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FacebookWordPress vs. Movable Type: The Advantages of Open Source and What It Means for Technical Writers
March 27th, 2007 | Posted in Technical Writing, Web 2.0 13 Comments »
I use several open source applications (Filezilla, Audacity, Firefox, 7-zip), and while I love them all, I’m really passionate about WordPress. WordPress is the open source blogging software that runs this site. It’s particularly interesting to compare WordPress to Movable Type, which is not open source. Whenever I search for comparisons between WordPress and Movable Type, 99% of the time I find people explaining their conversion from Movable Type to WordPress.
Google Trends agrees with this movement. Trends show that more people are searching for the word “WordPress,” which I think implies that more are embracing it.
In contrast, Movable Type seems to be on the decline (at least in the consumer market).
Google Trends also shows the top cities where the keyword is searched. For “WordPress,” the top searching cities are in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore (all developing countries, where open source apps would be more accessible). In contrast, the top cities searching for Movable Type are all in Japan. This is in part because Movable Type offers a localized Japanese version.
Why Is WordPress More Popular?
Why is WordPress more popular than Movable Type (at least outside of Japan)? The source code is free for anyone to use, without charge. Go to WordPress.org and download it. But just making a product free doesn’t guarantee its popularity. What makes WordPress popular is the vibrant developer community behind it. For example, Mike Rundle of Businesslogs points out the size of the WordPress’s community:
There are few open source projects in the world that have as strong a following as WordPress does. Every single user is an advocate, every designer an enthusiast, and you can hardly walk around the blogosphere without tripping over a WP plugin that does something interesting or useful.
Because more developers are using the software, they find bugs, engineer additional functionality, and feed those enhancements back into the original. So the real genius of open source software isn’t just that it’s free, but that it harnesses collective intelligence to make a superior product. I suppose this is a bit circular, because you couldn’t get the global developer community without the software being free. But just being free doesn’t guarantee the community or popularity.
In an article in MoreBusiness.com, a writer explains the power of collective intelligence in software development:
No company, not Microsoft and certainly not Extropia.com, could ever “hope to hire enough talented people to write all the code that this market will support” . . . Even Microsoft agrees. In the infamous Microsoft internal policy memorandum called the “Halloween Document” released last year, the Redmond colossus admits that “the ability of [open source] to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS [open source software] evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.”
Just like Wikipedia trumped Britannica in scope, relevance, and speed, the same applies to open source software. The question for tech writers is, what does open source mean for us?
How Do Open Source Trends Affect Tech Writers?
I think open source trends will have several impacts on technical writers:
- Wikis will be a main tool for gathering documentation, and hundreds of users will contribute. (If hundreds aren’t contributing, there isn’t a vibrant community around the open source project, and it won’t take off — at least not for a while.)
- You can sell your own tutorials, books, and guides around open-source software to users who don’t want to learn help through a possibly hard-to-navigate wiki. In this sense, tech writers may learn to be more independent and entrepreneurial.
- Companies may sell the technical publication deliverables as peripheral sales to the open source software. In other words, companies may release the software for free, but charge for the training, user guides, job aids, and so on. And some companies may go weaker with documentation altogether, relying on user-contributed content. The release of Yahoo Pipes, which had little instruction, followed by users who created professional video tutorials for the product, point to the possibility that users (on a global scale) can and will contribute instruction in place of professional technical writers.
- Documentation will never be done. As long as developers continue to add enhancements, new functionality, fix quirks, and make other improvements, the documentation will be in a constant state of flux, with some help pages out of date with each new release. If you’re a tech writer for such a project, the documentation will be like a living child, always growing, maturing, asking harder questions, getting into more trouble.
- Standards for grammar and literacy will decline. Sure people will always prefer well-written, clean, grammatically accurate instructions. But as user contributions flood the wikis, users will be accustomed to reading illiterate-but-still-accurate instructions that answer their questions.
WordPress offers a great open source documentation wiki as a sample of what’s to come.
What do you think? Am I on target, or am I knee deep in speculation?
I think that you projections are right on. There are a couple additional impacts to our industry that should be considered. One is the change in mindset that is brought about by the movement from a more stable writing/deliverable methodology to one that requires writers to be more agile. The rate at which software is developed today can cause some writers who have been around for a while to fight against the change and eventually become more of a burden than a valueable resource.
The second impact is on the technical writer’s necessity to be more technically capable. On my team now, we are up against implementing an open source application and being limited by our technical knowledge. There are talented writers on my team, but there is a point at which the technical expertise ends and we are forced to tap a development or IT resource to get us out of a jam. It is becoming more and more evident that technical knowledge is a necessity for our job more than a just a resume entry that would receive more consideration during a job interview.
Hi Tom, I have trackbacked your article, but can’t see the link anywhere here.
[Avi, I'm not sure why the trackback didn't work, so I'll check into it. In the meantime, I'll add this link to your post. Thanks for the mention. -- Tom]
[...] open source mean for technical writers The increasing use of open source software may have an impact on technical writers, according to Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing. He uses as comparision of the open source [...]
Great post Tom!
People love many things about open source software – the price, the community, likelihood of reported bugs or feature requests being addressed – but this love is usually expressed by hobbyists, not by the corporate world. Not to say that open source software is inherently inferior to closed-source, but there is no assurance of accountability or support from free software.
