Campfire Learn Together: Code for the People

Code for the people. I mean, that’s what we do.
— Code for the People, a film by Bao Nguyen

Open source is a way to build software that increases freedom and autonomy in the world, and I feel like we have to fight for that freedom.
— Code for the People

For our Sunday, August 9, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK Campfire Learn Together, we are watching and discussing Code for the People, a documentary by Bao Nguyen about open source, the open web, and what happens to all of us when the walled gardens win.

This one is personal. I helped start WordPress and Automattic, both of which appear throughout the film. The philosophy, processes, and practices we run Stimpunks on did not come from the nonprofit sector or from education. They came from twenty years of building software in the open with people I mostly never met in person. Default to open. Everyone can contribute. Communication is oxygen. Those are not slogans we adopted. They are the working conditions that let me — an undiagnosed Autistic developer with a spiky profile and a body that does not do offices — do the best work of my life.

So watch this one knowing we are not neutral about it. We are downstream of it.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole bodyminds. And we argue with the parts that deserve arguing with.

Videos

We’ll watch this together at the start of the session — subtitles on, sound up, cameras optional. No need to have watched ahead.

Code for the People | A Film by Bao Nguyen | Full Documentary – YouTube

Code for the People, a film by Bao Nguyen. A documentary about the open web — how it got built, who built it, what a software license has to do with human freedom, and why the people who made it are worried. It opens on platform decay and ends on someone planting a tree they will never sit under.

One film, one question: who does the code belong to?

Videos
Free as in Freedom, Not Free as in Beer
The Blogging Software Dilemma
Tenant or Landowner
Anyone Can Scrutinize the Work
Water Your Garden
The AI Fault Line
Free, Life-Changing, and Available to Everyone
The Stimpunks Synthesis
Join Us
Main Takeaways
Related Glossary Entries
Reflection Questions
Resources

Free as in Freedom, Not Free as in Beer

There’s this expression in the open source world — free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Because a lot of people think that free means I don’t have to pay for it. The free stands for the freedom of using, reading, modifying, sharing the code.

The film spends its first minutes doing something documentaries about tech almost never do: it explains a software license and treats that explanation as a matter of human freedom. Normal software licenses, it points out, are lists of things you cannot do, written to protect a company. Use this, but pay us. Don’t sue us. Use it only for purposes we approve. And if we wake up one day and decide you can’t use it anymore, we can take it away and you have no recourse.

An open source license inverts that. Same legal machinery — copyright — pointed the other way. Instead of listing what is forbidden, it enumerates what you are free to do: use, read, modify, share. The film reaches for the public domain as its analogy: for as long as we have had copyright, we have also had the idea of creative work that belongs to all humans together. Open source applies that idea to software.

This is why our license page is not boilerplate buried in a footer. It is a statement of what kind of thing Stimpunks is. Everything we write is CC BY-SA 4.0 — a free cultural work, which is a higher bar than merely being readable at no charge. Knowledge hoarded is knowledge that fails the people who need it most. The license is the invitation. The ShareAlike clause is the part that keeps the door open for the next person, and it is the part corporations most want you to drop.

The film calls open source a technological democracy. Hold onto that phrase. We are going to come back and press on it.

The Blogging Software Dilemma

I used to joke that WordPress had more developers than users. There was only like a handful of sites.

The origin story in this film is one I lived alongside. In early 2003, Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post about wanting a publishing tool that did not yet exist — something with the sensibility of Movable Type, the ease of use of Blogger, the elegance of Textpattern, and the hackability of b2. Movable Type, he notes in the film, was proprietary. That mattered. A few days later a developer named Mike Little left a comment: if you’re serious about doing this, let’s work together on it.

That is the whole thing. A public post about an unmet need, and a stranger in the comments offering to build it with you. The ambition, as the film puts it, was software for me and a few friends. Twenty-odd years later WordPress runs a large share of the web and Automattic is over 1,500 people.

I want to sit with the unglamorous middle of that story, because it is the part that is actually instructive. More developers than users. Years of work with almost no audience, powered by a philosophy rather than traction. Nobody in the early days imagined it going beyond a couple of sites. The thing that made it survive was not a growth strategy. It was that the license and the culture made it worth contributing to — so people kept showing up, and the competency network got wider than any one company could hire.

We recognize that shape. It’s the shape of every good thing we’ve built here.

Tenant or Landowner

You are a tenant on those platforms.

The film opens where our enshittification entry opens, with Cory Doctorow’s pattern of platform decay: first the platform is good to its users and finds a way to lock them in; once leaving is hard, it makes things worse for users to make things better for business customers; then it turns on the business customers too; and eventually the whole thing is just a pile of what the word says.

