Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress | Hacker News Reader

Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress

automattic.com

98 pointsdangrossman54 comments

Okay, this confirms a narrative I’ve been considering: Matt committed a degree of profit to his investors, and they’re not receiving it, so he’s chosen to attack WPE in order to reduce competition for revenue and drive paying users to his own product. (“My name is Matt Mullenweg and this is my favorite blog on the Citadel”, etc.)

This is an obvious next step — until revenue increases or expenses decrease, Mullenweg’s corporation is no longer investing in Wordpress beyond the critical minimum necessary to present as if everything is fine. The “until WPE concedes” bit is just redirecting the underlying cause, which is that Wordpress.com isn’t increasing their growth in revenue year-over-year, which makes VC-style investors uneasy — they want hockey sticks, not dividends.

The important thing when dealing with this sort of scenario is not to take the person’s accusations at face value, and not to let them distract you from discussing their own circumstances. If Mullenweg’s moves were intelligent and calculated, then what motivations would this psyops-style propaganda represent? That is the million dollar question that matters here, not the substance of whatever his latest attack is.

“Are you so strapped for cash that you can’t afford to pay your lawyers?” is probably the simplest example of the kind of question that needs to be asked of this latest post. “How many months of runway do you have left before the lawsuit bankrupts you?” is the sort of question that the tech press should be asking. Dissecting the surface-level statements feels vengeful and just; discussing the obvious implications and making them the focus of press responses is much more impactful.

Along the same lines, this could be a pre-emptive action to provide cover for some forthcoming layoffs.

I wonder how the severance packages will compare to the alignment offers... (the 2nd of which may not have ever actually been honoured...)

That's a very shallow assessment of Automattic's business, which has over half a billion in revenue and much of it not from WordPress. You also assume that investor pressure could drive company decisions, which is ridiculous given I vote 84% of the stock. Automattic has infinite runway, we're not a startup stumbling from funding round to funding round.

Seems like you have it good. It sounds like it is a personal decision to be an insufferable loser in the industry you cultivated.

This is one of those times I wish HN could support GIFs without it becoming unmanageable. The "You do get how that's worse, right?" clip fits right in here.

The legal action at issue apparently "diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health." So there must be some limitation to that runway, no?

If I had a dime for every instance where Matt shamelessly contradicted himself I'd be a rich man.

Automattic (it’s Auto-Matt-Ic as in Matt Mullenweg, who embedded his own name into the company name) is a reflection of Matt’s ego. If he fails his investors, he will view himself as a failure, and that’s not acceptable for someone who has literally embedded their ego in their business. Whether or not he has infinite runway, he does not have infinite VC reputation.

While it’s possible he suddenly woke up one day and decided to become greedy and petty, it seems more likely that with the end of zero-percent interest rates, his investors are nagging him to increase his rate of growth of profit accordingly. Otherwise why rock the boat when, as you note, he’s already making money hand over fist? But it’s not rate of return annually that matters to investors, it’s the rate of growth of rate of return that matters, and that’s almost certainly trending negative by now.

photomatt is Matt Mullenweg

I don’t generally take note of HN usernames when commenting, but noted. Certainly that does put him in the unique position of being able to substantively disprove me, if he chooses to!

However, if Automattic is indeed flush with unlimited runway, then the lawsuit is not in contention for any resources needed by the Wordpress project, which lends credence to this being simple market manipulation — i.e. “we have ceased Wordpress development to drive the community and userbase into pressuring WPE to increase investment into Wordpress open source work”, which only works when there are few (or no) serious competitors. It could be a precursor to taking future development of the Wordpress project closed-source, too. We can only guess.

Well, isn't a private equity-funded legal onslaught a valid reason for struggling? Genuine question.

I don't think it's that at all. The motive is quite clear. It's right there in the article:

> We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org *when the legal attacks have stopped*.

