{"id":62758,"date":"2026-07-08T20:20:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T00:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/?p=62758"},"modified":"2026-07-08T20:20:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T00:20:20","slug":"matt-code-for-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/?p=62758","title":{"rendered":"Matt: Code for the People"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

Lights! Camera! Action!<\/p>\n

Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic\u2019s \u2018Code for the People\u2019 Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet<\/a>, from the NYC premiere last week.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the documentary<\/a>, and then tomorrow everyone can stream it for free on codeforthepeople.com<\/a>! Appearances by Anne McCarthy<\/a>, Beau Lebens<\/a>, Eric Binnion<\/a>, Ian Stewart<\/a>, Marjorie Asturias<\/a>, Mary Hubbard<\/a>, Mat\u00edas Ventura<\/a>, Matthew Miller, Paolo Belcastro<\/a>, and Paul Maiorana<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We need to tell the story of Open Source in as many ways and places as possible. It\u2019s never been more critical. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Film is new to us, and it\u2019s funny how quickly things change: There\u2019s a segment with a few \u201cOpenAI not open\u201d sound bites, but to their credit, they have been releasing open-weight models (Safeguard is particularly interesting)<\/a>. That said, the top open-weight models are all from China<\/a>, save for Nvidia\u2019s Nemotron<\/a>, in ~12th place. <\/p>\n

When I went to the first WordCamps in Beijing<\/a> and Shanghai<\/a> in 2009, it was a very different time. They were the biggest in the world at the time! I don\u2019t think you could take photos in Tiananmen Square as freely as I did then<\/a>; now to visit I think you need an appointment, ID checks, and security checks. <\/p>\n

Even during WordCamp, it felt like the freedom of Open Source was in high demand, but it also created a lot of fear. I found out later that one of the student volunteers who helped their professor organize everything had been taken in for hours of questioning following the event.<\/p>\n

On that trip, I saw how fine-grained the Great Firewall could be when individual posts (IIRC, about bad milk from a factory harming babies) wouldn\u2019t load, but the rest of the site would. WordPress.com had been totally blocked, taking about a quarter of our traffic at the time<\/a>, but behind the Firewall, Open Source continued to thrive and grow, and now the frontier open models are being driven by China in a way I never would have predicted!<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve had a taste of freedom, it\u2019s hard to go back.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lights! Camera! Action! Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic\u2019s \u2018Code for the People\u2019 Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week. I\u2019m looking forward to the San Francisco premiere … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rating_form_position":"","rating_results_position":"","mr_structured_data_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"multi-rating":{"mr_rating_results":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}