It's ironic he's so terrified of someone forking Wordpress, since Wordpress itself is a fork.
Parent comment OP must work for developer relations at Apple
This is a wordpress fork that will cost people to run and assuming WPEngine is supporting it it'll cost them money to support.
It’s always interesting when people become personally offended when someone dares to make money off of the project they personally open sourced before. Why would you license your stuff with a license that explicitly allows that if you’re salty about the consequences later?
Maybe chose a license you actually stand behind and can live with.
That's really the crux of this OSS pushback, people want all the benefits of being open source, like free labor and marketing, without wanting the ostensible cons.
Because that person chose a license that allows that for a start?
> b2/cafelog, more commonly known as b2 or catalog, was the precursor to WordPress
Open source software is about a specific kind of spirit, a way of relating to the community, and if you don't have that spirit then you shouldn't get the corresponding benefits of viral spread, contributions, increased credibility, or community goodwill.
He is now annoyed that someone else has been better at extracting profit from something that - going by what he says - he sees as his personal fiefdom.
I really dislike WP Engine because they ruined Flywheel, one of the best companies I’ve ever dealt with (and to which I paid tens of thousands of dollars over my lifetime as a customer of Flywheel).
But Mullenweg is coming off as completely unhinged.
The dude literally one of the top-ever contributors to WordPress. He's number 6 on the GitHub contributor graph with over 1000 commits. Him and Mark Little started WordPress. He's also the person who has funded most of the development either via his own private company or via Automattic.
> He is now annoyed that someone else has been better at extracting profit from something that - going by what he says - he sees as his personal fiefdom.
Another falsehood. Automattic makes more money than WP Engine. He's basically trying to force them to either contribute to WordPress to to pay Automattic. This latest move seems like a move to force WP Engine to fund a fork or help fund development of WordPress.
If he really does still have Neal Katyal working on whatever the merits of his actual case are, I am gobsmacked that he is being allowed to behave this way. Katyal is not an idiot or a troll, and this picture does not make sense to me.
Some of his bullshit has already been smacked down by the court: I don't get why he is still doing this.
Matt: stop.
I now know far more than I would ever have liked to know about him, including his apparent sexual proclivities, how his mother allegedly talks to the staff, and goodness knows what else as his reputation is dragged through the courts.
Did I prefer Wordpress before I became intimately acquainted - albeit secondhand - with Mullenweg’s reputation. Absolutely.
Did I trust Wordpress more when I thought it was a community of developers rather than something dictated by the apparently unstable whims of a vain 40-something year old manchild? You bet I did.
Do I think Wordpress will burn to the ground, dragged down by a capricious manchild? I’d lay even odds.
He’s funded the development via his own private company which profits from wordpress - and Automattic (also funded by profits from Wordpress - plus VC and private equity money derived from his relationship with Wordpress), which honestly seems to be a fairly autocratic vanity fiefdom primarily concerned with promoting Mullenweg’s interests.
So yeah, he’s got lots of GitHub commits, but given his recent dealing with staff, I would not really be surprised if those were just proxy commits with the code written by others but cuckoo’d by him. That’s just speculation - but given how nosebleed-crazy he seems to be, I’d not be at all surprised.
To clarify: I didn’t say WP Engine was making more money, just that they were better at extracting profit.
“Better” in this context (from the Mullenweg view) likely means “a threat to Mullenweg’s vanity empire because they might pull customers to their business at the expense of his”.
> He’s basically trying to force them to either contribute to Wordpress to to pay Automattic
Even though (a) they don’t have to and (b) “contribution” can mean many things including driving awareness and adoption or “marketing contribution” or providing a visible and simple entry point that sustains usage and development or “ecosystem viability”contribution if you will.
Mullenweg is pissed because they threatened his fiefdom. Plain and simple.
His nonsense regarding the trademarks says it all.
Edit: I say this as someone who has used Wordpress for two decades, and spent a significant amount of money on products and services related to Wordpress. I moved my Wordpress-based business off Wordpress a couple of years ago (because it was too messy), and I’ve never been so glad as I was when this nonsense started.
