Matt Mullenweg - The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet

Information swing on a pendulum between open and closed ecosystems. Examples:

• Dominance of AOL pages led to open blogging and search
• Dominance of open blogging led to paid newsletter community
• Dominance of AWS led to open source standards for server applications

Platforms have more value created on top of them than they cost (Gates). Successful open platforms tend to take about 5% of the value they create. Much more and incentive declines for contributions to the platform. Much less and there is not sufficient revenue for the platform sponsor to contribute to the platform themselves. In each WordPress release, c. 5% of updates come from the Automattic team; the rest come from the WordPress community.