Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I'm writing this newsletter in part for an audience — in other words, you the reader, and others like you — so when I'm deciding what to write about, I do try to take into account what you might be interested in reading about. But I'm also writing this newsletter for myself, and in this case what I care about trumps (sorry) what my readers may or may not be interested in. And I think this is about something important that goes beyond just WordPress.

Update: After publication, Matt sent me a message on Twitter with a link to a Google doc that lists some corrections and clarifications related to some of my comments here. My response is at the end of this post.

I care about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for a number of reasons, some personal and some professional. On the personal side, I've been using WordPress to publish my blog for more than two decades now, and I've helped countless others with their WordPress-powered blogs and websites over the years. It has its quirks, but it is a great system. I've tried Drupal and Squarespace and literally everything else, and I keep coming back to WordPress. On the non-personal side, the Columbia Journalism Review — where I was the chief digital writer for about seven years, until a month or so ago — runs on WordPress, as do hundreds of thousands if not millions of other websites (WordPress likes to boast that it powers more than 40 percent of the sites on the web.)

Not long after I started using WordPress for my blog, which was in 2004 or so — after experimenting with Typepad and Blogger and other publishing systems — I cofounded a Web 2.0 conference in Toronto called Mesh, and one of the speakers we invited to the very first one was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, who was then just 21 years old. I have a very clear memory of Matt sitting at a table with my friend Om Malik (whose Gigaom blog network I would later join) and others, while I tried to get a friend to stop using a local company's terrible blog-publishing software and switch to WordPress.

I had a huge amount of respect for Mullenweg then, and I still do now. He not only created a great publishing system but then gave it away as open-source software, although he also set up a for-profit company called Automattic that sold a commercial version of the software and blog-hosting services through wordpress.com (the nonprofit arm was housed at wordpress.org.) Despite that respect, or perhaps because of it, I am surprised — and more than a little disturbed — by what has been going on over the past few weeks. I have seen a side of Matt I was unaware of, and it's not pretty.

Pay up or else

For many, the first rumblings of any discord in the WordPress ecosystem started with a speech Mullenweg gave at WordCamp, the annual get-together of WordPress users, on September 20th. After talking about the vision behind and benefits of open-source software, Mullenweg started talking about those who don't give back to the community and just take advantage of the open source ecosystem and how WordPress users should "vote with your dollars." It seemed — not just to me, but to others who were in attendance — a little out of step with the rest of his uplifting comments.

The same day, Mullenweg had expanded on those thoughts in a blog post on the wordpress.org website, in which he named WP Engine — a large commercial website-hosting company — as the target of his ire and called them a "cancer to WordPress." WP Engine, he said, had not contributed much to the open-source community, and had also been misusing the WordPress and related trademarks for years by not licensing them. After his remarks, WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic and Mullenweg, who sent one back — and then WordPress shut off WP Engine's ability to access the open-source project's database, meaning anyone using WP Engine would be unable to update plugins.

So far, this sounds like a classic commercial dispute, with a big company — WP Engine is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity fund with $100 billion in assets — taking advantage of a small nonprofit, and Mullenweg playing the role of the plucky little founder protecting his baby from being taken advantage of. But the reality is somewhat different. For one thing, WP Engine competes with WordPress.com, which is owned by Automattic — a $7.5-billion company that has given Matt a net worth of about $400 million. Also, the marks that WP Engine was accused of misusing are held by the nonprofit, but Automattic has an exclusive license to use them, which seemed to come as a surprise to many.

Update: I think it's important to note that WP Engine has been using WordPress trademarks for over a decade now, and neither Matt nor Automattic nor the nonprofit ever mentioned that they were infringing on them until two weeks ago, at least not publicly. Automattic also invested in WP Engine at one point not that long ago, and Matt spoke at a conference that WP Engine put on last year, and talked about how WP Engine was the kind of corporate partner that others should emulate. So what changed? Is it just that Automattic is not producing enough revenue to pacify its private equity shareholders, who have funded the company through a number of financing rounds?

It gets worse, from my perspective at least. Wordpress.org, which is the online home of the nonprofit open-source part of the ecosystem, and through which all the licensing and other activities flow, also happens to be owned and controlled by Mullenweg — not through Automattic, but by him personally. "Wordpress.org belongs to me," as he put it in an interview. That probably made sense when Matt first created them as a 19-year-old software developer, but now it looks like the CEO of a multibilion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.