This is a fair bit of silliness now I'm afraid. Like him or loathe him (and he's making it so very easy to do the latter), Mullenweg was one of the only developers of WP for years back when it was starting. He wrote it part time, he actually quit his job to work on it full time, and he was still a teenager. His energies are why it exists.
Has it all gone horribly wrong in the last couple of years? Yes. Has the money situation complicated things? Yes. But we can state these things without constructing an alternate, incorrect timeline.
He's surely acting like this in part because he does so closely identify with something he risked his livelihood to build as a pretty prolific young developer.
There are plenty of things he's done recently that are ridiculous and bogus enough that they can be criticised without imagining stuff.
Focus on the actual issues.
Matt himself has claimed that Automattic and WPEngine have similar revenue levels.
Edit: "has" -> "hasn't" lol
Nit: Mike Little was the other cofounder - you might be confusing him with Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers and largest contributors early in the project.
Also, with regards to contribution count, it’s important to look at “props” which are the credits given for commits. WordPress has a contribution system that predates things like git’s multiple author support, so users are given props via commit messages, and a system tracks this for attributing credit for each release.
This is quite inaccurate. Sure, WP started as a fork of b2, but it's not true to say Mullenweg is a cuckoo. WordPress is something he personally did extensive development work on to evolve it to where it is today, and he hired many of the people who did most of the rest of it as it became commercially viable. Even early on it was a quite different product to b2, which was at best fledgling, and it is fully fair to say that he is one of its creators. He wrote loads of it at the beginning; it's his thing as much as it is any other developer's, if not more. We should not diminish that achievement by pretending he is just leeching off something that in fact he substantially built.
Now, whether he is cuckoo is another matter; as you say, he appears unhinged. Something has happened to him such that the more self-absorbed tendencies that used to work quite well in a BFDL context have gone very wrong. He always used to be able to come across as the guy who could help sell this so it will all work for everyone in the ecosystem commercially, and could be likeable and encouraging as a community figure, but something has broken.
I am sad for him because this kind of loss of control is ultimately humiliating him. It's time to take off all (or all but one) of the hats, and find something else in life.
You are right about WP Engine: I am no fan having had considerably less than optimal customer service experiences with them.
But this is fucked up.
Matt’s behavior has been borderline sociopathic, and it’s actively harming people, to say nothing of the Wordpress brand itself.
Mullenweg needs to step away from WP and spend a few months in therapy.
EDIT: was Wordpress GPL’d all along because it’s a fork of b2/cafelog?
There even seems to be an open source variant of the OS https://www.puredarwin.org/
What Matt has done, though, is far worse. In his legal filings, he has effectively asserted sole proprietorship of the entire WordPress ecosystem, access to which is gated solely on his whim. Furthermore, he has also argued that previous steps to create a non-profit foundation that is independent of any dictatorial powers were void from the start, and that anyone who thought such actions genuine are laughable idiots. His actions are anathema for an open source project, and even for a corporate product, quite life-threatening.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/thanks-for-the-15-minute-b...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/wordpress-vip-go-sites-are...
I was briefly thinking what if techcrunch was using Automattic but quickly dismissed the thought.
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
Forking is Beautiful - WordPress News >> https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
Forking is essential.
No one should care if matt is unpleasant when they can just fork and be done with him.
The problem is that the tens of thousands of small businesses who placed their trust in Wordpress will be damaged by this. I know - anecdotally - that many of those people like Wordpress “because it is free” (like both beer and speech) and because they know - even fuzzily - that because of that there’s lots of cool useful stuff that is available.
Now, sure, a lot of that cool useful stuff will still work with a fork. But it splits the message and gradually - not overnight - people developing that cool and useful stuff may lose faith and do something else.
What Millenweg is doing hits at the very heart of what open source means - and what community means - and is, as far as I can see, an absolutely cynical move made in the pursuit of profit and vanity.