This is a move to show how much the development of WordPress depends on Automattic (some 4k hours per week) and how WP Engine is using the product of that effort without giving much back (45 hours per week) - "A Level Playing Field". It all started from this and it sends a message "don't take it for granted".

https://web.archive.org/web/20240927025102/https://wordpress...

https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=hou...

> We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.

The only reason the lawsuit happened is because Matt started the feud. This is literally the "guy puts stick in own bike wheel then falls off" meme.

It started because WP Engine was abusing the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks in a way that was confusing to customers around the world.

You are the dumbest person in most of the rooms you enter. A judge will express this in more words and flair, but it will mean the same thing.

And yet you have never pursued a trademark lawsuit which you clearly believe you would win. Why is that? Nor did you ever mention the trademark until they refused to hand you $32 million and became a cancer which must be eradicated.

It's almost like if you had not so loudly and deliberately set out to destroy the company you wouldn't currently be so tied up in this litigation which is apparently such a massive drain on Automattic's resources. But yeah, this is all WPE's fault. For trying to stymie your campaign to destroy them by leveraging laws which exist for exactly this purpose. How dare they. There was just no way to see this coming.

Aside: in the last 15 years I have had to explain the difference between .com and .org to hundreds of people. I don't recall a single instance of having to explain that WP Engine is not affiliated with either the project or the commercial hosting company. And now so many parts of .org unexpectedly direct navigation to .com. Remind me again who is brazenly and unfairly profiting off of the WordPress trademark?

Unsurprising that Matt never replied to you.

I'm curious, are you just surrounded by "Yes men" at work? Do you actually have people who meaningfully criticise you or decisions from your leadership team?

There has been fairly widespread and well corroborated reporting that Matt has intentionally removed or incentivized people to leave who don’t agree with him.

My personal opinion theory is that either he is suffering a significant mental health crisis, or cynically trying to cash in on how widespread WordPress has become.

Of course we have seen this play out in FOSS history before, and we know how it goes, so it’s almost immaterial why he’s trying so hard to blow up his own spot.

Matt posted a blog late last night about blocking Joost de Valk, Karim Marucchi, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen on Wordpress.org. It's precisely because they disagree with Matt's leadership.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

When I saw that dreck in my inbox this morning I was speechless.

His talent for penning cynical, backhanded, sanctimonious doublespeak is astonishing. I genuinely believe he is unable to relate the reality around him to his actions.

I have a meeting next week where I have to try to explain all this nonsense to a marketing agency that has placed a lot of WordPress business with us. We plan to exit to the fork ecosystem as soon as it’s running and stable.

Trademark abuse is a "business-on-business crime". Even if you were in the right (nobody was confused about branding except for you mother, apparently), this is not a cause you can expect users to rally behind.

Even the staunchest Disney fans don't rally behind Disney when one of their "trademarks gets abused".

That's actually not true. E.g. Nintendo fans vs Palworld / Pocket Pair.

You're actually proving his point.

Palword vs Nintendo is not a trademark case but a patent one. People in gaming are notably very much not in love of patents restricting what games can or can't do.

> Trademark abuse is a "business-on-business crime".

So, I get where you're coming from, but I also have some second-hand exposure here because my wife is a trademark agent (and has to put up with all my inane hypotheticals about trademarks) - while you can call it a "business-on business crime", the question of fact revolves around whether an average consumer would get confused.

As a consumer, I'd feel pretty miffed about being misled into purchasing a product due to trademark confusion.

> Is there a law that says you have to give back? No. There is a law that says you can’t violate the trademark, so that’s the law that we’re using to try to encourage them to give back.

https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM?si=mcjqRvZsTh8KDjnw&t=804

That doesn't justify an extortion attempt, preventing users from receiving security updates, stealing their plugins, unfair competition, or banning their developers.

That's not what you said at WCUS. You only mentioned the trademark issue as an aside. Your primary beef was with their contribution level and the fact they were funded by private equity. That's a fact. Plain as day.

