I love asking that question the same sort way Taylor Swift can walk into stadium unnoticed.. But among the power users and developers among us, the difference between WordPress org and WordPress com is apparent and divide that draws sacred and blurry line between the lively open-source community that WordPress is known for, and the commercial efforts of Automattic, the company that uses WordPress to power its hosted CMS platform.. By community of largely unpaid contributors, The difference is sacred line because crossing it tarnishes the open-source-ness of WordPress as decentralized project maintained... That sacred line is also blurry, at best, and great example of that popped up this past when WordPress com published clone of WordPress org Plugin Directory to its own site. one or two developers take notice of change, post tweet about it, and Automattic Matt Mullenweg splashes kerosene on it. we get away from the real issue at WordPress has problem, not plugin problem.. The current threat to WordPress market dominance has more to do with its future as product and how it competes in world of low-code and no-code platforms. I see the possibility of separation of concerns between business and community interests because, there is little to no difference between running WordPress site on WordPress com's servers on its Business Plan and self-hosting the site on managed host like WP Engine. You get the same access to the same files for the same underlying software that is used to WordPress com, the same as it's used to power any other website that chooses to download and self-host WordPress.. Rather maybe we'll see day where we go all-in on direction either by renaming WordPress com to allow WordPress org to be WordPress or leaning deeper into effective co-branding that distinguishes the two properties while leveraging the.
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