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.
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.
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.
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)
This is just a long way of saying "tl;dr", isn't it?
TL;DR: TL;DR
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
I found this moment and the few minutes after it to be pretty fiery:
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.
I also took that to be just a recent example.
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:
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/thesis/
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.
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.
Yes. Apparently, WPEngine has been dragging this along forever, being the primary party responsible for impacted users, but somehow has gotten away from the responsibility.
WordPress could have handled escalation better, and I’m sure they will in the future, but, what a weird thing public perception is.
> 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.
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
Really don't like this little dweeb (Theo). Poisonous individual.