alt.hn

1/11/2025 at 6:14:17 PM

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

 https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/11/matt-mullenweg-deactivates-wordpress-accounts-of-contributors-planning-a-fork/

by impish9208

1/11/2025 at 11:44:04 PM

This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...

(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)

by rmccue

1/12/2025 at 1:19:34 AM

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

by wyclif

1/12/2025 at 2:05:38 AM

I've been saying this on twitter for months now. I don't believe this is a mentally healthy individual. His continued defence of his behavior with the whole "if you knew what was happening you would understand" style responses indicates he's lost in the sauce.

If he's not having some sort of mental health crisis it really begs to question how we got here with someone like him running those organizations for this long.

If he is, and he makes it out of this state, I feel for the emotions he's going to have to deal with when he sees (with a different perspective) what he's done to what is ultimately his life's work.

It's sad. All the way around, truly just sad.

by Implicated

1/12/2025 at 2:26:05 AM

I thought that too until you go down the rabbit hole and realize it's been this way since apparently the beginning. It's also interesting to note just how hard everyone was tearing the author apart in the comments only for it to basically become true a decade later.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....

I guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality. Just never get to see it in the beginning.

by ookblah

1/12/2025 at 6:06:30 AM

That’s a brilliant snapshot. Thanks for sharing. It also really shows the value of things like archive.org — this context would otherwise be lost if a site disappears.

It’s also inspiring to see how Ben handled most of the comments/criticism.

by whycome

1/12/2025 at 4:04:07 AM

I think the conflict of interest is obvious, but most people did not know about it. I think it is so glaring that I would have assumed it would not have been set up like this.

> guess money is just some force multiplier for negative aspects of someone's personality.

I think there is an element of seeing himself as the good guy and therefore entitled to things as a reward.

by graemep

1/12/2025 at 3:30:26 AM

That guy was right predicting conflicts. The comments on that post are something.

by ricardonunez

1/12/2025 at 8:51:05 PM

And supposedly Matt tried to get him fired for this post!

>TLDR. In May 2010 Ben Cook wrote a post titled Why Matt should resign. [..] The post, a well-balanced, well-argued, and respectful post, was not liked by Mr. Mullenweg, who reached out to Ben Cook’s employer, Network Solutions, and tried to get Ben Cook fired. Network Solutions did not fire Ben Cook.

Why? Because THAT POST "borders on hate speech"

https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/

by gizzlon

1/12/2025 at 1:41:17 PM

Thank you for the "direct link to the bottom of the rabbit hole". This article makes the point clearly and succinctly.

by JBiserkov

1/12/2025 at 4:40:01 AM

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.”

by bugglebeetle

1/12/2025 at 4:36:37 AM

Nah, this is just what they call “mask off.” The amount of people like this at the top of orgs is not small, nor is this atypical. One could speculate as to the many reasons why this has become more obvious over or they’ve felt emboldened to make this clear over the past 10 years or so, but I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.

by bugglebeetle

1/12/2025 at 5:50:30 PM

> Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.

by justin66

1/12/2025 at 5:41:12 AM

Let him destroy Wordpress with his antics. Something better will emerge and it’ll not have this man-child at the helm.

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 7:44:34 AM

not really - there's a lot of existing investment in wordpress which would be lost if this is the case.

I think it's better for wordpress community to push out Mullenweg, and establish a community owned source. It is both a fork, but not just of the source code.

I think surviving this sort of disaster makes the whole stronger/resilient in the future. Starting anew will surely just have history repeat.

by chii

1/12/2025 at 11:37:08 AM

Pushing out a founder is fine and all and I’m here for it to happen.

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 8:10:14 AM

[flagged]

by pixxel

1/12/2025 at 11:34:07 AM

“Something better will emerge” could be a libre fork of the project without him. He is the problem.

But also technically it would be (inertia not withstanding) good if the project were replaced with something else, something better.

Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 11:53:48 AM

> Django with plugins could be made to look like and work similar to Wordpress I bet.

https://wagtail.org/ is a solid CMS

by siquick

1/13/2025 at 9:33:25 AM

I'm a Python fan condescending on PHP, but doesnt the world still depend on deploying instantly via FTP and cheap hosts enjoying the low overhead of a 100000 sites on a server? On the other hand, cheapest Namecheap and Digitalocean plans are neck to neck on first glance.

by aitchnyu

1/13/2025 at 8:06:02 AM

Thanks for sharing. I had no idea about them. Taking a look

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 1:31:23 PM

> could be a libre fork of the project

They should call it PressWord.

Then get a ton of free publicity when Microsoft sues them.

by JBiserkov

1/12/2025 at 4:48:44 PM

I like FreePress or LibrePress

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 2:08:56 AM

If you're in leadership it's a good idea to get some outside advisors/mentor/muse.

Hard to find but, much cheaper than a lawyer. Many times just rubber-ducking the problem with someone can help build a more complete thought experiment.

by edoceo

1/12/2025 at 4:42:07 AM

Presuming he has a problem. What makes your think you think he would welcome intervention, or seek professional help, or respond to help?

He's clearly ignoring blunt feedback, and I've yet to see anything that suggests he thinks he's doing anything wrong.

Our society has been validating his behaviour with his half-billion dollar business: clearly some of his behaviour has value. Our society seems to reward and encourage similar behaviours in other founders (especially in current zeitgeist).

Sadly in my experience we don't have many options to help, and sometimes all we can do is watch someone burn themselves and those around them down.

He's losing his game and I can't see Automattic surviving the reshuffle that's coming. Business clients hate this shit and they have agency. Matt has been giving employees non-voting shares (a different class): https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/ although he owns 84% of the normal shares (although details of control depend on agreement with investors).

The saddest thing is that I'd guess he will toxically blame Jason Cohen. I'm sure Jason can deal with it (surely dealt with in past) and Jason seems smart enough to take strong advantage of the opportunity he's been gifted by Matt.

by robocat

1/13/2025 at 12:36:32 AM

FWIW, Matt has never claimed to own 84%. He's only ever claimed to "control" that percentage. Presumably, some investors have assigned him their voting rights by proxy. Oops.

by mthoms

1/12/2025 at 11:19:55 AM

Is Jason still at WPEngine?

by disgruntledphd2

1/12/2025 at 5:54:08 AM

Doesn't he seem to be following the trend: Embracing contempt for anything but ego and power? That's what Musk does, prioritizing those things over profit and the well-being of his businesses. Zuckerberg is all in, so are many others. It's 'founder mode'. In a way, they are following Trump.

Why treat it like a novel case, or like he has a mental health issue - unless all these people do.

by mmooss

1/12/2025 at 6:36:35 AM

Same for Elon. He still runs several companies.

See also your presidents (current and next), both not fit for any job.

by rurban

1/12/2025 at 9:47:24 AM

[dead]

by zackees

1/12/2025 at 3:13:54 AM

[flagged]

by curiousgal

1/12/2025 at 10:43:36 AM

Let us ponder for a moment that this is how autocracies go astray, but instead of the banhammer, it is jail or gallows for the dissidents, and possibly a war against an external enemy. No checks on an individual's power will result in self-defeating madness, at least sometimes.

It is also a counterpoint to the "just educate people more" crowd. That doesn't save bad institutions from going haywire. Matt Mullenweg is almost certainly a highly educated, well-traveled individual, and yet he rules his roost like Mao once did.

by inglor_cz

1/12/2025 at 4:26:43 AM

Been following your posts since the beginning of this. We met a while ago after a Milwaukee WordCamp and I remember talking about API v2 and how WP was going to be brought into the modern era.

