I’ve been working with and around WordPress for about two decades now — nearly half of my life. I’ve been working in it so long that it’s easy to occasionally forget about the foundational principles of this ecosystem that have kept me coming back all these years. My recent trip to WordCamp US in Portland was a great reminder of why I’m still here.

Simply put, it’s really profound and increasingly more rare that software is not only free but protected by a license that let’s anyone download, modify, fork, remix, redistribute, and profit from it. That’s just not really how we build software anymore. And yet here we are with WordPress.

Not only is there a powerful publishing platform available to everyone and hundreds of free and inexpensive ways of going live with it, there’s also a directory of tens of thousands of extensions that you can use to extend your site in a million different ways. Those are also free.

If that’s not enough, there is a directory of tens of thousands of themes that give you the power to express yourself with beautiful typography, vibrant colors, and stunning layouts. Want to use Comic Sans and Wingdings as a type pairing and set it to #14FF00? Go for it!

Oh yeah, and those are also free.

Thousands of people spend their limited and highly-valuable time keeping the platform and these extensions going every day. And they do that for free too. They do it on their lunch break. They do it 15 minutes before they have to pick up their kids from school. They do it in between surgeries. They do it on holidays. They do it in hallways and on trains. They do it when they know they should be doing something else.

Let there be no confusion as to why these people, myself included, continue to show up every day for this project for over 20 years now — this is an inspiring and unique beacon of freedom worth fighting for.

WordPress, like it or not, has no peer. It is the operating system for half of the entire web. It reigns supreme. Its size, impact, and reach cannot be disputed. There is no pie chart, bar graph, or white paper that exists to make it untrue. And that’s not because of any one person or company — that’s because of us.

Sure, it may not always be the shiniest or the coolest platform of the day. And we have plenty of work to do to improve leadership, transparency, and diversity of thought. But WordPress will always be bigger, it will always be open, and it will always be free.

There are nearly a billion WordPress sites out there on the vast expanse of the worldwide web. And they are not just websites — they are people’s stories, they are revolutions, they are outlets, they are opportunities, they are ideas, they are launchpads, they are change, they are commerce, they are connections. And they are all running on WordPress.

WordPress belongs to all of us. And for all of these reasons, it should be as obvious as it is imperative that we all take our roles in this wild experiment in web publishing seriously.

Whether you’re a freelancer or a billion dollar enterprise, you show up to support the project not because someone asked you to, but because that’s how we continue to keep the web open and accessible and free. The more you take, the more you give back. And the more you give, the better the project gets, the longer it lives, and the more people it impacts along the way. It’s really that simple.

We dedicate our time and effort here not merely because WordPress is a good tool for building websites. We invest ourselves because we are an integral part of WordPress – its community, its mission, and its future. Our commitment stems from a shared vision of an open, accessible, and innovative web that empowers creators worldwide.

We are WordPress.