At the higher levels of serious companies — by which I mean ones trying to win in the market, regardless of size - managers and executives regularly receive training about this.
I can’t say more because this is my alt, but: “executives are childish”, “executives are psychopaths”, etc. are very common, often incorrect narratives. If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.
To return to topic: something is going seriously sideways with Matt, and I wish him the best.
Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.
wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets
Automattic previously spent ~4k hours a week maintaining wordpress, so I'm not sure what you're on about
But if we're going by hours...the WP Community as a whole probably spent several hundred thousand hours on maintaining or improving WP last week.
Even if half the staff quit (they didn't) they'd still have hundreds of employees...
You seriously don't think they had 4 people working on Wordpress full-time?
At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.
the code of WP is free software. free-as-in-freedom.
the services are not, and never were... they were free-as-in-beer.
RMS taught us about this, and it comes in handy again.
It's the services that they got cut-off from. They are separate things that to the layman are seen as "wordpress".
> I don't recall voicing an opinion
Well, you mention they contribute to the ecosystem. If it is not your supply chain, you cannot dictate how it is run. You call it an attach, they call it a commercial endeavour.
1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that they are not affiliated with WP Engine"
2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course
3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the text rather than make code changes.
Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate narratives
I actually find your explanation even less believable than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I don't necessarily believe it is either).
If there were no facts in evidence, it your alternate possibility would still not be plausible since there's no reason the person wouldn't hide the checkbox if they didn't want to delete it but there's also no reason not to just delete it since removing it from the client is as much of a code change as changing the text.
Developers on WordPress.org have stated that the value was not stored, and still is not stored. Matt also said he didn't care if you checked it or not.
WordPress isn't as legacy as those platforms for whom "too hard to change the functionality, just change the text" is common.
To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any adults left?
I've implemented a handful of methods to detect 'networks' of these bots/spammers/karma farming accounts and, from the subreddits I'm monitoring, it's _more than half_ of the total accounts posting to them. This is across subreddits of all types, sizes and topics. Massive subs, regional subs, local subs, they're all completely inundated with these accounts - and these are the ones that make it through Reddit's own spam detection and whatever each subreddit has in place to handle moderation. These are the posts that do go public, more than half of the _accounts_ I've determined are spam/karma farming/bots. It's an even greater proportion of the _posts_ that belong to these accounts. (Thus, there are more spammers than "real" users, and they're posting more than the "real" users)
And this is with rather elementary methods of determining "spam" from "real" users/content. Those spammers who aren't being very lazy can pretty easily slide through my filters. (I'm detecting 'duplicates' of images and post titles/account descriptions using perceptual hash/simhash and hamming distance only - I'm rolling out text/image vector embedding based duplicate detection now and the numbers are even worse with this in place but I don't have it properly tuned yet) They're literally just re-posting the same content that successful/high karma accounts have previously posted en masse across as many subreddits as they can find/aren't banned from and it's wildly effective.
What's crazy to me is that many of them are in the 6 and 7 digits of karma - obviously spam accounts with > 1,000,000 karma is wild.
It seems to me that Reddit has zero interest in controlling this. Some might argue this is confirmed by the lack of moderation tools available to subreddit mods (which was ultimately the motivation of me building this system - but when they changed the API stuff I changed my goals/intention with it).
Reddit destroying its user communities causes real damage. Those users don't magically congregate somewhere else.
The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it. /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of /r/Israel.[2]
Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It is clearly spelt out in the terms.
“You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other subreddits and spreads propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism.”
Personally I don’t use Reddit that much, so I can speak to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do think it is.
Point noted. I should have prefixed it with zionist Israelis.
There are Israelis that have been awakened to the truth (see BT Salem, Ilan Pappe milo peled etc)
Also many former American Jewish Zionists [1] see Israelism film. You can also watch this to understand how these ideas and misinformation is propagated at an industrial scale.
You will note I clearly specified Zionist , which is an inherently racist/supremicist ideology. Akin to aparthied in South Africa.
However, I know a lot of South Africans and will be sure to warn them away from your company.
False claims of beheaded babies, reports of babies burnt in ovens.
Even more nefarious , are the psyops influence campaigns (both against own citizens [1]) and against American's [2]
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-admits-psychological-warfa...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/israel-us-disinformation-us-lawm...
That's one take.
Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
Not saying it wasn't user hostile or sucked, it just doesn't match the experience I had (or when I talked to some people).
It might be that this will be the only "community" that remains going forward.
I can't even remember all the times I've been suckerpunched with "hey we hired these people to implement <magic wordpress> and its not going so well. They tell us its because our systems are bad and our employees are not doing things right. Can you get with them and see what the <Insert Manager speak for blames you> seems to be....?
