Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/12/holiday-break/

by PuffinBlue • 2 years ago

135 97 2 years ago

daenney• 2 years ago

There’s one useful paragraph of information in there, and the rest is Matt whining about the consequences of his own actions.

phoe-krk2• 2 years ago

As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you.
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine.

This post should be named "Holiday Breakdown" rather than "Holiday Break". In particular, one thing stood out to me:

I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year.

He can't prevent WP Engine from getting access to Automattic services, so he acts out his revenge on the rest of the world instead?

drcongo• 2 years ago

If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo.

Actually tempted.

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers

A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars crying poverty while throwing a months-long temper tantrum. Hilarious if you don't have any stakes at play.

MyFedora• 2 years ago

He can't prevent WP Engine from getting access to Automattic services, so he acts out his revenge on the rest of the world instead?

Not a fan of Mullenweg either, but let's be realistic. For anyone who isn't completely detached from reality, dealing with lawsuits is draining, emotionally and mentally.

It's easy to point fingers and assume motives, but unless you're in the trenches, it's hard to truly know what's going on in someone's head. Given the circumstances, his decision to take a break isn't exactly out of the ordinary.

Most people would probably do the same if they were in his shoes.

danaris2• 2 years ago

Sure, but he brought 100% of this on himself with his previous petty-tyrant tantrums. There was absolutely no reason he needed to be on the business end of a lawsuit.

acdha4• 2 years ago

The lawsuit exists because he repeatedly chose to force it into existence. He will almost certainly lose it because he repeatedly made bad choices which had to have been against his lawyers’ counsel. He is likely going to lose the foundation’s non-profit status because he repeatedly made bad choices.

I’m sorry for the other people affected and am amazed that he was willing to trash a reputation and business decades in the making, but it was his repeated choice to do so.

solarkraft• 2 years ago

My brother in christ, he made this happen.

phoe-krk2• 2 years ago

I'm not criticizing his personal decision of taking a break. I'm criticizing the fact that he pulled wordpress.org's functionality along with him, as if those functionalities depeneded on him personally, and the way in which that break was announced - namely, by spending most of his announcement criticizing WP Engine instead of talking about breaks.

serial_dev• 2 years ago

I wouldn't say it's revenge, but this meant to cause a stir, so that the few people who don't know about this unfortunate legal battle will hear about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he was so delusional that he thinks this will gain him and his web of companies more sympathy.

He slaps the WordPress community in the face, out of nowhere, then he points at WP Engine, and says: "Isn't it a shame that these a*holes made me slap you... again?".

I'm just speculating in this whole comment, but this is how I interpret this current chapter of the drama.

Brian_K_White3• 2 years ago

"I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services"

Can a court sue a person for lying/libel about the court itself?

Now I'm imagining like how doctors and psychiatrists need to go to other doctors and psychiatrists for themselves.

Normally if you lie about me we both go to a court, but if you lie about the court, where does the court go?

Fluorescence• 2 years ago

Contempt of Court... literally.

IANAL but if this is execution of a court order it would be CoC if it counts as failure to follow orders to include false claims. I don't know if a judge can charge CoC for disrespect of the court when not actually in it. If an ongoing case, might get a warning to remove contravening commentary and only a CoC on failure to do so.

jorams2• 2 years ago

I'm confused why this statement stood out to you. Isn't that exactly what the court ordered? WP Engine could no longer be denied access to wordpress.org services, and thus he is now legally compelled to provide them with the services of wordpress.org.

Brian_K_White3• 2 years ago

Because no the court did not order any such thing.

I'm confused why you think it did.

That was a lie. I'm not confused. It's just that the obvious explaination is not flattering.

Zealotux• 2 years ago

I wish for his sake he had a good friend to take that shovel away from his hands and take him on a long, contemplative, peaceful hike.

Money truly can't buy everything.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

It mostly can, but you need to be willing to actually buy it ( 人 •͈ ᴗ •͈ )

jamwil• 2 years ago

It can’t buy friendship. That’s the one thing in life that is earned and earned alone.

notfooled• 2 years ago

Does he really believe he can convince people that the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.com is a different Matt Mullenweg from the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.org?

They even look the same.

nolok7• 2 years ago

At this point I am pretty sure he convinced HIMSELF of that. Which would explain the whole ongoing fiasco.

