One important people to keep in mind as they read this post, the linked Google Doc, and tweets from the past day where a bunch of people are receiving unsolicited DMs[1] from Automattic with grammar that matches Matt's:
- Matt, under various guises, is shifting blame to different entities that are effectively himself.
- Automattic is Matt. Matt is the CEO of Automattic.
- The WordPress Foundation is, effectively, Matt.
- The problem is Matt. Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous.
"Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous."
This is the best single line distillation of the current lunacy. I mean with every passing day, it all becomes more and more unhinged, and I see no good outcome in the long term. The overall damage to the ecosystem I think begins it's death spiral now.
It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.
I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase, and bizarre unpopular features like Gravitar and Gutenberg now make more sense in hindsight.
ACF was one of the most important enterprise plugins in the ecosystem when they hijacked it. They essentially did a supply chain attack on the top WordPress users and expected there to be no repercussions.
He was also apparently upset that WP Engine was not pushing Jetpack, Automattic's own thoroughly mediocre service package that they try upselling to every WordPress user.
So I get the impression Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase, and he still sees the primary feature of WordPress as a blogging platform.
> Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase.
I think Matt probably has some idea of a "user base" for which he's "fighting the good fight". But it doesn't include _me_. Or any of the place IO work at's clients who're running WP for their website. Or the ACF plugin developers, or any of the other developers publishing themes or plugins on wordpress.org who must be thinking "WF actual F" about now.
As I commented elsewhere:
So far as I can tell, when Matt talks about "the WordPress Community", he means:
- Matt
- the people who didn't quit Automattic last week
- _maybe_ the WP core developers who don't work at Automattic, so long as they keep their criticisms to themselves
And the community of people who _use_ WordPress to run their websites, and the people who help them to do that, and the 3rd party plugin and theme developers who make WP work for so many different kinds of websites - can all go and get fucked.
> I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase
Ironically, ever since past data of "active installs" was removed from the plugin directory [1], Matt is, as sole owner of WordPress dot org [2], the only person in the world with unfettered access to plugin usage trends.
Wordpress is an open source project. If he's "right" about WP Engine, then he's "right" about basically every user of every open source project, and there ceases to be any such thing. OS is take-it-or-leave-it, if he wants contributions back, put it in the licence and also offer support.
I am confused. Is WordPress trying to change the open source license to a more restrictive one? Suddenly trying to enforce some terms of the existing license that they never did in the past? Or is it an old fashioned legal dispute where each party says the terms of the contract mean something different?
He's right about every user of every open source project. The license gives you code, it doesn't give you trademarks, infrastructure support or moral support.
I am amused to see the usual HN vibe both complaining that commercial entities crowding out creators with their own software is violating the "spirit of open source," and insisting that FOSS maintainers don't owe you anything morph into commercial entities don't owe the FOSS maintainers of the software users anything, and are owed trademarks and access to infrastructure.
WP Engine is a hedge fund spinning money out of FOSS. It's fine, it makes more choices available for people. But the idea that Automattic has to acknowledge them, and that acknowledgement cannot be hostile, that's not in the license.
Well if we are just going by what's "allowed" legally and going by the license... automattic also hasn't done anything that's either illegal or a breach of the license. So going by that logic, they haven't done anything wrong either.
Everyone thought for sure that Twitter would die with what Elon Musk has been doing to it, but somehow it seems to still be alive.
Likewise, everyone thought there would be a total exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy or Kbin. And while those platforms did get a lot of new users, it feels like it didn’t reach the level of significance of the Digg -> Reddit mass-migration.
Therefore I am not convinced that people will actually be leaving Wordpress in droves. No matter how bad the situation currently seems for WP users.
Reddit is much worse today than before the exodus, it is recovering and maybe it will eventually fully recover. The issue with the Reddit exodus is that people fled to various different platforms and not just one. Plus some people likely just stopped using social media. This shattering to various different platforms stopped the momentum from totally killing Reddit. And maybe the same will also project WordPress.
I am still at Reddit but many subreddits are just not the same.
Yeah, entire parts of reddit have been hollowed out and a lot of the subs have changed in many ways. I don't enjoy using reddit any more, even as someone who mostly didn't care about the protest.
Twitter is dead, it just hasn't stopped twitching yet. Turns out network effects are extremely durable. There is no time like the present to move to BlueSky if you haven't already.
Indeed, network effects are durable but not unbreakable. I haven’t deleted my Twitter account yet, mostly because there are those (increasingly rare) occasions when it’s necessary to log in to view some thread or the like, but when I find myself there, it always feels like a raging dumpster fire. Building a new network on BlueSky took a while, but it was definitely worthwhile, and while there are a handful of people I miss from Twitter, I have a good community that fills the need that Twitter used to. I suspect that for most tech people, Mastodon is going to be the new destination and there will never be a single destination for social networking again, but maybe that’s a good thing.
> It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.
There aren't that many when it comes to the usual wordpress "niche" aka "slap it on a 5$ VPS and be done with it". Virtually everything else has a muuuuch steeper learning curve, and you gotta be lucky to find third party integrations for more than the usual suspects (WP, Drupal, Joomla).
Matt has a history of doing this. There was a similar blowup at Tumblr (owned by Automattic) earlier this year [1] where Matt did the same thing, DM'ing users criticizing him and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.
> and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.
While I think Matt's current behaviour is abhorrent, my understanding is the linked article buries the lede a bit.
