WordPress the supply chain is currently dependent on wordpress.org. The community is working to route around this by decentralising distribution - see efforts such as AspirePress.
WordPress the software development project is dependent on wordpress.org, and there is no way to route around this unless Matt agrees to give up his DFL position or a fork is created.
WordPress the brand is being tarnished, mostly by Matt’s actions. wpdrama creates a riskier environment when assessing whether to use it as a CMS.
WordPress the community is being denigrated and diminished. Again, I think only a change in governance can resolve that.
The one thing I’ve learned from all this drama is that all of the separated components of “WordPress”, from the .com to the .org and from the code to the hosting, were mostly superficial. Mullenweg appears to be equally in control of all of them and throws his weight around wherever it suits his agenda.
I know Matt hangs around these parts and at no turn have I seen him engage in curious conversation.
Basically what I have seen is emotional outbursts and crusading against the windmills.
I don't have any stake in this drama since I haven't used WordPress for something like 13 years, buy to me this feels like crab bucket mentality, going after Mullenweg because he feels like a target that could actually be taken down as opposed to people like Zuck/Page/Brin/Nadella/etc who are truly untouchable. The level of vitriol just seems unreasonably high for something that isn't really that big of a deal.
I cannot understand how he is the guy in charge of all of this.
There is no viable way to separate without forking the project and using a different name. Mullenweg is already trying to make like difficult for anyone he suspects might be thinking about forking, so anyone leading a fork has to assume that Mullenweg is going to make their life hell. He’s not afraid of dumping money into lawsuits to crush people, so forking WP is a scary proposition.
Besides an org like that that would do it for ideological reasons, the only other party would be some large org that is deeply invested in the WP ecosystem. I imagine there is some ecomm giant that's probably got 8 or 9 figures sunk into WP, for them it would be worthwhile to fork as it would likely be cheaper than migrating to another solution, but that's a hard maybe because you would need the right org with the right set of priorities to take on something like this.
All of this is just pure speculation, if I'm being honest I find it unlikely that either scenario plays out in the real world.
Counting income + assets - liabilities - expenses:
Mozilla ~142.7 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...
Linux Foundation ~136 million https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
Apache has ~4.25 million based on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/470...
FSF - 902k if I did the math right on this (ouch) https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/428...
Not sure I'd trust FSF to steward a project. Apache could but it feels like they're almost a graveyard.
Also not sure I'd want Linux to control it based on the latest Chrome/Google dealings.
Not a huge fan of Mozilla, but it's somewhat in their wheelhouse, at least.
What else is there for tech non-profits and dev stewardship of something like this?
Drupal community to benefit here tremendously. As well as consultant work to migrate away from WP
“Why did you do this thing?”
“Sir, you told us to.”
“Don’t argue with me. You’re fired”
"Hire great engineers that have sustainability in their bones"
Actual implementation by the grifters : Hire other grifters with Sustainability in their resume, whose only job is to act as gatekeepers with psuedo-science garbage and make this team as big as the Engineering Team.
It's perfectly fine for the leader to look at the implementation and say "what's this fucking bullshit and cut everything".
These concepts are of course completely alien to leader/rich-hating HN
Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.
This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.
The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.
These were salaried employees working on the sustainability team, correct? If not, how could Mullenweg shut it down?
Check out the bios of the team reps here: https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2024/12/13/proposa...
Here are all the contributors on the GitHub repo, also all volunteers: https://github.com/WordPress/sustainability/graphs/contribut...
Mullenweg can shut down the team because he has complete control over all the WordPress.org infrastructure.
This is a huge drama about nothing. Matt is being a baby and so is everybody else who's crying about it. There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for any of the involved parties to not simply walk away and stop associating with each other.
I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
That was my experience- I didn't feel like it was worth all the work just to be able to contribute to WP, for reasons that are becoming more widelt visable.
And yes, there is money on the line for a lot of folks- if you sell WP-based solutions to the gov and large NGOs (that's what the co I was working with did), than it is very hard to "just walk away" because in addition to ceasing the current work you'd have to find an alternate solution, re-train the hundreds of people you've trained to admin the system, etc/etc/etc.
