Although GitHub is primarily used for code collaboration, which is how I use it to show you both the behind the scenes and client side of what I can do for you as a developer, WordPress’ Community team is considering adopting the platform to standardize their project management tools.
Contributing to open source already is a challenging for some but when it requires signing up for multiple services in order to access the team’s many spreadsheets, trello boards, Slack groups, and other modes of communication, gaining new contributors becomes needlessly difficult.
A new proposal, that was authored by Community team rep Leo Gopal, outlines the benefits of using GitHub as a central communication tool. These benefits include things such as improved collaboration and communication using the platform’s commenting system and the ability to track progress and assign tasks.
Gopal claims that standardizing on GitHub would increase transparency and accountability while supporting better organization with tools like issues, labels, milestones, and project boards.
“By adopting GitHub for project management and issue tracking, the Community Team will standardize our way of working, making it easier for new team members to get up to speed and enabling more effective cross-team collaboration. This standardization also makes it easier for Community Team members to track progress, identify issues and make data-driven decisions.”
Gopal said
Other Make teams, such as Learn, Hosting, Meta, Marketing and more, are already successfully using GitHub to manage their communication and prioritize projects. Gopal proposes the Community team learn from their efforts and adopt these tooling methods for a quarter as an experiment.
“If after the first Quarter the consensus is that this does not suit our team, we will revert back to initial project and tracking practices and explore more.”
Gopal said
A few participants in the discussion have concerns about the transparency and losing track of conversations, as they would not be linked to their WordPress.org profiles, although some activity is shown on their WordPress.org profiles if they link them.
“The truth is that I am unsure about it. I think the community team is not particularly technical, and using GitHub may pose certain barriers we didn’t have so far. Maybe for many people opening an issue, requesting a pull request, or similar is their everyday life, but for others, it can be a bit blocking. I’m also afraid that discussions will move from this Make site to GitHub, and we shouldn’t lose the spirit of owning our content (linked to our .org profile) and lose the use of this space for decision-making and public discussions like this one.”
Weglot-sponsored Community team contributor Juan Hernando said
He addressed this concern by stating that there would be no code and that users who can work with Trello boards will have no problem adopting to GitHub’s tools for planning.
“Trello was used for planning and often forgotten until time for reviews or recaps. There was no way other teams would know what we are working on or add to the conversation unless they dug up our trello boards AND if we took their suggestion and weighed it in.”
Gopal said
He said using GitHub would allow the team to incorporate advantages like automations, assignments, and inter-team collaboration with new advanced reporting capabilities. Overall, GitHub has the potential to increase the visibility of their work for those collaborating across teams.
Milana Cap, who uses GitHub to help organize the Documentation team for reporting issues and automating tasks, recommended adopting the platform and shared how the Docs team has been using it.
“All the other benefits: version control, precise contribution tracking, all sorts of project management tools etc., can not be found all in one tool other than GitHub, and I can not recommend it enough – for everything.”
Cap said
The discussion is still open on the proposal and Gopal has published a Proposal Poll for Community Team members to give their feedback on standardizing communications on GitHub.
WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we’re taking care of it for the next generation.”
Matt Mullenweg
A small audience of WordPress contributors, developers, and extenders gathered on December 15 for the annual State of the Word keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Those who could not join in person joined via livestream, of which I have watched since, or one of 33 watch parties held across 11 countries, with more than 500 RSVPs.
For more on the Four Freedoms of Open Source check our my blog post The Four Freedoms
Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, launched the event with a reminder of why so many of those gathered choose WordPress, the Four Freedoms of open source. As she noted, open source is an idea that can change our generation, and WordPress is one of the most consistent and impactful stewards of those freedoms on which it is based.
As with previous State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the year’s accomplishments, learnings, and aspirations as the project moves into 2023 and beyond. From Gutenberg concluding its second phase of site editing in preparation for phase three, Collaborative Workflows, to the restoration of meetups and global WordCamps, to the introduction of a new theme and plugin taxonomy, to contemplation on the potential of machine learning, WordPress is entering its 20th year continuing to define bleeding edge technology all thanks to the ecosystem’s vibrant community.
The one-hour multimedia presentation was followed by an interactive question and answer session where Matt fielded questions from the livestream and studio audience. All questions will be responded to in a follow-up post on Make.WordPress.org/project.