The user claimed they were banned due to bigotry and that Tumblr was lying about them having NSFW content. Things continued to escalate until Matt shared a list of their NSFW accounts.
The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them. The only explicit thing was the usernames of the accounts, which doesn't violate any rules. Posting the user's private account names was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.
> The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them.
Was this confirmed by Tumblr staff?
And if the accounts were empty then what's the harm?
> ...was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.
The user voluntarily made several accounts with extremely vulgar and sexual names, ostensibly for NSFW purposes. If merely sharing the names is enough to "smear them as a sex pervert", I don't think that's Matt's fault.
Especially considering the post was in response to the user inciting harassment against Tumblr staff.
Mullenweg just keeps digging. He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim. If Trademark was the issue, why did it take him over a decade ? Why is he not going after all the other gazillion WP providers that use similar phrase on their website ? We all know the answer. The only company (WP Engine) that beat his for profit company (wordpress.com). He is just salty.
> he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim
Jason Cohen understood the tradeoffs of using private equity versus bootstrapping. He goes into the decision in more depth elsewhere, but at 44s into this video about avoiding private equity he alludes to his decision:
> He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim
Right. At the very start of this I was automatically on wordPress' side because yeah, kick back if you make a mint off free code. It's the morally correct thing to do.
The rest is just.. wtf. I hope I never mullenweg a project this badly.
What you've said is completely true, but I still can't detect any bad behavior here. He stopped supporting a company that was threatening (not unfairly) his company with his software. Why would he be obligated to justify that?
If you built your business next to mine, and I shared e.g. my water infrastructure with you for free or for a nominal fee, then one day your business got large enough to threaten my business, am I obligated to let you keep using my water, or should you have figured something else out long ago?
That analogy doesn't fit. What actually happened is that someone shared with you how they do mining contingent on the fact that if you use that knowledge or add to it, that you have to share it as well (WordPress was a fork off of b2/cafelog)
You did so, but turns out that other people are way better at utilizing that knowledge than you are. You throw a hissy fit on the internet. Everybody turns against you, even people who think that in essence you're right.
Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark.
For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress. I can imagine a world where you are inundated with complaints that your software doesn't do X basic thing (because the top provider has disabled it) but ITS BEEN THERE THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME TIME STOP COMPLAINING (put a smile on and explain calmly). You get my point. And then you snap.
No idea if that's what is in his mind but I have some sympathy for Matt. In principle. (This is me steelmanning Matt)
Even if they had literally disabled 80% of the functionality of wordpress, would that still be the concern of anyone other than WP Engine and their customers?
Why would anyone using open source software be required to use 100% of the functionality that the software is capable of providing?
Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated.
This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dump
I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.
Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.
I don't know about you but I would be more frustrated not being able to revise posts? It's bad enough on twitter I can't update my posts, I have to delete and repost
I can't speak for blogging usecases, but for agency websites we would disable revisions and a bunch of other things for every single wordpress installation(even the blog posts that show up on the main admin area)
Every WordPress installation I have seen has had plugins. And likely used revisions too. So I would say about the same, both are mandatory features for most users.
He is absolutely destroying WordPress. I wasn't ever a fan but given that 40% of websites rely upon it, the end users are the ones who will suffer the most here.
If somebody doesn't fork WordPress soon, it will be decades before WordPress is purged from the web and in the meantime a lot of those remaining sites will devolve into bot-net members and malware hosts.
Because that's how Mullenwegs crusade is going to end: With the death of WordPress.
My tinfoil hat - this is all semi-intentional self-sabotage.
WordPress is itself a fork of a previous open-source GPL license. Meaning Mullenweg couldn't make it close source even if he wanted to.
He makes it pretty clear that he thinks all of WordPress should belong to him. So he's intentionally closing out the ecosystem by making it as hostile to third-parties as possible.
What I am not seeing in any of the discussions about this is the connection with various database products that used to be Open Source but then changed their licenses because they didn’t like AMZN and the like offering hosted versions of their products without paying anything. It’s a similar situation.
How much of that code is still left? I’d think the bigger problem is that they’d have to get everyone who ever contributed to it not as an Automattic employee to agree to a re-license.
It’s another way of fighting back which could be more or less effective. (Right now I am dreading that I’ll need to change the database my RSS reader users because I can’t really use it commercially or open source the code.)
Last year, I was contacted out of the blue by an Automattic recruiter who encouraged me to apply for an engineering position there. I was intrigued for a few minutes because I recognized the company and knew they did some really terrific open source work once upon a time.
But then I regained my senses... I don't have any kind of reputation or extensive proof of accomplishments or character outside of my resume and real-life social circle. Any company that would cold-contact someone like me is 100% dealing with either abnormally low offer acceptance or abnormally high employee turnover, or both. I also remember reading (on Reddit and such) from previous employees that the CEO was best described as "mercurial."
There were enough bright waving red flags that I did not bother to respond.
Plus the recruiter adds your name to their file and tells future employers that they have x number of great programmers from which to select. You just ++x for the recruiter
Cold outreaches from an employer's recruiters can be from sourcers doing dumb keyword searches.
But can also be because your name was put in the hat by someone at the company (either because they know you, or because they saw something you said online).
I've worked for quite a few recognizable organizations and let me say this: Basing hiring decisions on past employers is just plain dumb unless you are looking for someone with extremely niche skills. Earlier in my career, some local jerk told me I hadn't worked with "prestigious" enough institutions to join his startup, despite having the exact skills he needed in a candidate. His startup failed while I, coincidentally, went to work for those "prestigious" organizations he was chasing. It's all very silly.
