The King of the Web: Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress Reign

Common users may not even know WordPress exists, yet it powers an estimated 40% of all websites in the world. So it’s the key software that powers much of the web today. Large eruptions around this important ecosystem should therefore be worthy of our attention. One of these is happening right now.

Founding Father

WordPress was originally developed as a blogging platform written in the popular PHP programming language. Matt Mullenweg, then a 19-year-old student, and programmer Mike Little decided together to create a new platform based on an older, abandoned b2/cafelog project. Mullenweg wanted to create a tool that would facilitated the publication of content on the Internet – the first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003.

WordPress quickly gained popularity due to its user-friendliness and flexibility. The two authors continued to develop it and added new features, resulting in a growing community of users and developers. In 2004, version 1.2 was released, bringing support for plug-in moduleswhich allowed users to extend the functionality of WordPress with many different features.

In 2010, the WordPress Foundation was founded, whose goal is to support and protect the open-source WordPress project and its community. The foundation focuses on education, organizing events, and ensuring that WordPress remains free and accessible to all.

Automattic Company

In 2005 Matt Mullenweg founded Automatticwhich focused on providing commercial services and products related to WordPress. Automattic has developed or purchased a number of popular products, including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Akismet, Tumblr and more. The company has become a key commercial player in the WordPress ecosystem.

So far everything is fine, there is an independent foundation to support WordPress and the vast world around it. Besides, there are also plenty commercial companieswhich offer all kinds of pieces to the growing puzzle: modules, templates, tailor-made solutions or even hosting for WordPress with many improvements and its own added value.

The WordPress software tool is still under development free license GNU GPL. This means that anyone can download, install and use it for free. Anyone can modify, expand or improve it in any way according to the license. The role of Matt Mullenweg is very meritorious, he invented the whole imaginary circus, built it and as its principal in the beginning he also led it. Today, however, he is just one of the many businessmen who make a good living from WordPress. Well, he should be.

Matt Mullenweg is also the founder and CEO of the mentioned company Automattic, whose value is estimated at 7.5 billion dollars. WordPress.com is central to Automattic, and individuals and businesses pay anywhere from $4 a month to more than $25,000 a year for services such as advertising products, security and customer support.

So far, the community around WordPress has seemed very large from the outside friendly environmentwhere developers help each other, the foundation supports everyone technically, and large companies make WordPress the top solution for the biggest customers on the Internet. Matt Mullenweg behaved reasonably, and except for a few minor problems, we practically did not know about him. Until a few weeks ago.

Battle with WP Engine

The whole problem started as a fight between Automattic and a rival company WP Engine. It belongs to the leading hosting providers for WordPress. Silicon Valley-based private equity firm Silver Lake bought a majority stake in WP Engine back in 2018, investing $250 million and acquiring three board seats.

Matt Mullenweg joins WP Engine unexpectedly leaned on the WordCamp conferencewhich took place on September 17 in Oregon. According to him, customers should vote with their wallets and think about which of the big players invests in the development of the WordPress editorial system and who just takes it. Freedom is not free, adds Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg then a rival company through his lawyers he challenged [PDF] and claims that WP Engine long-term violates trademarks belonging to the WordPress Foundation and WooCommerce. WP Engine allegedly misleads customers that it is authorized, endorsed or otherwise associated with trademark and other intellectual property holders.

Mullenweg also points out that WP Engine advertises its services as “WordPress for the masses,” but in reality it’s hardly anything does not contribute to its code. WP Engine is said to only spend 40 hours a week on development, while Automattic says it puts 4,000 hours a week into development.

WP Engine’s entire 400 million a year business is said to be based solely on the vast and unauthorized use of services and trademarks of Automattic. According to the petition, WP Engine should immediately remove all the mentioned trademarks from its website, stop using the advertisement for the mentioned products and, of course, pay compensations.

According to Mullenweg, it’s about straightening things out and paying fees or increasing investment in WordPress itself. This is not a money grab: we expect that any company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars on an open-source project should put money back into the project. If they don’t, they may not use his trademarks. WP Engine refused to do both and instead proceeded to bash my efforts to make a fair deal with them, writes Matt Mullenweg at your website.

Independence at a glance

Since then, the whole matter has escalated almost daily. Finally, the WordPress Foundation took a surprising and dramatic step and made resources unavailable to WP Engine needed to serve customers. Their sites were cut off from the central one storage for WordPress, which is run by the foundation. They were thus unable to download any extensions or update existing ones. At the same time, the reasoning is very superficial and dubious.

