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photomatt

Happy to answer any questions from HN folks, to the extent I can. I love this community and have been here since 2007.

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> to the extent I can

Taking legal advice now? Rhetorical question, more a statement: last time you were here, you didn't.

edit: For the uninitiated, page 24 is neat. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

It's interesting to me that all the screenshots besides the HN one appear to be from mobile devices?

By the way, you can append `#page=xx` to link to a specific page in a PDF file.

Thank you, would be surprised how rarely I use this filetype

Do you have a response to the top comment (among others) which assert that you are mischaracterizing the ruling? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927

My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.

The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.

And wordcamp. I mean, I'm not sure on the content, but there were less people at least.

> we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.

Based on https://us.wordcamp.org/2025/attendees/, https://us.wordcamp.org/2024/attendees/, and https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/attendees/

Looks like 2023 had 1,449 attendees, 2024 had 1,339, and 2025 had 884.

This data is all transparent. I think what you're looking for is this, which shows about 1,2000 ticktets: https://central.wordcamp.org/reports/ticket-revenue-report/?...

You can look at reviews of the event, people had a good time. International visitors have been down due to political and immigration issues outside of our control.

Being there on the ground, it did feel a little spread out, lots of pockets of people connecting, but the venue was pretty huge. We'll try to keep things tighter in Phoenix next year. The upcoming WordCamp in India looks like it will be double the size of any previous ones.

Perfect.

Tickets sold,

  2025 - 1,200 - down 38%
  2024 - 1,928 - down 10.5%
  2023 - 2,149

Some people choose to attend other camps because they are concerned about the US border issues. If you zoom out, we're also trying to spend time on various events, such as Campus Connect, which don't show up in those numbers. However, indeed, we haven't yet reached our pre-COVID in-person attendance levels, which peaked around 40k/yr across all camps, and we're now around half that. COVID hit us pretty hard, and we haven't yet figured out the right formula for everything, but it's showing positive momentum in meetups, camps, and the new educational events.

One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.

If you could hypothetically turn back time to prior to what is now called the 'WordPress drama', would you personally choose this same path again, or would you do things differently?

Differently.

How so?

Not OP but, IMO one can only speculate. The answer you will most likely get would be that one will have chosen to execute these moves before WPEngine existed turning back time much earlier than the actual start of the drama/legal battles itself.

Have you thought about licensing future additions to WordPress under AGPL? I believe it can be done [1]. This will disallow private forks and require companies to publish any changes they make.

[1]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12276/how-to-...

How would this help? This isn’t at issue.

It would disallow private forks of WordPress (require them to share the modifications) but I don't know whether WPEngine and other hosts have any private modifications or they all use stock WordPress.

The problem we have isn't that they have some amazing code they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.

I suspect WordPress will be GPL forever; it's a lovely license, and I enjoy publishing work under it.

It's been almost a year, I'm curious if there's been any serious discussions about settling this case (e.g. a proposal both sides were actually actively considering/negotiating)?

There was an excellent magistrate judge and a settlement proceeding, which I showed up to in good faith, but the other CEO did not.

With how you acted, I'm not surprised that they have zero interest in settling and want to have the law decide.

Are you considering or have you ever considered moving to or developing some other CMS?

I'm maintaining and developing two other CMS systems, in Tumblr and Day One, and I hope one day there can just be one.

> “There can only be one.”

—Connor MacLeod

I’ll just show myself out…

Matt do you guys still use the office in the US Bank Building in the mission?

We do! Would like to activate it more.

What in your opinion is the nature of your personality?

I’d describe my personality as curious, open-minded, and calm under pressure — I like exploring ideas deeply and listening before I speak. But I do get worked up when fighting for open source principles.

So all positives, except one quasi negative (that's a positive). Are you familiar with what narcissism is?

If I may ask, what's your take on SSGs?

Static site generators? Not sure what you mean. A static site is appropriate in some situations. I love sites that are alive, dynamic, reactive.

Static sites are pretty much alive and dynamic, but that dynamism happens at a different layer of the stack.

Hi, Matt. Why, in late 2025, should I opt to use PHP and WP for a blog or a web site instead of just using Rust and Tokio?

If I use Rust, my web site will be blazingly fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, and it can power performance-critical services that run on embedded devices and easily integrate with other languages. Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. And that's on top of how Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling. I can even use Rust to supercharge my JavaScript, one module at a time.

> Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.

With PHP, you don't have to worry about compile-time bugs, because there is no compile time.

…and instead you get runtime bugs which is somehow better?

you also get runtime bugs with rust and everything else, so i just don't get the "somehow better" line of comparison

The idea is that if something would have been a compile-time error (ex: using a method that doesn’t exist), but you don’t see that compile error because you don’t have a compiler, the error is still there. It’s just that you won’t see it until the associated code happens to run. Essentially the compiler can catch whole classes of bugs early on. Just because it’s annoying to be told your code has bugs doesn’t make that better than having bugs and just not being told.

It depends on your goals, your customer needs. All technology is just a means to an end. Languages and frameworks are easy to switch between once you understand programming fundamentals. We run production Erlang code at Automattic. Use the right tool for the job. Don't start with a language; start with a problem to be solved.

Computer nerds should probably use Rust and Tokio. Then they can spend hundreds of evenings tinkering with their oh-so-superior contraption of a website, muttering how silly everyone else's websites are.

But everyone else who just want to put their small business website up that their marketing assistant can easily edit, will just pay someone on Upwork to pop up a WordPress site for them in a day or so, with everything they need included, so they can spend their time on value-added activities.

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