Some WP sites have thousands of admin users and hundreds of thousand of items of content.
So if photomatt takes his toys and goes home, yeah, these projects all have the code and can fork it or do whatever and photomatt can't do much, but there is a tremendous real cost to folks. Millions of dollars in the case of the small 7-person shop which I worked at.
If they were actually being paid for this, which is contrary to numerous other comments in this discussion, then it actually does make sense for Matt to cancel that work. But I have been assured they weren't being paid, so they didn't have any money on the line and can just walk away from Matt's org while simultaneously continuing the work they are supposedly super passionate about.
You might consider, though, that the context of a bit of work does matter. And to other folks working in that context might take that capricious dismissal as a mark of how their own contributions might be seen.
Like yeah, they weren't getting paid, but that also means it wasn't a big cost to keep them volunteering- there are people up and down the WP ecosystem doing a lot of work for the exact same reasons. It's why- to my original point- I never tried to participate in the larger development efforts: the thing is locked up by one person so ultimately those folks are working on someone else's toy.
However once the publish: He has the trademark, and unless this group of people was very careful in their wording, to only state technical facts and not opinions, he can sue them for perceived damages and based on recent action he seems to have chosen the aggressive approach, despites potential trouble for his company and product.
The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.
Like, it's incredibly irritating to me that mobile browsers are practically unusable, not because mobile design isn't ubiquitous, but because every website now makes my phone hot because it's running 800 MB of fucking JavaScript to render text.
> Three Mile Island, the power plant near Middletown, Pa., that was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, will reopen to power Microsoft's data centers
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...
If WordPress was released today and had the sort of growth that AI has has, yeah, there would probably be considerations to spin up new power sources.
Saving 5% electricity per WordPress http request is a massive amount of electricity in aggregate.
whatabout: retasking yourself on that issue instead of just commenting?
Is it bizarrely heinous? Or is it just kind of bad? I enjoy WordPress drama, and run a couple of lazy WordPress services, but I don't think that this is actually worth all the spilt ink and tears, relative to all the other injustices a person might choose to concern themselves with.
I don't know man, I feel like the entire planet has gone mad over the course of about 15 years. Who am I supposed to root for? The executives who throw public tantrums and behave like children? Or the activists who try to turn the company into a vehicle for whatever the latest left wing cause is?
How about someone in that organization gets back to actually building some good fucking software? Is there a connection between all the horsing around these people do and the fact that after 5+ years of development Gutenberg is still kind of a pile of crap? I feel like not so long ago in history it would have been obvious to everyone that the answer is yes, work is about actually working and producing things. But now everybody's primary job is apparently to wail on Twitter instead of putting butt in seat for 8 hours a day, writing code, and on a good day, maybe figuring out how to get a little better at it. Idk man. Whatever this world is I don't really want any part of it anymore, I want to switch to the sane timeline.
1.
> When will you be honest with your followers? That the repeated adult content violations were not pictures like this, but likely ones on your other accounts (actual names): irishbigcockgiri, burgerfootjob, furryvore-burps, bredstrogen, cumburp, doggirlballsack, hungqueen, bigtittycockgf, bigcocktittygf, girltaint, muskmommy, girlballsack, showersharts, sapiosexual-breeder, catgirlhairball, catgirlcondom, catgirlcumsock, catgirlballsack, cumspangler.
2.
> These photos are fine for Tumblr. Someone else could post them. You can't because you violated the community guidelines and terms of service multiple times and are banned for life. With your new accounts on other services, consider not posting deathwishes against their staff.
3.
> Reporting credible threats of violence or terrorism is actually a legal requirement. No one reported your "i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death", however.
> There's no problem with your transition photos, or the millions of others that have been posted.
That last tweet in particular is evidence against the claim, is it not?
