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Comment by swores | Hacker News Reader

I believe that you're mistaken and have flipped them the wrong way round: Wordpress.org is the official website of the open source project owned by the WordPress Foundation, while WordPress.com is the company owned by Automattic.

https://wordpress.org/about/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#WordPress_Foundati...

https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic

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I work at Automattic, owner of WordPress.com.

I asked how WordPress.org is funded and will get details on that but I can tell you WordPress.org is not part of the foundation.

Open source project and the WordPress trademark are owned the WordPress Foundation. WordPress.org has a license to use the name from the Foundation, as does Automattic.

The WordPress Foundation links to wordpress.org as the official site for their project called WordPress, and wordpress.org directs donors to donate at wordpressfoundation.org so it's hard to see how you could be right, but if you can come back explaining that then I'll happily admit to having been confused by it all.

Projects page of the Foundation (https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/) does not say those projects belong to the Foundation. It states:

> Matt Mullenweg, the director of the WordPress Foundation, has been directly involved in the creation of, or coordination of volunteers around, a number of WordPress projects that espouse the core philosophy

I'll admit this might sound confusing. Foundation came years after some of these projects were already established.

If https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ had a page titled "Projects" that listed "death camps" as the first item, you would assume they're up to something, right?

They do link to wordpress.org outside of that.

https://wordpressfoundation.org/contact/

says "a violation of our domain policy." and links to wordpress.org, why would their domain policy be on a site that isn't theirs?

And then wordpress.org says "For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark", how can wordpress.org say "our" if the foundation owns the WordPress trademark and .org is not run by the foundation?

> Projects page of the Foundation (https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/) does not say those projects belong to the Foundation. It states:

But their site does say that money raised will be "used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs." and links to the projects page that contains wordpress.org... but you said it isn't funded by the donations from the foundation

Ironic how this whole thing started with an allegation that WP Engine makes things confusing. I wonder if Matt's mom can tell the difference between WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org.

So you have:

Wordpress.org which is directly controlled by Matt Mullenweg

Automattic (ie wordpress.com) whose CEO is Matt Mullenweg

and The WordPress Foundation which is run by (checks notes) Matt Mullenweg

Yet you seem to think we should treat all three of those entities (Matts?) as separate and independant

We should expect the non profit foundation to be independent from the for profit company, yes.

In short: wordpress.org is just a personal homepage of Matt Mullenweg, not legally or financially related to neither Foundation nor Automattic? There could be technical relations but who has not "forgotten" your personal homepage to your employee's machine, just a honest mistake.

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