Then it names the structural fact underneath the pattern. On a closed platform, you do not own what you make. MySpace. Friendster. An algorithm change. A shutdown. The community and the audience you spent years building can go away overnight, and there is nothing you can do to bring them back. The film’s prescription is blunt: everyone should have a website, everyone should own their own domain. Be a landowner, not a tenant.

This is A Domain of One’s Own, and it is why stimpunks.org is a domain we own running software we can read, not a page inside somebody else’s app. It is why our knowledge garden is a garden and not a feed. As Mike Caulfield put it, the stream rushes past you stripped of context; the garden is the web as topology, arranged and rearranged, every walk through it making new paths. Streams are rented. Gardens are tended.

For our community the stakes are higher than nostalgia for blogs. Disabled and Autistic people build our support networks, our mutual aid, and in many cases our incomes inside these platforms. When a platform decays, non-disabled users lose convenience. We lose access to care. A walled garden is a single point of failure for a life.

Anyone Can Scrutinize the Work

One of the defining things around open source is that anyone can scrutinize the work.

The film makes a claim that lands squarely in our territory: when development happens inside a walled garden, things go un-critiqued. Open the source and thousands of people comb over what you are doing, looking for problems — evaluating whether it is biased, whether it unfairly penalizes certain groups or communities. The transparency argument is not only about security. It is about accountability for the decisions encoded in software.

We built a whole practice on this. Flow Patrol is a team name I brought here from Automattic: designated dissenters, public editors, ombudsfolk for users, dogfooding what we make with our own creaking humanity in mind. Continuous development requires continuous outspoken humanity. That is default to open with teeth — the quality of what we make depends on how much feedback we get and how many people use it, so building behind closed doors puts an artificial ceiling on both.

But listen to how the film phrases the cost, because it is doing some work with that phrasing:

Whenever they are open source, there is healthy criticism. Maybe not always healthy, but criticism in general when you open things up.

Maybe not always healthy. That aside is carrying a lot. Anyone who has spent time in open source knows what lives inside it: pile-ons, contempt for newcomers, rejection sensitive dysphoria hit like a hammer in a public thread, burnout dressed up as rigor. Radical transparency without psychological safety is not accountability. It is exposure. The film glances at this and moves on. We can’t, because the people it costs the most are our people.

Openness is necessary. It is not sufficient. The license makes the code accessible; only the culture makes the project habitable.

Water Your Garden

If you don’t invest back into the maintenance of something — if you don’t water your garden, if you don’t plant new plants, if you don’t weed the garden — at some point it will go fallow.

The film’s most honest passage is about money and labor. Open source is free, and there is a lot of investment that goes into it. Not required, but part of the social contract that makes the successful projects work: some percentage of the people who use it find a way to give back in a way that doesn’t only benefit themselves.

Note what that sentence quietly admits. The commons runs on a norm, not a mechanism. People give back because the culture asks them to, and the ones who don’t are free-riding on a maintenance burden carried by someone else — often unpaid, often exhausted, frequently one person. If we ran the library economy argument over this, the parallel is exact: the Carnegie library only stayed free because towns taxed themselves to sustain it. Charity builds the palace once; a commons is something a community renews on purpose, again and again, or loses.

Open source never got its version of the tax. It got a norm and a lot of goodwill, and the gap between the two is where maintainer burnout lives. That is not a reason to abandon the model. It is the open question the film hands us — and it is the same question our own Library page keeps asking. You are a patron, not a customer. Which also means you are a keeper of the thing.

The AI Fault Line

Despite its namesake, OpenAI is not open at all.

The film’s last argument is the newest one. Every major model right now is closed, and — as the film says plainly — trained on tremendous amounts of copyrighted data from people who didn’t opt in, and that’s just a fact. The pattern it names is the old pattern with new clothes: commercializing things that should essentially be open.

The counter-case it makes is worth taking seriously. With a closed system, you are ultimately not in control of what you create. With open models, what the AI produces shares the same fundamental freedoms as the software — material a human can look at, read, understand, and modify. And the accessibility argument: AI opens the door for more people to modify software to their own needs, which is exactly the door our community keeps finding locked.

We hold this next to our own position on AI, which is harm reduction rather than purity, and next to techno-solutionism, which is what happens when the tool arrives before the question. Two things can be true. Open weights are meaningfully better than closed ones for autonomy and scrutiny. And open does not launder the consent problem in the training data, or the water, or the labor. A license is not a substitute for consent. We’ll take that tension into the discussion rather than resolve it in a blog post.

Free, Life-Changing, and Available to Everyone

This is where the film and Stimpunks turn out to be the same argument.

The phrase that organizes our whole philosophy of liberatory infrastructure came out of open source. Larry Wall said he wanted Perl to be “free, life-changing, and available to everyone.” Steve Silberman put it on page two of NeuroTribes, where I read it in 2015 as an undiagnosed Autistic father with a newly diagnosed Autistic kid. Alongside it on that page: there is more than one way to do it. Two ideas from a programming language community that shaped my entire career and, eventually, this organization.