There's a good chance the recruiter was just spamming anyone and everyone they could find. At least 50% of the cold recruiter messages I've gotten have been for roles that had nothing to do with my background.
Automattic's recruitment process is also... "involved":
> Write a thoughtful cover letter, and thorough responses to application questions.
I've seen these kind of application questions before. These are not from Automattic but comparable to what I saw from them: "Describe in detail, including the metrics, KPIs and reasoning you used when you launched your previous 0 to 1 product to ensure a good fit to your customer", "Describe in detail the biggest challenge and obstacles you've overcome getting a product to market, including both the technical aspects and business/people components, and be specific about the role you played in making sure these were surmountable" and so on.
> a Slack interview
This is actually novel and kinda cool, especially when it's one of the primary ways you might communicate day-to-day.
> 30-60 minutes Zoom interview
> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week
That's starting to add up.
> Trial "can last anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Most candidates complete the trial while working full-time and we know life is busy"
Better check your existing employment contract about moonlighting / outside employment (I am not saying I agree with such restrictions, but given how common they are, maybe this should be called out a little more....)
I've been building sites on WordPress for almost 20 years. A couple of years ago I ran into an old friend, and it turned out she worked for Automattic. She encouraged me to apply there, so I did.
The initial interviews went well, so I moved on to the code test. It was a slog; I was working full-time and raising a three-year-old. But I loved the idea of working for the keepers of WordPress, so I powered through. During this process I got a peek inside Automattic, and there were some concerning oddities. One that stuck out to me was that there is an annual week-long gathering of employees, and it is mandatory.
Then my "trial" began. It was certainly within my technical capabilities, but it was something like 2 weeks worth of full-time work, all to write code that would ultimately be thrown away. I was instructed to invoice Automattic $30/hour for the time I spent on it, and told that taking too long to finish would result in rejection. I got a few hours in before I concluded that it was just not possible, and I withdrew my application.
There was also a fair amount of weird forced corporate jargon in the materials. Instead of "employees" it was always "Automatticians," and things like that. It felt a bit cultish. In retrospect, I think I dodged a bullet.
A code test that takes a couple of days?! That's an awful lot of unpaid time for a single interview step, and that's even assuming it's not one of the many companies that underestimates how long the exercise will take. Open application pipelines have a low success rate, so anyone going through this process is likely going through many others as well. Most adults currently in a full time job don't have time for that much nonsense.
> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week
Doesn't that run foul of minimum wage laws and social security laws? At that point you're doing unpaid work.
Under US labor laws at least, you only have to pay someone if they are doing work that benefits the company materially somehow. They would be forbidden from grabbing bugs out of their queue and saying, here go fix this and maybe we'll hire you. Same with unpaid internships which are _supposed_ to be training and shadowing opportunities only, no actual work being done.
That said, I did just peek and my notes and I read that candidates are paid two week's salary for the coding assignment.
How is it legally different to sitting a one hour interview? You're not getting paid for that either, that doesn't make it a minimum wage violation because its not doing work.
I think their code test / interview process sounds terrible, but the two days of code test is part of the interview, it's not producing code for the company to use.
(I do think that any company that wants applicants to spend that much time should pay for that time, but only for ethical, not legal, reasons.)
"Sorry, Joe, while your cover letter told a good story of how you created X 5 years ago, we are looking for people with more experience in X. Good luck on your search!"
"It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute"
No one with money at stake will allow their Wordpress install to be subject to random sabotage by the whims of unhinged behavior. I don't know if a fork is the solution, but Matt can't have admin access to so many installs.
Matt’s response to DHH was really some of the pettiest stuff I’ve seen from a major public figure in the tech world
Maybe its a newfound persona, maybe its a new marketing angle, or maybe its just someone going a little unhinged. But all isn’t right in the WordPress world
I think he's right about the movement, right about better monetization for open source, right about the trademark issues, and while rude, his comments are harsh truths about DHH and his work in OSS.
Obviously, they way he's handled everything has been bad - very valid to ask why he didn't act sooner about the trademark issue. And, snide comments about DHH not donating enough to charity are irrelevant. But he is right about a the core issues.
The harsh truth that DHH made a ton of money but did not choose to dedicate his life to become filthy rich but instead also focused on making the world a better place through open source?
I am no fan of DHH but I do not see any harsh truths.
The article update links to a Google Doc in which Matt takes issue with the following remark from the article:
> he's a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor
Matt responds:
> WP Engine is a “competitor”, but so is every other web host in the world. Automattic and WordPress.org have had good relations with all the others for 21 years. WordPress.org recommends a number of hosts.
It seems Matt is forgetting his "friendly" spat with GoDaddy a few years ago.
Matt continues:
> His criticism of certain practices focuses on maintaining the platform’s integrity and open-source commitment to ensure the community can grow further with sustainable investments.
Let's assume this is all true. It doesn't change the fact that he's attacking a direct competitor.
Matt continues:
> Silver Lake is far wealthier than Matt or Automattic.
This is how you know that Matt wrote the response. It's the same ego defending behavior that he used when responding to DHH.
Matt is very, very bad at PR. It's really time he learns that and lets others take over those roles. And it's time he learns to shut up. He hurts more than he helps.
They don't "support WP". All the fees are going to Automattic, as was revealed in term sheet Matt himself shared.