Stop trying to rewrite history. There is documented evidence of what actually happened.

Still not buying this argument.

If it was a simple matter of trademark abuse, your attorneys talk to theirs. If nothing good comes out of that, your attorneys file a suit. Have you done this? Nope.

This is not about the supposed trademark abuse.

Absolutely. Sounds like a slam dunk case. Which is why you sued them for trademark infringement, right? You had them dead to rights because if you google "wordpress hosting", WPEngine is the only site that comes up.

Oh, that didn't happen. Because you know you would lose that case.

Do you think we don't remember your confession? Do you just think we're stupid?

Notably, Matt will still personally control what is and isn't allowed to be contributed to WordPress Core.

Otherwise, the very first commit should be removing all the personally identifiable information and other telemetry sent back to Matt's personal website (WordPress.org) and WooCommerce.com that isn't properly documented anywhere. [0][1]

At the very least, there should be code changes facilitating informed consent.

Of course, even though that is in the best interest of WordPress users, Matt Mullenweg won't let that happen. Because, money.

[0] https://duanestorey.com/posts/down-the-rabbit-hole-a-deep-lo... [1] https://x.com/SybreWaaijer/status/1875230654054752374

Adding an xcancel link for people who don’t have Twitter: https://xcancel.com/SybreWaaijer/status/1875230654054752374

The fact that they snoop on your revenue is pretty outrageous.

> Otherwise, the very first commit should be removing all the personally identifiable information and other telemetry sent back to Matt's personal website

This is one of the things I removed in our WordPress fork. I found it horrifying to learn that an open source software does such a user-hostile thing, and wondered why nobody but me objects.

This is one of the most stupidest and toxiest moves ever; imagine Google saying: millions of devs and thousands of companies use Golang and they are not contributing as much as we do so we are going to drastically lower our contributions just to sabotage other devs and companies.

Sheesh. My 6 year old niece has better control of her emotions than Matt Mullenweg.

And just as strategic. When I asked her for a donation to my FOSS project she looked at me dead in the eye and asked “What’s the Bluey angle?”

I'm going to take all of my toys and go home until everyone promises to stop being mean to me.

Given Mullenweg and Automattic hired a full time ‘Executive Director of WordPress.org, does that mean that Automattic will contribute 5 hours to Wordpress beyond that?

Also fascinating that Mullenweg is willing to back away from the WordPress people love, but won’t let others engage to take up the slack. Has he been blocking WPE and others contributions if they don’t line up with his/Automattic’s commercial interests all along? Is there another shoe to drop?

If community members submit code to improve core by removing the dependency on .org and allowing users to choose will Mullenweg allow it in?

Is there a leading Wordpress fork?

ClassicPress is the only public one with any traction. wordpress.com could be considered a private fork.

Reality is that Wordpress is not an application for Hacker News techie types who can just create their own whatever. It’s a website appliance where you can have someone design focused apply a design, mash in a few plugins and assign some slightly higher than minimum wage fresh employee to manage your website.

We are not the target market for this product.

The wordpress ecosystem is a behemoth. Even it isn't for you and me, it plays a super important role.

Yes. In previous discussions it was noted repeatedly that 40% of websites use WordPress.

I always find that metric kind of interesting in that it's only grown less than 1% in the last three or four years. In the preceding period of the same length, it gained 10%. I anticipate this year's numbers to show loss, in no small part due to Matt's dogged contributions.

My sense is that he could well pull the whole house down a là Samson.

That's like saying PHP is not good enough for HN.

Not everyone here is building an AI based SaaS for YC

It’s definitely an overly broad brush.

Usually reinventing every wheel is a waste of time and resources, and that’s why when you need a website, you might reach for WordPress, or Hugo, or Craft, or whatever else.

Not everyone wants to spend development time crafting a custom website platform. Unless you’re trying to craft a custom website platform of course. That’s not most businesses.

Petty

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