Aspiring to FAIR Package Management
Word of the announcement of the FAIR Package Manager at the AltCtrlOrg side-event to WCEU in Basel, Switzerland has traveled quickly. The announcement took place immediately following Matt Leach’s demo of AspireUpdate and AspireExplorer, immediately before a Q&A session whose topic was suddenly focused completely on the FAIR announcement, partly due to the excitement in the room and partly due to the fact that the panel participants (including Joost de Valk) were already familiar with FAIR.
An immediate question for followers of AspirePress is what this means for us in light of the public release announcement we made at the same time. So glad you asked — we’ll respond by sharing a bit of background.
The AspirePress project to develop a distributed repository for WordPress was founded by Sarah Savage in the fall of 2024. Once work had begun, the AspirePress community began to grow and more contributors were added to the team. At that stage, Sarah shared A vision of a distributed package repository in WordPress, outlining where the project was headed. On the heels of an open letter from 20 leaders in the WordPress community In December of 2024, Joost de Valk posted about leadership in WordPress and called for Fair And Independent Repositories, or FAIR. At the same time, Karim Marucchi published his post about a new WordPress roadmap. Both posts included “Breaking the Status Quo”, and Joost stated that 2025 would begin with discussions about next steps. (Several other supportive posts appeared soon after; including my own take on breaking the status quo.)
As of Spring 2025, discussions were quietly underway among a slowly-growing group of individuals, many of whom did not feel free to speak about their involvement publicly. At that time, many people had been banned from contributing, blocked from logging into wordpress.org, and publicly maligned. The group fully respected this, and continues to maintain their confidentiality. Sarah Savage (AspirePress founder) and I (AspirePress project manager) were engaged in discussion with the group, which came to be known as FAIR. A handful of other contributors to AspirePress have also participated in creating FAIR.
For assistance governance structure, the group organized itself under the Linux Foundation. As stated by Carrie Dils (FAIR TSC Co-Chair) during the FAIR announcement this past weekend, rather than reinvent the wheel, when it came time to start coding the FAIR project began with the code written by the AspirePress team.
While respecting the confidentiality of many contributors, the work of AspirePress alongside the FAIR project has been close, cooperative, and collaborative. In many ways, AspirePress has become a part of FAIR — we share a common vision toward federated independent repositories, and are proud to be working on it together. At its launch, the FAIR plugin redirects API calls for wordpress.org for updates to plugins, themes, and WordPress core to our API server running AspireCloud via Fastly CDN, and serves package downloads from this alternative source — the same as the AspireUpdate plugin does.
Although the package update mechanism is the same, there are a few differences between the initial release versions of AspireUpdate plugin and the FAIR plugin. First, AspireUpdate includes a dropdown setting allowing the user to select between updating from wordpress.org or from the AspireCloud production server, and offers a text field where the url for any compatible mirror can be entered. The FAIR plugin also supports other compatible mirrors, but the configuration is done by setting a constant in wp-config.php. Second, the FAIR plugin includes some additional options for independence from wordpress.org, such as replacements for browse-happy, serve-happy, Gravatar, and dashboard RSS feeds. These were all well down the priority list for AspirePress, but because we had already tackled package updates, the FAIR team were able to tackle these additional features.
In short, we are where we are by working together.
What’s next? We’ll keep working together. In speaking about FAIR and the WordPress community, Karim Marucchi has used the phrase “groups of groups”, and we believe that’s the future for a healthy WordPress community and ecosystem. Like FAIR and AspirePress, organizations like the WP Community Collective, AltCtrlOrg, and the re-minted Post Status are all like-minded groups with different mandates. Each contributes to the whole, not as rivals, but as groups within a shared community, cooperating and collaborating in the stewardship of the Commons that we share.
This is the best and healthiest future we can imagine for the WordPress community and its ecosystem.