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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

> Mullenweg is a cuckoo. He did not create Wordpress and yet has managed to closely associate the product with his own persona and ever since has spent most of his life wringing money out of Wordpress.

The dude literally one of the top-ever contributors to WordPress. He's number 6 on the GitHub contributor graph with over 1000 commits. Him and Mark Little started WordPress. He's also the person who has funded most of the development either via his own private company or via Automattic.

> He is now annoyed that someone else has been better at extracting profit from something that - going by what he says - he sees as his personal fiefdom.

Another falsehood. Automattic makes more money than WP Engine. He's basically trying to force them to either contribute to WordPress to to pay Automattic. This latest move seems like a move to force WP Engine to fund a fork or help fund development of WordPress.

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> Him and Mark Little started WordPress

Nit: Mike Little was the other cofounder - you might be confusing him with Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers and largest contributors early in the project.

Also, with regards to contribution count, it’s important to look at “props” which are the credits given for commits. WordPress has a contribution system that predates things like git’s multiple author support, so users are given props via commit messages, and a system tracks this for attributing credit for each release.

> Nit: Mike Little was the other cofounder - you might be confusing him with Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers and largest contributors early in the project.

Started/founded are basically the same, no?

> Also, with regards to contribution count, it’s important to look at “props” which are the credits given for commits. WordPress has a contribution system that predates things like git’s multiple author support, so users are given props via commit messages, and a system tracks this for attributing credit for each release.

This is all way after he stopped contributing on a code level.

> Started/founded are basically the same, no?

My point was that his name is Mike, not Mark :)

AH, my bad.

I don’t trust his commits, given how he’s acted recently.

He’s funded the development via his own private company which profits from wordpress - and Automattic (also funded by profits from Wordpress - plus VC and private equity money derived from his relationship with Wordpress), which honestly seems to be a fairly autocratic vanity fiefdom primarily concerned with promoting Mullenweg’s interests.

So yeah, he’s got lots of GitHub commits, but given his recent dealing with staff, I would not really be surprised if those were just proxy commits with the code written by others but cuckoo’d by him. That’s just speculation - but given how nosebleed-crazy he seems to be, I’d not be at all surprised.

To clarify: I didn’t say WP Engine was making more money, just that they were better at extracting profit.

“Better” in this context (from the Mullenweg view) likely means “a threat to Mullenweg’s vanity empire because they might pull customers to their business at the expense of his”.

> He’s basically trying to force them to either contribute to Wordpress to to pay Automattic

Even though (a) they don’t have to and (b) “contribution” can mean many things including driving awareness and adoption or “marketing contribution” or providing a visible and simple entry point that sustains usage and development or “ecosystem viability”contribution if you will.

Mullenweg is pissed because they threatened his fiefdom. Plain and simple.

His nonsense regarding the trademarks says it all.

Edit: I say this as someone who has used Wordpress for two decades, and spent a significant amount of money on products and services related to Wordpress. I moved my Wordpress-based business off Wordpress a couple of years ago (because it was too messy), and I’ve never been so glad as I was when this nonsense started.

???

This is a fair bit of silliness now I'm afraid. Like him or loathe him (and he's making it so very easy to do the latter), Mullenweg was one of the only developers of WP for years back when it was starting. He wrote it part time, he actually quit his job to work on it full time, and he was still a teenager. His energies are why it exists.

Has it all gone horribly wrong in the last couple of years? Yes. Has the money situation complicated things? Yes. But we can state these things without constructing an alternate, incorrect timeline.

He's surely acting like this in part because he does so closely identify with something he risked his livelihood to build as a pretty prolific young developer.

There are plenty of things he's done recently that are ridiculous and bogus enough that they can be criticised without imagining stuff.

Focus on the actual issues.

Wordpress is a fork of b2. That is why Matt is so scared of forks.

He's not scared of forks. He's kinda trying to force fork.

He wants WP Engine to either fund a fork which means they would have trademark issues since their fork won't be WordPress, or for them to partly fund the development of WordPress, which is what this entire battle was kinda about.

Matt hasn't done a code commit since 2009.

Matt himself has claimed that Automattic and WPEngine have similar revenue levels.

Edit: "has" -> "hasn't" lol

>Matt himself has claimed that Automattic and WPEngine have similar revenue levels.

Maybe for WordPress VIP or something but Automattic is at $700m while WP Engine is at $400m.

Whatever the latest move is, it's clearly a dick move. He is in a bad place, if he wins anything it is going to be a pyrrhic victory, and he needs to stop.

If he really does still have Neal Katyal working on whatever the merits of his actual case are, I am gobsmacked that he is being allowed to behave this way. Katyal is not an idiot or a troll, and this picture does not make sense to me.

Some of his bullshit has already been smacked down by the court: I don't get why he is still doing this.

Matt: stop.

I was pretty much blissfully unaware of Matt Mullenweg before this recent nonsense. I knew him as “the Wordpress guy” but beyond that I didn’t really care much.

I now know far more than I would ever have liked to know about him, including his apparent sexual proclivities, how his mother allegedly talks to the staff, and goodness knows what else as his reputation is dragged through the courts.

Did I prefer Wordpress before I became intimately acquainted - albeit secondhand - with Mullenweg’s reputation. Absolutely.

Did I trust Wordpress more when I thought it was a community of developers rather than something dictated by the apparently unstable whims of a vain 40-something year old manchild? You bet I did.

Do I think Wordpress will burn to the ground, dragged down by a capricious manchild? I’d lay even odds.

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