You can't force folks to contribute stuff, but you very much can prevent them from contributing things.
That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.
So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
They can publish their "how much carbon did this WordPress instance burn" plugin without any approval from Matt, under the name of their own organization. Since they weren't being paid to do this in the first place, the only thing Matt was giving them was a chatroom which they can replace for free.
If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.
In one level,yeah you're right- a) I don't know if it's really super important work and b) the physical payout is probably the same for those folks doing that work regardless of if it's done in the context of WP or not.
You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.
Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.
That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.
So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.