Tonight there was a lovely event at TinkerTendo by Raman Frey and Karin Johnson of Good People Dinners, this one honoring David Gelles’ new book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. I’m a huge fan of Yvon Chouinard and really enjoyed his book Let My People Go Surfing which I read back in 2018. It was the first time hosting such a large 60-person dinner in the TinkerTendo warehouse, and thanks to this Copper battery-operated induction stovetop and an amazing local chef, Hanif Sadr, the food turned out amazing.
I’ve only started the new book, but I’m interested to see what’s happened in the 20 years between Yvon’s book and David’s, especially the story of how Yvon gave away all his equity and control in the company to ensure a focus on his lifelong goal of environmentalism and conservation. Patagonia is one of the better corporate entities fighting for good, but it reminded me of how companies can put on a jacket of doing good while actually being evil underneath.
Like I talked about the economic concept of Externalties a few weeks ago, I think it’s imperative that the WordPress community understands the history of Greenwashing, which the United Nations defines as follows:
- Claiming that the company will achieve future environment milestones while not putting sufficient plans in place to do so.
- Being intentionally vague about operations or using vague claims that cannot be specifically proven (like saying they are “environmentally friendly” or “green”).
- Saying that a product does not contain harmful materials or use harmful practices that they would not use anyway.
- Highlighting one thing the company does well regarding the environment while not doing anything else.
- Promoting products that meet regulatory minimums as if peer products do not.
In WordPress and open source our environmental crisis comes from companies that frack the open source software and brands, which shows up as lack of investment in the code which falls fallow especially in the security sense, or by attaching themselves to a brand or trademark and tricking people into thinking they’re associated with the Good Open thing, when they’re really a parasitic cancer on it.
This is happening right now in WordPress, so when you see a company hire a good person or sponsor an event that seems on its own a good thing, and probably represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, weigh that against the tens of millions they’re spending with their other hand to destroy the source of everything they’ve benefited from, and if they were to win, endanger every open source project. It’s an open source form of greenwashing, perhaps call it openwashing.
Sounds like GoDaddy.
I wouldn’t put them in that category. I think they’re pretty straightforward in having different business interests, some which support open source and some which are proprietary, but it’s clear which are which.
Thank you for the clarification. I really appreciate it.
It’s good you highlight openwashing. But it must be highlighted too that there a no systems in place to highlight the ones who do it the right way. Even someone deep into the ecosystem can’t really know who’s genuine or just ‘washing’.
We’re attempting to give good karma and recognition to good actors with our Five For the Future program at WordPress, and also how we rank things in the plugin and themes directories.
Five for the Future is not really a “system”.
Only the (technical) contributors care about that karma. Their boss or the one above the boss doesn’t not care about karma.
However, if those “bosses” can use an “official” label that represents that recognition (and they can use in ads), that’s what i mean with “system” and seeing who’s greenwashing or not.
Certainly if you look at hosting companies. If my national hosting company (in Belgium) get’s a “label” for paying a contributor 10K or 20K, maybe they will refer some of their marketing-budget to the community.
Suppose we believe F5TF is a system.
Let’s look at the websites of current bigger contributors, you hardly find any information about their contributing work. I’m just thinking: Aren’t they proud? And why aren’t they doing it? Because of the audience that doesn’t care about it? Or because the audience don’t know about it how “open source” works?
If i was a manager of a contributing company, i’ll probably use as UVP for sure. But if there was a “system” that takers and makers recognize, then contribution becomes a real “marketing” asset. Competitors look at competitors. If my competitor uses that kind of marketing asset, i’ll will look at the freelance contributor market and wonder what individual or group we can sponsor.
And in the end, Karma won’t pay bills.
You’re right that we can make the incentive loops a lot better, but it’s a good start. I’ve been thinking about this for everything in WordPress, actually, for example how the plugin rating system should show ratings over time, or badges shouldn’t just be binary, they should show how active you are in an area.
Really thoughtful post, Matt. I like how you connected corporate greenwashing with “openwashing” in open source a powerful analogy and an important reminder for the community.