"You can't proooove that he's transphobic, and you can't prooooove that he outed her because he wanted transphobes to harass her" yeah well we're not in court, this is a social matter. I am an individual human who has to make low-information judgments about other members of my species, and my low-information judgment of Mullenweg is that he's a transphobe. It is impossible for me to see an honest argument to the contrary. I am aware that dishonest arguments come quite easily:
- "innocent before proven guilty!"
- "what about the tweet where he said 'trans people are okay I guess'"
- "that was 8 months ago, when he was a wee 40-year-old lad, he's grown since then"
But considering Mullenweg is a horrifically bad person in many other areas of his life, I am quite confident he also sucks when it comes to civil rights.
It's quite funny that you doubled down with a feels over reals argument though. Just shows that deep down, you know you're throwing around spurious allegations.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You seem to have a rather large chip on your shoulder.
Honestly, Matt gets my kudos if for no other reason because he's the bigger man (relatively speaking) by engaging in artful trolling instead of plainly undressed insults. At least that shit's potentially funny.
No, being immature does not make you “the bigger man.”
Are you saying that journalists can never share an opinion? Also, are you trying to argue Mullenweg is only looking bad because of journalists? His own actions and words seem to be doing a pretty good job on their own.
No. A journalist's job is to journal something and nothing else, it's literally their job name. Much like I do not expect nor want NTFS or ext4 to tell me what it thinks about my files, I don't want a "journalist" to tell me what it thinks about what happened let alone how I should think. That's not what I would read journalism for.
If a "journalist" wants to write their thoughts they should be an author, critic, commentator, influencer, or the like instead. They will still be cancers upon society, but at least they won't sully journalism.
>are you trying to argue Mullenweg is only looking bad because of journalists?
Matt dug his own grave, but "journalists" are definitely making it harder to have worthwhile conversations about him.
Just as programmers not only “design schedule or plan radio or television programs”, journalism is not just “journaling”
That is a pretty plainly terrible mindset, but one that I don't think is very uncommon.
Her M.O. is to take a 'hot-button' issue and simply add fuel to the fire with zero nuance or in-depth analysis.
Not related, see the entire ReCode fiasco.
Again, I hold no sympathy for Silver Lake, but I hope they fuck him up good.
This is crazy if true.
I wonder if Matty boy saw my comment, on the post here about the ACF takeover, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, lol.
Certainly, he has single-handedly turned the entire WP ecosystem into a toxic cesspool. I feel sorry for everyone that he seems to have threatened, bullied, or outright extorted. Anyone aware of these shenanigans would be wise to steer clear of the entire mess until he is out of the picture.
2. If the behavior is as bad as it seems... Did Mullenweg always behave like this? (Like, hints of it, even if the circumstances at the time meant it wasn't very negative?) Or did it increase slowly over time, or change rather abruptly?
I think a national-politics-grade PR attack campaign is unlikely. So, if it wasn't that, I'm wondering whether the current character was always there, or there was some gradual or punctuated mental health change. That can often be helped and healed.
Separately, in any case, the larger WordPress community will hopefully realize the risks of dictators and kingdoms, and move to be more resilient. And not make the same mistake yet again, just with a new overlord, like we often do in tech consumption (and in human history, for that matter).
Like others who faced pushback from certain communities, he decided to double down on the arrogance and insensitivity. Unlike others, he doesn't have the charisma, goodwill, or video podcast to pull it off.
Matt, literally (he turned 21 then), came of age in the 2004-2006 Silicon Valley climate of the post-Bubble "Trümmerfrauen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau) movements that brought us things such as DHH and Rails, Matt and WordPress, Andreessen being himself, and others, all of which are now considered "problematic."
I don't think Matt has changed. The climate these projects operate in, has. To some it's an eggshell walk, to others a game of signaling the right virtues while acting against them in secret, and to some a chance to achieve relevancy or dominance. And for all of them, there's a day of reckoning. 2005s proclivities have no similarities to 2025 dogma, and why should they. Neither did 2005 have any with 1985. Feel old, yet?
Matt's Matt. That Matt was what was needed to kick a floundering piece of software (P2) into the kind of trajectory that helped transform it into the absolute unit of a social and communications portfolio, Automattic is today.