The "volunteers" on the WP project that approve all of the work and revisions are full time Automattic employees. The work that the Foundation does primarily benefits Automattic.
There is nothing to even support besides Automattic.
As an open source creator, I can understand Matt's position to some extent and the frustration behind seeing some competitor profiting from his work. He is clearly eccentric. The part about him asking WP Engine for revenue-sharing in exchange for changing words in his speech made me chuckle. What I don't understand is why he cares so much. He is probably one of the wealthiest OSS people of all time so it seems petty in that context.
Creating uncertainty (both for users and ecosystem developers) means he’s sabotaging it.
It doesn’t matter what he thinks he’s doing (my belief is that he’s just frustrated that someone else is profiting more than he thinks is “fair” and is using everything else as a cover, but maybe he does actually believe WPE is causing harm).
But here’s the problem I have with the whole position he’s taken. If this were actually about “Wordpress the project/community” the payment would be to the non profit not his personal for-profit company. If it was about trademarks, he should not have made the prior claims that the trademarks were not the property of his for profit when they functionally are. He would have not misrepresented the non profit as an independent entity (a fiction demonstrated clearly by the requirement to compensate his for profit).
if WPEngine is not contributing a “fair” amount to an open source project that sucks, but that’s always a risk if you want to build a for profit business on an OSS basis. But you can’t then unilaterally and retroactively change the rules later on, and act like it’s a “protecting the community” nonsense. You sure as shit don’t get to just engage in explicit extortion.[1]
Again, maybe wpengine was not contributing a fair share back to “the community”, but that’s just how OSS works, not everyone is a contributor.
[1] something I’ve found myself wondering about: my understanding is that under the law a contract signed under duress is not valid. Given the threats Matt was making, if WPE had signed it, would they be able to then go to court and say it was not enforceable due to the threat being leveled at them?
The Google doc linked in this post is theoretically a way for a corporation to harvest the Google usernames of people accessing it. They probably wouldn’t be able to see IPs but that doesn’t prohibit Google from writing your username into their audit logs for them. Use appropriate precautions when accessing.
That's not how it works... at all. Only within an org can you track, and when you share publicly (not individually) you cannot see their view history, only aggregate and anonymous.
Way too early to tell, but the way everyone is piling on this guy and saying he has mental problems makes me believe he will end up being in the right on this
Because you are contrarian just to be contrarian? That is a very lazy thing to be, arguably even lazier than blindly following the masses. It is a way to feel superior without having to think.
Why don't you read up and form your own opinion? It is just like 15-30 minutes of research.
My opinion is very similar: both parties are in the right, but one is calling up a mob to pile up on this guy and call him mentally ill.
Automattic has the right to cut off use of its trademarks and infrastructure for any reason, and the hedge fund has the right to whine about it because they got used to the generosity.
Matt tried to call up a mob against WP Engine. For example with his talk but also the things he wrote in the admin panel of all WordPress users. It backfired and the mob turned on him.
As far as I know WP Engine has not tried to call up a mob. The mob was entierly Matt's own creation. So you agree that he is the one in the wrong?
One important people to keep in mind as they read this post, the linked Google Doc, and tweets from the past day where a bunch of people are receiving unsolicited DMs[1] from Automattic with grammar that matches Matt's:
- Matt, under various guises, is shifting blame to different entities that are effectively himself.
- Automattic is Matt. Matt is the CEO of Automattic.
- The WordPress Foundation is, effectively, Matt.
- The problem is Matt. Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous.
1. https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1846448485979107824
"Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous."
This is the best single line distillation of the current lunacy. I mean with every passing day, it all becomes more and more unhinged, and I see no good outcome in the long term. The overall damage to the ecosystem I think begins it's death spiral now.
It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.
I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase, and bizarre unpopular features like Gravitar and Gutenberg now make more sense in hindsight.
ACF was one of the most important enterprise plugins in the ecosystem when they hijacked it. They essentially did a supply chain attack on the top WordPress users and expected there to be no repercussions.
He was also apparently upset that WP Engine was not pushing Jetpack, Automattic's own thoroughly mediocre service package that they try upselling to every WordPress user.
So I get the impression Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase, and he still sees the primary feature of WordPress as a blogging platform.
> Matt is really, really, really out of touch with his own userbase.
I think Matt probably has some idea of a "user base" for which he's "fighting the good fight". But it doesn't include _me_. Or any of the place IO work at's clients who're running WP for their website. Or the ACF plugin developers, or any of the other developers publishing themes or plugins on wordpress.org who must be thinking "WF actual F" about now.
As I commented elsewhere:
So far as I can tell, when Matt talks about "the WordPress Community", he means:
And the community of people who _use_ WordPress to run their websites, and the people who help them to do that, and the 3rd party plugin and theme developers who make WP work for so many different kinds of websites - can all go and get fucked.> I think revealed in this is that Matt has no understanding of the Wordpress userbase
Ironically, ever since past data of "active installs" was removed from the plugin directory [1], Matt is, as sole owner of WordPress dot org [2], the only person in the world with unfettered access to plugin usage trends.
[1] https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...
Shit, I'd forgotten that Gravitar is Matt's.
Just deleted my Gravitar profile/account, which required me to delete my Wordpress.com account too.
Well, he's not right about WP Engine.
Wordpress is an open source project. If he's "right" about WP Engine, then he's "right" about basically every user of every open source project, and there ceases to be any such thing. OS is take-it-or-leave-it, if he wants contributions back, put it in the licence and also offer support.