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

How are those two Matts related to the one running the Foundation?

tanepiper• 2 years ago

Why has no one intervened on what is clearly a mental breakdown of one man?

anon7000• 2 years ago

Been surrounding himself with yes men for years. I mean he literally said “commit to my ideas or leave with a half year of severance” and a lot of people took him up on the offer

OJFord• 2 years ago

It would take a very awesome job or a very bad market for me not to accept that I think.

chii• 2 years ago

Why would anyone do an intervention, when it neither benefits nor profits them to do it? Let the man break down as much as he desires. The law will eventually catch up; not to mention that the good will, if there was ever any, is but all gone.

nolok7• 2 years ago

He was here saying his lawyer validated everything he was saying when anyone with any little amount of experience with lawyers and B2B legal case could immediately tell no actual decent lawyer would have validated any of that. And what he said here on HN ended up being used against him in the injuction ...

So either he stopped listening to the people around him (including lawyer in a legal case), or the people around him are chosen based on their ability to say yes rather than be useful.

I don't know about the ownership of Automattic to know if there is a board not doing its job either or if they can't do anything anyway.

And ultimately the legal cases "doesn't matter" grand scale, but the damage he is doing to public perception is immense. There are a bazillion marketing agencies out there being affected by his emotionnal breakdown, so if WP Engine were to put themselves in the middle as a separate, "safe" provider they might even benefit even more from the situation. People don't like it when you touch their wallet.

grvdrm• 2 years ago

You said it best: sounds like he surrounds himself with people (and lawyers) that tell him what he wants to hear.

Have worked for someone like that before - it is not fun.

bookofjoe3• 2 years ago

For exactly the same reason anyone who attempted to intervene and send Prince to rehab would have been instantly fired.

varun_chopra• 2 years ago

Damn, reading all this makes me feel terrible. I wonder what goes on in somebody’s mind to make them self-sabotage their lives like Matt has over the past couple of weeks.

altairprime5• 2 years ago

My working theory is that investors are pulling up ladders now that interest rates are VC-unprofitable, and so either he finds a way to increase growth in profit y-o-y or they bail and let him crash like TypePad did years ago. (Except TypePad had paying customers, so their bandwidth bills weren’t anywhere near the looming threat WP is presumably facing.)

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

What he’s doing is basically what every cloud provider does but for some reason he is demonized even more

bookofjoe3• 2 years ago

I've been with Typepad for my blog since 2004 and though it's clunky and glitchy, it still works!

smallerfish• 2 years ago

self-sabotage their lives

He's made his millions. He could leave wordpress completely and have a great rest-of-life. In fact, he probably should.

I knew him when he was working out of CNET's basement on 2nd st in SF, doing the initial commercialization of wordpress. I honestly don't see anything inconsistent in his current behavior with who he was back then.

altairprime5• 2 years ago

It’s not about success or failure, it’s about investing your ego so deeply into your business that morality and sanity end up seeming like reasonable currencies to spend as a last resort to viewing yourself as a failure. He is the Matt in the company name Auto-Matt-ic, so of course he’s taking it poorly. There are serious downsides to Cult of Personality meets Cult of Infinite Annual Growth.

Honestly, though, the weirdest thing to me about all of this is that corporations already behave like Matt every day, yet when a human starts doing so, we consider involuntarily removing them from society. Perhaps we ought to be less forgiving of his behaviors from the non-humans, too.

acdha4• 2 years ago

I think part of it is that corporations tend to be lawful evil, not chaotic. We shouldn’t forgive that but it’s not as dramatic when Oracle or Broadcom jacks up their prices because they don’t target one company with unhinged rants like they kicked the CEO’s dog, and it follows a legal contract process.

That boring grind just isn’t going to get attention the way an exploding dumpster does even though it’s more extractive.

pluc3• 2 years ago

This is just a play to pretend that WordPress.org is run by volunteers when in truth it's entirely run by Automattic. If it was actually ran by volunteers, he couldn't make any of it stop... because people volunteer their time without being told what to do.

I can't wait for him to lose millions of dollars for a hissy fit. It's going to be delicious.

nolok7• 2 years ago

Except the injunction was against .com, not the .org

Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities is fake, and actions like this may backfire in a big way (and I'm not even talking about the taxes aspect of it at the end).

