Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against a competitor of his-for profit company has led more focus on the web of entities Matt Mullenweg has created and a lot of confusion between them. We are going to try to untangle those in this post. There are three or four central ones and two additional ones worth mentioning. If we have missed something (the web is complicated), please leave a comment so that we can update the post.

Automattic

Automattic is Matt Mullenweg’s for-profit company that has various WordPress focused solutions as well as unrelated ones. The WordPress related solutions include Akismet, Gravatar, Jetpack, Pressable, WooCommerce, WordPress.com service, and WP VIP. They also are investors in other companies in the WordPress space.

Automattic employees claim Automattic is separate from WordPress. For example, one employee recently said: “Would encourage you to be careful saying “WP/Automattic” when the WordPress project is so much more than Automattic and always should be.” That is hard to square with what else is going. For example, Automattic hired someone and put them in charge of “management of the WordPress YouTube channel.” The Executive Director of WordPress didn’t disclose the employment situation when announcing the person was being put in to the role.

Originally, Automattic owned the WordPress trademark. It was transferred to the WordPress Foundation, but Automattic has a pretty extensive license for the WordPress trademark.

WordPress

There doesn’t appear to be an organizational chart for WordPress. There isn’t any board or other leadership group running it. Matt Mullenweg is widely referred to as the head of it. He was one of the co-founders of WordPress.

The aforementioned Executive Director of WordPress is not someone appointed by a board of the WordPress community, instead Matt Mullenweg simply gave them that title. He didn’t disclose their employment at Automattic. According to the Executive Directory, she “also leads Automattic‘s open source division.” So WordPress essentially slots in to Automattic’s organization chart.

There is an obvious conflict of interest problem for both of them. The Executive Director announced in 2021 WordPress was going to have a conflict of interest policy. It was never released. Neither was a companion code of ethics.

Below that those two people, Automattic employees appear to large amount of control of WordPress without it being clearly disclosed what exactly they have control over or any justification for that level of control. For example, one team has Automattic employees posting on their blog as if they are members of the team, without being listed as members or ever being disclosed to be on the team. Another team, was shut down, apparently because they had independent minded members who believed in governance. Even before it was shutdown, a lot of their area of focus was restricted to Automattic employees.

WordPress does things that benefit Automattic. For example, the install of WordPress includes Automattic’s Akismet plugin. The only other plugin included is a plugin from Matt Mullenweg. When you go to install news plugins from the admin interface of WordPress there are a Featured plugins that are shown. Two of those are commercial, Automattic’s Akismet and Jetpack plugins. There are the first row shown:

No criteria or explanation is given as to how Featured plugins are chosen.

The top person in charge of new versions of WordPress, the Release Lead, has since at least 2019, almost always been Matt Mullenweg. The Executive Director and another Automattic employee were the other Release Leads. (There is some discrepancy over if two releases had a non-Automattic lead, though it appears they were not.)

One aspect of extortion campaign by Matt Mullenweg was that the “news” feed on the admin dashboard after you login to WordPress included links to post written by him the extortion victim. Matt Mullenweg personally control what website’s posts get included. On the associated website for the feed, “If you think your blog should be part of this site, send an email to Matt.” It doesn’t say who Matt is or how to email him. The feed includes his personal blog, the blog of Automattic businesses, a blog by an Automattic employee promoting Gutenberg (something that Matt Mullenweg and Automattic are heavily involved in), and group of podcasts tied in with Automattic.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is sometimes used to differentiate between the WordPress software and the WordPress.com, but is also appears to be used by Matt Mullenweg to refer to his ownership of the WordPress website. The WordPress is notably silent as to who owns the website/domain name, and who is paying for the infrastructure for it.

Some of the website infrastructure belongs to Automattic. Specifically, images for the website are hosted on i0.wp.com, wp.com redirects to wordpress.com. Plugin icon images are hosted on ps.w.org. A traceroute brought us to the same Automattic IP address range for i0.wp.com and ps.w.org. The plugin icons being hosted by Automattic permits them to gather information on what plugins WordPress users are interested in.

Based on a comment Matt Mullenweg made in an interview over the weekend, he apparently personally has license to use the WordPress trademark. Though the license doesn’t appear to be available publicly.

WordPress Foundation

The role of the WordPress Foundation is often a source of confusion. While Matt Mullenweg and others have likened it to the Mozilla Foundation, it isn’t. Text on the homepage of it would make you believe it has a central role within WordPress, as it is stated (emphasis theirs):

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.

In reality, the foundation owns some trademarks, has a scholarship, and through a subsidiary, is involved in WordPress meetings.

Matt Mullenweg is one of three directors on the board of the foundation. One of the others hasn’t had any public connection with WordPress in over a decade and the other has no public connection.

Audrey Capital

The website of Audrey Capital describes it as “an angel investment and research company created by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress to help innovative ideas grow.” It also employs two people that manage WordPress.org for Matt Mulleweg. When Matt Mullenweg removed important information plugin developers, it was one of those people that took the action.

The WP Tavern

The About page of the WP Tavern describes it as “a news site focused on all things WordPress.” Also, according to that page, it was acquired by Matt Mullenweg. Completely out of line with being a news site, its posts never disclose that the ownership when covering Matt Mullenweg, Automattic, or other related parties. The lack of disclosure has been noted repeatedly, but never fixed. One of the writers claimed they wanted to do that:

I do want us to have a disclosure system here on the site with more specifics than the About page, and it is something that I think we’ll implement.

That person later left the WP Tavern and moved over to Automattic.

Less than two months later, that person wrote a post criticizing a competitor of WordPress for getting a sponsored article written. In that, they wrote this:

If you read through the rest of the article, you will note that the post was sponsored by Storyblok. At least they were honest about it.

Somehow I believe most readers would have skipped the article if that was posted before the content.

They did not disclose being an employee of Matt Mullenweg, while criticizing a competitor for an article with disclosure.