Elinor Ostrom and the open source commons

In January 2022, Lesley Sim asked a question in a Post Status article that WordPress still hasn’t answered: “Who officially speaks for WordPress, the open source project?” Her essay, “WordPress as a Commons,” set out how tangled the roles had become between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation, and it made a pointed observation about the project’s leader. Matt Mullenweg often warns about the tragedy of the commons, Sim wrote, but he “never mentions Ostrom or that this problem has already been demonstrably solved many times.”

That article was one of the top five most memorable and worked-over pieces of writing at Post Status, during my time as its editor, when it was an active publication. Two years after we published it, Lesley’s question stopped being academic or theoretical at WordCamp US 2024.

Mullenweg co-founded WordPress, runs Automattic, and personally controls WordPress.org. WP Engine is one of the largest companies that host WordPress sites. In his closing talk at WordCamp US, in September 2024, he cited the tragedy of the commons, accused WP Engine of taking from the project without giving back, and said it might be the last WordCamp where the company had a booth. Within days WP Engine was blocked from WordPress.org, and the dispute went to federal court.

The tragedy that wasn’t

In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that people who share a resource will each take as much of it as they can, until it is ruined. His “tragedy of the commons” became an argument for two remedies: divide the commons into private property, or put it under the state. To prevent the former from happening, Mullenweg has seemed an implicit advocate for the latter, as WordPress’s chief steward or “benevolent dictator for life.” If you see room for a third option, a more distributed model, the nationalized vs. privatized extremes look like a false dilemma, which is what Ostrom’s work demonstrates.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career looking at what real people and communities actually do. She and her colleagues found fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and grazing lands that their users had governed for generations, sometimes centuries, without either remedy. As she put it in her Nobel lecture, “Finding multiple cases where resource users were successful in organizing themselves challenged the presumption that it was impossible.” She was the first woman to win the Nobel prize in economics, in 2009.

Ostrom drew eight design principles from the commons that lasted. In plain terms: clear boundaries around the resource and who may use it; rules that fit local conditions; a say in the rules for the people they affect; monitoring by people accountable to the users; penalties that start small and grow; cheap, accessible ways to settle disputes; recognition by outside authorities of the users’ right to organize themselves; and, for large commons, governance in nested layers.

Open source turns the problem over

Software is not a fishery. Using code doesn’t use it up. As the programmer Aldo Cortesi pointed out in 2009, the danger for an open source project is not overuse but under-contribution: “An Open Source project is definitely a commons, in the sense that it is a community resource that thrives or starves depending on contributions from its members.” He put the condition for a healthy project as an inequality: the benefit of contributing must exceed the benefit of not contributing plus the cost of contributing. Much of the ordinary machinery of open source, from version control to bug trackers, to WordPress’s Five for the Future pledges, can be read as ways of shifting those three terms.

Eight questions for WordPress

Ostrom’s principles are a description of what has worked, not a checklist that guarantees anything. Read as questions, though, they fit WordPress uncomfortably well.

1. Boundaries. What is the commons: the code, the WordPress.org directories and update servers, the trademark, the community? The licence settles the first. The rest are not clearly anyone’s, or are clearly one person’s.
2. Rules that fit. Do the plugin and theme guidelines fit the people who work under them, from solo developers to hosts the size of WP Engine?
3. A say in the rules. Who decides the guidelines and the roadmap, and can the people they bind take part?
4. Accountable monitors. Who enforces the rules, and who are the enforcers accountable to? Sim asked the same thing in 2022.
5. Graduated sanctions. In 2024 WP Engine went from a public dispute to being blocked from WordPress.org in a matter of days, a sanction that also fell on its customers. Was there a smaller step first? See our WordPress record for the sequence.
6. Cheap conflict resolution. The dispute ended up in federal court, which is about as far from cheap and accessible as conflict resolution gets.
7. Recognition of the right to organize. In September 2026 the court ruled that the WordPress trademarks belong to the WordPress Foundation, not to Automattic or Mullenweg. Whether the Foundation will act as the community’s institution is an open question.
8. Nested layers. Here WordPress has done well: local meetups and WordCamps, the Make teams, and translation teams are layered, and much of the project’s life has happened in them. How healthy are they today, and how will they be sustained?

What Illich adds

Ostrom asks how a commons survives. Illich asked what happens when one doesn’t. In “Silence Is a Commons,” an address to a 1982 symposium in Tokyo on “the computer-managed society,” published the next year in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, he defined the commons as the part of the environment people had “recognized claims of usage” to, “not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.” Enclosure, he said, “marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment” — what had been a commons became a resource.

His example was silence, enclosed by loudspeakers: “Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete.” The same move is open to software. Code can be held in common by the people who use and repair it, or it can be treated as a resource that companies extract from and compete over. The licence keeps WordPress’s code from being enclosed. It does not keep the project from being run as a resource.

That is why the two belong together here. In our terms, the commons is what holds radical monopoly off: as long as the code and the way out belong to everyone, no one owns the tool that two in five websites depend on. Ostrom shows that people can keep a commons without a sovereign or a market to manage it for them. Illich is the reminder of what is lost when they don’t. In her Nobel lecture, Ostrom argued that “a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.” That is a good test for the institutions that govern WordPress too.

Open questions

• Could the WordPress Foundation become the kind of institution Ostrom described, accountable to the people who contribute to and depend on WordPress?
• Which of Ostrom’s principles could a community put into practice without waiting for leadership to agree?
• Is under-contribution still the main threat to open source, or is capture by the largest contributors now the bigger one?

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