The huge problem with open source software is that there are no sales numbers to show how many people are using it. We know that WordPress.com hosts over three million blogs. We know EduBlogs powers nearly 200,000. But how many sites are hosted using the original, downloadable, self-installed and managed version of WordPress?

Now, the automatic update notification system in WordPress gives answers to that question and others. Most hugely: over 2.6 million sites are hosted on WordPress.

I wish I’d seen this from WordPress maven Matt Mullenweg before I finished My LTR on open source software for libraries. Mullenweg is brushing off some of the mystique and praise the media has been giving him, and giving an honest sense of what makes open source software work:

the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion. It’s not about selling out to a single company, it’s dozens of companies independently adopting and backing an open source platform for no reason other than its quality. I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.

Oh yeah. WordPress 2.3 is out and available for download. It’s a major milestone for the project both architecturally and on softer issues like lifecycle management that are often the Achilles heel of otherwise great open source projects.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress, startup, myth, open source, free software, motivation

I awoke this morning to a bit of a mess. After enjoying months of spam-free bliss thanks to Akismet, I found over a hundred spam comments for pills and free pictures to suit most any need or desire. Spam has snuck through before, but never in this volume, and Akismet has always been quick to learn from my manual corrections and stop further leaks.

Not this time.

So I began to panic. Had spammers figured out Akismet’s tricks (a)? Was there some problem with Akismet (b)? Had my license been terminated for over-use (c)?

I was surprised to see Matt Mullenweg’s quick response to my support inquiry. As it turned out, there was problem with the Akismet systems, and things should be back on track soon. I was relieved, and also impressed with the quality of the support. I’ve seen many companies and people struggle with customer support (and I struggle with how to support bsuite users), but Matt’s 82 word response was about perfect.

It’s (b), I’m very sorry.

There was a bug which caused Akismet to return extra data in its response which caused your plugin to ignore the response. Because all our systems were functioning correctly on the backend, just the response that was bad, our monitoring didn’t catch this problem.

I’ve taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future, of course. Everything should be working again correctly, please let me know if you have any more problems.

Related: here’s a library angle on customer support.

akismet, customer support, matt mullenweg, spam, support, user relations, user support