ME: The problem is they are some hack shop that "sold you" and bit off more than they could chew and they also don't have a clue about systems integrations.
MGMT: Nope the problem is our employees that have been working here getting "Exceeds expectations" on reviews that are the problem. We have no explanation for why though... So we are hiring McKinsey to come in and do a department evaluation to find out.
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.
If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he could do is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.
This is actually a very successful business strategy and even has a name: racketeering.
Question however is, whether auch a scheme would have made WordPress successful, or if it thrives from the community, where many assumed that everybody plays on the same field via GPL.
I agree with Matt's ideals but not the actions. The reality is theres not a whole lot he can do without looking like spoilt kid taking his ball away from the game.
I have 20 years in WP and B2. This is tragic. He needs to be removed or the platform will die making a huge repository of knowledge valueless.
but i think you would be hard pressed to find a scenario where Automattic is the rent-seeker and WP engine is not, given that Automattic both contributed to WP and is actively using their revenue to improve WP, whereas WP engine… isn’t.
I'm not sure it's logically consistent to attack the phrase "rent seeeking" as unclear, then apply it anyway (?!) but muddle the word "contributing" in turn, to reach pre-desired conclusions about which party is at fault. You'll have to clarify for me what branch of neo-classical economics is concerned with assigning fault. Seems entirely removed from economics for me.
More broadly, we're not discussing any of this in the context of "contemporary classical economics" (ie right of centre economics), so I have no idea why you think we'd agree on using those definitions, or why those definitions have pride of place over any others.
>Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate more and more power
Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc
Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the conversation
The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term would actually subscribe to the idea that human development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.
Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a justification for the Nazi party and their economic ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.
Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus maintaining demand, sort of.
Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward, so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain in power, while the masses see their quality of life decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had.
> the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been consumed
that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene now.
I just disagree that late stage capitalism imperialism is where we're at. It's not true for the US, or the west or the globe.
Yes we're in the anthropocene, and while that phrase has a negative implication nowadays, it is not true that anthropocene means "low hanging resources" have been consumed leading to uncontrolled rent seeking. It is no more true than a barracuda lurking in a coral is an out of control rent seeker. That's just the nature of barracudas.
The problem as I see it isn’t simply capitalism=bad, it has produced the greatest expansion of wealth in history after all, but rather it’s just not equipped to be the answer for everything. There are problems and opportunities that exist where capitalism does not have a solution for. Things like healthcare, equitable wealth distribution, and environmental sustainability are the obvious examples that come to mind.
These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability to maintain stability and take care of its citizens, since every attempt to suggest that some industries should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening here, I am speaking in broad terms.
The trouble here is that this is a misunderstanding of what free markets are supposed to be.
The idea of a free market is, if you have an oligopoly which is charging high margins and ripping people off, do you a) break up the cartel and restore competition in order to bring down margins, or b) impose price controls or otherwise regulate the oligopoly while leaving it intact. The premise of free markets is that you do the first one and not the second one.
The problem we have is that you often have one party saying "don't do either of them" and the other party saying "do the second one" and then the first one doesn't happen even though it's the thing you want. The premise here is free market competition, not free market monopolization.
You have a different problem with things like pollution. That isn't something markets are expected to solve, in the same way as you don't expect them to prevent theft or homicide. The problem then is, how do you solve the problem? "Have the government do it" is under-specified. The Soviet Union did not have a sterling environmental record. Outcomes and efficiency both matter, so you can't just give it to some unaccountable bureaucrats or they'll simultaneously drive up the cost of everything with red tape, fail to prevent the pollution, and get captured by incumbents who use the red tape to lock out competitors. So how do you apply competitive pressure to politicians? Maybe change the voting system, e.g. use approval/score/STAR instead of first past the post so you can have more than two viable political parties. Or stop trying to do everything federally and hand more back to the states, so we can have back the laboratories of democracy and have 50 chances to find the right balance instead of just one.
Definitely not the type of leader I would want to be leading an open source project I depend on.
From a risk analysis perspective, this would make me question if wp is fit for my company. If the ceo/leader can behave in this way , what are the risks he pulls similarly self destructive moves that jeopardises my sites?
I am have no bone in this fight, I dropped wp back In 2010, due to the multitude of issues with plugins, themes and security. It was easier(and more secure) to roll an app with django/rails.
Though, I think if you are using Wordpress. Either look for alternatives , or look to a fork with better governance.
In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.
1: https://www.therepository.email/wp-engine-sues-automattic-an...
I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.