Honestly, the project just feels stagnant to me. I get wanting to support plugins/the community for as long as possible, but I fear not having a sensible web framework has done nothing but given credence to the common criticism that WP shouldn't be taken seriously.

From my perspective as an owner of a small open source project, Matt's comments have been petty and vindictive. I personally probably will never touch the platform again. There's too many other frameworks out there, whether you want something similar like Statamic, Grav, Drupal.. or if you want to build with an actual app framework with Laravel, ASP.NET Core, etc.

by pathartl

1/12/2025 at 5:50:46 AM

Honestly, my first response to this whole fiasco was "people still use WordPress?" It turns out to still be very popular despite HTML infrastructure subsuming many features that WordPress used to offer (on one side) and competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.

by pclmulqdq

1/13/2025 at 2:47:11 PM

> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing.

The "just" is your explanation there. Most businesses want a blog, but also a half dozen other things. An event calendar, a mailing list, contact forms, an online store, etc, etc.

WordPress is kind of a mess technically, but you'd probably be surprised at some of the name-brand sites that use it. I want to say the NYT was using it at some point. It's the epitome of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough". You could build a better site by duct taping together a dozen services or open source products, but WordPress is generally good enough.

by everforward

1/12/2025 at 1:46:35 PM

The plugin system is pretty amazing, and block themes allow really much better styling/ management of sites.

It’s not perfect but its easy to use and a lot of people know how to use it.

We switched our non profit to using it so we could have more people helping post content. We could teach something else, but this was fairly easy..

by acomjean

1/13/2025 at 1:06:52 AM

Yep. I’ve tried to avoid it but for groups where less technical people need to be able to edit pages and contribute content, WP continues to be the go-to solution. The last time around I tried to avoid it but after trying everything I could find, I gave up and installed it again. I’d love to see some alternatives spring up, but the plugin and theme ecosystem is so large I think it’d be hard to replace anytime soon.

by castillar76

1/12/2025 at 8:03:50 PM

> competing platforms being just better for things like blogging/writing

Have a favorite one? (Not a list of ten, please, just one or maybe two.) I've found WP easy & pleasant to use for my personal blogs, but I'm open to switching to something that's better and not associated with this nutbar.

by coldpie

1/12/2025 at 1:52:27 AM

Honest question from an outsider. WordPress is open source, so why hasn't the project been replaced with one that doesn't include him?

by bachmeier

1/12/2025 at 2:02:39 AM

WordPress is a lot more than it's core code. There's a whole ecosystem of plugins, for example, and the usual place to share them (wordpress.org/plugins) is, essentially, controlled by one guy. It's not so easy to fork that.

by troymc

1/12/2025 at 5:24:50 AM

Then start with a new place to share plugins.

by econ

1/12/2025 at 9:39:53 AM

The first people to take this step will most likely have their plugins stolen, just as Matt did with ACF. This means taking this step is a massive danger for the first contributors - those with the highest impact are those with the most to lose.

by Timon3

1/13/2025 at 5:48:56 AM

What do you mean? If you create a neopress.org and host the existing open source plugins there, how can they be stolen?

Just the code of WordPress needs to be updated that the plugins are downloaded from the new URL.

It's not so hard.

by gitaarik

1/13/2025 at 9:25:37 AM

Did you look at the other comments, where someone asks the same question, and I give an answer?

by Timon3

1/13/2025 at 12:56:28 PM

Do you mean that your plugin can get stolen?

Well, you can ask plugin owners to upload a particular file with a particular key to their plugin on WordPress.org. That way they can prove they have access, and they should be allowed ownership of the plugin on the fork.

by gitaarik

1/13/2025 at 1:05:13 PM

No, that's not the "stealing" I'm referring to. Instead of guessing what I could mean, just read my response to the person who first asked what I mean with "stealing".

by Timon3

1/12/2025 at 10:00:17 AM

What do you exactly mean with „stolen“? Honest question.

by Ringz

1/12/2025 at 12:46:32 PM

Matt's company will fork your project, replace your original plugin listing and claim all your reviews as theirs, while also stopping you from distributing security updates to force people to switch to their fork.

Imagine if you make your money from selling your plugin, and Matt does this to you. Every WP plugin developer has to live in fear of this happening at any moment, and you can be certain it will happen if you show any kind of resistance towards Matt.

by Timon3

1/12/2025 at 6:38:24 PM

I'd suggest guerilla-scraping the entire plugin site under the radar, unbeknownst to them. Go live with a new site that simply has all the same directory data as the existing site and additional mirror site links for each plugin, And create a process for plugin authors to claim the existing page in the directory.

Matt may be able to fork plugins, but they won't be able to fork every single plugin in the directory, as it isn't very feasible.

It also would then not necessarily be obvious to Matt which plugin listings in the new directory have been claimed, and which plugins are being updated by other people from the community.

by mysidia11

1/12/2025 at 8:52:06 PM

Just scraping the site isn't quite enough. You'd also have to fork Wordpress to be able to use a plugin directory not under Matt's control, which is important for the average admin to quickly patch security-relevant issues.

But even when you do that, I'd expect him to just give people an ultimatum - either "officially" host on his plugin directory, or others, but not on both. You'd have to reach critical mass pretty much immediately, or Matt can bully the ecosystem into compliance.

by Timon3

1/13/2025 at 1:38:49 AM

If that mass doesn't accumulate fast enough he is right and people want him to run things the way he does. It might look weird to me or others, they might even say the opposite but only ones actions count.

by econ

1/13/2025 at 7:55:42 AM

No, that's not how consent and preferences work. If someone has power over a group of individuals, and that group doesn't act due to threats, it's not confirming that they want to be controlled by that someone.

by Timon3

1/13/2025 at 1:44:03 PM

They are to blame for his power. If someone else decided the time to act is now then they must choose now. The default is to not change anything.

I may ignore what people say and look what they do. I do this to make people angry :-)

What is the alternative? To tell people how sad it is they can't possibly anything ever? Why bother? Does more harm than good.

by econ

1/13/2025 at 4:38:51 PM

You're completely ignoring that the individuals have a high risk when doing this, even more so when they are the first to take this step. It can often happen that individuals make choices to minimize risk, which lead to increased risk for the whole group. It's just game theory. But it sounds like you're ignoring this deliberately to make people angry, so I'll leave you with one last thought:

You're legitimizing Matt's bullying (by telling people "well, if you don't act counter to game theory and deliberately worsen your own standing, you obviously want to be bullied!") and thus actively telling people "they can't possibly anything ever". What you're doing does far more harm than good.

by Timon3

1/14/2025 at 6:39:18 AM

I suppose the only advice one can give are things one would do in that situation.

I've build many great popular things on other people's turf/platforms of which nothing remains.

I have a wp blog too since the beginning! We tried to rebuild our lost communities there. Then akismet started banning people for posting comments with links and I discovered it has no appeal mechanism.

Meet the new boss..

by econ

1/13/2025 at 1:34:32 AM

Sounds fun. You would only have to provide listing editing if the plugin is not on the other site.

If anyone fills a complaint and can prove ownership a redirect can be provided.

Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.

by econ

1/13/2025 at 11:09:21 PM

> Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.

And we are now back at the "having your plugin stolen" problem.

by bigiain

1/13/2025 at 3:17:51 PM

Yeah you mean he takes control of the plugin on WordPress.org? But if we all move to a different domain, you don't have that problem?

Only problem is that existing WP installations would need to be manually patched to the new domain name. As long as users don't do that they'll still be in Matt's control.

