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Tag Archives: Matt Mullenweg

4 Nov 2024

Matt Mullenweg and His Lawyers Have Very Different Estimates as to the Cost of Running WordPress.org

Recently it was made public that Matt Mullenweg personally has the ability to stop WordPress websites from getting automatically getting security updates from WordPress.org. That was exposed when he blocked customers of WP Engine from getting those updates. He can do that because he apparently personally owns the WordPress website. He provides various justifications for that. Including that someone independently wealthy is needed to subsidize the website, “[t]hey need to be independently wealthy to subsidize http://W.org, which serves 30k requests a second at peak.” It doesn’t actually need to be owned by an individual, but whoever owned, there is the question of how much it costs to run it. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t provided accounting how much it costs to run and how much money he is making off it (he apparently has income from the website). So how much does it cost? The answers coming from his side vary significantly.

On September 26, Matt Mullenweg put the price of supporting only the estimated 1.5 million website hosted with WP Engine as costing millions of dollars, “You could imagine that probably costing millions of dollars per year in infrastructure and cost, development time, everything to support those 1.5 million sites.” [Read more]

30 Oct 2024

WP Tavern’s Latest Author Got the Job in Part by Writing “Ad” Promoting Automattic Powered Hosting From Bluehost

While the timeline of the public part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine sometimes starts with his talk at WordCamp US on September 20, there were two events that happened before that. On September 17, he published a post on his own website that included criticism of WP Engine. That post was promoted in the admin dashboard of every WordPress because he decided years ago that the posts on his personal blog should be included in the “news” feed of WordPress. Two days later, another website included in the “news” feed of WordPress ran a post simply repeating lots of the information from his post. That post started this way:

WordCamp US 2024 is in full swing, and Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, shared his thoughts on a powerful philosophy driving Open Source. [Read more]

28 Oct 2024

Matt Mullenweg Claimed He Makes Money Off of WordPress.org

The current situation with WordPress has made the control of the website for WordPress, WordPress.org, an important security issue. Recently Matt Mullenweg has claimed in multiple places that he personally owns the website. Notably, though, he hasn’t done that on the WordPress website itself. Last week his lawyer also made that claim in a legal filing. If that is true, then a remaining question is who is paying for the website. As we have mentioned in previous posts, parts of the website are clearly hosted by Automattic. An Auotomattic employee stated in December that Automattic “provides the infrastructure and maintenance” for another part of the website. It also widely assumed that web hosts are paying to be included listed as recommended hosts on the WordPress website. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t provided any explanation as to what is going on with any of that. But it turns out he recently indirectly admitted to making money off of the website.

In looking over a recent legal filing from WP Engine’s lawyers, an October 1 tweet from Matt Mullenweg caught our eye for a different reason than the filing’s focus on it. The tweet says “So if http://W.org was under the Foundation, which is a 501c3, we’d have to remove all commercial plugins, like Elementor, Yoast, Jetpack, etc. That’s why I run it through me personally and pay taxes.” He wouldn’t have to pay taxes for simply owning the domain name or the website. He would have to pay taxes if he was receiving income from the website. (WordPress.org doesn’t have any employees, so he wouldn’t be paying employment taxes either.) [Read more]

24 Oct 2024

Matt Mulleweg’s Lawyer Says that WordPress.org Is Not WordPress

We have been following the confusing situation with what WordPress.org is and who owns the website hosted at wordpress.org. That has included Matt Mullenweg disagreeing Automattic’s lawyers over that, which became a legal “mystery”. One place that you can’t find answers to those questions is the About page on wordpress.org and the rest of the About section on of the website. In the text of that page, there are 11 references to WordPress and none for WordPress.org. The title of the page does include WordPress.org. So you would reasonably think that the website of WordPress is wordpress.org. Not so says the lawyers defending Automattic and Matt Mullenweg in the lawsuit brought against them by WP Engine. Instead, they make this claim in a legal filing submitted yesterday:

