Because of my friendships with the co-founders of Slack, Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, WordPress.org has had a free version of the Pro version of Slack since they started in 2009. We switched from IRC to Slack, and it was like superpowers were unlocked for our team.
Over the past 15 years, Slack has been our secret weapon of productivity compared to many other open source projects. Its amazing collaboration features have allowed us to scale WordPress from running just a few blogs to now powering around 43% of all websites in the world, almost 10 times the runner-up in the market.
As we have scaled from very small to very large, Slack has scaled right alongside us, seemingly effortlessly. WordPress.org currently has 49,286 users on its Slack Business+ instance, which would cost at least $8.8M/yr if we were paying. (And we may need to go to their enterprise grid, to support e-discovery in the lawsuit attacks from WP Engine, which would cost even more.)
This incredible generosity was continued by the enlightened leadership of Marc Benioff at Salesforce when they bought Slack in 2020. However, it has not been widely known or recognized on our Five for the Future page, which only highlights self-reported contributor hours and doesn’t mention Salesforce at all.
This is a grave error, and we are correcting it today. Going forward:
- I would like every business in the world to see the amazing collaboration and productivity gains Slack has enabled for our community of tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide and consider adopting it for their own business.
- Salesforce will have a complimentary top sponsor slot at our flagship WordCamp events in the United States, Europe, and Asia, which attract thousands of people each.
- We will update our Five for the Future program to reflect contributions such as Salesforce’s going forward.
We just want to repeat: Thank you. We hope to deepen our partnership with Salesforce in the future.
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