I run a business that is invested in the WordPress ecosystem.
It’s going to be a non-trivial endeavor to get a fork seriously running and reliably delivered.
In the meantime the community has to suffer this clown’s further antics.
I spent about a decade working with WP and wrote a lot of code for it, and had to read way more folks' code than I care to think about.
It's unique compared to other stacks I have worked with in that unlike ruby, python, node, or even Drupal, lots of businesses are often making money by selling submodules... which is strange because they are basically selling GPL code for a GPL'd stack.
In an environment like that, folks bristle at the suggestion of "forking" and will accuse folks of "stealing". WP.org has more or less endorsed that view.
I find it a bit nutty, but hey they all think I'm a crank. Maybe I am. Personally, I just made money fixing weird bugs that arose from that pile of cruft, or writing bespoke plugins for very niche purposes. It wasn't fun, but I got very good at dumb stuff for sure- it has some real problems but if it does what you want it's very easy to turn over to the marketing department.
There are plenty of contradictions in that anti-GPL point of view which can be seen in the fact that WP itself is a fork of an earlier project and it's main ecommerce setup was forked as well. But folks generally see what the want to see, I think.
(Sorry I’ll see myself out)
These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says
> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.
That sounds like a partnership to me.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
And it names the specific members of the community, Joost, Karim, who subsequently had their accounts deactivated, not just the community at large.
We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition. And while I'm not sure of the particular definition that's going to be in play, I strongly suspect that the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction.
"We are committed to working with [...] We stand ready" isn't strong enough to actually constitute a partnership, I'm pretty sure--it is at best an expression of intent to make one.
Indeed we are not, but absent various exceptions the legal definition of a term is its ordinary meaning.
I don't know if there's a history here of courts interpreting (or legislatures defining, or so on) "partner" in a particular technical way that would cause a deviation from that default, I'm certainly not going to try and prove that negative, but as a starting point for an informal discussion on the internet it's a reasonable guess that there is not.
It almost certainly refers to WP Engine's partnership program [1]. The catch-all is WP Engine users. It would seem prudent for anyone doing business with Wordpress to become a WP Engine user so they can benefit from the injunction. (Not legal advice.)
"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.
> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’
That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.
The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.
(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)
The current top comment and discussion on this Reddit thread provide good context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hylx50/matt_tro...
Is that all it takes these days?
I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!
Matt Mullenweg painted it as a fork to suit his narrative and pre-emptively poison the well (by implying they are incompetent) of a potential future fork.[2]
He's done that a couple times now. He claims to support forks and says "I'll even promote them on WordPress.org" (paraphrase) but what he does is post before a fork is even ready or properly organized. Thereby sabotaging the effort and making everyone involved look bad. [3]
It's truly evil.
[0] https://x.com/jdevalk/status/1878210129914409063
[1] https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/
[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
[3] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/
EDIT: Matt just posted another childish taunt in response to Joost's clarification. See https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815
The plan was to scrape the site and set up an alternative, not to fork Wordpress. The headline was deliberately written to deceive.
-----
edit: that being said, a distributed model would be best for all situations like this. I still can't get over the fact that Rust has a github dependency. And I'm sure they're not the only one.
Have I unflinchingly recommends Wordpress to dozens of people over the years? Yes.
Have they gone ahead and used it? Yes.
Have I helped them get set up? Yes.
Was it worth staking a little bit of my reputation on Wordpress saying “this will just work, and when it doesn’t there are loads of people who can help”? Yes.
Will I continue to do that when there is this insane level of Mullenweg-induced teenage-boy-angst highschool drama surrounding Wordpress? Hell no.
And that’s the problem. This nonsense kills the community goodwill around the software. And that’s really really sad, and all of Mullenweg’s making because his ego has run away with itself.
It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult life. But it seems like his psyche has got stuck when he got “famous”.
You see this with kids in bands who get too rich, too famous, too fast - and the fallout is similar: destroy everything in a bonfire of vanity.