Again, I doubt any lawyer with any once of competency validated this move, let alone write it publicly like this that it's because of the legal case and WP Engine. That's very dumb. What are the lawyers supposed to say when the case will be reviewed ? Nothing to do with the case ? Reasons unrelated to WP Engine ? Their client put it in writing without even being asked to.

arielcostas2• 2 years ago

Except the injunction was against .com, not the .org

Against .com (Automattic) and .org (Mullenweg as an individual)

Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities

Three, actually: WordPress Foundation, Automattic Inc., and Matt Mullenweg (as an individual)

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

a play to pretend that WordPress.org is run by volunteers when in truth it's entirely run by Automattic

It's run entirely by Mullenweg. The Board is clearly unable to have a big-boy conversation.

pluc3• 2 years ago

WordPress.org is way too big to be a one-man show. I am absolutely certain that Mullenweg has nothing to do with plugin or theme validation, account creation or even packaging new WordPress versions, but also certain that he can tell his employees what to do. Hell, all of that should be automated by now.

He wouldn't be able to do any of that with volunteers that aren't operating under his authority.

rurban• 2 years ago

You forgot his mother.

https://projectdmc.org/regarding-mullenwegs-mother-the-wpe-l...

danaris2• 2 years ago

While I agree with your overall conclusion...

If it was actually ran by volunteers, he couldn't make any of it stop... because people volunteer their time without being told what to do.

...this doesn't really follow. Just because someone is a volunteer for an organization doesn't mean the people at the head of that organization have no control over what they do. As a library volunteer, for instance, I can't just take all the books off the shelves and start building forts out of them (unless the library board is into that sort of thing).

He can't force them to show up and do things he tells them that they don't want to do, but he absolutely could stop all operations, including those run by volunteers.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

He can't play pretend wordpress.org is run by a group of volunteers, given how he has demonstrated ultimate decision power over it.

deepfriedchokes• 2 years ago

It’s pretty clear that Mullenweg is having a mental health crisis, not a hissy fit.

Let’s not take pleasure in someone destroying their life because they don’t have the support they need.

CMThF• 2 years ago

Oh no! Anyways...

ochronus• 2 years ago

Jesus, what an absolute sh..show :/ it's really a pity.

gustavorg• 2 years ago

After reading all these comments, I started to worry and even panic because it seemed to me that I was on the wrong side. HN, which side are we on?

Sebb767• 2 years ago

This is a faceted issue where both sides have valid points. Also, HN is not a single entity.

thanksgiving• 2 years ago

Personally, I am now clear that both sides, matt and wp engine are wrong. Matt is more wrong than wp engine but that doesn't mean wp engine is right.

This is just my personal opinion.

ChocolateGod• 2 years ago

It's possible to agree with both stances that WPEngine gets a free ride on a bunch of volunteers and that Matt's behaviour is disgusting

conartist6• 2 years ago

It couldn't matter less whose "side" you are on is kind of the point.

You could like Matt and think he's basically right about freeloaders, yet you would still be horrified and absolutely powerless as you watch him shred his once-whole community into halves, then quarters, then eighths as he doubles down and doubles down some more...

poisonborz• 2 years ago

I think views are mostly uniform around here. Matt had a few valid points but they are overall meritless. WPE would have been nice to contribute more, but they are absolutely not required to. Rug-pulling an open-source project and making defamation like this is a very dangerous example, and as we will see, also illegal. Would be interested in your arguments, I haven't read much if any in his support.

belorn2• 2 years ago

Does google just have that much better lawyers that they can get away with Rug-pulling products and services? I know several examples, from youtube plugins to search optimization, that had their company being pulled from existence because google decided to remove or change their free services or api's. The google graveyard sits alongside a much larger graveyard of companies who got caught when the rug was pulled.

jcarrano• 2 years ago

If you run a business on open source, you have to expect that some actors will contribute less than you would like. It is the price to pay for the advantages open source provides (contributions, widespread adoption etc).