But yeah, can't we create some bots that scan the internet for WP sites and send the webmasters an email informing the corruption going on inside WP and the option for them to move to the new community.

by gitaarik

1/13/2025 at 4:44:23 PM

If you could move all WP plugins & plugin developers to a different domain at once, sure, there's no problem! But unless you have a magic wand, this won't happen. Then the question is: can you move enough at once to clear the network effect?

If you cannot do that, every developer that moved with you potentially just lost their livelihood. That's the crux of it. There's no technical issue to solve here, it's purely a social and economical one.

by Timon3

1/13/2025 at 11:21:59 PM

Not that I think it's "the right thing to do", but WPEngine could almost certainly "move enough at once to clear the network effect".

They host a _lot_ of sites. They were forced by Matt to maintain a mirror of the .org theme/plugin repos. They could very easily come up with a list of plugins that'll allow 99% or 99.9% or more of WP sites to work. They 100% have the technical skills and the cashflow and the business case to do this. They could very easily build and deploy this, and donate it to a properly managed foundation - the way Wordpress.org _ought_ to be.

My guess is the only reason they haven't done it (or gone public with it if they're already building it) is because they're waiting for the lawsuit to give them most of Matt's and Automattic's money first.

by bigiain

1/13/2025 at 10:30:15 PM

Well it can still go gradually. First move the plugins, one by one. Then update the WP sourcecode to the new domain. Then update existing installations.

by gitaarik

1/14/2025 at 7:33:20 AM

You are still ignoring the point I've brought up repeatedly: those who move first have the most to lose.

You act like moving gradually has no danger for the plugin authors. You've moved 5% of plugins over. Whoops, Matt stole their listings, and since you didn't reach critical mass nobody uses your WP fork which points to your new plugin directory.

You've just wiped out the livelihoods of 5% of plugin developers.

by Timon3

1/14/2025 at 8:54:24 AM

I don't understand, you mean in the case that most people don't patch their WordPress installation, and keep getting updates from WordPress.org?

You have to move all installations to the new domain, but you don't have to do that in 1 day. You can create bots scanning the internet for WP installations and mail the webmaster and inform them about the corruption at WordPress and give them info how to patch their instance.

Matt would have to clone all the plugins and keep them up to date by copying the plugins from the new domain. But he would be risking a lawsuit for each plugin he does this with. Seems like a lot of work with a lot of risk.

by gitaarik

1/14/2025 at 10:06:05 AM

> You have to move all installations to the new domain, but you don't have to do that in 1 day.

YES, YOU DO! At least you have to move the majority of all installations day 1. I don't know why you keep repeating this.

Matt stealing a plugin isn't a theoretical issue. He has already done it. It has happened. I'm not constructing some unlikely scenario, I'm telling you what already occurred. WP plugins are GPL licensed, so there's no legal risk if he doesn't behave incredibly stupidly.

You keep throwing technical solutions against a social and economical issue. It doesn't work. There's no technical solution here.

Every plugin you move gradually is a livelihood you potentially destroyed. Can you at least acknowledge this?

by Timon3

1/14/2025 at 11:18:05 AM

Oh yeah ok, I guess I did forget a bit the important detail that most WP plugin developers are making money from a subscription plan on the WordPress.org site. So yeah their income is basically tied to that domain name.

Yeah ok, that sucks pretty hard.

Ok, then what about DDOSing wp.org during the entire transition? Just an idea, maybe a bit crazy.

by gitaarik

1/12/2025 at 9:25:19 AM

Exactly. It's a SPoF. Depending on ego and whims of a malicious tyrant is stupidity or insanity.

by magic_smoke_ee

1/12/2025 at 2:01:25 AM

Momentum. Heavy objects in motion have inertia. Oddly works in a similar fashion with software projects.

20+ years of OSS contributions and Matt leading the project is a LOT of inertia. You can fork the project right now yourself, but until some significant number of contributors move their efforts to your fork, you get no change of direction.

by geuis

1/12/2025 at 2:01:26 AM

The value of WordPress is in the brand, the ecosystem, and the community, and we’re all trying desperately to hold that together.

by rmccue

1/12/2025 at 2:44:28 AM

Maybe stop doing that? There's a reason revolutions usually involve total destruction at some point along the way.

Makes me wonder with the apparent lack of strong will just how much of the dissent is actually a (very) loud minority.

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 3:11:21 AM

Tangential, but I see the same arguments being made as I discuss completely abandoning social media this week - "But where else can we go to find out about X/Y/Z?".

I dunno, but we can figure that out, we always have. Maybe, like you said, we should just start with not desperately holding something like that together. Maybe not everyone in the world needs to be in the same place at the same time, maybe a hodgepodge is okay. But people have the need to inform and be informed, so a solution will eventually crop up.

by jjulius

1/12/2025 at 2:00:18 PM

When I've worked with the REST API I've been quite pleasantly surprised by its flexibility. I thought it was quite cleverly designed. Good job mate.

by grandpoobah

1/12/2025 at 12:01:58 PM

>I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.

Harsh lesson to learn. He who builds on the people builds on mud. GG.

by moralestapia

1/11/2025 at 9:33:05 PM

The TechCrunch headline is not accurate. As far as I understand, none of the people whose WordPress accounts were deactivated were planning a fork.

The current top comment and discussion on this Reddit thread provide good context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hylx50/matt_tro...

by ValentineC

1/11/2025 at 11:46:14 PM

So it's actually worse and more scandalous than the clickbait headline claims. I guess that's an achievent on @photomatt's part.

by baobun

1/12/2025 at 2:51:03 AM

Basically they discussed reorganizing governance of Wordpress, not necessarily forking.

by softwaredoug

1/11/2025 at 11:28:27 PM

From Mullenweg (https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/):

> To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.

He seems to be justifying the deactivation by claiming it will 'help them', somehow?

by diggan

1/11/2025 at 11:42:49 PM

This post is wild. Mullenweg comes across as completely unstable, insecure, and appears to feel very threatened. He takes every opportunity he can to give a thinly veiled insult.

Wordpress is a giant. If he’s as confident as he tries to present in this post, he could just do nothing and Wordpress would prove the more valuable software in the end. Instead, he’s accelerating progress on the fork.

He could have done with taking a few deep breaths before publishing this post.

by sd9

1/12/2025 at 12:43:58 AM

Have you followed this at all? The man has been in HN threads arguing about posts about himself for months. He's on some kind of scorched earth ego trip.

His profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=photomatt

by bdndndndbve

1/12/2025 at 1:05:46 AM

I see he’s back to posting again. Do we think he fired his lawyers or that they quit?

by saagarjha

1/12/2025 at 2:25:21 PM

I think down voting photomatt is immature and unconstructive. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinion, I think his views are quite central to a discussion on what is going on.

Down votes hides posts. I don't understand why so many HN'er wants Matt's comments removed from HN threads about WP.

by wodenokoto

1/12/2025 at 3:16:47 PM

I think you misunderstand entirely. HN wants Matt removed from the internet, and for good reason.

by eGQjxkKF6fif

1/12/2025 at 10:42:03 PM

As someone who hasn’t been following this at all. It seems like I’m watching a digital mob go after a heretic which is interesting.

by SlightlyLeftPad

1/12/2025 at 2:15:06 AM

Interesting his karma is currently 20XX. If I had to guess, it was probably significantly higher before this whole thing blew up?

by indigodaddy

1/12/2025 at 2:50:44 AM

I don't recall when this adventure started, but going through the Wayback Machine his karma was 1.7k around December 2023[1] and then climbed to 1.8k around September 2024[2] and then just a hair under 2.1k around October 2024[3].

