I hope that one positive outcome of this whole debacle will be people realising that the Wordpress Foundation board is apparently three Matt Mullenwegs in a trenchcoat: https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... (I exaggerate, slightly.)
This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like.
If this mess creates pressure to put more separation between the Foundation and Automattic, I think that can only be a good thing.
I’m the president of an internet nonprofit (miraheze.org) and we have five active directors with an annual budget of ~$10k. We have elections for community appointed directors as well. This stuff is not hard.
By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.
I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other. I haven't used Wordpress in years, and this drama makes me never want to use it again.
Initially, I was taking the side of WP.org and Automattic; however, I changed my mind completely once they took over the “Advanced Custom Fields” plugin, and replaced it with another plugin that broke people's websites. So Matt weaponized the WP package repository, and stole the users of a well-maintained package, making WP site admins work over the weekend to fix the breakage.
This isn't opinionated, this is theft.
If the project had been run like this since the beginning, it wouldn't be where it is today. Automattic is a rich company partially due to the community around WordPress, and the trust that community has had in the governance of the project.
> replaced it with another plugin that broke people's websites
What makes you think it broke someone’s website? AFAIK they just patched the security issue that wp engine team couldn’t patch because they were locked out from pushing to repo?
It reminds me of Reddit cracking down on 3rd party apps or Twitter changing that policy and a whole lot more once Musk took over. The problem isn't necessarily the actions or policies in a vacuum. There are legitimate benefits to these approaches. The problem is it feels like these communities were built up around certain practices and there was no reason to expect those practices to change. So when there is a big change that only happens after a platform has already reached near monopoly status, it feels like a bait and switch to users because many people would have never signed up for a platform with those policies in the first place.
> Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other
There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.
> There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version
All the projects doing that will soon discover that they were popular mostly because of the Open-Source licensing. Once that changes, the popularity, and goodwill go down, for the simple reason that trust gets breached and forks happen. Open-Source is essentially about the freedom to fork, and that's precisely what happens when governance fails.
Some of them will backtrack on that decision, but it will be too late; like ElasticSearch recently changing again to AGPL, except now the question is why would people choose it over the more trustworthy, open and secure OpenSearch.
There's nothing wrong with building proprietary software, but there is something wrong with pulling a bait-and-switch, betraying your community that invested in your product because of its Open-Source nature.
Matt surely knows that, and also, changing the license of WordPress is probably not possible due to them not having the full copyright. WordPress is not really theirs, despite all their contributions. Which is why this will not end well for Automattic.
Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.
In 2021 Automattic, the company that effectively owns Wordpress, has a valuation of $7.5 billion in 2021, and revenue of $750M in 2024. It's big money.
I'm probably wrong here, but my tinfoil hat take is that Matt has seen how well Taylor Otwell is doing with Laravel and he wants a piece of that cake. Granted they're doing pretty good with wordpress.com hosting, but they'd have so much more money if they licenced plugins and features the way Laravel does.
That might be part of it, though I think the more pressing boat anchor around Automattic's neck is the money pit that Tumblr is, for what seems like very little return.
On the off-chance that Matt is doing the irresponsible thing here and still getting involved in social media discussions on this topic:
People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth policy against those who don't take your side... the side that's going to be picked isn't your side. There's just too much risk to taking your side.
Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.
Oh yeah, this is a fantastic thing to sit back and munch popcorn to. It's when the people involved are demanding that you stop munching the popcorn and start throwing knives at someone that the fun stops.
@WPEngine - fork Wordpress, rebrand yourself and the code. Setup a plugin / update hub like Wordpress.org and provide a pathway for your customers and devs to migrate. I recognize this is non-trivial. Ending an abusive relationship usually is.
They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it.
The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
He’s not going to step down. And if his beef (as stated) is companies making money with WordPress without contributing back, where’s the line? The top page builders like Divi and Elementor all do the same with their cloud offerings. Does he sue them next, simply for using the word “WordPress” to indicate compatibility in their marketing materials? Who wants to invest time and money simply to have Matt steal your work on a whim.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming Matt’s scope is limited to WPEngine; the kind of personality that acts in this way will do the same to anyone.
What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand?
There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it.
> Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive.
Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith.
> The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
My mother has a WordPress site talking about hedgehogs and at this point it seems like it's only a matter of time before Matt's vendetta shows up in her site footer.
There’s a ‘sport’ where contestants see who can kick a rolled up hedgehog over the most garden fences. Maybe that one? Or it was a Sean Lock joke. I forget.
