WordPress is the most popular CMS, the founder is a multimillionaire, the parent company (Automattic) is worth over a billion bucks so why should you give anything back to the project when it has so much already?
Well for a number of reasons really, not least because you get to use and abuse the software for nothing! The potential is there for you to start your business website or personal blog for the cost of a domain and some hosting.
Don’t forget the opportunity to actually make money from WordPress, whether it be via an ecommerce store (built with WP obviously), web development, premium theme and plugin development or like us here at WP Tweaks providing a support service. I could list a lot more here but you get the picture.
At this point some of you may remain unconvinced and might be saying; well if they want to make the software GPL that’s fine, nobody is forcing them, plus I’m expanding their market share and value by using WordPress in my projects. And you’d be right…kind of, sure nobody forced Matt to launch and keep WP as GPL but in so doing he has kept it community driven! Being community driven means you can have a say in what’s next for WordPress and be a part of the bug fixing an release process. It’s all dependant on your skill set really, if you have some great ideas or even if you want to vote for some head over to the WordPress ideas page where you can do just that. See you don’t have to be a techy type to give back to the project! If you are of the techy or coder persuasion then perhaps you can get involved in bug fixing or testing, if you feel like that’s you bag then head over here to start.
I’m getting off trac a little here though (see what I did there), this isn’t a post about how you can give back to WordPress. It’s about why you should.
Look it’s not all about WP’s monetary value or even how much you can make from it, it’s about helping to shape something that has a direct and positive impact in your life, other people’s lives and the internet as a whole.
To put it simply if someone helped you in your life, you would be open and willing to help them in return (if your not I can’t imagine you are very popular but I can imagine your very quiet funeral with tumble weeds blowing across your grave)! Could you imagine the result if everyone that used WordPress decided to give something back to the project. Even if it was just an hour a month. Seriously, just think about that for a minute.
So what are we doing, well you can find us playing to our strengths over on the WordPress support forum. Wait a minute a WordPress support company is giving away support for free, how is that a good business model? Well the flip side to that coin is it gets our name out there and gives us a warm squishy feeling inside. Future plans also involve releasing some cool themes into the wild.
So the question really isn’t why should I give something back to WordPress, it’s why aren’t you!
Hah I knew I could get through the whole post without mentioning Karma 🙂
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