I am confused. Is WordPress trying to change the open source license to a more restrictive one? Suddenly trying to enforce some terms of the existing license that they never did in the past? Or is it an old fashioned legal dispute where each party says the terms of the contract mean something different?
Way too many progressive people proclaim the virtues of free and open and then <pikachu_face.gif> when others take them for their word.
If you want compensation of any kind you must stipulate them before the fact.
But is Matt progressive in any sense of the word?
Perhaps in the "progressive cognitive dysfunction" sense...
He's right about every user of every open source project. The license gives you code, it doesn't give you trademarks, infrastructure support or moral support.
I am amused to see the usual HN vibe both complaining that commercial entities crowding out creators with their own software is violating the "spirit of open source," and insisting that FOSS maintainers don't owe you anything morph into commercial entities don't owe the FOSS maintainers of the software users anything, and are owed trademarks and access to infrastructure.
WP Engine is a hedge fund spinning money out of FOSS. It's fine, it makes more choices available for people. But the idea that Automattic has to acknowledge them, and that acknowledgement cannot be hostile, that's not in the license.
Well if we are just going by what's "allowed" legally and going by the license... automattic also hasn't done anything that's either illegal or a breach of the license. So going by that logic, they haven't done anything wrong either.
> It's a boon for competitors I suppose
I would think so too, but it’s not guaranteed.
Everyone thought for sure that Twitter would die with what Elon Musk has been doing to it, but somehow it seems to still be alive.
Likewise, everyone thought there would be a total exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy or Kbin. And while those platforms did get a lot of new users, it feels like it didn’t reach the level of significance of the Digg -> Reddit mass-migration.
Therefore I am not convinced that people will actually be leaving Wordpress in droves. No matter how bad the situation currently seems for WP users.
Reddit is much worse today than before the exodus, it is recovering and maybe it will eventually fully recover. The issue with the Reddit exodus is that people fled to various different platforms and not just one. Plus some people likely just stopped using social media. This shattering to various different platforms stopped the momentum from totally killing Reddit. And maybe the same will also project WordPress.
I am still at Reddit but many subreddits are just not the same.
Yeah, entire parts of reddit have been hollowed out and a lot of the subs have changed in many ways. I don't enjoy using reddit any more, even as someone who mostly didn't care about the protest.
Twitter is dead, it just hasn't stopped twitching yet. Turns out network effects are extremely durable. There is no time like the present to move to BlueSky if you haven't already.
Indeed, network effects are durable but not unbreakable. I haven’t deleted my Twitter account yet, mostly because there are those (increasingly rare) occasions when it’s necessary to log in to view some thread or the like, but when I find myself there, it always feels like a raging dumpster fire. Building a new network on BlueSky took a while, but it was definitely worthwhile, and while there are a handful of people I miss from Twitter, I have a good community that fills the need that Twitter used to. I suspect that for most tech people, Mastodon is going to be the new destination and there will never be a single destination for social networking again, but maybe that’s a good thing.
> It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about it.
There aren't that many when it comes to the usual wordpress "niche" aka "slap it on a 5$ VPS and be done with it". Virtually everything else has a muuuuch steeper learning curve, and you gotta be lucky to find third party integrations for more than the usual suspects (WP, Drupal, Joomla).
Matt has a history of doing this. There was a similar blowup at Tumblr (owned by Automattic) earlier this year [1] where Matt did the same thing, DM'ing users criticizing him and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.
1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
> and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.
While I think Matt's current behaviour is abhorrent, my understanding is the linked article buries the lede a bit.
The user claimed they were banned due to bigotry and that Tumblr was lying about them having NSFW content. Things continued to escalate until Matt shared a list of their NSFW accounts.
https://www.threads.net/@samhenrigold/post/DAuTTaEtm_7
The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them. The only explicit thing was the usernames of the accounts, which doesn't violate any rules. Posting the user's private account names was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.
> The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them.
Was this confirmed by Tumblr staff?
And if the accounts were empty then what's the harm?
> ...was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.
The user voluntarily made several accounts with extremely vulgar and sexual names, ostensibly for NSFW purposes. If merely sharing the names is enough to "smear them as a sex pervert", I don't think that's Matt's fault.
Especially considering the post was in response to the user inciting harassment against Tumblr staff.
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Why does a CEO even get involved in something like that? No matter who is in the right?
I mean, we're aren't talking about him and Automattic because he's a good CEO or person.
There's plenty of reasons to dislike Matt without stirring up petty drama from an unreliable source.
Good on him for doing so.
> Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous.
As forseen by silicon valley
Mullenweg just keeps digging. He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim. If Trademark was the issue, why did it take him over a decade ? Why is he not going after all the other gazillion WP providers that use similar phrase on their website ? We all know the answer. The only company (WP Engine) that beat his for profit company (wordpress.com). He is just salty.
> he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim
Jason Cohen understood the tradeoffs of using private equity versus bootstrapping. He goes into the decision in more depth elsewhere, but at 44s into this video about avoiding private equity he alludes to his decision:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=0m44s
> He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim
Right. At the very start of this I was automatically on wordPress' side because yeah, kick back if you make a mint off free code. It's the morally correct thing to do.
The rest is just.. wtf. I hope I never mullenweg a project this badly.
Congratulations!
"I hope I never mullenweg a project this badly."
That is the only good thing I've seen come out of this whole debacle. This needs to become standard tech/OSS lexicon, and Matt's enduring legacy.
