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**Daniel Bachhuber:** \[27:57\] In the WordPress ecosystem, WP-CLI is this project that everyone depends on; all the businesses in the ecosystem. So it's almost like priceless, in a sense. Not to toot my own horn a little bit too much, but there's not an equivalent good that you can just use. Yeah, someone could fork t... |
So I think that if your project lends itself to that sort of value proposition for larger companies, then it's just a matter of having a conversation with them; you can talk to the C-level executives all day long about what you wanna do. If your project isn't defensible in that way, well, it's gonna be hard to convince... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This is interesting though, because you're essentially saying that there is a particular skillset that you need to have in order to reach out to these companies and get them to invest in this Kickstarter, and I think when a lot of people point at Kickstarter as a sustainability method, they just go l... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah... I almost have like a moral objection to having developers pay $5 and $10 donations to pay for this stuff, when really it's companies that I think should be paying for that kind of stuff. But I think a lot of people don't think about it or don't want to deal with the company's sponsorship side ... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** But how do you force a company to pay for an open source product that they can use freely? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I don't know. You tell me, because you did it. \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** I'm not forcing anyone right now... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm sorry... \[laughs\] You've gotten a lot of sponsorships this year, right? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Right. So the way that it's working right now -- well, the way that it worked last year is I tried to build a business around WP-CLI, building premium WP-CLI commands that were specifically tailored to larger businesses... And then also enterprise support, however you describe that. |
I think it's a relatively common model amongst open source projects. It kind of worked... It didn't really work that well; it was gonna be like a long, slow grind sort of a business. But most importantly, because it's just me doing my thing, and I've only got so much time in the week, and my time is zero-sum, the time ... |
\[31:53\] So I did this last-ditch titled "What is WP-CLI worth to you?" [blog post](https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2016/12/12/the-big-question/), and I just had a call to give me money, and some links where people could give me money, and it was probably the worst-timed fundraising campaign anyone could ever do, becau... |
Then what ended up happening is that Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress, founder of Automattic), my old boss - influential person in the WordPress ecosystem... He was able to negotiate with some hosting companies and other players in the WordPress ecosystem, and they came on as major backers of the project. So whe... |
So as far as sustainability goes, like, sustainable for 2017 and loving it! And who knows what 2018 is gonna be. \[laughs\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So it's just for 2017, the sponsorships? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** That is the commitment right now. Matt said it's not gonna be any problem to get the same amount of funding for next year. There's actually a good amount of money in the WordPress ecosystem. One of the most challenging things is that these companies do have the money to invest, but that money is i... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There isn't a budget called that. Nobody has that budget line, it turns out... \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Yeah, and companies too are -- or at least a lot of companies are hesitant to enter long-term pay for software contracts, because you can basically never get out of those, unless you suddenly don't need the software anymore, which is not very often. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's interesting that it took Matt getting involved to get those sponsorships, and sort of this high-level "What is this worth to you? Seriously, somebody do something" kind of call to action. \[laughter\] |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** It's interesting, but if you know the WordPress ecosystem, that's kind of how the WordPress ecosystem works. Here's an equivalent - Drupal. Drupal has a foundation, Drupal has Acquia, the company, which contributes a lot of development time... I'm pretty sure the foundation has employees... The Wo... |
\[36:09\] Matt will ask companies to invest employee time on behalf of the project. Matt's actually publicly called out -- there's this phrase, "Five for the future", so 5% of all employee time towards the project for businesses operating in the WordPress ecosystem... And most businesses aren't contributing nearly that... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** As a maintainer, would you rather have a company offer employee time or money to you? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Well, money is only good if I know what I'm gonna use it for. Obviously, I'm paying myself -- the opinion I have about that is I'm paying myself on a part-time basis, and it's a monthly stipend, because I think that like... You know, I'm an entrepreneur and a business owner and I've got little oth... |
So the way that it's justifiable for me to get paid to work on the project is that I'm paying myself far under market rate, and it's part-time basis, and it's basically the time that I need to spend on the project to keep it moving forward on a regular basis... You know, ongoing committed time. But I don't expect it to... |
