release software under licenses that meet a common definition of Open Source benefit from decades of prior art and an incredible foundation that lays out the philosophy and definition of what defines open source.

For the layperson, though, it might be helpful to break things down in an analogy of authoritarian vs democratic regimes, or a core question of who holds the power.

Proprietary licenses may grant things that feel like freedoms; for example, Fizzy’s O’Saasy license lets you download the source code, run it yourself, modify it, and use a public bug tracker, and you can see the software’s source control history. That’s cool! Also, in the past several years, there have been Middle Eastern countries that have just now allowed women to drive cars. That’s great! However, as a free person choosing to use this software, or choosing to live in a country, you have to ask yourself: Am I still free?

No, you’re not. You are allowed to do some things that are in and of themselves good, but ultimately, it’s not built on a foundation of an inalienable right or constitution; it’s at the whim of the leader. O’Saasy license has this restriction:

No licensee or downstream recipient may use the Software (including any modified or derivative versions) to directly compete with the original Licensor by offering it to third parties as a hosted, managed, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product or cloud service where the primary value of the service is the functionality of the Software itself.

Oh wow, I can’t compete with the leader. In how they choose to operate their business today, or however they might choose to in the future. My freedoms are at their whim. This violates rule 5 of the OSI definition of Open Source: “The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.”

I’d like to choose software and live in a society that doesn’t discriminate.

It’s not uncommon for people trying to take away your freedom to want to use the same words as those in truly free societies. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Why? Per Google’s AI:

Socialist Definition of Democracy During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies used “democracy” to mean “people’s power” through a single ruling party, representing the working class, as opposed to the multi-party “bourgeois” democracy of the West. North Korea adopted this lexicon, as did other communist states like the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Yeah, really democratic. In that sense, you can say O’Saasy is an “open” “source” license. Perhaps a bubble of people will agree with you. But the rest of the world will use common sense and see that as a fraud. And most disappointingly for 37signals, a company that prides itself on high integrity, it’s false advertising.

(For what it’s worth, I tried to resolve this quietly with Jason Fried a few days ago.)

Happy Birthday Kinsey

Automattic, Personal

Yesterday I had the great honor and privilege of attending a colleague’s 70th birthday party. You may not have heard his name before, but Kinsey Wilson has been at the center of shaping journalism with a movie-worthy career that started at the bottom as a crime reporter in Chicago, and has taken him to the highest echelons at NPR, the New York Times, and, most recently, we’ve been lucky to have him at Automattic.

Kinsey brings a journalistic curiosity and passion for finding truth, paired with a deep optimism and creativity for seeing around the corner for how technology can transform how we consume and produce media.

While his Wikipedia page or biography provides appetizers to some of what he’s done, Kinsey has led such a rich and beautiful life that any attempt to summarize it ends up being criminally reductive. The best you can hope for is to give a taste of his person through vignettes.

A beautiful snippet from the montage of accolades at his birthday was how Kinsey was someone you’d follow into battle. I’ve learned so much from seeing the empathy, candor, and integrity he brings to every team he leads, which engenders an incredible loyalty I’ve rarely seen in my career. When he left NPR, 62 colleagues made an “Infinite Kinsey” website of accolades.

That sort of thing is rare, and it’s been an honor and a privilege to work alongside him to democratize publishing.

One of those colleagues, Elise Hu, introduced us while he was at the New York Times and while my intention when I first met him was to get more WordPress at the Times, my imagination was sparked by thinking of how he could bring his experience to help shape WordPress and Automattic, hence my pivot into recruiting him.

Kinsey’s impact on journalism (and podcasting!) at NPR and New York Times is easy to understand, but less well-known is how he came into Automattic and got deep into understanding WordPress and seeing it as a platform that could enable the newsrooms and journalists to accomplish their mission in a more efficient way with the project he leads, Newspack.

He’s a fierce steward of the Fourth Estate.

Newspack and its team’s close relationship to customers invents solutions on top of WordPress that delight its users and percolate and influence everything we do at Automattic. They’re one of the teams that sets the bar for others in the company.

To Kinsey, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my other inspirations, Charlie Munger, who at the tender age of 99 shared a wish with a visitor, “Oh, to be 86 again.”

I’ll try not to be too tech-bro optimist and say that 70 is the new 40, but I look forward to seeing the ripples that you have on the future of publishing for many years to come. 

Self-driving

Tech

There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist’s look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It’s behind a paywall. I enjoyed how they thought about the second-order effects of self-driving.

