There's a fun moment in this interview where Matt says that WP Engine was warned that access to wordpress.org would be cut off. Theo, the podcast host, asks when they were warned and Matt says they were sent a term sheet a week before the cut-off.
Theo then reads out the specific terms that Matt says contain the warning, and there is in fact no warning about service disruption.
I enjoyed the part where he explains that he has to operate WordPress.org personally because the IRS wouldn’t allow a non-profit to operate a website with commercial value. He then talks about the structure of the WordPress Foundation, explaining that it has a for-profit subsidiary to run the WordCamps which generates around $5 million per year in revenue from commercial partners. Matt, you just shared a workaround that would work for WordPress.org that you’re already using for operating the WordCamps! He speaks with a calm and polite tone but has a complete lack of sincerity. Anyone with an ounce of integrity would at least pause to consider their contradictions.
Mullenweg has done an excellent job of turning an issue where he has both the moral and legal high ground into one where he's the villain through overreaction, ego, and unnecessary grandstanding. After seeing how he retributes against people and organizations he doesn't like, it's hard not to fundamentally worry about whether Wordpress is a legally safe platform on which to build one's business. (Comments about its historical insecurity aside.)
Somebody needs to start telling him "no." Ideally he'd step aside. I doubt either of those things will ever happen.
I mean, doesn't he? WP Engine is certainly profiting off of Wordpress's trademark. They certainly are controlled by VCs who are not supportive of the broader Wordpress community. What makes you feel otherwise?
WP Engine is profiting off of wordpress, not their trademark, the same as countless other consultants and service providers, and perfectly allowed even if no other companies were doing the same thing.
They are controlled by vcs and don't give back much, if you don't count things that could be argued to be self-serving marketing, like hosting conventions. But so what?
If you require that someone give ypu something in return for your software, then it's not open source. Just charge for it honetsly.
He has no moral high ground by several different angles. Both because he has no right to get what he's complaining abput not getting, and he's wildly abusing his position in a public non-profit organization to extort a competitor to benefit his for-profit company.
PR pro tip: if you're being portrayed negatively in various media and want to correct/respond to/counteract that portrayal, you need people to be able to hear your side of the story. And of the people that have heard about the Wordpress drama, statistically speaking approximately zero of them will sit through a 2 hour interview video, so consider summarizing your points in some other form (and "changed my mind on a few things" is not a summary)
The whole interview feels so fake. Matt consistently avoided answering direct questions, such as whether he had to defend the WordPress trademark in the past 20 years and if so, how. Additionally, he frequently changed the subject, particularly when questioned about why WP Engine was chosen as a sponsor despite his negative characterization of them - calling them “cancer”.
It’s difficult to take the interview seriously. Very disappointing and a waste of time in my opinion.
The tone is very calm, Mullenweg is vocally very soft spoken and I think it made sense for Theo to follow this. However he does confront him on some things. Especially here: https://youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU?si=VnIqx8LPHcEXnTl-&t=2366
Doesn't he have a whole story about having to enforce the WordPress trademark against a company reselling rebranded GPL WordPress plugins as "pro" versions, jus a few weeks ago? Where did you stop watching? This comes up just after the first appearance of the cat.
There's a lot of back-story here but the tl;dr is that someone did some really shady stuff with GPL themes and was a jerk to Matt and the community. Full stop. He admits as much.
The other side is that... years later, Matt spent $100,000 just to spite the developer by buying the domain he wanted. Imagine spending six figures just to spite someone. That's a lot of meals for hungry school kids.
This is really scary behaviour for anyone. Let alone the leader of a community.
I don't know about that or what the circumstances were, I was just responding to the claim that the trademark hadn't been enforced in the past; the video seems explicit on that point.
At 32:10, he asks him how, and all he answers is: the other thing people don’t know about […]. He didn’t answer the direct question but changed the subject to how it wouldn’t hurt him/them if WPE paid a fee to use the trademark; it wouldn’t be a big deal. Then he goes on about how many times WordPress is actually mentioned on the WPE sites. He continues by giving examples that WPGraphQL is not confusing for consumers, but WP Engine is. The reason? His opinion.
You're right, he answered later though with the example of reselling GPL licensed plugins. I guess I missed that at first.
I just stopped watching after an hour, after the arguments about who should actually pay the fee and who should not. No other companies seem to have to pay the 8% fee, but then he decides that WPE should do it and maybe because they hurt his feelings, they probably need to pay even more - his own words.