I think that the dynamics of contributing to an open source project on a full-time basis and a part-time basis are actually hugely different, in the sense that if you're working on a project on a full-time basis, it's possible to fall into this trap of inventing more work for yourself to do, whereas if it's on a part-t... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It puts you kind of on equal footing with other contributors coming to the project too, that are doing it part-time. There's not this huge time and disparity between you. |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Right. And there's this dynamic too of like, "Well, I get paid to work on the project" versus "I don't get paid to work on the project", and that's something I'm struggling with every day. The way that I justify that right now is that the people that get paid to work on the project should actively... |
\[40:12\] And also the non-paid thing is non-committal. I've started onboarding committers to the project, people who have commit access, but it's volunteer basis, and I'm trying to be very clear that "The expectation is that you're here to have fun, learn and grow, and as soon as any of those principles are in violati... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Before we move into the next break, I wanted to just come back to the actual numbers... So you funded a Kickstarter... You said that it got fully funded and then got some more, and then now you have this new system that Matt Mullenweg -- could you tell us the difference in the numbers there, between ... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Well, I'm not sharing any of the numbers publicly, because there's a bunch of downsides to that and not very many upsides. From a perspective of other open source projects that have funding for maintainers to get paid to work on a project, it is a healthier number than that. And I have budget appr... |
**Break:** \[41:40\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Tell us a little bit about why you did eventually decide to join the WordPress project, and maybe why it wasn't always part of the WordPress project. |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** That's a great question, and also a very difficult one. Actually, it's not difficult to answer, because it's happened and there's a conclusion to it. So ultimately, the decision to join the WordPress project revolved around the wp-cli.org domain, in the sense that... I don't actually own the domai... |
\[44:04\] So it was just kind of stressful, and keep in mind this is middle of December, two days before I'm headed on family vacation to relax and take a break from life, and that sort of thing. And all throughout the vacation I had this unanswered question of "Under what terms am I going to get the wp-cli.org domain?... |
When I got back from vacation, I finally was able to connect with him. His thought process was basically does he give me the domain outright, or does he lease it to me for $1/year under some specific terms, so that I don't take the project in some direction that's divergent from its original ethos, and what it is today... |
At that point I'm just like, "There is no way that all this stress and agony and everything related to this is worth the amount of money that I'm trying to raise to work part-time on the project." So I got on a call with him and I'm like, "Okay, so keeping WP-CLI independent doesn't seem like it's the best option at th... |
I think that the reason that it hadn't been an official WordPress project for a long time was again around the dynamics of the WordPress ecosystem. Matt Mullenweg is definitely BDFL, for better or for worse, and the project itself is oriented towards the end user. So you as a developer open a new track ticket, say "I w... |
I think for a lot of developers in the ecosystem there's a little bit of animosity - and at times a lot of animosity and tension - around the decision-making process for the WordPress project, and... Why deal with that? If you can be independent and just kind of do your own thing... That's much better. |
Ultimately, that was why it was not top of my list thing that I wanted to do, cede control to the WordPress project, whose decision-making process is potentially divergent from my own. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** The moment you said "Trac ticket" I was like, "Oh, god..." |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Yeah, there's a little bit of "Ugh... Ouch!" |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Was the fear from the original maintainer about the project going in the direction whose vision he didn't agree with, or was it about the money part of it? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** You know, introducing money to any sort of situation always makes things more complex. One obvious here is "Daniel couldn't make this a proprietary license, or have some split license that's kind of orthogonal to the ethos of the community around it, in the interest of trying to commercialize it a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Is the project GPL? Is that the license on it? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** It's MIT. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Uuuh... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Even more free! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Uuuuuuh... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[47:55\] Well, when you said potentially do a dual license, I assumed that that would mean that it was GPL, because that's one of the ways that you can kind of get money out of GPL code if you own the copyright on it. But if it's not even GPL, that actually -- the dual licensing becomes pretty diffi... |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Yes. I wanna talk about GPL just a little bit, because the GPL is actually this huge topic in the WordPress ecosystem, in that it's used as often a blunt instrument for enforcing certain economic dynamics around everyone's businesses in the WordPress ecosystem, and ultimately it's around the end u... |
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