The result is a lawsuit WP Engine filed last week against Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic. In the lawsuit, the company said it did not violate trademark law and that Mullenweg was using it to anti-competitive I practice. In this case, it is abuse of power, blackmail and greed, says the text of the lawsuit. The abuse at issue here is all the more shocking because it happened in an unexpected place – the WordPress open source community built on promises to freely create, run, change and distribute without barriers or restrictions, for everyone. These promises were not kept and this community was betrayed by the wrongdoing of a few at the expense of others.

In a subsequent statement, a WP Engine spokesperson said that Mullenweg’s behavior harmed not only our company, but the entire WordPress ecosystem. He also added that his approach revealed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if not addressed, threaten to destroy the trust of the WordPress community.

It turns out that the separation of the WordPress Foundation and Automattic is just an illusion. In fact, Matt Mullenweg owns Automattic and also controls the foundation. WordPress.org belongs only to me personally, Mullenweg said quite frankly in an interview with The Verge. The foundation should act as neutral arbitrator in a unified environment. However, it is not a neutral, independent arbiter of the ecosystem. As the owner of WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company that A: threatens me with legal action and B: uses the WordPress trademark. That’s one of the reasons we cut off access to the servers, says Mullenweg.

Pay or program

The foundation later temporarily unblocked WP Engine’s access and gave it until Oct. 1 to agree to the terms of the license agreement that Mullenweg made public. The essence of the agreement is that WP Engine will agree to a license fee of 8% of monthly incomewhich will go to Automattic. Or commit to investing 8% of revenue in the form of salaries for WP Engine employees working on WordPress features for the Foundation.

There was no agreement, so there was a deadlock reintroduced. WP Engine customers find this behavior cruel and inappropriate. But Matt Mullenweg says his critics don’t understand how long he’s been trying to get a deal done. “I’m finally going to talk about the bad things you’re doing if you don’t talk to me,” Mullenweg said.

But WP Engine does not want to accept such conditions. At the same time, it claims that it is legal, does not violate any laws or rules, and behaves exactly the same as hundreds of other companies. It accuses Mullenweg of defamation and defamation over his public comments and claims the WordPress founder is in numerous conflicts of interest in managing the community and your company due to the open-source nature of the technology.

The result is the aforementioned lawsuit, in which both organizations are accused of a joint effort to destroy WP Engine. For the past two weeks, the defendants have been carrying out a plan to deny WPE access to the WordPress community unless it agrees to pay Automattic tens of millions of dollars for an alleged trademark license that WPE does not need at all, the lawsuit says . The defendants’ plan, which came without warning, gave WPE less than 48 hours to either agree to pay them or face the consequences of a ban and public vilification.

Employees riot

Mullenweg himself admitted on his personal website that the trial caused a great stir in his company internal strife. It was clear that a large portion of my colleagues at Automattic disagreed with me and our actions, Mullenweg wrote.

So he decided to offer generous severance pay to anyone who resigns by early Thursday afternoon — $30,000 or six months’ salary, whichever is greater. Anyone who accepted the offer would not be eligible for a “boomerang,” which is the term for rehiring.

Mullenweg said 159 people, or about 8% of the workforce, ultimately accepted the offer. He considers it a good result, which helped to cleanse the company of some people. I feel much lighter now, she says. I am grateful and thankful for all the people who accepted the offer. I look forward even more to working with those who turned down the $126 million and stayed.

Too much power is harmful

Mullenweg may be openly excited and grateful for the employees he has left, but the WordPress community is taking a serious hit. Many WP Engine customers are in deep trouble, and Automattic is gearing up for a legal battle against the $100 billion+ private equity firm. Does anyone really want this?

The main problem in this case is the dictatorial founder, who apparently handed over his powers independently foundation, but in fact still controls it and still clings to it he admits. It also clearly abuses its power by cutting off a competing company from the infrastructure that is meant to serve everyone without distinction.

The Linux community is already prepared for this kind of thing and has experienced such situations over the past two decades many times she passed For everyone, let’s name Mambo vs. Joomla, MySQL vs. MariaDB, OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice, XFree86 vs. X.Org. WordPress is considered the leading example of successful free software, but it is still very centralized and controlled by one person with enormous power.

In such situations, the patient should be prescribed strict treatment: community takeover, complete separation from the dictator, establishment of uniform rules and their 100% compliance without exceptions. The WordPress community will still have to learn this.

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