What you've said is completely true, but I still can't detect any bad behavior here. He stopped supporting a company that was threatening (not unfairly) his company with his software. Why would he be obligated to justify that?
If you built your business next to mine, and I shared e.g. my water infrastructure with you for free or for a nominal fee, then one day your business got large enough to threaten my business, am I obligated to let you keep using my water, or should you have figured something else out long ago?
That analogy doesn't fit. What actually happened is that someone shared with you how they do mining contingent on the fact that if you use that knowledge or add to it, that you have to share it as well (WordPress was a fork off of b2/cafelog)
You did so, but turns out that other people are way better at utilizing that knowledge than you are. You throw a hissy fit on the internet. Everybody turns against you, even people who think that in essence you're right.
Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark.
For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress. I can imagine a world where you are inundated with complaints that your software doesn't do X basic thing (because the top provider has disabled it) but ITS BEEN THERE THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME TIME STOP COMPLAINING (put a smile on and explain calmly). You get my point. And then you snap.
No idea if that's what is in his mind but I have some sympathy for Matt. In principle. (This is me steelmanning Matt)
Disabling/limiting revisions is built in to WordPress.
All WP Engine did is add:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );
to their configs.
Even if they had literally disabled 80% of the functionality of wordpress, would that still be the concern of anyone other than WP Engine and their customers?
Why would anyone using open source software be required to use 100% of the functionality that the software is capable of providing?
Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated.
This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dump
If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.
I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.
But until the last few weeks the Wordpress site enthusiastically endorsed its use by third parties.
It wasn’t “we really wish you wouldn’t”.
Which is also something done by his own hosting companies (unsure if it's in all cases, but at least some).
Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.
I don't know about you but I would be more frustrated not being able to revise posts? It's bad enough on twitter I can't update my posts, I have to delete and repost
I can't speak for blogging usecases, but for agency websites we would disable revisions and a bunch of other things for every single wordpress installation(even the blog posts that show up on the main admin area)
Heck even Jetpack, Automattics official plugin, recommends limiting revisions: https://jetpack.com/blog/wordpress-revisions/
Lastly, Wpengine never fully disabled post revisions, they just limited it to 2-3.
Revisions in this discussion is a copy of revisions you've made so you can reference or revert to one. You can still update posts all you want.
Every WordPress installation I have seen has had plugins. And likely used revisions too. So I would say about the same, both are mandatory features for most users.
He is absolutely destroying WordPress. I wasn't ever a fan but given that 40% of websites rely upon it, the end users are the ones who will suffer the most here.
If somebody doesn't fork WordPress soon, it will be decades before WordPress is purged from the web and in the meantime a lot of those remaining sites will devolve into bot-net members and malware hosts.
Because that's how Mullenwegs crusade is going to end: With the death of WordPress.
That Google Doc is painful to read. You point at the stars and Matt looks at the finger.
> you can just continue to use WordPress without any impact
That's nice—
> on any other host than WP Engine
That's the whole point, Matt.
My tinfoil hat - this is all semi-intentional self-sabotage.
WordPress is itself a fork of a previous open-source GPL license. Meaning Mullenweg couldn't make it close source even if he wanted to.
He makes it pretty clear that he thinks all of WordPress should belong to him. So he's intentionally closing out the ecosystem by making it as hostile to third-parties as possible.
As some like to say, "the cruelty is the point".
What I am not seeing in any of the discussions about this is the connection with various database products that used to be Open Source but then changed their licenses because they didn’t like AMZN and the like offering hosted versions of their products without paying anything. It’s a similar situation.
Well, they changed their licenses. That's not what happened here.
Wordpress can't because it was a fork of b2/cafelog. You can't un-GPL code you didn't own in the first place.
How much of that code is still left? I’d think the bigger problem is that they’d have to get everyone who ever contributed to it not as an Automattic employee to agree to a re-license.
It’s another way of fighting back which could be more or less effective. (Right now I am dreading that I’ll need to change the database my RSS reader users because I can’t really use it commercially or open source the code.)
Because database products didn't build a platform in hopes that Amazon would add features to it, it's quite the opposite.
This looks more like Amazon copying products from successful sellers on its marketplace, then pushing them to the side.
As someone very interested in open source being sustainable, I'm sympathetic to the challenges, and very interested in solutions.
But, obviously, this is currently looking like a disaster of PR and community.
So, hopefully they can figure out:
* solutions to the open source sustainability challenges,
* a solution to the harm done by recent mistakes, and
* how to try to prevent mistakes like that from happening again.
Last year, I was contacted out of the blue by an Automattic recruiter who encouraged me to apply for an engineering position there. I was intrigued for a few minutes because I recognized the company and knew they did some really terrific open source work once upon a time.
But then I regained my senses... I don't have any kind of reputation or extensive proof of accomplishments or character outside of my resume and real-life social circle. Any company that would cold-contact someone like me is 100% dealing with either abnormally low offer acceptance or abnormally high employee turnover, or both. I also remember reading (on Reddit and such) from previous employees that the CEO was best described as "mercurial."
There were enough bright waving red flags that I did not bother to respond.
If it was a recruiter encouraging you to apply, chances are it was a mass campaign to fill the recruiting pipeline.
In my experience that’s how recruiters work and the only thing it indicates is that the company has open roles to fill.
Plus the recruiter adds your name to their file and tells future employers that they have x number of great programmers from which to select. You just ++x for the recruiter
Heh, like that old joke "I'd never join a club that would have me as a member"!