Is extort too strong a word? Perhaps. But in the lawsuit that WP Engine has filed against Automattic and Mullenweg, there are copies of text messages that Matt sent to the CEO of WP Engine just before his speech at WordCamp, offering to alter his talk to something more innocuous if WP Engine paid Automattic 8 percent of its revenues annually, which would amount to about $32 million (Automattic has published a memorandum of understanding that said paying 8 percent of its revenues to hire staff to work on WordPress would also be acceptable, although Mullenweg says that deal is now off the table.)

A godawful mess

There are other somewhat incriminating-sounding messages in the WP Engine statement of claim: in one, Mullenweg threatens to tell the media that the CEO of WP Engine talked to Matt about quitting WP Engine to join Automattic (something WP Engine lawsuit says is untrue.) Mullenweg has also posted about the situation on a public Hacker News forum, which seems, er.... unwise at best (at one point, a poster who says he is a lawyer actually advises Mullenweg to stop talking so he doesn't further incriminate himself, but he continues.) And a former Automattic staffer who was critical of Mullenweg's actions in a Medium post says that the Automattic CEO threatened her with legal action.

Update: There have been more developments since I wrote this that raise questions about Matt's motivation. Among them are the fact that WordPress (i.e. Matt) seized control of a popular plugin developed and maintained on behalf of WP Engine, which even some diehard WordPress supporters found difficult to justify. WordPress said it was a security vulnerability that hadn't been patched, and that the software's terms of use allows it to take over plugins that aren't being maintained, but others pointed out that the spirit of the terms suggests that WordPress is only supposed to do this in extreme situations.

Matt also wrote an incredibly mean-spirited post after David Heinemeir Hansson of 37signals criticized his actions related to WP Engine, saying Matt was "doing open source dirty." In Matt's original post, he made fun of how little money Hansson and his partners have made from their software (and also slipped in a piece of misdirection by saying that the WordPress foundation controls the trademarks, which is technically true, but as I described above, Matt controls the commercial use of those marks.) Matt later took down his post — which you can still see via archive.is — and said he got carried away because "vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain."

If there has been poisoning, it doesn't seem to have stopped. According to a number of reports, Matt has threatened to fire anyone who is caught speaking to the press about what's happening, and 404 Media reported that Mullenweg also told staff in an internal note that employees were free to sign up for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, but that they would have to ask him for the access code — which of course would identify anyone who wants to discuss WordPress there.

Original: It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as protecting WordPress, and forcing a no-good corporation to cough up some dough after years of taking advantage of the community (he says he has been trying to negotiate with WP Engine for more than a year now, while WP Engine says it gives back to WordPress in a number of ways.) To some observers like me, however — and to some other longtime members of the WordPress ecosystem — it looks like Matt has dragged the WordPress community into a legal mess with a variety of unforeseen and potentially serious consequences. Did he ask any members of the community before he did that? Not as far as I know.

Also, there is the unfortunate appearance of a significant conflict of interest — Matt is not just the plucky founder of a nonprofit open-source project, he's a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor, and using his status as the founder of the nonprofit to extract money from that competitor. It's true that the money he was trying to get would have benefitted the open-source project, but convincing WordPress users to stop using WP Engine would also benefit Automattic and Mullenweg personally. According to some programmers, anyone who wants to contribute to the open-source project now has to check a box saying they aren't affiliated with WP Engine.

In a word, it's a godawful mess. And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not. Instead of looking like a hero who is protecting a community, Matt looks like a multimillionaire corporate executive who has come to see a nonprofit, open-source community as an extension of himself, with his own needs or desires as the only criteria for taking action. It's not good for WordPress or the open-source community and ecosystem as a whole, and it is unlikely to end well.

Addendum: I don't want to make light of what Matt or his team put in the Google doc he sent me (which you are free to read) but my response was: "forgive me if I feel that most, if not all, of these [items of clarification] are semantic differences and that you have completely missed the larger point that I (and others who care about WordPress) are trying to make about your behavior." To take just one example, I said that Matt was caught in a conflict of interest and he (or his legal team) responded that "Matt’s dual roles are aligned to ensure Automattic's success enhances WordPress as a platform." Which is not really a correction at all, but appears to be mostly Matt's way of saying "Yes, I have a conflict, but it's for the best."

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Ghost or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.