America is home to 1m taxi and bus drivers, as well as over 3m truck drivers—adding up to 3% of the working population. Other potential losers are less obvious. Without car accidents there will, for instance, be less demand for personal-injury lawyers. If people stop buying cars, dealers and used-car salesmen will go. 

It’s fascinating to think a few chess moves down the line, for example, fewer personal-injury lawyers funding politicians might lead to some form of Tort Reform, an area of society that, like gun control, has centrist changes most Americans would agree with, but has been captured by special interests.

Unifi 5G

Tech

One of my favorite hobbies is home networking and wifi, and once you go down that rabbit hole one of the best companies you can follow is Unifi. They’re such a cool company in so many ways, from having a 4-person board of directors, as a public stock. You can clearly tell they delight in bringing great design to hardware, in a Apple-like attention to detail.

They ship such cool products regularly, across an entire ecosystem that spans cameras to access control, it’s hard to describe everything they can cover, and they’ll even have random stuff that integrates into their system like EV charging or digital signage. I get as excited when they ship a new generation of hardware as I do for an iPhone launch.

But what’s exciting is that they just launched 5G bridging, with some fun devices that connect everything. I imagine someday I’ll have a Unifi puck hooked up to Starlink, providing amazing routing and connectivity anywhere in the world, powered by some PoE battery.

SoTW Eve

WordPress

The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring WordPress 6.9 to the world.

We’ll also be crossing streams with another community: in the last ten minutes, we’ll join TBPN, the new must-watch daily tech show.

The art and activations are looking so good; it’s fun to see how everything evolves. Tokyo was so beautiful last year; I wasn’t sure how we’d top it, but the creativity of everyone coming together has sparked something new this year that I think is quite cool. We’re trying to honor our mission of democratizing publishing, making things that are powerful and capable, but also retain the flicker of art.

We’re also opening up TinkerTendo to the community. I was just there with a few dozen of the crew, and the vibes are so fun. If you’re in SF, definitely swing by and connect with the folks building the most open internet we can all enjoy.

Check out the livestream tomorrow, it’ll be a nice capstone to all we’ve built together this year.

It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, Genevieve Jurvetson, and now a DJ set by Grimes. I was hoping he’d be talking/interacting more with the guests, but it’s been more of a live commentary. Glad all the work Bryan is doing, as Genevieve said, to broaden the Overton window on this, really re-opening a lot of research originially started by the government and pharmacutical companies 50-60 years ago.

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future of Web Apps, O’Reilly Etech, and TheNextWeb. Though we don’t see each other often, I have enjoyed following his work and writing over the years, and it delights me that he’s still learning and sharing with the same vim and vigor I remember from when we first met. I think he might have been the first person to introduce me to the works of Richard Feynman through a BBC program.

SF WordPress Party

Asides

We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Tuesday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in.

So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party. There will be some cool art from the Misalignment Museum there, great wifi, lots of power plugs and floor seating, a big projection screen and speakers and I think will be a great spot for WordPress folks to hang and network and co-work while in San Francisco. I’ll swing by after the talk to meet everyone as well.

If you want access, you can register via Meetup here.

Thanksgiving

Personal

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! To me, the holiday is a reminder to be grateful. A gratitude practice is one of the most surefire ways to improve your happiness, as this study covered by Harvard Health explains.

I was part of a leadership coaching cohort with other founders and CEOs, and one of our exercises was to have a weekly 15-minute Zoom call where we’d each take turns saying something we were grateful for. (I think the original assignment was 7 minutes, but Parkinson’s law and Google Calendar’s 15-minute default expanded it.) Like most great coaching, it seems silly on the surface, but when you actually practice it with an open mind, something magical happens.

It really grew on me, and while most of the randomly assigned pods of people that had this assignment for a few weeks dispersed, ours has kept it going now for several years beyond the conclusion of the coaching program. The calls are also a great way to stay in touch with people I love, but we might easily fall into our own universes and not keep up with each other. Wherever we are in the world, whatever is happening, this standing meeting is on everyone’s calendar, and while it has ebbs and flows, the flame has been kept alive.

Consider starting your own pod: pick a time, set a standing Zoom room, and see what happens. We do early mornings before most meetings start. I don’t make it every week, but I do more than not, and the weeks when I do are definitely a bit brighter, both in my own gratitude practice and in the connection with the others in the pod.

3D Printing Wowza

If you have ever customized your home setup, or done extra work to make the cable just so, it’s impossible not to delight in the very deep rabbit holes this person goes in 3D-printing custom holders for everything in his junk drawer. I’m in awe. It’s an ad for Bambu Lab, but honestly it’s the kind of thing I could watch all day. So satisfying. Scott Yu-Jan is someone to keep an eye on.