Hah, I was literally thinking of that as I was writing the comment.
Groucho Marx for those that are interested.
Cold outreaches from an employer's recruiters can be from sourcers doing dumb keyword searches.
But can also be because your name was put in the hat by someone at the company (either because they know you, or because they saw something you said online).
Sure, I've had that happen too. In this case, I didn't know anyone at Automattic.
I've worked for quite a few recognizable organizations and let me say this: Basing hiring decisions on past employers is just plain dumb unless you are looking for someone with extremely niche skills. Earlier in my career, some local jerk told me I hadn't worked with "prestigious" enough institutions to join his startup, despite having the exact skills he needed in a candidate. His startup failed while I, coincidentally, went to work for those "prestigious" organizations he was chasing. It's all very silly.
There's a good chance the recruiter was just spamming anyone and everyone they could find. At least 50% of the cold recruiter messages I've gotten have been for roles that had nothing to do with my background.
Automattic's recruitment process is also... "involved":
> Write a thoughtful cover letter, and thorough responses to application questions.
I've seen these kind of application questions before. These are not from Automattic but comparable to what I saw from them: "Describe in detail, including the metrics, KPIs and reasoning you used when you launched your previous 0 to 1 product to ensure a good fit to your customer", "Describe in detail the biggest challenge and obstacles you've overcome getting a product to market, including both the technical aspects and business/people components, and be specific about the role you played in making sure these were surmountable" and so on.
> a Slack interview
This is actually novel and kinda cool, especially when it's one of the primary ways you might communicate day-to-day.
> 30-60 minutes Zoom interview
> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week
That's starting to add up.
> Trial "can last anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Most candidates complete the trial while working full-time and we know life is busy"
Better check your existing employment contract about moonlighting / outside employment (I am not saying I agree with such restrictions, but given how common they are, maybe this should be called out a little more....)
I've been building sites on WordPress for almost 20 years. A couple of years ago I ran into an old friend, and it turned out she worked for Automattic. She encouraged me to apply there, so I did.
The initial interviews went well, so I moved on to the code test. It was a slog; I was working full-time and raising a three-year-old. But I loved the idea of working for the keepers of WordPress, so I powered through. During this process I got a peek inside Automattic, and there were some concerning oddities. One that stuck out to me was that there is an annual week-long gathering of employees, and it is mandatory.
Then my "trial" began. It was certainly within my technical capabilities, but it was something like 2 weeks worth of full-time work, all to write code that would ultimately be thrown away. I was instructed to invoice Automattic $30/hour for the time I spent on it, and told that taking too long to finish would result in rejection. I got a few hours in before I concluded that it was just not possible, and I withdrew my application.
There was also a fair amount of weird forced corporate jargon in the materials. Instead of "employees" it was always "Automatticians," and things like that. It felt a bit cultish. In retrospect, I think I dodged a bullet.
A code test that takes a couple of days?! That's an awful lot of unpaid time for a single interview step, and that's even assuming it's not one of the many companies that underestimates how long the exercise will take. Open application pipelines have a low success rate, so anyone going through this process is likely going through many others as well. Most adults currently in a full time job don't have time for that much nonsense.
> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week
Doesn't that run foul of minimum wage laws and social security laws? At that point you're doing unpaid work.
Under US labor laws at least, you only have to pay someone if they are doing work that benefits the company materially somehow. They would be forbidden from grabbing bugs out of their queue and saying, here go fix this and maybe we'll hire you. Same with unpaid internships which are _supposed_ to be training and shadowing opportunities only, no actual work being done.
That said, I did just peek and my notes and I read that candidates are paid two week's salary for the coding assignment.
How is it legally different to sitting a one hour interview? You're not getting paid for that either, that doesn't make it a minimum wage violation because its not doing work.
I think their code test / interview process sounds terrible, but the two days of code test is part of the interview, it's not producing code for the company to use.
(I do think that any company that wants applicants to spend that much time should pay for that time, but only for ethical, not legal, reasons.)
Sounds like canonical.
It's not quite as bad. At least A8C doesn't ask you to talk about what grades you got in high school.
Canonical accepts my PR's but won't hire because I didn't graduate high school :-)
Reminds me of the (sadly not apocryphal) stories:
"Required: 10 years of experience in X"
"Sorry, Joe, while your cover letter told a good story of how you created X 5 years ago, we are looking for people with more experience in X. Good luck on your search!"
"It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute"
No one with money at stake will allow their Wordpress install to be subject to random sabotage by the whims of unhinged behavior. I don't know if a fork is the solution, but Matt can't have admin access to so many installs.
Matt’s response to DHH was really some of the pettiest stuff I’ve seen from a major public figure in the tech world
Maybe its a newfound persona, maybe its a new marketing angle, or maybe its just someone going a little unhinged. But all isn’t right in the WordPress world
> Matt’s response to DHH was really some of the pettiest stuff I’ve seen from a major public figure in the tech world
ElonM Has Entered the Chat
< Removed the Link, because it can be interpreted as political. I was talking about his statement, which was simply puerile. >
It is petty, but I find myself on Matt's side.
I think he's right about the movement, right about better monetization for open source, right about the trademark issues, and while rude, his comments are harsh truths about DHH and his work in OSS.
Obviously, they way he's handled everything has been bad - very valid to ask why he didn't act sooner about the trademark issue. And, snide comments about DHH not donating enough to charity are irrelevant. But he is right about a the core issues.