WordPress.org is not WordPress. WordPress.org is not Automattic or the WordPress Foundation, and is not controlled by either. To the contrary, as Plaintiff itself acknowledges, WordPress.org is Mr. Mullenweg’s responsibility. [Read more]

23 Oct 2024

The WordPress Must Win Open Letter Pretends That WordPress’ Lack of Independent Governance Isn’t Intentional

WordPress has a significant problem with toxic positivity. We have seen that over and over in the security space. Where trying to have a discussion about problems and how they could be fixed leads to criticism for bringing up the problems. That not only means problems don’t get resolved, but it helps out those taking advantage of the WordPress community. Along those lines, the latest WP Weekly newsletter mentioned “a petition calling for the creation of strong WordPress Foundation v2″ called WordPress Must Win. The letter is described as an “appeal to divert all energy being wasted in fights towards co-creating a fully independent, transparent, and strong WordPress Foundation v2.” It doesn’t address the big problem with that proposal, WordPress doesn’t have that independent and transparent governance because the person in control of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, doesn’t want that.

Here is how they described the WordPress Foundation v2: [Read more]

22 Oct 2024

Minutes of WordPress Foundation 2024 Meeting Highlight How Intertwined It Is With Automattic

In a cease and desist letter dated September 23, a lawyer from Perkins Coie wrote that they were writing while representing “Automattic Inc. and WooCommerce, Inc.” One section of that was titled “Violations of Our WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy” and has this information under the heading:

It is further inappropriate that you violated the terms of your WordCamp US Sponsorship Agreement, which specified clearly that “any use of the WordPress trademarks is subject to the WordPress Trademark Policy listed at http://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy.” You repeatedly and intentionally violated the WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy’s prohibition on the “use [of] the[] [WordPress marks] as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name,” as demonstrated in Exhibit B attached hereto. [Read more]

21 Oct 2024

Automattic’s Lawyer Didn’t Mysteriously Delete Statement That WordPress.org Is a Non-Profit, Matt Mullenweg Deleted It

On Friday, the law firm representing WP Engine in their lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg filed a motion for preliminary injunction. One claim made by the lawyers from Quinn Emanuel in that stood out to us, because they claimed something was a mystery, but it isn’t. It suggests that maybe the lawyers are not doing as good a job as they should be or they were not telling the truth.

Here is the statement with the claim: [Read more]

17 Oct 2024

Was the WordPress Foundation Just Matt Mullenweg When It Issued Him a License for the WordPress Trademark?

As part of Matt Mullenweg’s attempt to post through his own bad actions, earlier this week he was criticizing people behind a couple of other open source projects over the ownership of the trademarks. He wrote this:

Let’s talk about trademarks! I don’t own the WordPress trademark personally, it belongs to a foundation on which I’m one of three votes. Rails? [Read more]

15 Oct 2024

Matt Mullenweg Claims He Doesn’t Know about Day to Day Operations of the WordPress Foundation, Who Does?

So far, with everything going on with WordPress, there has been a decided lack of new details exposed by journalists. There have been plenty of stories, but most just repeating claims made by various parties in the situation. That changed today, as TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta reported on an internal Automattic blog post that laid out the strategy of trying to gain more control over the WordPress trademark. Here is part of how he described that:

The message – penned by Automattic’s then-chief legal officer Paul Sieminski in January 2024 on the company’s “P2” (a version of WordPress aimed at internal communications) – outlined a plan for how Automattic would approach this strategy, through direct negotiations with companies and via legal action from “nice and not nice lawyers and trademark enforcers.” And Automattic potentially would register further trademarks going forward. [Read more]

14 Oct 2024

How Did Automattic Employee Know in Advance of Takeover of Advanced Custom Fields if It Was Done by WordPress Security Team?

On Saturday, Matt Mullenweg announced a takeover of WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields plugin. That isn’t really surprising. As we wrote recently, Matt Mullenweg can hold plugin developers’ hostage. Matt Mullenweg claimed this was done by the WordPress security team:

On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem. [Read more]