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Aleksandra Bodera

Making and designing is awesome, but the biggest satisfaction comes from being able to see your creations used, shared and improved by others. Open exchange and collaboration creates synergy, and a unique opportunity to prosper and give back for both individuals and businesses. As a company we benefit immensely from synergy brought by incorporating different perspectives and voices in our design and development process. As individuals we learn and grow thanks to freely shared ideas and knowledge. WordPress would never have powered 26% of the web, had it been developed behind closed doors.

Allan Cole

Open source is so valuable because it encourages a community with an idea to evolve that idea naturally through experimentation and peer review. The benefits of that evolved idea then get spread back around to the community which in turn, fosters more evolution on the idea. To me, it’s what separates incremental growth and exponential growth in a cooperative way that parallels democracy in its truest form.

Takashi Irie


Filipe Varela


Brie Anne Demkiw

I think many of us became designers to help improve the world somehow—to make things better for our users, the businesses we work with, our families, and ourselves. Open Source provides each of us with this opportunity and stands as an example of how designing more openly and more transparently, can give a voice to anyone in the world, while remaining completely voluntary— “freedom” in every sense.

Matt Miklic

The open source nature of WordPress plays a significant role in why it’s gotten the traction that it has. We’ve seen beautifully-designed proprietary competitors come and go, unable to reach the critical mass they need to sustain themselves. If usage is oxygen for ideas, open source is one of the most effective ways to breathe life into a young project.

Mel Choyce

Open Source is the foundation of everything we do. The idea that you can take something, break it apart, figure out what everything does, and then rebuild it? It inspired an entire generation of hackers and builders and makers. Our work is about improving the world—you can’t do that if everything you build is hidden away to all but a privileged few.

Davide Casali

I see “open source” as the embodiment of the underlying values of the original hacker culture (ref: Hacker’s Manifesto, Fravia, et al), of which I identified since I faced the digital bits going through a 9600 line in the ’90. It’s not just about code, it’s about a society that is able to leave scarcity behind, understand everyone is interconnected, and acknowledges that money, greed and personal gains are a widespread driver of many issues.

John Maeda, Why Automattic?


John Maeda

  In the beginning days of the Web, Open Source was a human right. I can often remember in the 90s as the Web was just starting to emerge how important it was that all […]