Rumors are that another round of voluntary layoffs are coming to Automattic today. I am optimistic for the future of WordPress because it looks less and less likely to involve Matt. Matt has created the ideal conditions for a fork to succeed: WordPress (the software) is a fixture of the internet, it is never going away no matter how much Matt sabotages it but Matt's control over it is not a foregone conclusion given all Matt really controls is the brand. The name and leadership may change, but WordPress will live on.
I have been thinking about the alignment offer that Automattic has offered its employees. It’s hard for me to imagine any scenario at any company where I would not take the money and go. Six months of salary is a lot of money for just simply walking away.
To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if that’s the reason less than 10% accepted the first offer.
If you're a PHP developer with expertise in WordPress Automattic is pretty much your version of FAANG - I can totally understand why people wouldn't want to trade even six months salary for never being able to work there again.
> after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors
I expect that even Matt is aware that that is not an unreasonable assumption. Purportedly, via Bullenweg, an email went out yesterday re another offer, and it included this, from Matt:
> You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
I mean that would have to be a first. "We're offering voluntary resignations with these benefits" followed by "and I promise we'll actually offer those benefits" - shows you how low trust seems to be at Automattic.
No Roman general ever decimated his legion twice. Matt should go on vacation and beg Dries Buytaert to clean up his mess because he's the only guy talking sense. https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes.
If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that.
So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player.
"WordPress hosting" is an accurate description of what the product does and uses the term nominatively, which is legal. You couldn't call your company that, but within the company, you could call the product that hosts WordPress "WordPress hosting". (IANAL;TINLA)
Yeah the DHH post is an example or projection… Automattic is hosting a lot of WordPress sites but not making anywhere near as much money as the WP Engines and Go Daddy’s of the ecosystem. (And yet automattic contributes the most to the project.) So it’s definitely a point of frustration to the business.
One positive outcome of this entire dispute is I picked up an old project where I wrote my own cms. It's been fun stepping through the code, and I'm tempted to take it further under a permissive license.
Readit News
This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like.
If this mess creates pressure to put more separation between the Foundation and Automattic, I think that can only be a good thing.
By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.
> There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or create this page.
This isn't opinionated, this is theft.
If the project had been run like this since the beginning, it wouldn't be where it is today. Automattic is a rich company partially due to the community around WordPress, and the trust that community has had in the governance of the project.
What makes you think it broke someone’s website? AFAIK they just patched the security issue that wp engine team couldn’t patch because they were locked out from pushing to repo?
This is quite reminiscent of the Great GPL Themes Kerfuffle of 2009 [0], actually. Stakes are a lot higher now, of course.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/wordpress-and-thesis-go-to-battl...
There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.
All the projects doing that will soon discover that they were popular mostly because of the Open-Source licensing. Once that changes, the popularity, and goodwill go down, for the simple reason that trust gets breached and forks happen. Open-Source is essentially about the freedom to fork, and that's precisely what happens when governance fails.
Some of them will backtrack on that decision, but it will be too late; like ElasticSearch recently changing again to AGPL, except now the question is why would people choose it over the more trustworthy, open and secure OpenSearch.
There's nothing wrong with building proprietary software, but there is something wrong with pulling a bait-and-switch, betraying your community that invested in your product because of its Open-Source nature.
Matt surely knows that, and also, changing the license of WordPress is probably not possible due to them not having the full copyright. WordPress is not really theirs, despite all their contributions. Which is why this will not end well for Automattic.
WordPress is GPL because it is a fork of b2/cafelog:
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.
Deleted Comment
80% annual codebase churn (according to Theo) says otherwise
People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth policy against those who don't take your side... the side that's going to be picked isn't your side. There's just too much risk to taking your side.
Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.
How can you sit back and watch the drama if you're a part of it?
do not like = have not prized in
drama = the idea that the free meal could walk off thr plate.
The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming Matt’s scope is limited to WPEngine; the kind of personality that acts in this way will do the same to anyone.
What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand?
There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it.
> Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive.
Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith.
> The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if that’s the reason less than 10% accepted the first offer.
I expect that even Matt is aware that that is not an unreasonable assumption. Purportedly, via Bullenweg, an email went out yesterday re another offer, and it included this, from Matt:
> You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
I mean that would have to be a first. "We're offering voluntary resignations with these benefits" followed by "and I promise we'll actually offer those benefits" - shows you how low trust seems to be at Automattic.
If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that.
So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player.
"Capturing value" I suppose.
Just taking a page out of the app store playbooks. I guess Matt hasn't been keeping up with courts starting to rule against those stores.
Matt behaving like a PE fund, or any standard Big Tech company. In other words, enshittification as usual.
Can you link to what you're referring?