So if anything, it seems his karma increased since the saga began.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20231220230743/https://news.ycom...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240930175846/https://news.ycom...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241013035048/https://news.ycom...

by Dalewyn

1/12/2025 at 2:48:17 AM

IIRC karma losses from downvoting are capped at 3 or 4 per comment.

by throwup238

1/12/2025 at 12:56:31 AM

It feels like this decade or so is defined by people who just don't know when to fade out and retire with their legacies intact.

Whether it be this guy, elderly politicians, or billionaires with social media addictions, everyone's lives would be far better, including their own, if they simply knew when to stfu and enjoy their success in peace.

by mingus88

1/12/2025 at 1:00:13 AM

Unlike famously chill billionaires of the past like William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes

by bdndndndbve

1/12/2025 at 1:53:50 PM

Unfortunately it seems like it might be the dawn of the era of demagogues aka mob rule :/

by baobun

1/12/2025 at 2:54:26 AM

This sort of black and white thinking of you’re either 100% in agreement with me or you’re 100% agreeing my enemies, with no room for nuance, is the stuff of the mentally unwell.

by softwaredoug

1/12/2025 at 2:52:27 AM

> Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

Oh, the level of snark here is unreal.

by rafram

1/12/2025 at 8:16:44 AM

The fact that any of the Wordpress community is standing by him at this point makes it feel more like Stockholm syndrome or a cargo cult than a healthy open source project.

by ablation

1/12/2025 at 4:02:48 AM

Heather Burns responds:

https://xcancel.com/WebDevLaw/status/1877979616045891649

"At this point you either need to check into rehab, or frankly do the world a favour and overdose."

by bigiain

1/12/2025 at 4:10:47 AM

Hah, her comment after that is equally fantastic.

by jjulius

1/11/2025 at 11:31:20 PM

It feels like a backhanded compliment and encouragement.

If there wasn’t a threat perceived you could with them well and ask them to let you know them how they might need help.

by j45

1/11/2025 at 9:25:56 PM

Huh, the injunction against "blocking, disabling, or interfering with WPEngine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ (hereinafter “WPEngine and Related Entities”) access to wordpress.org;" [0] is still in effect right? There's nothing on the docket saying otherwise...

These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says

> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.

That sounds like a partnership to me.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

[1] https://x.com/wpengine/status/1870242287218790849

[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

by gpm

1/11/2025 at 9:46:51 PM

> with WPEngine’s

"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.

by andypants

1/11/2025 at 9:53:07 PM

You can't cut "WPEngine’s" off from the disjunctive that follows.

> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’

That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.

by gpm

1/11/2025 at 11:39:48 PM

I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker: https://journal.rmccue.io/468/on-contribution/

The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.

(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)

by rmccue

1/12/2025 at 9:49:08 AM

I find this astounding given your contributions. Feel free not to answer but how is this affecting businesses such as the one you work for? How is the rest of the Wordpress agency/consultancy community reacting to all this? It’s not a space I play in, despite having heavily built on Wordpress in the past (and since abandoned it after this debacle), but I am curious. Are agencies just pretending it isn’t happening? Making contingency plans?

by ablation

1/12/2025 at 3:33:23 PM

They didn't, they emphasized it.

How do you figure that the people mentioned are partners with an unrelated wordpress hosting platform?

by SpaceNugget

1/11/2025 at 10:49:57 PM

Parters involved in WPEngine so yes, you can cut it off. If they aren’t working on that specifically it’s irrelevant if they’re partners on a separate project, even if it’s similar

by atkailash

1/11/2025 at 9:37:10 PM

That does not sound like a partnership at all. It sounds like an intent to work with the community.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 9:39:54 PM

Is "committed to working with" not a subset of the class of "partners" in your vernacular? What do you think is required to be "partners"?

And it names the specific members of the community, Joost, Karim, who subsequently had their accounts deactivated, not just the community at large.

by gpm

1/11/2025 at 10:35:03 PM

> What do you think is required to be "partners"?

We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition. And while I'm not sure of the particular definition that's going to be in play, I strongly suspect that the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction.

"We are committed to working with [...] We stand ready" isn't strong enough to actually constitute a partnership, I'm pretty sure--it is at best an expression of intent to make one.

by jcranmer

1/11/2025 at 11:49:52 PM

> the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction

It almost certainly refers to WP Engine's partnership program [1]. The catch-all is WP Engine users. It would seem prudent for anyone doing business with Wordpress to become a WP Engine user so they can benefit from the injunction. (Not legal advice.)

[1] https://wpengine.com/partners/

by JumpCrisscross

1/11/2025 at 10:49:28 PM

> We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition

Indeed we are not, but absent various exceptions the legal definition of a term is its ordinary meaning.

I don't know if there's a history here of courts interpreting (or legislatures defining, or so on) "partner" in a particular technical way that would cause a deviation from that default, I'm certainly not going to try and prove that negative, but as a starting point for an informal discussion on the internet it's a reasonable guess that there is not.

by gpm

1/11/2025 at 11:13:51 PM

I don't know, that legal concept likely goes back to the Phoenicians, eg the start of codified law.

by bbarnett

1/12/2025 at 11:19:29 AM

In my vernacular, a partnership is actually working together. Talk is cheap, lots of people say they're committed to stuff but aren't really.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 9:44:48 PM

This is - without question - the best thing that could happen for their fork. It’s generating 100x the amount of attention they would’ve gotten otherwise.

I’ve known about Joost for many years and have a ton of respect for his work. Best of luck making this happen!

by iambateman

1/12/2025 at 12:07:22 AM

They never claimed to be starting a fork (at least not yet)[0]. They only called for reform to the existing governance structures.[1]

Matt Mullenweg painted it as a fork to suit his narrative and pre-emptively poison the well (by implying they are incompetent) of a potential future fork.[2]

He's done that a couple times now. He claims to support forks and says "I'll even promote them on WordPress.org" (paraphrase) but what he does is post before a fork is even ready or properly organized. Thereby sabotaging the effort and making everyone involved look bad. [3]

It's truly evil.

[0] https://x.com/jdevalk/status/1878210129914409063

[1] https://joost.blog/wordpress-leadership/

[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

[3] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/

EDIT: Matt just posted another childish taunt in response to Joost's clarification. See https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815

by mthoms

1/11/2025 at 10:28:20 PM

If they weren't planning a fork like one of the other comments suggests they totally should now because the have the media initiative, people will be looking for it. Strike while the iron is hot basically.

by TehCorwiz

1/12/2025 at 12:38:04 AM

Mullenweg needs to be more careful doing this. The moment Mullenweg realises exactly what Mullenweg’s doing to WordPress, Mullenweg will deactivate Mullenweg’s account.

by LeonB

1/11/2025 at 11:33:39 PM

In case anyone is looking for some background on this, I wrote this post before seeing the news today. Stuff's not been great in the WordPress community leading up to this point, and Mullenweg deciding to deactivate the accounts of folks who might start new forks certainly isn't helping matters.

https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble

by GavinAnderegg

1/12/2025 at 1:49:18 AM

I know assholes like this exist everywhere, but it's the constant need to re-affirm that he's the "nice guy" while brazenly punching you in the face that unsettles me somehow. At least I know what I'm getting with certain politicians or tech moguls when they speak heh.

by ookblah

1/12/2025 at 3:07:53 AM

Some people thrive on the drama they create and feed on the outrage. I try to remember that when consuming content about certain personalities. The outrage they elicit is what they love. So I try to roll my eyes and not give it to them.

by softwaredoug

1/12/2025 at 12:10:51 AM

Joost clarified on Twitter he never asked for a fork. He was asking for reform of the current structures. Which is plain to see from his original post. Matt was the only to one to claim there was a fork forthcoming. He literally made it up.