In an effort for no questions to go unanswered, those submitted on Livestream and Twitter are listed below with answers from WordPress contributors.
How do we convince legacy web builders, agencies, and companies to more quickly adopt new WordPress features? I’m seeing a ton of opportunities to support older sites (5.0), but very few agencies/projects/companies are moving to build on 6.0.
A few teams are working hard to share and educate users about new features in the latest WordPress releases. The Training Team publishes tutorials to help ease adoption. Marketing highlights new #WordPress features across multiple social networks. @annezazu hosts regular Hallway Hangouts in Test. Your thoughts on additional adoption initiatives are welcome.
How close is WordPress to editor collaboration? It’s sometimes frustrating that two people can’t be in the editor at the same time.
The project roadmap shows the big picture goals and upcoming releases, and @matveb shared some early thoughts about building a “multiplayer” experience, but there is no release date for this feature yet. As noted in the Q&A, some big questions need to be addressed before collaboration can be addressed. That said, some exciting plugins explore comments and other collaborative tools.
Any thoughts on p2’s release date for self-hosting? It looks lovely!
The new version of P2 requires WordPress.com hosting to power its more advanced feature set, so there is currently no self-hosted version available. You’re welcome to try the O2 plugin and the P2 Breathe theme, but please note that this plugin is not in active development.
What commitment does WordPress Core have to advance accessibility for disabled WP users and also for baking it into WordPress sites created?
Accessibility is top of mind while developing WordPress, and WordPress 6.1 has seen 40 accessibility improvements listed under milestones 13.1-14.1 in the Gutenberg GitHub repository, if you would like to follow along, with more expected in upcoming releases. As Matt mentioned in the Q&A session, there is an interest in slowing down the fast clip of Gutenberg development to allow for necessary improvements, like accessibility.
What is the plan for making the Site Editor accessible?
Are there any plans to make future WordCamps hybrid to take advantage of the aspects of video conferencing that we discovered during the pandemic?
WordCamp US 2022 had a captioned Livestream available throughout the event(recordings also available). Community members in San Diego and at home kept the conversation going with #WCUS across social platforms, especially on Twitter. WordCamp organizers are committed to iterating and exploring how best to bring the experience to participants both in-person and online.
What is the timeline for removing the “Beta” tag from the Site Editor?
The Core Team is discussing open issues and blockers to the removal of the Beta label. You can follow along with the discussion on GitHub.
Right now, the navigation block is basic. Are they planning to improve this? For example, I would like to easily create a mega menu.
Navigation is a crucial part of the site editing experience and can cover a wide array of use cases, from simple “all pages” navigation to complex structures. Currently, the project is focused on ensuring the best experience possible for the most common use cases while still allowing extensibility. Once that experience is polished enough, the editor will be extended to allow more complex navigation structures such as mega menus.
WordPress lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí has in the past proposed using GitHub Codespaces to improve the contributor experience especially for new developers just getting into contributing. GitHub, a few days ago, announced the availability of GitHub Codespaces, its a quick launch cloud-based developer environment, for all users, with 60 hours free per month for Free users and 90 hours for Pro users to use as they wish. Rather than the old way, Codespaces makes it possible to launch any GitHub repository in a single click.
“I’m looking to make wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces with an initial target audience of folks getting started with contributing to core on a Contributor Day. This seems to mostly be a matter of making decisions about our container setup(s).”
-Hou-Sandí
Users having to get a development environment up and running can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of attending a contributor day, especially with slow wi-fi, as some may have. Hou-Sandí recently experienced this at the 2022 WordCamp US Contributor Day.
“This experience reminded me that as a project we should take a look at making it ever-easier to contribute to WordPress, and a remote development option is a good thing to have in our toolkit. This allows contributors to get started with minimal setup and without the requirement of a desktop/laptop – you could patch and test WordPress from a tablet or your phone.”
-Hou-Sandi
This woman has been working with Codespaces for nearly two years. In her 2021 WordCamp US presentation titled “A voice for the new White House administration with the block editor,” she surprised many in the audience with a live demo of the architecture of a custom block using Codespaces. The recording, which tours some of the work she and her team did on the 2020/21 Biden/Harris whitehouse.gov website, is a good example of how Codespaces can be a helpful tool for WordPress development.