What are the consequences, exactly?
If after 5 years revenue doesn’t grow the value is still $1,000,000. Unless the value increases the investors won’t get a return on their investment. Often investment comes with conditions.
So no it’s not as simple as “just needs to stay stable”
zen question: what is the "everything" that will "go through"?
That's the core problem: there's no exit in sight. None
I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.
As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of money and that they were the single largest consumer of WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal."
I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story than that.
And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he wasn't such a jerk about it.
But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights. WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems warranted.
So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard accusations that there has been a feud between the two going back years but if those finer details are buried in that story, then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?
(Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding Matt's motivations).
Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org. It's his property. What you can't do is:
make a service publicly available and then threaten a company that it needs exclusive terms
In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an estimate.
>we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal.
In the lawsuit Automattic asked the judge to force WPengine to shut down their mirrors. They want control over the system. Which is also legit, but legally you can't offer public terms for all and then threaten a company with "the nuclear option" unless they agree to a separate set of terms for 8% of revenue.
Wordpress.org could have terms that allow companies to setup mirrors, but they explicitly don't want this, and wordpress.org is hardcoded into Wordpress Core.
The court filing is here if you'd like to have a look. Some california law around anticompetitive behaviour applies.
I thought of trying to summarize but don't wish to be inaccurate. Obviously this is under litigation so it remains to be seen which headings they win on if any.
But it definitely isn't as simple as being able to selectively withdraw a public service at any point for any reason. If it were the case would have been dismissed already.
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP...
I'm more interested in the colloquial understanding than the legalese. The dev community will probably have a more relevant opinion than the judge imho. As I see it, WP core is free and the "public utility" you mention. But the infrastructure running the plugins has very little precedent it seems, and that's the important part. That's what Matt's pissed about. I don't think there is a good analogy in the Linux ecosystem or anywhere else as to such a massive undertaking as WP that is simultaneously non profit and for profit. And that's where I think it's kind of foolhardy to go head to head with the guy who's managed to staple it all together while they're still standing on it.
The thing he withdrew is their plugin repo access which is not a public service afaik. I can see why Matt is going crazy running servers for hundreds of millions of downloads and people treat it like he's legally obligated to do that. It's an ambitious enterprise and people should be sensitive to the fact that they probably work extremely hard keeping that going.
Automattic and Mullenweg argued that WP Engine should be required file a bond of $1.6 million to ensure that they are compensated for potential costs and damages if it’s later found that the preliminary injunction was granted without sufficient basis.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/judge-sides-with-wp-engi...
>WPEngine’s arguments are persuasive. …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.”
The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.
> WordPress.org has to pay for their servers
Wordpress.org was sold to volunteers as a community asset owned by the foundation not Matt and even Matt's lawyer made public statements to that effect.
Volunteers spent their time building it up, developing in to WordPress core reliance on w.org infra, etc..
Matt has a long history of un-ethical behaviour, and the current WPDrama is extensive. For me alone, the one screenshot of his threats to go to the press with confidential information about someone unless they did what he wants was enough.
Now volunteers find out from court documents that w.org is "Matt's personal website" as he puts it.
Additionally, now many volunteers are banned from the thing they helped build simply for voicing disagreement with his actions which are almost universally accepted as unethical. Many have been banned for reacting to one of his post with with disapproving emojji!!
Matt has built up the foundation through deception and then weaponised it.
> The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about crime.
If we're going to get that pedantic, and ignore the "spirit" in which that statement of mine was intended, then it's equally fair for me to point out that no, the legal case is not anything to do with a "crime." It is a civil dispute.
WPEngine allege
> > "As part of the WordPress community, WPE has contributed tens of millions of dollars in ongoing support "
> going to get that pedantic
I didn't think i was being pedantic, sorry.
I don't understand the US Court system but from what i gather, at least Attempted Extortion and breaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are crimes.
COMPLAINT FOR:
(1) Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations;
(2) Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations;
(3) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.;
(4) Attempted Extortion;
(5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code § 17200, et seq.;
(6) Promissory Estoppel;
(7) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement;
(8) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution;
(9) Libel;
(10) Trade Libel; and
(11) Slander.
That isn't what happened. The for-profit company Automatic asked for money, and then used their CEO's exclusive control of the non-profit foundation to punish their direct competitor.
It would be an entirely different thing if this was part an initiative to charge commercial users of WordPress.org for the costs they incur the non-profit foundation to stabilize it's funding. Such a thing could have been handled professionally without threats of "nuclear" retaliation.