In case there was any question about the utter pettiness of Mr Mullenweg, here's something he JUST posted in response to Joost's clarification.

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1878227222927933815

by mthoms

1/11/2025 at 8:55:11 PM

Related:

Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138

WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801

by ChrisArchitect

1/11/2025 at 9:34:16 PM

and also:

Forking is Beautiful - WordPress News >> https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/

by itronitron

1/11/2025 at 11:31:07 PM

The link to “open press” was a bit confusing since the website no longer mentions that name, boasting an open source knowledge graph for LLM agents now, but with a little jumping around I found the empty git repo with the feature list quoted in the blog

https://github.com/OpenAgentsInc/openpress-orig

by jazzyjackson

1/11/2025 at 11:28:52 PM

It's kind of wild that he's escalated from stalking ex-Tumblr users a year ago to...this. I guess when people show you who you they are, believe them.

by LexiMax

1/12/2025 at 12:10:54 AM

I feel like Matt is one step away from hosting a telethon showing his "evidence".

He's clearly a fan of the idea that the vast majority of the public does not care about anything other than what the loudest voice in the room is saying. Say it loud, say it often. Even if what is being said is contrary to evidence, most people are not going to look at it any further.

by dylan604

1/12/2025 at 12:41:36 AM

Absolutely. Despite overwhelming evidence against everything that he says, I continue to see many absolute half-wits defending him in various forums

by nchmy

1/12/2025 at 6:22:13 PM

Is that a wrong take though?

The instability this is causing is, mostly from what I can tell, strictly tied to the OSS dev community. I haven't seen tonnes of users talking about it or even caring enough to see what the fuss is about.

To be clear, I think what he's doing is bad in a variety of ways. I may be just jaded by years of watching corporations ignore the things that "should" matter and never being punished for it.

by BeefWellington

1/11/2025 at 10:02:35 PM

Oh man. This isn't just "some contributors". Joost is basically one of the founding fathers of the Wordpress ecosystem. Him getting deactivated is like Stalin assassinating Trotsky.

by legitster

1/12/2025 at 1:16:08 AM

As someone entirely on the outside looking in, WordPress is sounding like more drama than it's worth.

by plussed_reader

1/11/2025 at 9:11:34 PM

People who don’t support forking don’t actually support the concept of open source/free software.

Forking is essential.

by sneak

1/12/2025 at 12:33:13 AM

Not in wordPress land, where the GPL is ignored and selling the software itself is a big chunk of a lot of peoples' business models.

I spent about a decade working with WP and wrote a lot of code for it, and had to read way more folks' code than I care to think about.

It's unique compared to other stacks I have worked with in that unlike ruby, python, node, or even Drupal, lots of businesses are often making money by selling submodules... which is strange because they are basically selling GPL code for a GPL'd stack.

In an environment like that, folks bristle at the suggestion of "forking" and will accuse folks of "stealing". WP.org has more or less endorsed that view.

I find it a bit nutty, but hey they all think I'm a crank. Maybe I am. Personally, I just made money fixing weird bugs that arose from that pile of cruft, or writing bespoke plugins for very niche purposes. It wasn't fun, but I got very good at dumb stuff for sure- it has some real problems but if it does what you want it's very easy to turn over to the marketing department.

There are plenty of contradictions in that anti-GPL point of view which can be seen in the fact that WP itself is a fork of an earlier project and it's main ecommerce setup was forked as well. But folks generally see what the want to see, I think.

by scarecrowbob

1/13/2025 at 9:05:58 PM

I was flabbergasted when a friend introduced me to WP's ideas of "GPLs" and "nulled plugins", which is to say, by the community's description, someone other than the author distributed GPL-licensed WP plugins without charging for them.

Uh, what? Yes, that's how the license those authors chose for their code works. The other people aren't "thieves" for redistributing it.

Other people reading this, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ghc2o6/gpl_clar... for a representative example of odd discussions on the subject.

by kstrauser

1/11/2025 at 9:18:28 PM

Exactly.

No one should care if matt is unpleasant when they can just fork and be done with him.

by throwaway48476

1/11/2025 at 10:37:24 PM

That disregards the value and recognition of the Wordpress brand beyond people who understand the concept of forking.

The problem is that the tens of thousands of small businesses who placed their trust in Wordpress will be damaged by this. I know - anecdotally - that many of those people like Wordpress “because it is free” (like both beer and speech) and because they know - even fuzzily - that because of that there’s lots of cool useful stuff that is available.

Now, sure, a lot of that cool useful stuff will still work with a fork. But it splits the message and gradually - not overnight - people developing that cool and useful stuff may lose faith and do something else.

What Millenweg is doing hits at the very heart of what open source means - and what community means - and is, as far as I can see, an absolutely cynical move made in the pursuit of profit and vanity.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 10:48:50 PM

I agree with you.

I run a business that is invested in the WordPress ecosystem.

It’s going to be a non-trivial endeavor to get a fork seriously running and reliably delivered.

In the meantime the community has to suffer this clown’s further antics.

by TheNewsIsHere

1/11/2025 at 11:20:41 PM

Get the support of Cpanel for the fork and it will replace Wordpress. Cpanel powers a significant amount of Wordpress sites, possibly even the majority of them.

by rtsil

1/13/2025 at 5:40:29 PM

That is a fantastic idea. That and probably Plesk.

We built our own hosting platform that is vendor agnostic, but we’d happily support these larger platform oriented players as a matter of open source collaboration.

In the meantime, I’m looking for an alternative to my journaling app, Day One, which sadly was acquired by Automattic a few years ago and shoved into their mostly languishing “Cosmos” (stuff not WordPress related) team. That’s been a long time coming though. They introduce feature regressions a lot and don’t really “do” feedback.

by TheNewsIsHere

1/13/2025 at 6:10:45 AM

Yeah the community is a big part of it. But if the core of the community is corrupt and you can't do anything about it, maybe it's not such a bad idea to build up a new more healthy community?

Yes it takes time and effort etc, but wouldn't it be worth it?

I at least would not find it worth any of my time to contribute anything that has anything to do with the WordPress.org domain.

by gitaarik

1/13/2025 at 5:21:42 PM

That’s exactly my point though - Mullenweg’s impact on Wordpress is toxic both to the community of users, and the community of contributors.

by saaaaaam

1/12/2025 at 1:01:34 AM

Is this a correct interpretation of the timeline?

1. Matt announces that he's going to effectively stop contributing to WordPress for now https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

2. Others in the community say they'll pick up the torch in leading the next releases within the current WordPress project

3. Matt says "nuh-uh, I'm busy self-sabotaging my own project here in an attempt to prove how none of you can live without me, stop interfering and go become irrelevant in a fork somewhere instead" https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

by kalleboo

1/12/2025 at 3:17:13 AM

0. He pathetically tries to extrot money and fails miserably.

by curiousgal

1/12/2025 at 6:04:32 AM

Many here complain about Mullenweg's boundary-crossing, counterproductive, acting out. Yet many are following Mullenweg's lead - the comments here seem like the worst HN behavior I've seen.