WordPress developers at the event responded positively in support of using Codespaces to improve contributor experience and many of them are eager to help on the project and test when it’s ready.
Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said having a built-in online development and testing environment would be “a great addition to the WordPress and Gutenberg repositories.”
If, by using Codespaces, a user can reduce the friction and help people get set up with a development environment in a matter of minutes versus hours, it would significantly improve the productivity at events dedicated to contributing.
“I believe this will help not only new but all contributors. To me, using Codespaces to review PRs is such a great experience. Besides, adding Codespaces support also means adding devcontainer support, which makes it way easier to set up the local development environment for contributors who use VS Code.”
-WordPress developer Tung Du
GitHub has a limit of 60 free hours for its users that may also be used up by developers in their own projects so there may still be the need for tutorials on using other local development methods. For the occasional Codespaces user, it will be tough to beat the convenience of spinning up a development environment in seconds.
“I love this even for contributors who aren’t new. I personally would find this very handy as it removes another roadblock towards contributing. I’m all for it, I can’t wait to give it a try once it’s ready for testing.”
Back in July, I wrote an article about whether or not it was time to leave GitHub. Well, There has been some developments since then and now Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are getting sued by a programmer an lawyer named Matthew Butterick, with allegations that GitHub’s Copilot violate terms of open-source license and infringe on the rights of programers that have had their code used by it.
Microsoft released GitHub Copilot in June of 2022, it is an AI-based programming aid using OpenAI Codex to generate real-time source code and function recommendations in Visual Studio.
This tool was trained with machine learning using billions of lines of code from public repositories and can transform natural language into code snippets across dozens of programming languages, but there’s a problem with them doing this
Clipping authors out
While Copilot can speed up the process of writing code and ease the development of software, the fact that it uses public open-source code has caused experts to worry about the fact that it violates licensing rules around attributions and limitations.
Open-source licences, such as GPL, Apache and MIT licences, require that a person posts attribution of the author’s name and defining particular copyrights.
Copilot, However, is removing this component, even when the snippets are longer than 150 characters and taken directly from the training set, no attribution is ever given.
Some programmers have gone as far as to call this open-source laundering, and the legal implications of this approach were demonstrated after the launch of this AI tool.
“It appears Microsoft is profiting from others’ work by disregarding the conditions of the underlying open-source licenses and other legal requirements,”
Joseph Saveri, the law firm representing Butterick in the litigation.
Aside from the licence violations, Butterick has also alleged that the development feature violates the following:
GitHub’s terms of service and privacy policies,
DMCA 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information,
the California Consumer Privacy Act,
and other laws giving rise to the related legal claims.
The complaint was submitted to the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, demanding the approval of statutory damages to the tune of $9,000,000,000.
“Each time Copilot provides an unlawful Output it violates Section 1202 three times (distributing the Licensed Materials without: (1) attribution, (2) copyright notice, and (3) License Terms). So, if each user receives just one Output that violates Section 1202 throughout their time using Copilot (up to fifteen months for the earliest adopters), then GitHub and OpenAI have violated the DMCA 3,600,000 times. At minimum statutory damages of $2500 per violation, that translates to $9,000,000,000.”
Butterick also commented on another topic in a blog post earlier in October, where he discussed the damage that Copilot could bring to the open-source community
He argued that the incentive for open-source contributions and collaboration is essentially removed by offering people code snippets and never telling them about the creator of the code and how to attribute them for it.
“Microsoft is creating a new walled garden that will inhibit programmers from discovering traditional open-source communities. Over time, this process will starve these communities. User attention and engagement will be shifted […] away from the open-source projects themselves—away from their source repos, their issue trackers, their mailing lists, their discussion boards.”
He fears that given enough time, Copilot will cause open-source communities to decline, and in turn, the quality of the code in the training of the training data for the AI will be diminished
When contacted by BleepingComputer, GitHub issued the following statement.
“We’ve been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start, and will continue to evolve the product to best serve developers across the globe.”