The matter is that this "freeloading" is subjective as the GPL license does not really place any contribution requirements. Matt says it is about trademarks but the court stated TMs were not violated either. Dura lex sed lex, he will have to deal with it.

nperez2• 2 years ago

The preamble of the GPLV2 begins with: "The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. "

I don't think Matt should ever be required to provide the live services of wordpress.org, but as for WP Engine, the license is supposed to be free for them and that's pretty clear.

claudiulodro• 2 years ago

That's Matt's whole argument, no? That anyone can grab it from e.g. Github, but he's not compelled to provide access to the wordpress.org servers or the WordPress trademarks under the GPL.

rsynnott• 2 years ago

I mean, if anything this sort of thing surely has to be pushing people towards WPEngine, rather than the service run by the guy who is visibly losing it?

frereubu• 2 years ago

I run a WordPress agency and I'm absolutely horrified by all of this. It's not cutting through to our clients yet, but building on WordPress suddenly feels incredibly risky when one person can throw their toys out of the pram - the pineapple checkbox is just fucking ridiculous - and derail an entire ecosystem. I really wish there was some kind of mechanism to cut Matt entirely out of WordPress because he deserves to be completely ostracised.

semi-extrinsic2• 2 years ago

Planning to set up a new customer-facing website next year, and there is 0.0% chance that it will be based on WordPress, even though several of our existing websites are WP.

therealdrag0• 2 years ago

What will you use instead?

acdha4• 2 years ago

I wish he had someone who he trusted who could help him get therapy. So many people have benefited from his project but now anyone with a business is going to ask whether he’s about to do something wild, which is a tragic end for such a popular open source project.

nolok7• 2 years ago

That's also what happens when you clear house of everyone but the yes men (which he did with his large severance offer for anyone not willing to say yes to anything he said).

Yes men make you feel better, but they're nowhere to be seen whenever you actually need help.

bookofjoe3• 2 years ago

The problem is that paranoids trust NO ONE, so this is impossible. Same reason rock stars implode from time to time: the money, fame, and ALL ACCESS pass to drugs create a solipsistic world view.

TheNewsIsHere• 2 years ago

Hard agree.

I’ve been chatting to my partners about this, and we aren’t planning to deploy anything net new on WordPress indefinitely.

In one respect it’s a shame to give Matt that power. On the other hand, I can’t control that he’s showing his ass, and I’m not risking my business or client deliverables on an unstable ecosystem.

xnx• 2 years ago

Through all of this, has there been discussion about how WordPress is "freeloading" off of PHP, MySQL, etc.?

josefresco• 2 years ago

Yes, and as a result of that public shaming effort Automattic increased their contributions to the PHP Foundation by 2.5x: https://x.com/ThePHPF/status/1853390265429508427

mkopinsky• 2 years ago

$250k is a respectable amount, but shouldn't it be based on a percentage of their revenue? /s

hulitu• 2 years ago

Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions

If sanctions work so well for other countries, why wouldn't they for WP Engine ? /s

Gud• 2 years ago

I’m so happy this drama came now and not later.

I was in the process of setting up a simple Wordpress site for my wife’s business, to replace the Adobe portfolio she is currently using… so thanks, I guess?

kemayo2• 2 years ago

He timed the initial meltdown perfectly, because it was just before the domains I'd transferred to WordPress.com's registrar when Google Domains got sold were up for renewal. So the net effect there was that Matt bought me a free year of domain hosting, and drove me away just in time for me to not start paying him.

exsomet• 2 years ago

As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers

Didn’t the court order have a whole section about WP Engine covering the cost of providing the required services?

Scion9066• 2 years ago

Matt's side wanted WP Engine to cover what seems to be the costs of running the entire wordpress.org site but the judge didn't go for that:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in...

Defendants [Matt's side] counter that a bond of $1.6 million is appropriate. Opp. at 32. They assert that “the continued maintenance and operation of the Website incurs an estimated $800,000.00 in administrative, server and developer costs per year[,]” and that allowing WPEngine to access the developer resources of the Website permits WPEngine to benefit from the distribution of its products on the Website[,] which “carries with it a separate value.”
[...]
In reply, WPEngine argues that if the court is inclined to require a bond, “it should be a de minimus amount, not wordpress.org’s entire budget for two years.”
[...]
Under these circumstances, the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024. Accordingly, the Court declines to require WPEngine to post a bond.

eonmist• 2 years ago

Why is it a conflict at all? Does modifying the software go against the license? They don't have to follow Matt's philosophy. If Matt want to control the use he should have encoded it in the license. Isn't this a classical case of wrongly chosen license and assuming others agree with you on unstated things.

Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions

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