Seriously, perhaps people can empathize with how Mullenweg came to behave this way. When people around you are doing it, it affects you; it subconsciously sets new norms, resets the boundaries in your mind. It impacts your emotions - you are drawn into their emotional state. And then you start acting like them.

Many, many people I know and in the public eye professed extreme dislike for Trump's behavior, but my impression is that over the years, many of the same people act more and more like him.

The trick is that when someone violates your values, you don't want to do the human thing and follow them - we're social creatures, we instinctively follow the crowd. You want to consciously be a leader, consciously remember your values and reset them, and lead the herd to a better place. That's why calm under fire, grace under pressure, dignity and composure are so important.

by mmooss

1/13/2025 at 6:05:19 AM

Yeah if you like power (and subsequently lots of money, because that gives power) and you become more addicted to it, you lose more and more morals. You need more of it all the time to compensate for the shame about leaving your morals behind.

If you see other people becoming like that too; they are starting their journey to power and addiction.

But we're not all necessarily into that.

by gitaarik

1/12/2025 at 12:07:00 AM

I've been following the whole story and from what it looks Matt thinks that WordPress is his own property. When something goes open source even the creator needs to be wise enough to understand that it's not his property anymore. I've seen this in many "hybrid" startups that plan to solve the marketing/distribution/ecosystem problem with "partial open source". But the history shows where these frequently end up.

You can't have full ownership of something that you've released to the world, but it takes balls to admit it to yourself.

by freefaler

1/12/2025 at 12:19:51 AM

It is still his property though because he still effectively owns and controls the trademark, despite making efforts to make it appear that he does not.

by saaaaaam

1/12/2025 at 4:57:00 AM

Again, the problem with forking WP is wordpress.org. yes you can setup a new plugin/theme repository.

The problem is how does someone who owns a plugin on .org validate their ownership on the new repository?

by sa752

1/13/2025 at 8:57:40 AM

The existing plugin list typically list the author name with a link to their homepage for each plugin. One method would be for someone to scrape and cache the existing plugin list along with each known plugin author's contact/home page information.

When authors sign up for an account on the new site: have the signup process provide the user a "hash code" to insert anywhere they want into the HTML code or as a HTML comment or header on their homepage to confirm author access to the plugin page on the new site.

by mysidia11

1/13/2025 at 5:59:25 AM

Well, you can ask them to upload a particular file with a particular key to their plugin on WordPress.org. That way you can prove you have access, and you should be allowed ownership of the plugin on the fork.

by gitaarik

1/11/2025 at 11:14:29 PM

This blogpost is astonishing.

It’s like Mullenweg has been taking lessons from the Trump school of media relations.

“Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better… he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself… Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people… In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on…”

It’s as if he’s saying “these little people are barely worthy of my attention and have achieved nothing, compare them to me I’m powerful, I’m important, you should respect my power and importance…”

by saaaaaam

1/12/2025 at 5:59:45 AM

total piece of work this dude, I abandon any and ALL things that even mention wordpress and will never touch again. Who knows what this guy will do next.

by ProofHouse

1/11/2025 at 10:28:08 PM

> This post was updated to clarify that de Valk and Marucchi haven’t specifically said they have planned a fork, and that they were hoping to create mirrors for the plugins and themes repositories, while also offering to lead on the next release of WordPress.

The plan was to scrape the site and set up an alternative, not to fork Wordpress. The headline was deliberately written to deceive.

-----

edit: that being said, a distributed model would be best for all situations like this. I still can't get over the fact that Rust has a github dependency. And I'm sure they're not the only one.

https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326

by pessimizer

1/11/2025 at 11:42:11 PM

Wow, 2016, thanks for that.

I’ll add this gripe from Bunnie of Novena/Precursor/et.al. fame, explaining how he is mulling over freezing the rust version (in fact the xous OS repo has a fork of rust in order to build against something stable), from the most recent update on crowdsupply [0]

The Rust project used to care about Windows as a target, so this work-around feels like a bit of a middle finger to Windows users. Lately, I have been feeling like Rust (and llvm) is giving the middle finger to everything that’s not POSIX x86_64 running in a FAANG-scale cloud environment; they don’t worry about software supply chain security because they are the software supply chain, and of course they trust their own tools. I suppose they are entitled to do that, given who funds their payroll, but it’s not a good omen for projects like ours.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates...

by jazzyjackson

1/11/2025 at 10:44:19 PM

Messy Wordpress drama is messy Wordpress drama though, and that’s the problem, whatever the truth of one or another story.

Have I unflinchingly recommends Wordpress to dozens of people over the years? Yes.

Have they gone ahead and used it? Yes.

Have I helped them get set up? Yes.

Was it worth staking a little bit of my reputation on Wordpress saying “this will just work, and when it doesn’t there are loads of people who can help”? Yes.

Will I continue to do that when there is this insane level of Mullenweg-induced teenage-boy-angst highschool drama surrounding Wordpress? Hell no.

And that’s the problem. This nonsense kills the community goodwill around the software. And that’s really really sad, and all of Mullenweg’s making because his ego has run away with itself.

It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult life. But it seems like his psyche has got stuck when he got “famous”.

You see this with kids in bands who get too rich, too famous, too fast - and the fallout is similar: destroy everything in a bonfire of vanity.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:31:05 PM

this. Wordpress was already in a precarious situaton with alternatives like squarespace and wix etc..

Wordpress was useful, because lots of people know it well enough. When your consultant can't be reached someone else can take it over and do ok. I even liked the Gutenberg page layout tool.

>It must be really tough being a “software celebrity” for your entire adult l ife.

I imagine it is hard. He didn't make the fortunes of others, but he had a pretty loyal and really nice community. One of the best. Its what made wordpress grow and be so successful.

As a wordpress professional said at a recent meetup, its hard to recommend wordpress, when you know the client will Google it an all this nonsense comes up.

by acomjean

1/11/2025 at 11:49:13 PM

Absolutely that. I now have people in my network, friends, the guy who runs the car washing service, my greengrocer, a friend who is a personal trainer, people like that - not remotely technical but who have Wordpress sites - who are saying “is Wordpress dead then?” because the drama is bleeding out.

Wordpress is going to become Twitter.

And that harms the hundreds of developers who have built really good single person dev shops, or a handful of people working and being paid well to develop on Wordpress.

All because someone’s ego got bent.

by saaaaaam

1/12/2025 at 2:14:13 PM

April 2016, damn, that's 2 full years before Microsoft acquired GitHub!

by JBiserkov

1/13/2025 at 6:51:15 AM

What a fucking goon, he's totally lost the plot. I hope Mullenweg is finished now before he destroys it all - he's useless anyway.

by 74gee

1/12/2025 at 2:11:01 AM

Can’t someone just kick this block of lead around their legs out of whatever corporate structure Wordpress.com has?

This is getting to comical proportions.

by Aeolun

1/12/2025 at 5:06:03 AM

He owns 84% of Automattic, so likely not.

by RF_Savage

1/12/2025 at 1:54:40 AM

At this stage some sort of fork seems inevitable.

This insanity is entirely unrecoverable on current trajectory

by Havoc

1/12/2025 at 6:18:52 AM

Is this how open-source works now? Odd interpenetration of GNU.

by dbg31415

1/12/2025 at 4:32:30 PM

Stop me if you've heard this one:

- Woman broaches the topic of changing the nature of her relationship with a man.

- Man attacks woman for it.

- Man cuts woman off from everything and slanders woman to all her colleagues.

- Man says his abuse of woman is for her own good, and he's actually helping her.

- Man has a track record of doing this to people who question him or who he otherwise doesn't like.

