The Future Is Forked: What Matt Mullenweg Sees Next for Open Source

Two decades ago, open source was a fringe philosophy noble, but rarely scalable. Today, it powers WordPress (which runs over 40% of the web), governs the infrastructure of the cloud, and shapes AI, blockchain, and even the social web. But what happens next?

At SXSW London, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress, reflected on what 20 years of open-source building have taught him, and why its most important contributions may still be ahead.

Mullenweg opened with a provocation: most people who benefit from open source don’t even realize it. From the infrastructure behind Spotify and TikTok to the publishing engines behind mainstream media, open source is not the alternative, it’s the default.

But as centralization creeps back in through closed platforms, surveillance-driven ad models, and proprietary LLMs, the risk is that we forget what made the internet powerful in the first place: openness, decentralization, and remixable code.

WordPress is often cited as open source’s greatest commercial success. But Mullenweg warned against complacency. Its growth has slowed in recent years not because the model is broken, but because the incentives for contributors have shifted.

“Most people today want things to work out of the box. They don’t want to tinker,” he noted. And that creates risk. If we only build tools for convenience, we risk losing the creative flexibility that made open platforms so vital.

The challenge for the next era isn’t to evangelize open source it’s to modernize the UX, governance, and sustainability models behind it.

A consistent theme was that open source isn’t a technology category. It’s a governance model. A way of working. A philosophy.

That’s why its impact is growing, not shrinking. It powers not just code, but collaboration: the federated architecture of Mastodon, the transparency of civic tech, the data-sharing models behind scientific research.

And it will be central to AI’s future, Mullenweg argued. “Closed LLMs are where we are today. But open models will define what’s trusted, localised, and adaptable tomorrow.”

For all its success, open source still struggles with incentives. Burnout is common. Core contributors often feel exploited. Businesses built on top of free code rarely reinvest in the communities that enabled them.

Mullenweg acknowledged this tension and called for new models, whether that’s GitHub Sponsors, foundation support, or co-op ownership, to ensure contributors don’t just ship, but share in the value they create.

Interestingly, Mullenweg was cautious about equating open source with crypto-native decentralization. While blockchains offer new models, he emphasized that open source predates Web3 and will outlast any hype cycle.

Instead, the next frontier is about portable identity, interoperable content, and shared governance, the building blocks for a more resilient internet. “The web wasn’t meant to be a series of walled gardens,” he said. “We have to stop rebuilding them.”

Mullenweg closed with a reminder: open source thrives when people take things, improve them, and share them back. It’s messy. It’s inefficient. But it works.

And in a world increasingly shaped by closed algorithms, black-box moderation, and extractive data models, open source isn’t just a technical preference. It’s a cultural stand.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with SXSW.

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