Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?
protocol.com
protocol.com
Nice. I hope if Mozilla is ever in jeopardy of losing its independence, Mullenweg can scrap together whatever it will cost to buy and fix them. Seems like the right person to look after them.
[1] https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-...
Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet.
All Matt has done and said makes me believe he loves OSS, freedom of the user and democratization of publishing. Why would he ruin his own creation by looking for an exit when WP is already hugely popular and more importantly why abandon what seems to be his principles around freedom/OS. I will eat my words in 5-10 years if it isn't true but I think everyone will see he will focus just as much on wp.org and freedom as he does Automattic (ie keeping as much as possible open, free alternatives (like jetpack), etc)
ALso Gutenberg is not nearly as bad as those reviews say. It is much better even only in the last few months, though a lot of UX development is needed it is a powerful editor.
I've been using it for a couple of years in WP and had absolutely no issue with it as a document editor.
And I've have used everything from LaTeX to Markdown, and from Word to Mellel, including all kinds of web-based editors.
What’s in it for them? Well, people do genuinely want to read these stories. It’s “win-win” for the writer (makes their job easier/they get access), the publication (eyeballs), and the corporation (positive story reaches the public).
Source: in my role at my company, I am occasionally asked to collaborate with hired PR firms to promote similar efforts.
It’s fine if Automattic wants to say that Wordpress is just for web developers and HN readers, but I think they really want to build the website platform for everyone, and that’s not happening with Wordpress without things like a real page builder.
(Full disclosure, I used to work at Squarespace and will freely say that the squarespace page builder at the time I was there was not great, but it was usable by regular people)
'Catering for everyone' is an ego-trip that's resulted in page bloat for everyone whether they wanted it or not.
But if you want to view the market as "getting everyone on the open web who needs a presence", it's hard to see how Wordpress the product is meeting that need. ~1/3 of US businesses have no owned/managed Internet presence at all (and the number is even lower outside of the US). Of the ones who do, something like 15% of them (iirc) are only on Facebook and/or Instagram, and that number is growing.
Let's take that small business owner who doesn't yet have an online presence and give them a default Wordpress install, and then let's give them a Facebook business page creator - which one do you think they'll be more successful at completing? Or if I need a simple blog/newsletter - let's try Wordpress vs. Substack or Wordpress vs. Medium - which is going to be easier?
If you say that's not the target market for Wordpress, that's fine, but every interview with Matt Mullenwig gives me the impression HE thinks that's the target market for Wordpress/Automattic - everyone who needs an online presence. By limiting Wordpress to only technical users and/or websites that are built by pros, it's basically ceding swaths of the user population to these purely commercial platforms that are open to varying degrees.
While I'm pro-Gutenberg (see my answer above), the WP editor pre-Gutenberg was absolutely fine for "non-technical users" too. It's adoption, for regular users like plain blog authors and journalists and so on, had already been massive (in the "tens or even hundreds of millions userbase" level massive...
But I think that limits you to two universes of setups - either built by a "pro" (for some definition of pro) who configures everything, installs plugins, installs and customizes the templates and basically gets everything perfect OR very basic cookie-cutter installs with lots of limitations.
Either of those scenarios is fine, and I think it's great to have an ecosystem of small designers whose customers are DIFM users. I agree for "blog authors" and writers it's also fine, subject to the above limitations.
The reality, though, is that market is tiny - "tens or hundreds of millions of users" - I do not think there are in the hundreds of millions of blog authors getting active traffic, though I maybe buy "10s of millions". Tumblr alone has 500+m active sites, even if we assume only 10% get actual consistent traffic (which would be roughly consistent with the data I remember), that alone is 50m active sites. If there are 10s of millions of bloggers, we would expect that the active # of sites are in the single-digit millions.
