Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP
notes.ghed.in
notes.ghed.in
Towards the end it says:
> I really like WordPress, as I’ve stated many times, but Matt has become an irresponsible and damaging actor. He urgently needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership, or he risks undermining WordPress’ popularity and driving the community away.
But it makes at best, a really weak case for how he is “irresponsible” or a “damaging actor”. Sure there may be some minor controversies like this redirection thing it mentions, but that really doesn’t seem like a big deal or anywhere close to requiring anyone to step down. I find the accusation that Matt Mullenweg is doing something wrong by mixing in commercial interests to be ridiculous - he CREATED Wordpress. That was 20 years ago. Given its success and adoption, I think he deserves the commercial spoils of it.
> WP Engine was acquired by a private equity firm, Silver Lake.
It is hilarious that this blog post does not actually talk about Silver Lake or private equity at all. PE is a cancer on society - all they do is acquire assets and financially optimize them to squeeze money out at the expense of everyone else - employees, customers, society. They don’t actually add value to the product or affected people around the product. Silver Lake is one of the worst of them. This is a firm that was literally called evil by Wired magazine (https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/), for firing employees right before the Skype sale in a purposeful scheme to rob hard working people who built the company of their equity. Why should anyone trust WP Engine or its leadership? Let’s start there, because it sounds a lot like Matt Mullenweg is right.
The main issue at play is that Matt used the blog of a GPLv2 project to attack a competitor of his own for-profit venture for playing by the rules — disabling revision posts is an official and documented WP feature. The point is: if Satan themselves decides to use and make a profit off based on WordPress, he is allowed as long as they follow GPLv2, which is the case with WP Engine. (Satan as an alternative example for a PE equity is not by coincidence, btw.)
This is unacceptable behavior for a FOSS project leader, not to mention his explicit conflict of interest by running a for-profit company rival to the one he tossed under the bus exploiting his power and position in the community.
If you can't see what's wrong here, I'm sorry, I can't make this clearer.
That his own product ALSO gates access to, unless you pay the top tier for?
I don't think it's fair to criticize the competition for that, and not acknowledge that you do the same, no.
To use your own logic, if the founder of a FOSS project leader wants to have a conflict of interest (which is a negatively biased framing of them earning a living off their two decades of hard work), they’re allowed to. If they want to criticize someone else making money off that project, they’re allowed to. It is downright bizarre that you think it is acceptable that “Satan” can profit off Wordpress but with the creator of Wordpress you suddenly take issue with a “conflict of interest”.
To further use your own logic: Is Matt violating the GPLv2? No. OK, then why are you whining about him? He has the same freedoms that you ascribe to WP Engine or others. It just looks like you’re carrying water for an evil private equity firm with a long track record of being evil. All to attack someone who actually created a massive positive impact on the world. Yea no thanks - no one is convinced by this weird demand that Matt needs to step down.
You may not care about the history of your website, many people do.
Unless I missed something, no one claimed it's not legal.
There are lots of things that are legal but nonetheless not nice.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean you can't say "that's not nice" or "you shouldn't be doing that".
"It's legal" is not an argument here. It's completely besides the point.
No he didn't. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked Michel Valdrighi's b2 cafeblog in 2003 to add new features and an admin panel. Wordpress is GPL because b2 was GPL. Matt built most of the early XHTML while Mike integrated patches and worked on the backend. Mike and Ryan Boren wrote large parts of the code early on. Christine Tremoulet came up with the name. Without them b2evolution or one of the other forks would've most likely raced ahead.
It's absurd that they gate so many features behind their higher tiers.
Early this year I wanted to blog about something and was tired of my Ghost self-hosted blog. I decided that I was just going to pay someone else to host it and since I get like 100 visitors/week (if that) I really was put off by the pricing from so many blog providers that want to charge you based on visitors. Especially since my blog is read by normally either very few (<100) or it hits on somewhere like HN (rare but it's happened) and I have thousands of visitors for a day or two.
I finally settled on wordpress.com, I've used Wordpress in some form or fashion for 15+ years and so I thought it would be a good choice. I went ahead and paid for 3 years at once for the savings (bad idea) but then started running into issues. Want to see analytics? You need to pay for Premium or above. Want to upload video? Need to pay for premium or above. Want plugins (you know, a /massive/ aspect of wordpress)? You need to pay for business or above (Starting at $25/mo). Yes, I could have worked around some of the issues but in the end I paid for Premium so I could get my stupid little blog up and running. I'm still bitter to be paying that much for a rounding error of traffic blog and still not have plugins but whatever.
I don't know what I'll do in 2 years but I know it won't be wordpress.com. I'd rather deal with self-hosting again than give them another penny.
Its so damn easy to get a WP site up and running with a decent and cheap VPS server and a cloud panel (e.g. runcloud, xcloud, enhance, spinupwp, gridpane, etc...). Some even have a free tier. Cyberpanel is even a free option, though clunky.
For a rounding error of blog traffic which can probably be fully cached in cloudflare CDN, you could use a 1vpcu server from Hetzner for like $3/month. Hell, I think there's a fully free tier at aws lightsail and Oracle cloud (theyre garbage, but again, just cache it all in cdn).
> Couple days ago he [Matt] posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated. [1]
He's allowed to be pissed off that some other company is profiting without contributing back. Developing the single most popular website framework is not without cost. Don't like his paid service? Don't use it!
Reading Matt's post, it's not my impression that he's really pissed about that – that seems more like an additional (less important) aside.
His core complaint is, paraphrased, "WP-Engine offers WordPress hosting, but all they offer is a bowdlerized version of it, which reflects badly on all of WordPress. So I'm pissed about it because I spent a lot of time and money on WordPress and I care about it a lot".
This sort of thing comes up every now and then in different contexts. A few months ago the Debian developer decided to offer a bowdlerized version of KeepPassX and was then excessively abrasive and rude about it when people complained. At the core, this is the same kind of disagreement/conflict.
All of that only amplifies your "he's allowed to be pissed". I'd probably be slightly more careful in my use of language, but I'd be pretty cross too.
Certainly doesn't seem like a resigning issue. The hell is up with that?
WP Engine is not WordPress