Its companion came from HeroPress, Topher DeRosia writing about WordPress accessibility: “provide freedom to those who deal with a world that’s built to be hostile toward them.” He was writing about Amanda Rush, who is Blind, and about a community that works hard to make the software usable without sight — which means people who navigate a hostile transit system and hostile workplaces can build a career on their own terms. Amanda’s own words, on a community with an eighty percent unemployment rate: with WordPress, we can make decisions for ourselves.

That is the part of the story this film gestures at but never quite says out loud. When it says the internet removed the barrier to entry — that you used to need capital, distribution, permission, and now anyone can start something — the people for whom that is most literally true are Disabled people. Open source and remote work did not merely make my career convenient. They made it possible. Text-first, asynchronous, distributed, judged on the patch rather than the handshake: that is an access practice, whether or not anyone designed it as one.

Public education, public libraries, and open source. Three expressions of one commitment: turn knowledge into shared infrastructure instead of private possession. Let’s help people get free, for free.

The Stimpunks Synthesis

The following is a Stimpunks synthesis — our own extension and critique, not a claim made by the film.

Almost everything in our operating manual is open source practice wearing different clothes. This is the part I most want to talk about at the campfire, because people assume we got our methods from disability services or from schools. We didn’t. We got them from building software in public with people spread across dozens of time zones.

Default to open is a line from an Automattic GitHub issue. Everyone can contribute is how you get omni-directional learning instead of one-way transmission — the same move Campfire Learn Together makes when it refuses to seat a designated expert. Our communication stack — three levels, three speeds, three spaces — is distributed-work practice we helped pioneer, and it maps cleanly onto caves, campfires, and watering holes and onto interaction badges. Intermittent collaboration is why we don’t hold synchronous meetings by default. Self-organizing teams and transparent competency networks are how we route work without a hierarchy. Flow Patrol is a literal team name I carried over. Even this knowledge garden is a wiki gardener’s habit applied to disability knowledge.

Distributed, text-first, asynchronous, open by default is an access practice. It was built by and for people who think and communicate in ways offices punish. That is the deepest thing this film is about, and it never says it, because it does not have our vocabulary. We do. That is the Stimpunks contribution to the argument: the open web is disability infrastructure that nobody labeled as such.

Now the pushback, in three parts, because a film made partly about the company I helped build deserves to be argued with rather than applauded.

First: a license is not a government. The film calls open source a technological democracy, and that phrase does a lot of unearned work. The license guarantees your right to fork. It guarantees nothing about who decides. In practice, most large open source projects concentrate real power — trademark, release keys, the plugin directory, the conference brand — in one company or one person, and the community’s only constitutional remedy is the nuclear one: leave and maintain your own copy forever. That is an exit right, not a vote. Exit is not voice. I say this as someone who was inside the room: the code was open the whole time, and the governance never was. If open source is going to be democratic, the democracy has to be built deliberately — self-organizing structures, transparent decision paths, nothing about us without us — and not assumed to fall out of a copyright license.

Second: transparency without safety is exposure. Covered above, and worth restating as a design principle rather than a complaint. The film treats scrutiny as pure upside. For Autistic and Disabled contributors, an unmoderated public review culture is an access barrier with a very high floor. Psychological safety is not the opposite of rigor; it is the precondition for anyone marginal being able to participate in it. Openness plus a covenant is a commons. Openness without one is a gauntlet.

Third: the hopeful part rests on corporate goodwill. Near the end, the film says the future of the web is not certain, and that companies like Automattic will fight for it. I hope so. I helped start that company, and I funded Stimpunks by selling part of it — and I would not be here at all without Om Malik, who gave high support to that work. But “a good company will hold the line” is the same structural bet the film spends its first ten minutes warning you about. Every platform in the enshittification story was once good to its users. The protection has to be structural — licenses, forks, federation, public funding, and communities that own their own domains — not dispositional. Not even when the disposition is currently sincere.

None of which makes the film wrong. It makes it an argument in progress, which is the best kind to bring to a campfire. The closing image is the right one to sit with: planting a tree that you will never live to see the shade of. Twenty years ago that tree was a comment on a blog post from a stranger who said let’s work together on it. Some of us are sitting in that shade right now. This organization exists in it.

Code for the people. Access for the people. Same fight, different layer of the stack.

Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, August 9, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.

Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

I’ll be there with twenty years of receipts and opinions, and I’d rather hear yours. Come with a story about something you made on the open web — a blog, a domain, a forum, a wiki, a Neopets page, a mod, a zine that became a site. Bring what the closed platforms took, too.

