h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Techcrunch.com is running a story called Automattic Spurns $200 Million Acquisition Offer where it's revealed that Automattic has turned down a large acquisition offer from a yet unknown source. I made a rather long winded comment on it, but decided that this warranted a post of its own here on my site, so here it is in its whole glory:

As interesting as this might be, the speculation is regarding Automattic and Wordpress.com not the Wordpress codebase. There is, or at least should be, a difference there.

Claiming this as “A great confirmation to the open source business model.” as Tim does above doesn’t really hold water though, as wordpress.com isn’t open source. The service is based on open source software, but Wordpress.com isn’t open source in itself. Sure, some of the work being done by Automattic trickles back to the Wordpress code base but thats being done on a case-by-case basis.

Everyone could potentially set up a service like Wordpress.com, based on any given open source platform, and make a bundle on it. While I applaud entrepreneurs who are able pull it off like this, this doesn’t have much to do with open source as much as it has to do with timing and providing a service people want.

In many ways, Wordpress.com isn’t much more open source than Facebook is, the only real difference is that the core service on Wordpress.com is based on a open source platform.

In my view this even further highlights the problem with differentiating Wordpress.com/Automattic (the business side) and Wordpress.org (The open source project).

The guys over at Automattic has made the Automattic Stats plugin available for download, which makes it possible for self hosted Wordpress installations to get the same statistics package as wordpress.com hosted blogs have by default. While this sounds like a good idea, and I'm sure a lot of people will be really happy about it, the total amount of data Automattic potentially can gather from Wordpress installs is further increased by this.

The plugin itself requires an Wordpress.com API key, you can use the same one as you use for Akismet, and all the data and statistics are gathered and created on the wordpress.com servers. In fact, the whole admin interface is located on the wordpress.com dashboard.

Combined with the data that Akismet gathers for each and every comment made on any Akismet protected installation it seems that Automattic are indeed gathering as much data as they can on non-wordpress.com hosted installs as well. They already have all this data for each of the 931,951 hosted installs and their data set can now grow even further with the new statistics package.

I wonder if people actually realize how much data Akismet actually gathers? For some reason it sends much more data than the actual comments, and combine all that information with views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks that the new statistics plugin sends back Automatic will have a lot of data about your self-hosted Wordpress install. I still can't understand why that much data needs to be sent for every comment made on every site that Akismet protects.

Combine that with the fact that Matt Mullenweg also owns Ping-O-Matic the sheer amount of data that the software creators have at their disposal in their datawarehouses is something that you might want to think about.

I know both plugins are opt-in for the self hosted Wordpress installs, but chances are that most installs will enable them both as they do provide a useful service to the site owner.

Don't get me wrong, Akismet does a great job fighting the evil that is comment spam, and I'm sure the statistics package will do a great job as well, but you might want to consider if you want to contribute to the data gathering. I'm not normally a very paranoid person, but the more I think about this the more it worries me.

For now, I run Akismet on this site just because there are no real alternatives available. I've also enabled the statistics plugin for testing purposes. I just wish there was a decentralized anti-spam service available.