The harsh truth that DHH made a ton of money but did not choose to dedicate his life to become filthy rich but instead also focused on making the world a better place through open source?
I am no fan of DHH but I do not see any harsh truths.
The article update links to a Google Doc in which Matt takes issue with the following remark from the article: > he's a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor
Matt responds: > WP Engine is a “competitor”, but so is every other web host in the world. Automattic and WordPress.org have had good relations with all the others for 21 years. WordPress.org recommends a number of hosts.
It seems Matt is forgetting his "friendly" spat with GoDaddy a few years ago.
Matt continues: > His criticism of certain practices focuses on maintaining the platform’s integrity and open-source commitment to ensure the community can grow further with sustainable investments.
Let's assume this is all true. It doesn't change the fact that he's attacking a direct competitor.
Matt continues: > Silver Lake is far wealthier than Matt or Automattic.
This is how you know that Matt wrote the response. It's the same ego defending behavior that he used when responding to DHH.
Matt is very, very bad at PR. It's really time he learns that and lets others take over those roles. And it's time he learns to shut up. He hurts more than he helps.
> WordPress.org recommends a number of hosts.
It's worth pointing out that, of the hosts Wordpress.org just promoted (https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wp-engine-promotions/) 3 are owned by Automattic and the other 2 pay Automattic licensing/service fees.
Thanks. Good to know that there are decent hosts to choose from, that help support WP by paying licensing/service fees.
They don't "support WP". All the fees are going to Automattic, as was revealed in term sheet Matt himself shared.
The "volunteers" on the WP project that approve all of the work and revisions are full time Automattic employees. The work that the Foundation does primarily benefits Automattic.
There is nothing to even support besides Automattic.
Anyone has Mathew's Mastodon link? I wanted to follow him but the link at the end of the post is broken.
Found the link https://mastodon.social/@mathewi@journa.host
As an open source creator, I can understand Matt's position to some extent and the frustration behind seeing some competitor profiting from his work. He is clearly eccentric. The part about him asking WP Engine for revenue-sharing in exchange for changing words in his speech made me chuckle. What I don't understand is why he cares so much. He is probably one of the wealthiest OSS people of all time so it seems petty in that context.
I think when you're rich you'd rather give charity to the needy than to other rich guys.
Creating uncertainty (both for users and ecosystem developers) means he’s sabotaging it.
It doesn’t matter what he thinks he’s doing (my belief is that he’s just frustrated that someone else is profiting more than he thinks is “fair” and is using everything else as a cover, but maybe he does actually believe WPE is causing harm).
But here’s the problem I have with the whole position he’s taken. If this were actually about “Wordpress the project/community” the payment would be to the non profit not his personal for-profit company. If it was about trademarks, he should not have made the prior claims that the trademarks were not the property of his for profit when they functionally are. He would have not misrepresented the non profit as an independent entity (a fiction demonstrated clearly by the requirement to compensate his for profit).
if WPEngine is not contributing a “fair” amount to an open source project that sucks, but that’s always a risk if you want to build a for profit business on an OSS basis. But you can’t then unilaterally and retroactively change the rules later on, and act like it’s a “protecting the community” nonsense. You sure as shit don’t get to just engage in explicit extortion.[1]
Again, maybe wpengine was not contributing a fair share back to “the community”, but that’s just how OSS works, not everyone is a contributor.
[1] something I’ve found myself wondering about: my understanding is that under the law a contract signed under duress is not valid. Given the threats Matt was making, if WPE had signed it, would they be able to then go to court and say it was not enforceable due to the threat being leveled at them?
Both.
he is def fucking it up.
[flagged]
I don't understand what the problem is. You found a cheaper hosting. Good for you. I don’t think what follows is warranted.
I just read his response to DHH, and I find it interesting how he's both out of line, and really right at the same time.
If you don't like it, fork it.
The Google doc linked in this post is theoretically a way for a corporation to harvest the Google usernames of people accessing it. They probably wouldn’t be able to see IPs but that doesn’t prohibit Google from writing your username into their audit logs for them. Use appropriate precautions when accessing.
That's not how it works... at all. Only within an org can you track, and when you share publicly (not individually) you cannot see their view history, only aggregate and anonymous.
Way too early to tell, but the way everyone is piling on this guy and saying he has mental problems makes me believe he will end up being in the right on this
Because you are contrarian just to be contrarian? That is a very lazy thing to be, arguably even lazier than blindly following the masses. It is a way to feel superior without having to think.
Why don't you read up and form your own opinion? It is just like 15-30 minutes of research.
My opinion is both parties are in the wrong, but everyone is piling on this guy and calling him mentally ill
>... [I] believe he will end up being in the right on this
>My opinion is both parties are in the wrong...
So you feel which way, now?
My opinion is very similar: both parties are in the right, but one is calling up a mob to pile up on this guy and call him mentally ill.
Automattic has the right to cut off use of its trademarks and infrastructure for any reason, and the hedge fund has the right to whine about it because they got used to the generosity.
Matt tried to call up a mob against WP Engine. For example with his talk but also the things he wrote in the admin panel of all WordPress users. It backfired and the mob turned on him.
As far as I know WP Engine has not tried to call up a mob. The mob was entierly Matt's own creation. So you agree that he is the one in the wrong?
This reasoning is how you end up believing the earth is flat
That's a survivorship bias of astronomical proportions
Eh, for every "they said he was crazy but he was a bona-fide genius" case, there's a few million "nope, just crazy" counter-examples.