I was pointed to an interesting article from WP Tavern called Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! on the Software Freedom Conservancy website. The Software Freedom Conservancy is a nonprofit organization centered around ethical technology. Their mission is to ensure the right to repair, improve and reinstall software at your choosing. They promote and defend these rights through fostering free and open source software (also known as FOSS) projects, driving initiatives that actively make technology more inclusive for everyone, and advancing policy strategies that defend FOSS (such as copyleft) for all.
Those who’ve forgotten history often unintentionally repeat it. Some of us in the developer world may recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, had proprietarized all their code, never to make it FOSS again. All major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was in effect now, itself, a proprietary system, and contrary to the philosophy of FOSS. The FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site for them to use. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash back in 2000, and still to this day, SourceForge refuses to solve these problems. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget, especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own purposes. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft’s GitHub doing the same thing now.
GitHub has, over the last ten years, risen to dominate the FOSS development ecosystem. They did this by building a user interface and adding social interaction features to the existing Git technology. (For its part, Git was designed specifically to make software development distributed without a centralized site.) In the central irony of this, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge had failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS. GitHub profits from those proprietary products (sometimes from customers who use it for problematic activities). Specifically, GitHub profits primarily from those who wish to use GitHub tools for in-house proprietary software development. Yet, GitHub still comes out again and again seeming like a good actor in the end, because they point to their generosity in providing services to so many FOSS projects. But we’ve learned from the many free offerings in Big Tech: keep in mind if you aren’t the customer, you’re the product at the end of the day. The FOSS development methodology is GitHub’s product, which they’ve proprietarized and repackaged with our active, often unsuspecting, help.
FOSS developers have been for too long the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water. GitHub’s behaviour has gotten progressively worse over time, and we’ve excused, ignored, or otherwise consented to cognitive dissonance. The people at Software Freedom Conservancy have themselves been part of the problem, that is until recently, even they’d become too comfortable, complacent, and complicit with GitHub. Giving up GitHub will require work, sacrifice and may take a long time, even for them: the people at Software Freedom Conservancy historically self-hosted their primary Git repositories, but they did use GitHub as a mirror. They urged their member projects and community members to avoid GitHub (and all proprietary software development services and infrastructure altogether), but this was not enough. Today, they take a stronger stance. they are ending all their own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub hoping to end their dominance. While they will not mandate their existing member projects to move at this time, they will no longer accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub when given time to do so. And, they will provide resources to support any of their member projects that choose to migrate, and help them however they can.
They give so many good reasons to give up on GitHub, and they list the major ones on their Give Up On GitHub site that they have created. And, were already considering this action themselves for some time, but last week’s event showed that this action is long overdue.
Specifically, the people at Software Freedom Conservancy have been actively communicating with Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary about their concerns with Copilot since they first launched it almost exactly a year ago. Their initial video chat call, in July 2021, with Microsoft and GitHub representatives resulted in several questions which they said they could not answer at that time, but would “answer soon”. After six months of no response, Bradley published his essay, If Software is My Copilot, Who Programmed My Software?, which raised these questions publicly. Still, GitHub did not answer their questions. Three weeks later, they launched a committee of experts to consider the moral implications of AI-assisted software, along with a parallel public discussion. They invited Microsoft and GitHub representatives to the public discussion, and they ignored their invitation, yet again not answering the questions. Last week, after they reminded GitHub of (a) the pending questions that they’d waited a year for them to answer and (b) of their refusal to join public discussion on the topic, they responded a week later, saying they would not join any public nor private discussion on this matter because “a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC’s] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC’s] detailed questions”. In other words, GitHub’s final position on Copilot is, if you disagree with GitHub about policy matters related to Copilot, then you don’t deserve a reply from Microsoft or GitHub at all. They only will bother to reply if they think they can immediately change your policy position to theirs. But, Microsoft and GitHub will leave you hanging for a year before they’ll tell you that!
Nevertheless, they were previously content to leave all this low on the priority list, after all, for its first year of existence, Copilot appeared to be more research prototype than actual product. All this changed last week when GitHub announced Copilot as a commercial, for-profit product. Launching a for-profit product that disrespects the FOSS community in the way Copilot does simply makes the weight of GitHub’s bad behavior too much to bear for developers.