To me, this embodies the maker / hacker / creator mentality that I try to imbue in all the software I work on. How do you make it your own? One of one, but then open source it and see how it gets better.

Flying From SFO

Gallery

When I can, I always try to time my flights for sunrise or sunset. The astounding beauty of nature never fails to amaze. The default nowadays is shades down; everyone is watching something, but sometimes it’s hard to match what you see out the window. And realize that only a small portion of humanity has ever been able to see these vistas from such an elevation.

Fred Vogelstein writes on Crazy Stupid Tech: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? “To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both say unequivocally that the conversations we are having now about the future of AI feel exactly like the conversations we had about the future of the internet in 1999. “

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives.

On the heels of announcing a $40B investment in Texas, Google has launched Gemini 3. It’s still funny how every organization ships its org chart with the naming and accessibility of the various models it releases, but, more broadly, it is so exciting to see so much intellectual capital focused on this area, with the frontier labs leapfrogging each other every few months. Every model has a feel, and with Gemini 3 you start to feel the breadth of Google’s long investment in the space show up in interesting ways. Yet it can still be beaten in coding by an upstart like Anthropic with a fraction of Alphabet’s resources.

What a time to be alive. Witnessing multiple excellent organizations ship the best work of their career rapidly is invigorating and inspiring; the competition drives better results, and the diffusion of new approaches is rapid. The consumer surplus that we all benefit from is just beginning to be felt; we’re maybe 1 or 2% impacted in the economy so far.

Rothko Chapel Garden

Personal

It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of the Rothko Chapel over decades, and gosh. There were literally monarchs and dragonflies (my Mom’s favorite) flitting about as each person spoke. Although the Houston heat beat down upon us on an unseasonably warm November day, you couldn’t have imagined a more perfect scene.

Speaking before me were Troy Porter (Board Chair), Abdullah Antepli (the new director), Christopher Rothko, Abbie Kamin (City Council member), Adam Yarinsky (architect), Lanie McKinnon (landscape architect), and my sister, Charleen. Here is what I offered to the proceeding:

I can’t believe we’re all here; it’s been so long coming to this point.

So I should start by saying that part of the reason I started blogging and WordPress is I have a terrible memory, I forget everything.

But as I remember it, my conscious relationship to the chapel begins in my teenage years, when exploring the city with some friends from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, some of whom are here today. We were always bumming around the area. HSPVA at the time was in Montrose, and we bummed around the Saint Thomas campus and the related parks and stumbled across the Rothko Chapel.

I was totally taken aback, and couldn’t wait to call up my parents about what I had discovered. “Mom! Look what I found!“

She just started laughing.

Of course, I hadn’t discovered it; it turns out that almost a decade before, she had brought me there as a small child. Apparently, we had been playing in Bell Park, and rain clouds started to form, so she was looking for someplace we could go inside, and the Rothko Chapel was, of course, open.

I’ve been to the Chapel countless times now. I’ve been when I’m grieving, I’ve been when I’m celebrating, I’ve been when I needed a reset, I’ve brought friends that loved it, that hated it, that cried, I’ve brought friends that laughed.

Some of my favorites when I was training for a half-marathon and would run here, take a quick meditation break, and then run back home

There’s a milion stories about how people come to the chapel, and many more about how they leave it, it’s a nexus or Schelling point. Whatever your experience, you’ll always remember it and leave changed.

I’m so glad to be able to celebrate this opening with all of you. Here are of course my family that raised me, but also friends and teachers that shaped me as a man and without which I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything I have in my life. I see some teachers here, I see Doc Morgan, David Caceres. Thank you so much for being here.

My father, Chuck Mullenweg, passed in 2016, but Mom, I know he would have loved this. Christopher, thank you for the opportunity to contribute in a small way to our shared mission of honoring our fathers’ legacy.

My mother, Kathleen Mullenweg, is right here, I hope you get a chance to meet her. A garden seemed very fitting as her lifelong green thumb and love of gardening has always been grounding and inspiring to me. Mom, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you again for being the best mother a boy could hope for, and giving me such a broad extracurricular education, especially in the arts.

I work in technology, which has already transformed society and is poised to do even more with the age of AI beginning, and I believe it is incredibly important for technologists building the future to be connected and informed by the arts, because we need our software to have soul.

What I hope for most, though, is that the peace and reflection garden and birch grove bring some mother and child someday, who perhaps wander into the chapel looking to escape rain, and that kid later goes back to his mother a decade later and says, Look what I found!