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Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations!

Just curious, usually being purchased by a Private Equity firm spells a death knell for the company. Of course at the right price it makes sense that you wanted to sell it away, but what are your thoughts about what will happen to the company now?

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My co-founder is continuing and so is rest of the leadership team. So, I'm expecting company and its culture to remain as is.

It depends on the type of private equity too. There are absolutely firms that want to milk a profitable business by shutting down investment.

There are others that are all about growth.

Just as a counter point, private equity seems to have helped WPEngine become so successful that Mullenweg has totally lost his mind over it.

private equity + a whole lot of commons to encircle

And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9/mo for a decade and have never once interacted or known who Mullenweg is.

And they can thank mysql.. and apache.. and php..

Take your money and be happy.

I met some of the worst people (CEOs) working in webhosting. Some truly awful people became very rich.

edit; I thought this was referencing old drama. This is brand new. www.reddit.com/r/wpdrama. I don't know anything about Mullenweg, I don't mean to sound like I'm calling him awful specifically.

This brand new drama (well, August/Sept vintage drama) reveals a _lot_ about Mullenweg.

I, for one, am happy to specifically call him awful.

Could anyone summarize the drama? I’ve been poking around the subreddit, and it’s clear something is going on (https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7931urG9ho) but it’s not clear what he actually did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7eoTXQnwhh is as close to an explanation as I’ve found, but it seems tangential to whatever kickstarted the drama in the first place.

I don't know the minutia and I'm thankfully nowhere near the webhosting industry any longer but Wordpress dominated my life for almost 20 years- I'm pretty sure it can be summed up with "WPEngine is taking all of our enterprise/etc business and I'm mad.." And he's trying to get rid of the opensource (he dropped their monthly dedicated hours from I think 2k-4k to 45, just 45 hours) to funnel people to wordpress.com.

Which, honestly I really do get from his end money wise, because I have friends in that industry who are worth hundreds of millions today from lucky breaks, timing, etc. and I'm still a wee-engineer.

But he made those choices, he was always the CEO. I didn't start with the funding my rich friends had.

Its hard to get the full picture of Mullenweg's behaviour in a summary, but I guess the TL;RD from my point of view goes something like:

Matt decides WPEngine are making "too much money" and "not contributing enough" buy selling hosting for WordPress, an open source (GPLv2 or later) project. He tries to blackmail them (using legally questionable trademark claims) to the tune of something like 8 million bucks a year or he'll"go nuclear" on them. WPEngine pushes back, and Mullenweg does his best to destroy WPEngine's reputation and business starting with his WordCamp conference keynote, and following on by blocking access to the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo/website for WPEngine and all their hosting customers sites, meaning millions oi WP sites could not install new plugins or get critical security updates. WPEngine lawyers up to get that access back, and to seek damages. During the drama, it come to light that contrary to most people's understanding, wordpress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and there is zero accountability for Mullenweg who owns Automattic (a WP hosting company and direct competitor tp W|PEngine), owns the wordpress.org website (a critical piece of infrastructure hard coded into WordPress core), and the WP Foundation board consists of a guy who sold his WordPress related company to Mullenweg a decade or so ago, a finance person with no visible track record of ever having anything to do with software or open source or WordPress, and Mullenweg himself.

There's way more, but my TL;DR is likely already TL.

This covers it in detail (scroll down and start from the first September 20th, 2024 entry for the "current drama)

https://www.joeyoungblood.com/technology/timeline-of-wordpre...

And a long list of what happened and when, backed up with links: https://github.com/bullenweg/bullenweg.github.io

That used to exist at bullenweg.com until Mullenweg sicced his lawyer on it.

Thanks so much! This was exactly what I was hoping for. I really appreciate all the detail you went into, and the followup links.

know exactly you feeling on bullenweg, had to tread really carefully writing this: https://weareqed.com/wp-engine-matt-mullenweg-the-wp-drama/ Been asked to make it skip straight to the latest, will insert a button later

Just a comment from the first couple of paras there:

> Wordpress.org (WP.org) – Open source software, partially created & owned by Mullenweg

I feel that's wrong?

WordPress is an open source software project and the most popular CMS on the web.

(and it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress, especially in the context of Mullenweg claiming WPEngine should be "giving back to the Word>Press community" in exactly the way he didn't do for the b2/cafepress community.)

wordpress.org is the main repository of the WordPress code and the home for a huge portion all the community contributed themes and plugins. It is hard coded into the WordPress core source code making it difficult to avoind or replace for most users. The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation.

(And it might be worth explaining that he can and has banned people from logging in based on his personal drama, which removes the ability for theme/plugin authors to provide update and security fixes. Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin urls, for example replacing WPEngine's wildly popular Advance Custom Fields plugin with his own "Secure Custom Fields".)

I appreciate everything you've said, but here's the problem with most of what you've said. Yes, I could write an entire post on what wp is, I only need a brief synopsis initially for the reader, because everything else becomes apparent as you read on. like: " it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress" - In the intro for the 2 others for the wp foundation:"Mark Ghosh – Has known Mullenweg from his days of forking B2 (pre- Wordpress, around 2003-4"

"The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation." See post on timeline Oct22nd, although most wouldn't have known this prior to Bulleweg actually announcing it

" Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin URLs" - See timeline posts Oct 15th-22nd regarding ACF and other plugins

Lots of the info you've flagged is actually there, and I get that most wont read into all the info. Hope this helps

Stylistic note: "knell" is a word for a sound, like the ringing of a solemn type of bell.

So something can't be said to "spell a death knell".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/death-kn...

This page has a couple examples that use the phrasing “spelling” a death knell:

> If it does, it almost spells the death knell of a great number of football clubs throught the country.

> Indeed, it may spell the death knell of the other place.

If it sounds strange in US English, could it be a way of wording that’s more common in UK English?

"X spells Y" means "X results in Y". It was used correctly.

Please don’t forget about 2nd definitions of words, and idioms. The stylistic note here is to be really careful when language policing. From what I’ve seen, it’s almost always wrong and backfires looking bad on you to claim other people’s word choices are incorrect. I know this from plenty of experience being knocked off the high horse. ;) But language is broader and more fluid than we imagine, and it’s quite fun to be a student of the way language works and changes over time. In English it gets even more fun when tracing etymologies through the other languages where our words came from and see the weird subtle ways the meanings change.

knell (noun) 2: “an indication of the end or the failure of something” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/knell

spell (verb) 2: “to add up to / MEAN”, 3: “come to understand” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell

Examples of the idiom ‘spell a death knell’:

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/28/862658646/the-latest-u-s-blow...

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/gladstone/spe...

https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Machine-Learn...

https://www.protectingtaxpayers.org/international/to-shield-...

I believe that back when the church was the center of English village life, they would ring the low bell when someone died. Being a village, you'd know when someone was ill. The bell was audible throughout the village, and probably to most of the surrounding fields, so having seen them struggle through their sickness, you'd know who had just died.

Anything, words included, that could metaphorically convey that the death-struggle was now finished. (Ironically, though, the death knell of things like companies is usually sounded before they are actually dead, and rather when the company is ill but the writer thinks that death is inevitable.) Although I don't like "spell a death knell" because the rhyme has an awkward rhythm, and it would be better to "sound" the knell.

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