Is this the archetypical spousal abuser? Someone showing all 3 of the dark triad (narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy)? Yes on both counts, and also business as usual for matt, CEO of a multimillion dollar company and head of the wordpress foundation. I guess money can't buy being a decent human.

Seriously though, this kind of person who thinks their personal ends justify any means, is dangerous. I would not want to associate with or be physically near such an unstable, abusive person.

by ImPostingOnHN

1/11/2025 at 9:34:36 PM

He's now actively hostile to the principles of open source.

by maxk42

1/11/2025 at 9:38:02 PM

Now?! The dude hijacked a plugin.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 10:09:13 PM

[flagged]

by endofreach

1/11/2025 at 11:35:56 PM

It was hostile because: (1) it was made under false pretences; Matt blocked the plugin authors from updating their code, and then used that fact to claim he needed to take it over because of a lack of security updates.

Reason (2) is that he didn’t “fork” the code to create a new plugin as is customary. He took over the existing listing (and its install base of several million), renamed it, and then forced his version into everyone’s sites.

So despite having installed “Advanced Custom Fields” by WPEngine people woke up to their sites running “Secure Custom Fields” by Automattic.

If that happened via NPM or any other package manager there would be outrage. It’s a supply chain attack, plain and simple.

Reason (3) is that he then took the paid version of that same plugin and released it for free, despite having official documented rules that he himself wrote against such a practice. Nulled plugins (as the community calls them) are explicitly not allowed in the repository.

In summary, this wasn’t a fork as we all understand it. This was a hostile take over of an existing install base without consent and contrary to the rules he, himself created for the plugin repository.

Oh, and one more thing. Automattic is currently suing someone for doing exactly what he did (redistributing paid plugins). In that case, his lawyers flat out lied to the Dutch court and claimed that the GPL doesn’t allow others to re-sell GPL code. He got caught and the judge was NOT impressed.

Imagine calling “open source” your religion but then lying to a judge about what that actually means.

The man is a greedy, egotistical, tyrant.

by mthoms

1/12/2025 at 12:43:20 AM

Got a sauce for the Dutch case and him getting caught?

by nchmy

1/12/2025 at 1:44:58 AM

https://meta.festingervault.com/t/announcement-of-reopening-...

To be clear: I’m no fan of what these guys are doing and I think they’ll probably be liable for TM infringement (but maybe not copyright infringement).

All that aside, Automattic lying about what the GPL means in a court of law is truly disgusting. Especially since Matt loves to talk about the freedoms afforded by the GPL and how he is its biggest champion.

The questions around reselling GPL code are well settled (anyone can sell GPL code). One just needs to read their FAQ to see that what Automattic’s lawyers argued in court is total bullshit.

by mthoms

1/12/2025 at 6:52:24 PM

Great replay, thanks. Also i actually wanted to write more to explain my point.

And in no way was i trying to say he isn't greedy, egotistical or a tyrant. My point was not about his methods nor his person.

I believe if more people acted like him it wouldn't be as bad for (F)OSS compared to how it would be if (even) more companies base their whole existence on specific OSS but never give back or support.

Not sure why i got flagged though. downvotes i expected, but flagged? Sure it wasn't you.

by endofreach

1/13/2025 at 12:10:40 AM

I didn't flag or downvote it FWIW.

by mthoms

1/13/2025 at 2:50:06 PM

Damn, now that i read my "sure it wasn't you" it seems as if it was meant sarcastically. Just to be clear: it was not. I really appreciate your reply & just wanted to make clear that i know you didn't flag me. I don't think a person responding that well & nicely would flag my kinda comment.

Anyway, good day my friend in another universe!

by endofreach

1/12/2025 at 3:12:24 AM

Looking forward to the summit in January 2026.

by edoceo

1/13/2025 at 5:56:36 AM

Why hasn't the whole community moved to a Matt-free fork and host?

Someone should just take the leadership in this and get everyone together. Come on, nobody wants to keep dealing with Matt, it's a useless fight, sooner or later the fork has to come anyway.

I'm not into WordPress, but if I was one of the main contributers I would not wait any longer.

by gitaarik

1/11/2025 at 8:28:40 PM

techcrunch.com seems down across the board right now? [20:27 UTC]

by croemer

1/11/2025 at 9:54:08 PM

Here's the archive link to read the article: https://archive.is/1YKki

by robocat

1/11/2025 at 10:09:05 PM

Which I created to read the article in the end :)

by croemer

1/12/2025 at 2:20:05 AM

Brave to post this considering their platform.

by Implicated

1/11/2025 at 10:41:21 PM

[flagged]

by curiousgal

1/11/2025 at 9:18:53 PM

What the fork is he thinking?

(Sorry I’ll see myself out)

by adamtaylor_13

1/11/2025 at 9:43:38 PM

"Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project."

Is that all it takes these days?

by itronitron

1/11/2025 at 7:51:01 PM

I haven’t followed this whole controversy closely but I don’t see a problem with this personally. It’s aggressive but this person spent most of their life building Wordpress to what it is, giving it dedicated focus for a couple decades. Why should WPEngine or others get to suck up the money from that?

by blackeyeblitzar

1/11/2025 at 9:06:35 PM

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.

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.

I really dislike WP Engine because they ruined Flywheel, one of the best companies I’ve ever dealt with (and to which I paid tens of thousands of dollars over my lifetime as a customer of Flywheel).

But Mullenweg is coming off as completely unhinged.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 9:45:59 PM

> 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.

This is quite inaccurate. Sure, WP started as a fork of b2, but it's not true to say Mullenweg is a cuckoo. WordPress is something he personally did extensive development work on to evolve it to where it is today, and he hired many of the people who did most of the rest of it as it became commercially viable. Even early on it was a quite different product to b2, which was at best fledgling, and it is fully fair to say that he is one of its creators. He wrote loads of it at the beginning; it's his thing as much as it is any other developer's, if not more. We should not diminish that achievement by pretending he is just leeching off something that in fact he substantially built.

Now, whether he is cuckoo is another matter; as you say, he appears unhinged. Something has happened to him such that the more self-absorbed tendencies that used to work quite well in a BFDL context have gone very wrong. He always used to be able to come across as the guy who could help sell this so it will all work for everyone in the ecosystem commercially, and could be likeable and encouraging as a community figure, but something has broken.

I am sad for him because this kind of loss of control is ultimately humiliating him. It's time to take off all (or all but one) of the hats, and find something else in life.

You are right about WP Engine: I am no fan having had considerably less than optimal customer service experiences with them.

But this is fucked up.

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 11:21:18 PM

[flagged]

by cws_

1/11/2025 at 9:41:28 PM

> 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.

by that_guy_iain

1/12/2025 at 12:42:08 AM

> 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.

by rmccue

1/12/2025 at 11:14:52 AM

> 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.

by that_guy_iain

1/12/2025 at 12:19:32 PM

> Started/founded are basically the same, no?

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

by rmccue

1/14/2025 at 10:29:12 AM

AH, my bad.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 10:26:15 PM

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.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 10:36:55 PM

???

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.

by throw646577

1/12/2025 at 4:30:14 AM

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

by gamblor956

1/12/2025 at 11:17:02 AM

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.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 10:59:47 PM

[flagged]

by closewith

1/11/2025 at 11:25:19 PM

That would be beautiful next level to his insane public breakdown.

Honestly though, I feel very genuinely sorry for him, and very sad for him.

Clearly something has cracked and it’s unimaginable being on the pedestal he’s been on for as long as he’s been on it. His friends are not looking out for him, which makes me wonder if he has any friends capable of telling him “stop”.

