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Tag Archives: Matt Mullenweg

3 Oct 2024

Untangling Matt Mullenweg’s Confusing Web of Automattic, WordPress, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation

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. [Read more]

2 Oct 2024

Who or What is WordPress.org?

As Matt Mullenweg continues his extortion campaign against WP Engine, he continues to confirm that there is an extortion campaign occurring. A new post on Automattic’s website starts this way:

One of the many lies in Silver Lake and WP Engine’s C&D was their claim that Automattic demanded money from them moments before our CEO Matt Mullenweg gave his keynote at WordCamp US. [Read more]

2 Oct 2024

Why Does Automattic Have So Much Control of WordPress When It Provides So Little of the Pledged Five for the Future Hours?

As part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against a competitor of his for-profit company Automattic, has focused on contributions to WordPress measured by the Five for the Future program. That is a program created by him and, based on recent activity, controlled by employees of his company Automattic. Here is how he compared Automattic’s activity to the competitor’s activity on his own blog in a post from September 17:

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. [Read more]

2 Oct 2024

Matt Mullenweg’s Claim About the Revocability of the Automattic’s License of the WordPress Trademark is Disputed by the License

In an interview that Matt Mullenweg did over the weekend, which was filled with falsehoods. One false statement he said stood out because of recently uncovered information. That uncovered information is the license that Automattic has for usage of the WordPress Trademark. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t it put out there for scrutiny and it turns out to be more extensive than he had made it sound when he was promoting having moved the license to the WordPress Foundation.

The license agreement states that Automattic has “an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license.” [Read more]

30 Sep 2024

Matt Mullenweg Can Hold WordPress Plugin Developers Hostage Too

As part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine, he blocked off WP Engine’s customer from software updates coming from wordpress.org. In an interview he did during the weekend, he wanted to highlight another aspect of this campaign. He had blocked WP Engine from providing updates to their 2+ million install plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is free, in the WordPress Plugin Directory. That also applied to their other plugins. His comments were, like everything else from him, highly problematic.

He said that “They need to figure out how to get all those people using their own update servers.” It is actually easy technically to provide updates for plugins outside of the Plugin Directory. You only need a little bit of code in the plugin and have hosting for a file that lists information on the latest version of the plugin and .zip file of the plugin. WP Engine is a major web host, so they could handle serving up the .zip files. Presumably, Matt Mullenweg should be aware of that, as his competing company is in the hosting business as well. The problem is that WordPress Plugin Directory doesn’t allow you to add the code needed to do that to the plugin. That is spelled out in guideline 8 of the Detailed Plugin Guidelines: [Read more]

30 Sep 2024

Matt Mullenweg Wants to Be Able to Hold the Security of Your WordPress Website Hostage

Matt Mullenweg’s recent unilateral decision to stop customers of WP Engine from getting updates for the software hosted on wordpress.org has exposed a huge security issue that has long existed with WordPress. That one person has control of WordPress infrastructure. That is something he has presumably intentional hidden away, as we noted in a post about the ownership situation of the WordPress website. That is a significant problem when that person also has a large business that competes with others in the WordPress ecosystem.

It would be deeply irresponsible for others in the community to assume this is a one-off situation looking at the “rational” he provided. He claimed that WP Engine needed a “trademark license,” despite WordPress not offering trademark licenses (an unrelated entity he controls does). He claimed that WP Engines’ “legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org” caused the block, despite a complete lack of those things being true (they had sent a cease and desist letter targeted to unrelated entities he controls). He also claimed that WP Engine had engaged in “attacks on us,” who the us isn’t specified. They had responded through their lawyers to Matt Mullenweg’s attempted extortion against them. Not attack anyone. [Read more]

30 Sep 2024

Who Owns The WordPress Website and wordpress.org?

Matt Mullenweg’s extortion campaign against WP Engine has serious security implications. Especially over the possibility that access to the WordPress website might be blocked to certain groups, as has now happened, or it could shut entirely. What seems like it should be a simple to answer question is who owns the WordPress website and the related wordpress.org domain name. It turns out there is understandable confusion over that. The kind of confusion that Matt Mullenweg seems rather concerned about between WordPress WP Engine, but the kind of confusion it turns out he often engages in. It appears that Matt Mullenweg owns those, which we will get in to more detail, after looking at the confused information out there.

WordPress Foundation Owns It?

If you were to search Google to try to figure out the answer, the snippet for one of top results, which is from the Awesome Motive owned WP Beginner, says “To summarize, WordPress.org and the WordPress trademark are owned by the WordPress Foundation”: [Read more]

30 Sep 2024

Here Is the Extensive License that Automattic Has for the WordPress Trademark

One piece of Matt Mullenweg’s attempted extortion against WP Engine, which has serious security implications, is the WordPress trademark. What hasn’t been clear is the situation with the trademark is. It is well known that previously belonged to Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic and now belongs to the WordPress Foundation, which Matt Mullenweg clearly has control over. But beyond that, the extensive nature of Auttomatic’s ability to use the trademark hasn’t been disclosed by Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg announced the transfer of the trademark in September 2010. In his post on his personal website, he made no mention of Automattic still having anything to do with the trademark. In the comments, though, he wrote this: [Read more]

30 Sep 2024

The WordPress Foundation Blog is Written by Automattic Employees

With the ongoing attempted extortion of WP Engine by Matt Mullenweg and the security risks that pose for WordPress, a central issue in that is Matt Mullenweg’s role in several ostensibly separate entities and using his role in one to benefit another. He isn’t the only one with roles across more than one of those. While looking at another aspect of the WordPress Foundation, we noticed that its News blog is being exclusively written by employees of his for-proftit company Automattic. Here are the dates and post authors of posts from last two years for that:

  • June 18, 2024: Julia Golomb
  • April 18, 2024: Julia Golomb
  • February 9, 2024: Reyes Martinez
  • June 29, 2023: Julia Golomb
  • May 10, 2023: Julia Golomb

On the WordPress website, Julia Golomb lists her employer as Automattic and it says that “Automattic sponsors Julia Golomb to contribute 40 hours per week to the Community team.” [Read more]

26 Sep 2024

The WordPress Foundation is Nothing Like the Mozilla Foundation

As part of Matt Mullenweg’s extortion attempt against WP Engine (and with his latest action, the wider WordPress community), he has claimed that there was confusion between WordPress and WP Engine. As many have pointed out, there is much more confusion between WordPress and his company Automattic’s WordPress.com service. That isn’t the only place where there is confusion. Take this recent attempt at an explanation of the structure of WordPress, including the WordPress Foundation:

WordPress’s structure works similar to the Mozilla Foundation, with a small exception that Matt is a majority stake on both sides (Automattic and the WordPress Foundation). Mozilla’s board does have some cross-over between the Foundation and Corporation, but with larger boards that influence is diluted. [Read more]