There are exceptions to this statement, of course. The open source Apache web server outnumbers Microsoft’s IIS, the number 2 server, by at least 200%. This is largely due to Apache’s excellent documentation and enormous user-driven support base. In true corporate fashion the determining factor of what tools to use resides in return on investment – a term Microsoft uses as its primary defence against the free Linux operating system.
The proliferation of blogging in private and corporate sectors would explain why the free Wordpress is outpacing the commercial Movable Type, but it doesn’t really explain why the latter would be losing customers. I’d have thought businesses would flock to commercial platforms for no reason other than it costs money and comes with a service plan.
On the hobbyist side I simply adore open source software. I tend to use only software that increases my abilities and saves me time, and it’s impressive to note that nearly half the software I use is free and open source. Simply trawling through open source community sites like http://www.sourceforge.net often gives me ideas for new ways of using my computer. It’s really empowering and exciting!
(aside – Technical Writers between jobs should consider volunteering time to SourceForge. It’s a great way to get your name out there!)
I encourage users of free open source software (aka FOSS) to communicate their appreciation to the authors, either through praise, bug reports, feature requests, or better yet, offering to volunteer!
Tom,
Good post. I love WordPress. Firefox, and other open-source apps you mention in the post.
I think you needn’t be worried about tech writers loosing jobs due to the open-source movement. While your example of Yahoo Pipes is an interesting example of people stepping up and producing documentation for a product, I’d guess that this type of response is an exception more than the rule.
In my opinion, tech writers have about as much to fear, professionally, as do programmers. After all, there are thousands of people out there writing open-source code for free. Does that mean that programmers are going to run out of paid work? None of the developers on my team are worried about it.
While you may find people willing to step up to the plate for large projects like WordPress or Firefox, software companies are still going to need to hire technical communicators for those projects that aren’t WordPresses or Firefoxes, but still need documentation.
My experience with open-source software has been that documentation is generally one area in which open-source projects are very weak–another reason why I don’t think technical communicators should feel particularly threatened. At least at this point.
And as far as documentation never being done — I’m in that boat right now! We have a young but maturing product, and each release there are tons of new features, changed features, and deprecated features. I’m a lone writer, and keeping track of the documentation beast is a big job!
Brian,
Thanks for your comment. You said, “there is no assurance of accountability or support from free software.” That’s certainly true, and this gap provides a market for the peripheral activities required to make the open source model work. There’s a lot of certification, licensing, integration, customization, training, support, etc. that is required when using open source software in the corporate environment. Third-party companies (and the companies that make the open source software) can supply these peripherals — that’s in part the business model behind open source.
You also said something that struck me as being very relevant: technical writers can volunteer their time with documentation for open source projects. How many times have you heard from would-be tech writers that they don’t have experience, and so they can’t get a job, but they can’t get experience without a job? Well, there’s tons of ways to get experience writing help for open source.
I keep meaning to volunteer my time with the WordPress codex, but haven’t quite made that jump yet. Thanks again for your comment.
Paul,
I think you’re right about technical writers not having to fear losing their jobs if their company produces open source software. I guess I should tweak what I wrote a bit. Maybe companies will force tech pubs to pull their own weight. Right now a lot of tech pubs departments piggyback on the IT budget. If the company delivered open source software, perhaps the training surrounding that software would be a peripheral sale. Free software, but the training videos costs $100. If no one buys the training videos, the tech pubs department starves. Or something like that.
Dan,
Thanks for your insightful comment and for sharing real-world examples in implementing open source. You said, “There are talented writers on my team, but there is a point at which the technical expertise ends and we are forced to tap a development or IT resource to get us out of a jam.”
I think this is where open source software finds a business model. The code may be free, but not the consulting and training fees needed to implement it.
I use a lot of wordpress. Honestly, it does everything I need, and more. Plus its free. Its rock solid and extends easily. There are wordpress websites that don’t even look like blogs. That kind of flexibility and the price make mincemeat of the competition.
The dedication of the WP community is phenomenal in every area from docs to dealing with bugs, to wish fulfillment (almost) in new editions. That kind of community feeling comes from strong volunteerism and builds on itself.
Vidyut, thanks for the comment. I agree that WordPress really has a strong momentum going for it. It seems the people who are still using Movable Type are those who used it when Movable Type was still king, years ago, and conversion to WordPress was too difficult.
Idolovethattime
[...] WordPress vs Movable Type The Advantages of Open Source and What Posted by root 3 hours ago (http://www.idratherbewriting.com) Maybe companies will force tech pubs to pull their own weight vidyut thanks for the comment i agree that wordpress really has a strong momentum going for it 2008 i 39 d rather be writing powered by wordpress modified limau Discuss | Bury | News | WordPress vs Movable Type The Advantages of Open Source and What [...]
[...] WordPress vs Movable Type The Advantages of Open Source and What Posted by root 21 minutes ago (http://www.idratherbewriting.com) Am i on target or am i knee deep in speculation vidyut thanks for the comment i agree that wordpress really has a strong momentum going for it 2008 i 39 d rather be writing powered by wordpress modified limau orange theme Discuss | Bury | News | WordPress vs Movable Type The Advantages of Open Source and What [...]