Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO, Seems Bound and Determined to Wreck WordPress
46 comments
·January 20, 2025iambateman
thisislife2
There's ClassicPress. But a better alternative than sticking with WP is https://textpattern.com/ (which has better and more stable codebase that is as old as WordPress).
chipotle_coyote
TextPattern needs more attention and love in general! (Although to be fair, it also needs to be developed a wee bit faster.)
iambateman
I’ve been a PHP dev for a long time and never seen Text Pattern. Thanks for sharing!
neom
Reminds me of this: https://medium.com/node-js-javascript/growing-up-27d6cc8b7c5...
xt00
Wreck wordpress? doesn't seem like it -- seems like a classic "somebody pseudo forked my open-source-ish product / project and they became too popular".. so I'm going to try to prevent fragmentation / somebody else "making money off of all my hard work" kind of thing.
adamhartenz
Yes, and they way they are going about it is wrecking wordpress
zdragnar
The takeover and renaming of a third party extension and subsequent updates which released previously paid features was a huge shock.
Add on top of that Matt claimed that WordPress.org is his personal website, so neither it nor the official plug-in repository are under the control of the foundation (unless he's walked back that claim since I last paid attention).
There's still going to be plenty of users, but a lot of trust has been lost, and a lot of users are now looking for alternatives.
dhotson
I'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable?
- WordPress code is open-source.
- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.
I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?
If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?
FlamingMoe
The WordPress community of developers/contributors has been under the impression that the dot org site was under the control of the nonprofit WP foundation. However Matt recently declared that dot org has been his personal website this whole time, and that entitles him to solely decide when someone else can no longer use it. However documents of the founding seem to indicate that dot org is indeed under the foundation: https://x.com/sneakytits85/status/1881119968215142462?s=46
dylan604
Because that's how open source works. If you don't want for profit companies using code for free, then offer it under a license that states that.
nejsjsjsbsb
Parent is asking about infra not copyright.
This is interesting in terms of Github. They could pull the same thing and say only the porceline git client and MS approved clients can pull. After all it is their servers. The open source licenses are orthogonal to this and are between authors and users.
likeabatterycar
Open source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose?
Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.
cmeacham98
Using WordPress.org services isn't some rogue hotlink, it's hardcoded into the WordPress source code. And Matt explicitly refuses to add a config option to switch servers[1] - you have to manually patch WP to do so.
Legally, he may be in the right (I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend like I can accurately predict the outcome of the ongoing lawsuit), but morally I think I can reasonably say that Matt is pretty squarely in the wrong when he's trying to abuse WP.org services to blackmail WP Engine out of 8% of their revenue.
ceejayoz
It’s unreasonable because the real reason was WordPress.com looking to kneecap a competitor.
Doubly so when they tried stealing the plugin.
refulgentis
Curious what you'd make of these holdings, I'm not up on all the nonsense that's happened:
- It was reasonable, in that it is fair and sensible, in that it was not trying to attain an unjust advantage. It might not be generous. But that's life in the big leagues.
- Going about it boorishly (ex. the login checkbox), then reacting poorly in an attempt to own the haters, definitely crossed a line (I'm sure stealing their plugin did as well, assuming they overrode someone else's code with their own in people's installs)
kemayo
In the abstract, yeah, that'd probably be fine. Maybe not 100% legally -- the injunction that WP Engine got seems to imply that blocking one specific competitor from using the infrastructure might not be cool -- but if it was a restriction that was in place from the beginning, it'd probably have been acceptable.
It's mostly that WordPress maintained that infrastructure for a very long time without having any sort of restrictions on who could use it -- whether you're a self-hosted WordPress site, or you're using some sort of managed hosting (like WP Engine or WordPress.com). Plus it's literally hardcoded into WordPress to use it; you can't change that without maintaining your own patched version. So everyone involved in the WordPress community viewed it as a general public good for all users of WordPress... and it suddenly getting weaponized didn't play well. For one thing, it put up a lot of people who were just users of WordPress as collateral damage.
(And the cost of the infrastructure doesn't seem to have been one of Matt's complaints, in general. If it was, and he'd been up-front about that, I suspect reactions might have been different.)
snihalani
is there an opportunity to make a vendor neutral Wordpress here?
dboreham
Just can't call it Wordpress. So Locutionprinter or something.
bugglebeetle
Termjuicer
Brian-Puccio
WP is a fork of b2/cafelog. So b3/bistrolist?
(There’s also b2evolution.)
generj
It’s amazing nobody has sat him down and told him to stop throwing temper tantrums yet.
ceejayoz
He gave severance packages to that cohort.
dboreham
That exact thing happened here, several times.
dcchambers
It's really sad seeing this whole saga play out.
xupybd
I've heard speculation that he as VCs driving him to make money and this is causing all the crazy behaviour.
dboreham
That could also lead someone to blow the hatch.
linotype
When you’re as rich as he is what difference does it make?
paxys
Funny thing is his net worth is almost entirely tied in Automattic, and he is doing his very best to crater the company's value.
choult
His sense of self importance and relevance seems to be especially crucial to him. He is losing both.
CoastalCoder
I'm trying to figure out what's the most loving thing to do for a person in his situation.
choult
I've done my best not to pathologize him here, but...
Suggest therapy.
dylan604
Sometimes, rock bottom is the only way to stop
KerrAvon
If you’re a relative or friend, take them aside and have a frank conversation. If not, nothing you can do!
airstrike
I think it's to try to help them by offering compassion, understanding, and trying to create harmony.
Try to look at it from an outside perspective instead of through the lens of our own preconception. Humans are subject to making terrible mistakes and lapses of judgment. Sometimes things spiral out of control. We all have our demons, so to speak.
It's very easy to judge a tech multimillionaire bro and saying he should know better, he deserves this, etc. And I mean easy as in cheap. It's the prevailing view and it feels "fair" to a lot of people who didn't get so lucky or so far ahead in life, so they don't feel the need to be sympathetic. But it adds no value to the situation, so it's a pretty useless take. And it's not like the world has a limited supply of sympathy, so it's OK to offer it even in these situations.
At this point I think the guy just needs help.
bawolff
Ego doesn't go away just because you made a bunch of money.
duskwuff
If anything, experience suggests it's the opposite.
marcus_holmes
There's usually a crowd of hangers-on who are feeding the ego and enjoying the perks.
They need someone to whisper in their ear "remember you are mortal" [0]
thatguy0900
Functionally infinite money seems to just not be enough in life for a lot of people. I honestly think if they weren't powerful it would be considered a serious mental illness.
linotype
Couldn’t have said it any better, thank you.
padiyar83
> How would you react if someone demanded you pay them 8% of your annual revenue? Yeah. Like that.
If I built my product on the labour of that "someone", I would pay it. Seems these days, doing what's honourable is not that simple.
theamk
You are making it sound like it was a single person who could not pay their bills.
It was not. That's a $7.5 billon company threatening $1 billion company over totally frivolous reasons.
If you’ve followed closely, this article is a retread of the last four months.
Also will someone please fork WordPress.