Main Takeaways

Free as in freedom, not free as in beer. An open source license is built on the same copyright machinery as a proprietary one, pointed the other way: instead of listing what you may not do, it enumerates your freedom to use, read, modify, and share. That is why our own license is CC BY-SA — a free cultural work, not just something you can read for nothing.
It started as software for a few friends. A public post about an unmet need, a stranger in the comments offering to help, and years of more developers than users. What carried it was the license and the culture, not traction.
On a closed platform you are a tenant. MySpace, Friendster, an algorithm change, a shutdown. When a platform decays, non-disabled users lose convenience; we can lose access to care and income. Own the domain. Tend the garden instead of renting the stream.
Openness is necessary and not sufficient. Anyone can scrutinize the work — and the film’s own aside, maybe not always healthy, names the cost. Radical transparency without psychological safety is exposure, and it falls hardest on Autistic and Disabled contributors.
The commons runs on a norm, not a mechanism. Water your garden or it goes fallow. Open source never got the equivalent of the library tax, which is why maintainer burnout is structural rather than personal. A commons is renewed on purpose, again and again, or lost.
A license is not a government. Open source guarantees your right to fork, not your right to decide. Exit is not voice. Democratic governance has to be built deliberately; it does not fall out of a copyright license.
Distributed, text-first, open-by-default work is an access practice. Our philosophy, processes, and practices came out of WordPress and Automattic, not out of disability services. The open web is disability infrastructure nobody labeled as such.
Free, life-changing, and available to everyone. Larry Wall’s line about Perl, Topher DeRosia’s clarion call about WordPress accessibility, and Amanda Rush’s account of building a career while Blind are the same argument as public libraries and public education: liberatory infrastructure, not charity.
Structural protection, not dispositional. The film’s hope rests partly on good companies holding the line. Every enshittified platform was once good to its users. Licenses, forks, federation, public funding, and owned domains are the durable defenses.

Open Source — Collaboration, participation, freedom, and trust as a working model, not just a licensing choice. One of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
Code — What it means to read, write, and be governed by code.
Web — A Domain of One’s Own, small-b blogging, and the hyperlink as our most potent weapon against disinformation.
Enshittification — The pattern of platform decay the film opens on: good to users, then good to business customers, then good to shareholders, then dead.
Digital Gardening — The garden versus the stream. Evergreen, densely linked, walkable in any direction.
Library Economy — Knowledge as infrastructure and access as mutual aid. The lens that makes water your garden legible as a funding problem.
Competency Network — Transparent meta-knowledge about who knows what, flowing freely instead of hoarded. How open source routes work without a hierarchy.
Intermittent Collaboration — Group work punctuated by solitude. The distributed-work rhythm that maps onto caves, campfires, and watering holes.
Flow Patrol — Designated dissenters and ombudsfolk for users. A team name we carried over from Automattic.
Self-Organizing — All systems are open; all systems self-organize. Why we don’t run on a hierarchy.
Psychological Safety — The precondition for anyone marginal participating in public critique at all.
Techno-Solutionism — What happens when the tool arrives before the question. The check on the film’s AI optimism.

Reflection Questions

On tenancy. The film says you are a tenant on a closed platform, and everything you built there can vanish overnight. What have you already lost that way — a community, an archive, an audience, a version of yourself? What are you still keeping somewhere you don’t control?

On freedom, not price. Free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Where in your life is something offered to you at no cost while quietly taking away your freedom to read it, change it, or take it with you? What would it look like to want the other kind of free?

On scrutiny. Open source says anyone can comb over the work and find the bias in it. That is real accountability — and the review culture that produces it has hurt a lot of our people. Where have you experienced critique as accountability, and where as exposure? What made the difference?

On watering the garden. The commons runs on a norm: some of the people who use it find a way to give back. What do you use that someone else is quietly maintaining, probably unpaid? What could giving back look like at your actual current capacity — not your imagined one?

On voice versus exit. A license guarantees you can fork; it does not guarantee you a say. Where in your life do you have exit but not voice? What would voice have to look like to count?

On what the open web made possible. For many Disabled and Autistic people, text-first asynchronous work on an open platform is not a preference — it is the reason a career or a friendship or a diagnosis was possible at all. What did the open web make possible for you? What would you lose if it closed?

On planting trees. The film ends on planting a tree you will never sit under. Twenty years ago that tree was a stranger commenting let’s work together on it. What are you planting that you won’t see finished — and who watered the tree you’re sitting under right now?

—

This page draws on Code for the People, a film by Bao Nguyen (codeforthepeople.com); the Stimpunks philosophy of free, life-changing, and available to everyone; and twenty years of my own work in WordPress, Automattic, and open source communities. The Stimpunks Synthesis section is our own extension and critique, not attributed to the film or its participants.