That kind of Matt is a dinosaur in 2025. As were 1985 coders and founders in 2005. Heck, 2005 didn't look too kindly upon 1999 Silicon Valley mindsets.
I guess Matt's "problem" is not, that he has changed. Matt's difficulty is, that he hasn't, and that 2025 is nothing like 2005. And, like DHH or Andreessen or Brendan Eich back in 2014, that can ... hurt. I'm too old to care, but I'd presume today's "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045, unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.
> I'd presume today's "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045, unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.
It's probably worth pointing out that most people do actually grow up and change with the times.
When it comes to Mullenweg, I am always impressed that there is often some worse behaviour mentioned in the article...
I took a 12 years hiatus from WP and just went back into actively using it since a couple of weeks now.
The shift went clearly into massive plugins that frees you from all the grunt work that was necessary 10+ years ago.
To me as someone who once wrote plugins on my own, had to develop themes totally by hand using the infamous WP loop etc. this is like going from command line to drag and drop UI.
WP is a OS and Divi, ThriveTheme etc. took over.
I like it, it saves a ton of time.
Is like Dreamweaver but you have to run Dreamweaver all the time your site has visitors and an instance of Dreamweaver for each visitor.
Then he found out these guys actually spend all their working lives implementing plugins that do little more than display "Your site needed 0.04663kg of CO2 to run this year" next to a green leaf.
Seeing how they spent 1,5 years on this and have little more to show than "concepts of a plan" he was right to shut this down.
These were volunteers.
> Seeing how they spent 1,5 years
They didn't.
> he was right to shut this down.
Ignorance is a choice.
If this is true: Is there any possible explanation for such a statement where leadership comes out unscathed?
The Sustainability agenda , quoted by the article, appears excessive to me as well - and it resonates with me why Mullenweg is asking for a different approach.
With the dramas going on, shutting down the channel was a dick move , though.
- Stuff going on you're not aware of?
- Things spiraling out of control/becoming self-directed?
- You forgetting what you did or said a few months/years ago, and getting mad on others in consequence?
- Your intentions not well understood?
All of this is on you (the leader). That's reason for resignation.
The behavior around it is just childish IMO. I wonder how this affects him being able to do his job.
Forgetting? That’s a lot of good faith on your part. Where in the time of people denying everything even with undeniable video/audio evidence and their target audience believes them. If you don’t believe then you were not the target audience and are irrelevant
Bingo. If someone wants to be the leader, then they have to deal with leadership. That means that everything going on under your leadership is your responsibility. We've let this slide as a society, letting leaders take credit for successes and then blaming others for failures.
It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the article proves.
But, I will say, Drupal is definitely confusing at first with all its nodes and entities and content types and poor documentation and so on. But on the other hand, it doesn't really force you into anything. You can build almost anything with Drupal, which I think makes it a great CMS.
https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms
Going to look into it in the next few weeks as a possible alternative.
This includes the account of someone who has not been involved with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3]
[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
[2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochast...
For people who claim to be really smart, original thinkers, they follow the herd right toward the cliff.
The whole sustainability area needs a rethink. It needs to be linked to cost of doing business (and no - not idiotic carbon taxes) and I think if you’re using public cloud services it already is. If your code is inefficient you will be hit with higher bills (I know I’m abstracting wildly but this is mostly true). If you need to lower cost/utilization write the code to do optimize.
If you own your own data centers, now that’s a very different proposition. Not sure whether Wordpress owns these - and I don’t mean renting space and racks. I mean owning the entire space.
> Varszegi said the team’s most impactful contribution to WordPress was the publication of the Sustainable Events Handbook, designed to help WordCamp organizers improve the sustainability of their events. The team was also developing a plugin to help site owners estimate the carbon footprint of their website.
So the answer is: Not much.
I just hope it's over quickly and some other ownership model comes into place. WordPress is an impressive & important project, it'd be a shame to lose it because of one lunatic.
What does this mean?
Better to prepare for more. Some did it out of conviction. But as we saw with FB the ones that did for other reasons are going to back pedal