Wordpress was useful, because lots of people know it well enough. When your consultant can't be reached someone else can take it over and do ok. I even liked the Gutenberg page layout tool.
>It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult l ife.
I imagine it is hard. He didn't make the fortunes of others, but he had a pretty loyal and really nice community. One of the best. Its what made wordpress grow and be so successful.
As a wordpress professional said at a recent meetup, its hard to recommend wordpress, when you know the client will Google it an all this nonsense comes up.
Wordpress is going to become Twitter.
And that harms the hundreds of developers who have built really good single person dev shops, or a handful of people working and being paid well to develop on Wordpress.
All because someone’s ego got bent.
I’ll add this gripe from Bunnie of Novena/Precursor/et.al. fame, explaining how he is mulling over freezing the rust version (in fact the xous OS repo has a fork of rust in order to build against something stable), from the most recent update on crowdsupply [0]
The Rust project used to care about Windows as a target, so this work-around feels like a bit of a middle finger to Windows users. Lately, I have been feeling like Rust (and llvm) is giving the middle finger to everything that’s not POSIX x86_64 running in a FAANG-scale cloud environment; they don’t worry about software supply chain security because they are the software supply chain, and of course they trust their own tools. I suppose they are entitled to do that, given who funds their payroll, but it’s not a good omen for projects like ours.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates...
It’s like Mullenweg has been taking lessons from the Trump school of media relations.
“Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better… he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself… Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people… In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on…”
It’s as if he’s saying “these little people are barely worthy of my attention and have achieved nothing, compare them to me I’m powerful, I’m important, you should respect my power and importance…”
> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?
If there wasn’t a threat perceived you could with them well and ask them to let you know them how they might need help.
Wordpress is a giant. If he’s as confident as he tries to present in this post, he could just do nothing and Wordpress would prove the more valuable software in the end. Instead, he’s accelerating progress on the fork.
He could have done with taking a few deep breaths before publishing this post.
His profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt
Whether it be this guy, elderly politicians, or billionaires with social media addictions, everyone's lives would be far better, including their own, if they simply knew when to stfu and enjoy their success in peace.
So if anything, it seems his karma increased since the saga began.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20231220230743/https://news.ycom...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240930175846/https://news.ycom...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241013035048/https://news.ycom...
Oh, the level of snark here is unreal.
https://xcancel.com/WebDevLaw/status/1877979616045891649
"At this point you either need to check into rehab, or frankly do the world a favour and overdose."
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)
If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long.
If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work.
It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....
I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.
> guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality.
I think there is an element of seeing himself as the good guy and therefore entitled to things as a reward.
Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.
He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong.
Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist).
Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down.
He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares: https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/
The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.
20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.
Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.
I dunno, but we can figure that out, we always have. Maybe, like you said, we should just start with not desperately holding something like that together. Maybe not everyone in the world needs to be in the same place at the same time, maybe a hodgepodge is okay. But people have the need to inform and be informed, so a solution will eventually crop up.
Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously.
From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.
You can't have full ownership of something that you've released to the world, but it takes balls to admit it to yourself.
In case there was any question about the utter pettiness of Mr Mullenweg, here's something he JUST posted in response to Joost's clarification.
He's clearly a fan of the idea that the vast majority of the public does not care about anything other than what the loudest voice in the room is saying. Say it loud, say it often. Even if what is being said is contrary to evidence, most people are not going to look at it any further.
1. Matt announces that he's going to effectively stop contributing to WordPress for now https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
2. Others in the community say they'll pick up the torch in leading the next releases within the current WordPress project
3. Matt says "nuh-uh, I'm busy self-sabotaging my own project here in an attempt to prove how none of you can live without me, stop interfering and go become irrelevant in a fork somewhere instead" https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
This insanity is entirely unrecoverable on current trajectory
This is getting to comical proportions.
The problem is how does someone who owns a plugin on .org validate their ownership on the new repository?