As it says in that link, the author of said link applied for a software patent after the initial GPL violations (that even in your article, he doesn't apologize for; he simply points out that he was a jerk about it while not meaningfully accepting guilt). If you look at the actual events of that situation, Pearson acted far worse than what you would imagine from just reading his own words, years later:
Pearson never made amends; he continued his bad actions long after being called out (and possibly still does).
The correct solution to bad actors is to raze them to the ground; Matt isn't wrong in this. He has the means and is doing something principled with them: Destroying a bad actor.
This should be encouraged; it is how capitalism is supposed to work.
> I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.
I can't blame them if they don't want to talk to him, since he called WP Engine a cancer. I don't think he meant it to sound so dehumanizing, but it's a hell of an insult to throw around.
Having sat through this, the main thing that irked me was Matt's lack of empathy towards impacted users.
Every time Theo tried to talk about the negative community impact or the perceived stability of the platform as a whole, Matt forcefully steered the conversation back towards criticising WP Engine.
Matt seems more concerned with retribution towards WP Engine than doing what's right for the WHOLE userbase. It almost doesn't matter how right or wrong he is in his arguments against WP Engine, what worries me is that he is being vindictive in a way that undermines everything he's built.
That seems understandable, since (according to this video) WPE has apparently been on notice about this for a very long time and has been playing a game of chicken with WordPress.
Indeed, and like Theo, I finished the video with little sympathy towards WP Engine. I think Matt's trademark argument is sound.
But as Theo pointed out, the public was not privy to this long running dispute, and Automattic's drastic action came effectively out of nowhere.
Matt seems so preoccupied with this line of thinking (i.e. is WP Engine doing something wrong) and not nearly preoccupied enough with the impact on the Wordpress userbase, the long-term perceptions of the Wordpress brand, and the overall business confidence in Wordpress as a platform. There are ways to balance both, but Matt has chosen not to.
It is clear to me that Matt sees Wordpress as "the foundation" and "the trademark" and "Wordpress.com" and not the 25% of the public internet that uses it.
The interview is there to give both of them the benefit of the doubt over having said and done hurtful things to people.
I can understand why comments are mostly negative given recent events, but I don't think it's fair to cherry-pick bits and pieces from a 2-hour interview with the aim to portrait someone in a worse light than he had already done for himself.
I personally don't think what Matt did was fair and I still don't think that after watching the video, but the additional context he gave certainly makes me a lot more sympathetic towards the complexity behind the situation for what we only saw the outcomes for.
If you don't have time to watch the whole thing but going to do it anyway, I recommend starting from 1:51:51 to set the tone for yourself.
Theo is a pretty bad personality, you see it come through the cracks whenever he thinks he has the moral high ground and feels justified to not have to think about what he's saying. For example, when customers in the Stop Killing Games campaign asked for protection of ownership rights he called them entitled assholes 20 times in a video and said every developer agrees with him, his own yt comments in the video where he said he hadn't seen a single developer disagree with him got flooded with developers.
Just like, if i want opinions and discussion of this quality i could go to 4chan and a good portion of the posters would be a lot more civil and rational.
These developer personalities like Theo and ThePrimageon and PirateSoftware all seem holier-than-thou and know-it-all. It's like podcaster bro x programming and I hate it.
I’m unsure how PirateSoftware is popular. Most of the time has either spins a story that a team of people worked on at blizzard worked on as his own personal achievement. Or has no idea what he’s talking about.
Theo on the other hand is mostly an idiot and people think he’s an authoritative figure on everything. He will never admit he’s wrong, rather sweep it under the rug or pretend no one saw him be wrong.
He’s a popular coding YouTuber, ex Twitch engineer, YC founder, comments here on HN. He knows his web dev stuff, which I’d rather see than a non technical journalist here.
He definitely does. People love to punch up and criticize, especially when JS land is receiving a lot of flamewar from Ruby/PHP land. But almost anyone who has actually watched him code or seen what he shipped will tell you he knows plenty:
While Matt's willingness to engage is commendable, it also exposes the need for clearer governance models in major open source projects. Perhaps it's time for WordPress to consider a foundation-style structure, separating Matt's personal influence from the project's direction.
Some feedback:
- The constant interrupting each other made it hard to listen to
- Also the interviewer Theo/T3.gg giving his CEO take on strategy to sandbag silverlake after finding out more context behind silverlake and automattic's relationship led me to have an unfavorable impression of the guy
Theo then reads out the specific terms that Matt says contain the warning, and there is in fact no warning about service disruption.
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