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.
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.
> 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.