FreeWP Is Here to Shake Up the WordPress Ecosystem
freewp.com
freewp.com
It’s curious why Matt Mullenweg would be hyping this up when it contains “WP” in the name, like WP Engine. “FreeWP” sounds just as much like something that would cause brand confusion.
Also, the FreeWP announcement post seems like a manifesto to remove Matt from stewardship of WordPress and to start some sort of class action lawsuit. With bits like:
“On the legal front, I’ve secured a suite of domains for WP Class Action. This independent initiative aims to address the issues plaguing our community head-on.”
“Change isn’t just coming — it’s here. Consider this your wake-up call to those who’ve held the reins for too long. FreeWP stands ready to ensures WordPress remains free, open, and genuinely community-centric.”
From the author [0]:
> I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.
See the FAQ for more evidence that this is mostly just Vinny trolling so far [1]:
> Well, what does ‘wp’ mean?
> We found some notes referencing “word processing” and “web publishing,” and there’s even a mention of Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William ‘Bunk’ Moreland in the popular HBO series The Wire. It seems to be related to one of those topics.
> It’s also rumored the singsongy vibes really sealed the deal.
FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight. And the WordPress community, for a big part, looks still very novice and in-experienced and a decent junk of community members might fall for this and put at least some (and more than they should) eggs into that basket.
Matt just seems to troll and knows that "FreeWP" is no competition at all. And continues on his path of eccentric and very weird behavior.
This is why I think it's a troll—it's so completely devoid of substance that I think it must be deliberately void, and getting Matt to respond was the only point. The OP specifically says they don't intend to fork, and they have a goofy FAQ with an intentionally-absent mission statement.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
"Consistently" is not an adverb I would associate with Automattic/WordPress.org/WordPress Foundation/Matt's behavior in recent months.
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
This goes with my view that Matt is technically correct almost all the time, which is the best kind of correct. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/909991-futurama
Thanks to that, I normally find consistency in what he says. The forking post about FreeWP makes sense.
Especially because there is some amount of joking in both freewp.com and the post. I like how Matt refers to him as a former WordPress community member.
In fact, Matt shoots himself in the foot. You don't become a billion dollar company overnight. Zero to thousands. Thousands to hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands to millions. Silence all the way. But billions and it becomes a copyright violation??
That's so ridiculous that only the stupid or the insane would believe it. Or both.
But this isn't about copyright. It's Matt looking for revenue and then manufacturing a flimsy excuse to demand money. Up to recently most of the WP Community drank the MM Kool Aid. That's not the case any more.
Copyright can’t be extinguished by common use. Trademarks can.
- strength/distinctiveness of plaintiff trademark;
- proximity/competitiveness of plaintiff and defendant’s business;
- comparative quality of plaintiff and defendant’s products;
- evidence that the imitative trademark was adopted in bad faith; and
- sophistication of consumers in relevant markets, and evidence of confusion.
Source: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/trademark-litigation-1...
IDK, some of those read as if you can't wake up one morning and then decide you've been violated.
For example, if WP Engine acted in bad faith, why was it bad faith in 2024, but not prior? It's difficult to argue bad faith when you watched - and enabled? - a company to go from zero to "billions".
If fact, that lens applies to most of this list. These conditions existed all along and MM & Co was silent.
On the other hand look at Apple (Computers) and Apple (Records). Once Apple Computer enter the mmusic market they had to negotiate with Apple Records because Apple Music's change in direction would cause confusion in the market.
Extinguish? Maybe not. But if you don't defend your trademark your argument for violation dilutes more and more as time goes on, true? "Billions" feels like a long time. "Billions" - and how MM went about it - feels very much like a "trademark troll".
Even if he wins the battle. He's lost the war. The community no longer trusts and respects him.
And ClassicPress is the fork of Gutenberg deniers who think a, now, below-average WYSIWYG editor is the way... or...
all the alternative "Page Builders", which are in itself a multi million dollar business, and are horrible usability & code-wise. The two newer big ones, Brick and Breakdance seem fine, but are much more complete website builders than editors. And also something that you don't want end-users to touch.
Don't see that fork being the future.
Btw, Gutenberg is a plugin and its rating in directory (2/5) is telling[1]. Meanwhile, Classic Editor[2], a plugin that disables most of Gutenberg, is used in +10 million websites and a 5/5 plugin.
[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/gutenberg/ [2] https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/
I recently told a friend I'd throw up a site for him for his dog grooming business, and naturally went to WP. I figured I'd just a simple free theme that was close and modify it to my liking if possible and it was anything but trivial. Free basic themes take a lot of digging to find, they're built on two(?) Wordpress theme-builders, or maybe some other proprietary theme, often include other weird addons, etc... I don't remember it being so convoluted- but I guess I am getting old in this space.
Squarespace has design templates, a gallery of blocks, domains (what's a DNS?), news section, email marketing, signup forms etc. all built-in making it easy and one-stop
Shopify is Shopify and doesn't need much of an introduction.
The https://neocities.org/supporter tier gets you a custom domain for $5/mo and is as usable as MySpace. https://zume.net/ gets you WordPress for $5/mo which makes for a quick migration.
Most customers are SMB's and $20-30 a month is nothing, considering how critical websites are. It's a third of the price of accounting software and gets you a day of Google or Facebook ads. The old alternatives of Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising would run 10x+ that.
> The https://neocities.org/supporter tier gets you a custom domain for $5/mo and is as usable as MySpace. https://zume.net/ gets you WordPress for $5/mo
No offence but I'm not sending either of those sites to anybody not a techie or a nerd. cPanel, NVMe, SSL certificates? That's _after_ you get through the confusing choices on the homepage of premium, managed, virtual server?
It needs to be easy to use and understand like opening and using Microsoft Word. That's what the online choices are.
My brother has barely typed up a letter since high school and I sent him to Squarespace. Without even asking me anything, he had a great looking website up in a day with a domain, logo and everything.
Multiple non-technical friends setup businesses (especially during lockdowns) and almost all got on with setting up Shopify with zero assistance from me.
I value my time more than anything - $20-50 a month is nothing and the results are better.
Sometimes you just need to get into and understand the mindset of 90%+ of potential users and what they need. That's why these companies are household names and I've never heard of either site you sent me - and I'm _very_ online.
If you’re looking for something you can really build from the ground up easily with, then my go-to is Craft CMS. You need to do things by hand, but it’s easy to build out data models, and the system is sane and easy to predict.
A few years back I helped my 70-year-old father-in-law (who's not remotely technical) get set up with a Squarespace site for a project of his and after initial configuration he was able to run it himself for years. At the time the big reason why I picked it over WordPress was that I knew that I'd be on the hook for maintaining a WordPress site. He just needed something he could post on occasionally and mostly forget about, and Squarespace worked great for that.
If I worked for Automattic, I'd take a buyout even if I didn't object to Matt's behavior, just because I know how much it always sucks to be one of the employees stuck at a company after a walkout or a layoff.
The whole "but once you leave there will be a Scarlett Letter on your HR folder's head (i.e., you will never be allowed back)" just sounded silly. Who knew Matt was a Taylor Swift fan?
After all, isn't domains/trademarks/IP the reason why Matt feels he can lord over the .org as if it doesn't belong to the community and should be controlled by a robust foundation?
Yet, per the author, it is not a fork: https://x.com/vinnysgreen/status/1844488053060141233
“I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.”
Matt is… trolling? by labelling FreeWP a fork.