It's ironic he's so terrified of someone forking Wordpress, since Wordpress itself is a fork.
This is a wordpress fork that will cost people to run and assuming WPEngine is supporting it it'll cost them money to support.
Because that person chose a license that allows that for a start?
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.
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.
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?
> b2/cafelog, more commonly known as b2 or catalog, was the precursor to WordPress
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
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.
Honestly though, I feel very genuinely sorry for him, and very sad for him.
Clearly something has cracked and it’s unimaginable being on the pedestal he’s been on for as long as he’s been on it. His friends are not looking out for him, which makes me wonder if he has any friends capable of telling him “stop”.
Matt, if you’re reading (which, c’mon, we all know you anlmost certainly are!) please stop.
It’s not too late to save yourself, to save your mental health, and to save your reputation.
Don’t dig your heels in, and don’t play chicken on the railroad tracks the lawyers are laying out for you.
Stop, and focus on the next stage of your journey, your legacy, and let the great work you did speak for itself, rather than be tainted.
You are not Wordpress, and your identify should not be so tied to Wordpress to the degree that is suggested by the way you are conducting yourself in recent times.
I guess everything itt should be taken with a grain of “personally” salt, because that clearly is an accusing statement not tagged as a personal opinion. I wasn’t following this topic at all, but what gp is saying contradicts your hypothesis at least, so there’s no “personally I” escape route.
More meta, it feels like all this civilized discussion on HN et al is just a facade, because in rare situations like this people suddenly start theorizing, rationalizing their position, jumping gray-voting wagons and so on. I mean, it’s their right, but it looks like a booing mob rule rather than a society of standards that everyone relates themselves to here.
> so why is it so unlikely that he could have potentially hired people to write code that he claimed under his moniker?
Sure and he could have bought loads and loads of monkeys and given them typewriters.
Why are you fantasising?
It's a pretty straightforward story here.
I stand by my statement that you have quoted. The “personally” bit was that I, personally, can no longer have full faith that his Wordpress commits are his work, given his recent conduct.
There is nothing accusatory about my statement that he has managed to closely associate Wordpress the product with Mullenweg the man. And it’s an undeniable fact that he’s managed to wring an enormous amount of profit from that relationship, and, indeed, boasts about it himself in the blogpost linked from this post!
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.
There even seems to be an open source variant of the OS https://www.puredarwin.org/
Started/founded are basically the same, no?
> 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 all way after he stopped contributing on a code level.
He wants WP Engine to either fund a fork which means they would have trademark issues since their fork won't be WordPress, or for them to partly fund the development of WordPress, which is what this entire battle was kinda about.
BSD is derived from Unix source, so it is Unix. Most BSDs cannot be distributed using the Unix name because of lack of trademark permission. However, MacOS is an officially certified Unix: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
Maybe for WordPress VIP or something but Automattic is at $700m while WP Engine is at $400m.