Their three primary questions for Microsoft/GitHub (i.e., the questions they had been promising answers to them for a year, and that they now formally refused to answer) regarding Copilot were:
What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub’s public claim, stated by GitHub’s (then) CEO, that: “(1) training ML systems on public data is fair use, (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler”? In the interest of transparency and respect to the FOSS community, please also provide the community with your full legal analysis on why you believe that these statements are true. They think that they can now take Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer as an answer of its own: they obviously stand by their former CEO’s statement (the only one they’ve made on the subject), and simply refuse to justify their unsupported legal theory to the community with actual legal analysis.
If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to onlytrain Copilot’s model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer also hints at the real answer to this question, too: While GitHub gladly exploits FOSS inappropriately, they value their own “intellectual property” much more highly than FOSS, and are content to ignore and erode the rights of FOSS users but not their own.
Can you provide a list of licenses, including names of copyright holders and/or names of Git repositories, that were in the training set used for Copilot? If not, why are you withholding this information from the community? It can only wildly speculated as to why they refuse to answer this question. However, good science practices would mean that they could answer that question in any event. (Good scientists take careful notes about the exact inputs to their experiments.) Since GitHub refuses to answer, their best guess is that they don’t have the ability to carefully reproduce their resulting model, so they don’t actually know the answer to whose copyrights they infringed and when and how.
As a result of GitHub’s bad actions, today the Software Freedom Conservancy calls on all FOSS developers to leave GitHub. They acknowledge that answering that call requires sacrifice and great inconvenience, and will take much time to accomplish. Yet, refusing GitHub’s services is the primary power developers have to send a strong message to GitHub and Microsoft about their bad behavior. GitHub’s business model has always been “proprietary vendor lock-in”. That’s the very behaviour FOSS was founded to curtail, and it’s why quitting necessary proprietary software in favour of a FOSS solution is often difficult. But remember, GitHub needs FOSS projects to use their proprietary infrastructure more than we need their proprietary infrastructure to build with. Alternatives exist, albeit with less familiar interfaces and on less popular websites, but we can also help improve those alternatives. And, if you join them, you will not be alone. Software Freedom Conservancy has launched a website, GiveUpGitHub, where they’ll provide tips, ideas, methods, tools and support to those that wish to leave GitHub with them. Watch that site and their blog throughout 2022 (and beyond!) for more on this subject.
Most importantly, they are committed to offering alternatives to projects that don’t yet have another place to go to. They will be announcing more hosting instance options, and a guide for replacing GitHub services in the coming weeks. If you’re ready to take on the challenge now and give up GitHub today, they note that CodeBerg, which is based on Gitea implements many (although not all) of GitHub. Thus, they’re also going to work on even more solutions, continue to vet other FOSS options, and publish and/or curate guides on, for example, how to deploy a self-hosted instance of the GitLab Community Edition.
This goes back to long-standing problems with GitHub, and the central reason why we must together give up on GitHub. They’ve seen with Copilot, with GitHub’s core hosting service, and in nearly every area of venture, GitHub’s behaviour is substantially worse than that of their peers. They don’t believe Amazon, Atlassian, GitLab, or any other for-profit hoster are perfect actors either. However, a relative comparison of GitHub’s behavior to those of its peers shows that GitHub’s behavior is much worse than others out there. GitHub also has a record of ignoring, dismissing and/or belittling community complaints on so many issues, that they must urge all FOSS developers to leave GitHub as soon as they can. Please, join them in their efforts to return to a world where FOSS is developed using FOSS.
I have now joined the world of WordPress in version 4.0.1. My Journey on a new platform begins and so ends my old site that I coded by hand using HTML and CSS and then Bootstrap.
About WordPress
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). It’s used by approx. 25% of websites. It was originally created as a blog-publishing system but evolved to support virtually any kind of site you can imagine. It was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog (for information on b2/cafelog and it’s evolution to WordPress, go to the WordPress Wikipedia page and read the history section). The software is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license.
Pre WordPress
As I just mentioned I have built two other versions of this site prior to being on WordPress, those sites were done in HTML and CSS then the second in Bootstrap. Below are information on those two sites.
HTML and CSS
The First site I had built was done by hand coding in HTML and CSS. The following are screenshots taken of that site.
Home PageAbout Me PageLinks PageContact Me Page
Bootstrap
The next version of the site was built using Bootstrap which helps enhance the look of a site. You can view this site here, and to view the code for that site go to the GitHub repository.