Put another way - what data do we have that shows that “everybody from kids to grandmas” started sites on Wordpress? And to get more specific, how many of those users either had help getting it set up, or used a template and made zero changes to it, or had a hosting provider build a site for them using a builder atop Wordpress? Because the data I’ve seen suggests that users really struggle with any customization of a Wordpress site, and I think the adoption of Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy’s website central, etc. shows that there is a real gap there for Wordpress.
Automattic sponsors about 100 people to work on the WordPress open source project, and that's somehow a bad thing? Also, this isn't an Automattic exclusive thing, many other companies do the same: https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=con...
(I'm an Automattic employee, but I don't work directly on the WordPress project)
Not in my experience. I prefer them to the messy and hacky third party alternatives..
>There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing.
As a user, I had absolutely no problem with Gutenberg regarding intuitiveness...
> In every way that matters, Automattic is a reflection of Mullenweg (you could say he puts the “Matt” in Automattic). He started building web software because he wanted a place to store and share his photos; he’s a blogger to the core, and loves anything that aids in the free expression of ideas on the internet. He loves jazz, which is why WordPress releases are named for jazz musicians.
Sure name your company whatever you like, but why should releases of an opensource project be named based on one person's taste in music?
Why not? As good as any other inspiration (like the naming themes admins use for hostnames in their LANs), and one man deciding helps stop the bikeshedding.
Only for those decisions that have the qualities I mentioned on my argument (which are hardly all): "as good as any other" and "stops the bikeshedding".
So, it should be decisions on things which don't affect much (the code-name of the release doesn't change anything, especially since people refer to it by version number, e.g. 5.8), and also trivial things prone to bikeshedding (similarly - nothing productive could ever come from a discussion about the naming scheme for releases).
The software he himself first created? Could have gone to worse hands. Not to mention it's still 100% FOSS and has been going from strength to strength.
> And then he offered the closest thing you’ll find to a Unified Theory of Matt Mullenweg. “As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.”
Contrast with this link also (currently) on the HN front page: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/12/is-it-even-worth-working-on-...
> He plans to spend the rest of his career building the web’s one true platform, the open system the internet deserves.
and his Camus quote later on:
> "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Uh what? This seems like a gross misunderstanding of FOSS licensing.
Edit: the Wordpress GitHub also states GPL2
Do I own it now?
Edit: Seems there's no contributor licensing agreement for Wordpress, so complicated here. Though the general point of copyright holders having specific rights beyond licenses they release under is still relevant, IMO.
Yes they do. Automatic doesn’t own the copyright to all the code. Individual contributions are still copyrighted and licensed under the GPL. They would need permission from all previous contributors to relicense it to avoid having to comply with the GPL.
They seem to track "copyright holders" for wordpress core and it's not a huge list: https://codex.wordpress.org/Copyright_Holders
e.g: I’ve been a contributor to WordPress for about 17 years, I personally own the copyright to a huge chunk of WordPress’ source, and I am not on that list. :)
(† nb: some asterisks that only matter to WP insiders)
(I’m a long-term contributor to WordPress.)
Wordpress might be very openly developed but that does negate legal ownership and responsibility.
(The WordPress Foundation is effectively controlled by Matt, and is the entity that actually owns the things that have ownership like trademarks.)
In the broader context of control as we’re discussing here, Automattic couldn’t eg unilaterally switch to closed source, or misuse the trademarks, or etc. The ownership of their contributions gives them the ability to veto relicensing (which is something many contributors can do anyway), or to assert their own rights if the GPL is violated (as Wix did, and which any contributor can do).
By pure size of their contributions, they can steer the project as well, but that’s not unilateral (and is a nebulous issue across the roles of Automattic vs the Foundation vs Matt). Now we’re getting very insider though.
This is exactly where a legal process would start.
For example, the team working on the React-based rich editor (Gutenberg) wanted to relicense it under dual MPL and GPL in order to encourage adoption within mobile apps (it supports React Native). To do so, they had to get agreement from over 700 contributors to relicense it: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/21/proposal-dual-lic...