Matt, if you’re reading (which, c’mon, we all know you anlmost certainly are!) please stop.

It’s not too late to save yourself, to save your mental health, and to save your reputation.

Don’t dig your heels in, and don’t play chicken on the railroad tracks the lawyers are laying out for you.

Stop, and focus on the next stage of your journey, your legacy, and let the great work you did speak for itself, rather than be tainted.

You are not Wordpress, and your identify should not be so tied to Wordpress to the degree that is suggested by the way you are conducting yourself in recent times.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:37:41 PM

All of this I agree with.

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 10:46:28 PM

[flagged]

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:25:46 PM

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.

I guess everything itt should be taken with a grain of “personally” salt, because that clearly is an accusing statement not tagged as a personal opinion. I wasn’t following this topic at all, but what gp is saying contradicts your hypothesis at least, so there’s no “personally I” escape route.

More meta, it feels like all this civilized discussion on HN et al is just a facade, because in rare situations like this people suddenly start theorizing, rationalizing their position, jumping gray-voting wagons and so on. I mean, it’s their right, but it looks like a booing mob rule rather than a society of standards that everyone relates themselves to here.

by wruza

1/11/2025 at 11:57:39 PM

Ah, we are at cross purposes here.

I stand by my statement that you have quoted. The “personally” bit was that I, personally, can no longer have full faith that his Wordpress commits are his work, given his recent conduct.

There is nothing accusatory about my statement that he has managed to closely associate Wordpress the product with Mullenweg the man. And it’s an undeniable fact that he’s managed to wring an enormous amount of profit from that relationship, and, indeed, boasts about it himself in the blogpost linked from this post!

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:34:41 PM

Oh fuck off, I am not Matt and it should be obvious.

> so why is it so unlikely that he could have potentially hired people to write code that he claimed under his moniker?

Sure and he could have bought loads and loads of monkeys and given them typewriters.

Why are you fantasising?

It's a pretty straightforward story here.

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 11:50:20 PM

[flagged]

by saaaaaam

1/12/2025 at 12:22:08 AM

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

by mthoms

1/14/2025 at 1:36:50 PM

>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.

by that_guy_iain

1/11/2025 at 9:55:55 PM

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.

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 11:03:19 PM

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.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 10:39:25 PM

[flagged]

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 10:48:39 PM

From the guidelines:

> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:34:22 PM

[flagged]

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 11:51:29 PM

[flagged]

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 11:53:57 PM

[flagged]

by throw646577

1/12/2025 at 12:15:17 AM

[flagged]

by saaaaaam

1/11/2025 at 9:05:58 PM

There's a good argument to be made that entities like WPE actually make WP more popular and viable as a solution. WPE is no more "sucking" things up than any other business which relies on open source software.

Open source software is about a specific kind of spirit, a way of relating to the community, and if you don't have that spirit then you shouldn't get the corresponding benefits of viral spread, contributions, increased credibility, or community goodwill.

by threatofrain

1/11/2025 at 8:39:28 PM

Suck up money from an open source project? Others making money from an open source project is kinda the point of open source. Also the people whose accounts are being deactivated have by definition contributed to the project in the past. It's not just one guy who created it all.

This is a wordpress fork that will cost people to run and assuming WPEngine is supporting it it'll cost them money to support.

by slyall

1/11/2025 at 9:19:56 PM

> Others making money from an open source project is kinda the point of open source.

It’s always interesting when people become personally offended when someone dares to make money off of the project they personally open sourced before. Why would you license your stuff with a license that explicitly allows that if you’re salty about the consequences later?

Maybe chose a license you actually stand behind and can live with.

by echoangle

1/11/2025 at 9:48:41 PM

But how else will you be able to use other people's contributions for free and market yourself as open source otherwise??

That's really the crux of this OSS pushback, people want all the benefits of being open source, like free labor and marketing, without wanting the ostensible cons.

by satvikpendem

1/11/2025 at 8:55:26 PM

> Why should WPEngine or others get to suck up the money from that?

Because that person chose a license that allows that for a start?

by prmoustache

1/11/2025 at 9:15:53 PM

Wordpress itself is a fork.

by andrewmcwatters

1/11/2025 at 9:32:28 PM

I didn’t know that. What did it fork from?

by boredtofears

1/11/2025 at 9:21:17 PM

Because of the GNU Public License he slapped on there. Matt was free to change the licensing model at any time in Wordpress’s history, so it’s really quite befuddling when people like these contributors encounter a bait and switch, that apparently forking a GPL’d project is against some terms of service.

EDIT: was Wordpress GPL’d all along because it’s a fork of b2/cafelog?

by jazzyjackson

1/11/2025 at 10:13:04 PM

IIRC yes.

by throw646577

1/11/2025 at 8:06:15 PM

I didn't know someone who worked on a piece software for a long time was entitled to every dollar everywhere associated with it! I'll have to send some emails; I think I've got some money inbound.

It's ironic he's so terrified of someone forking Wordpress, since Wordpress itself is a fork.

by stonogo

1/11/2025 at 8:55:19 PM

>I didn't know someone who worked on a piece software for a long time was entitled to every dollar everywhere associated with it!

Parent comment OP must work for developer relations at Apple

by mixdup

1/11/2025 at 9:43:30 PM

This just in, the creator of UNIX wants to deactivate your MacBook. Just yours. Sorry, hope you understand.

by jrhey

1/11/2025 at 11:56:38 PM

Was UNIX open source?

by dylan604

1/12/2025 at 4:01:10 AM

No, but XNU (Apple's OS kenel) is based BSD which is open source. In fact XNU itself is open source even though its BSD licenced so does not have to be. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

There even seems to be an open source variant of the OS https://www.puredarwin.org/

by graemep

1/12/2025 at 4:23:46 AM

And that has to do with the price of tea in China how?

by dylan604

1/12/2025 at 8:40:23 AM

You asked whether Unix was open source in the context of a macbook. The Unix derivative used on a Macbook is, indeed, open source.

by graemep

1/12/2025 at 2:55:23 PM

No, I asked if Unix was open source. The macOS kernel is a BSD derivative. BSD != Unix. If the comment was to hold true, they should have said BSD wants your MacBook.

by dylan604

1/13/2025 at 7:54:03 AM

> The macOS kernel is a BSD derivative. BSD != Unix.

BSD is derived from Unix source, so it is Unix. Most BSDs cannot be distributed using the Unix name because of lack of trademark permission. However, MacOS is an officially certified Unix: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

by graemep

1/11/2025 at 10:14:02 PM

The original actions may have been motivated by a sincere desire to get a freeloading entity to contribute more to the project (although later events make me doubt that sincerity). But that is the cost of open source: all open source licenses let freeloaders use your products without contributing back; if you don't like that, you should have written your own license instead.

What Matt has done, though, is far worse. In his legal filings, he has effectively asserted sole proprietorship of the entire WordPress ecosystem, access to which is gated solely on his whim. Furthermore, he has also argued that previous steps to create a non-profit foundation that is independent of any dictatorial powers were void from the start, and that anyone who thought such actions genuine are laughable idiots. His actions are anathema for an open source project, and even for a corporate product, quite life-threatening.

by jcranmer

1/11/2025 at 9:20:58 PM

If you haven’t read the details, you should probably educate yourself before making a statement like this.

Matt’s behavior has been borderline sociopathic, and it’s actively harming people, to say nothing of the Wordpress brand itself.

Mullenweg needs to step away from WP and spend a few months in therapy.

by adamtaylor_13