> But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights
Being a jerk isn't a crime, but it does broadcast a lack of professionalism and mental stability. Those aren't great traits to see in and individual who has unilateral control over infrastructure that you depend on. Those are extremely concerning traits when that individual has demonstrated a willingness to use that control to pursue personal vendettas in childish ways.
The problem the community is facing is that Matt is a weak, single point of failure. To re-establish trust given Matt's actions here, the non-profit needs to no longer be under his control, but under that of an independent board of directors.
The other major complication here is that Matt has thoroughly mixed his several roles together, so you have to spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to untangle the ownership of everything, I am not particularly persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the people they should be paying.
> why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for payment?
Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest competitor (a very distinct legal entity).
[1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of drama.
WordPress could, in theory, make the repository free for access to all except larger hosting entities that put more of a strain on things, for which there is a fee or throttling. Possibly even indicating this within the WordPress admin UI which flavor of access the user is getting. "Pro" vs "Free" for example.
Note that I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is based on my understanding of open source licenses like the GPL over my 20 years working on PortableApps.com.
Automattic's lawyer told the community the same thing.
Volunteers built in to WordPress core dependence on W.Org infra on that understanding. there are over 1500 hardcoded references to W.org infra.
Now those volunteers find out it's "Matt's personal website" and he can do what he likes with it. Including banning volunteers who's livelihoods depend on it for nothing more than reacting to a post with a disproving emojji.
In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).
That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.
I think Matt Mullenweg has every right to take the action he's taking. It really seems like many companies are perfectly happy to exploit open source products.
In this case, it seems like one company makes a lot of money using the Wordpress codebase and doesn't want to make equal contributions. Then they use the money they're making to turn around and sue Wordpress for standing up for themselves.
If I were Matt Mullenweg, you can bet I would be incensed! I'm honestly very surprised that Matt Mullenweg is facing such criticism when he's simply trying to protect IP that he and the community have spent a lot of time and money building together. It's only natural to want to ban the freeloaders, and in any case, it's a little outrageous to think anyone is entitled to access to the resources and creations of others with or without compensation.
There's a right way and a wrong way to handle a conflict, and he's taken a direct route down the wrong way with his foot on the gas.
He would've been wise to read Sun Tzu, 48 laws, all those books on the basics of manoeuvring in a conflict, and found himself some wise and steady council to guide him through this effectively.
Instead he basically burst into a sustained petulant childish tantrum. He was doing things that basically any adult would know not to do.
He was in here, running his mouth in the comments section after legal proceedings had started. With everyone telling him to shut up. And instead he just kept going. And the comments literally then showed up in the legal proceedings against him, as everyone had warned.
Rights and obligations go hand in hand. Yes he had rights, and yes he could have exercised them to the benefit of the open source community (which was extremely important given WPs role in the internet - effectively carrying the beacon of the original internet vs its consumption by big companies).
But he also had obligations stemming from that. He should have played this diligently and carefully. But he didn't. And thus everyone expresses their disappointment in their own ways.
I've been around WordPress since 2003 (since the fork from B2/Cafelog) and have watched Matt evolve over that time, make a few missteps, act/react with humility, speak conscientiously on a wide range of matters and issues. The actions of the past 12 months seem quite contrary to that established behaviour (speaking from a far perspective & never had met the man in person).
I feel sad whether this is a deliberate or unintentional (mental) path, but am confident that like the drama that created WP's popularity orignally (MoveableType), there will be a path forward for the community - it's the damage that will be done in getting there that's upsetting...
Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for much less money.
Over the past 5 years or so, I've start becoming numb to all of the tech leaders who I used to hold in high regard who I now think are just the boring epitome of self-involved douchebags, e.g. Musk and Andreesen, for example. It just looks like garden-variety power intoxication to me.
The problem with success is even when success is a reality, it's effects are temporary.
You get hungry even though you have just eaten.
The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt responding to successful critics by saying they weren't successful enough
I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000 engineers, what do you know"
If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google, sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.
Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was forced out somehow.
When I think about this, I also remember:
- the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years, Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.
- His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary focus, but it's always there, in everything lashing out that is publicized. If you're unhappy, and you're not sure why, and you have everything you thought you wanted, one easy thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not commensurate for the work"
1. https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
As long as money is flowing, nobody gives a damn how shitty you are. Once the money stops, however ...
He seems do be doing fine, though, perhaps also is having the time of his life, nothing wrong from perspective of other for-profit projects. Wonder who promised this and how was it guaranteed it'd not happen at some point?
Besides LLMs be soon spitting 'wordpress retold' with Cursor and all, and he may have just realized it.
This is a childish emperor tantrum, stressing everybody beneath him for petty cause.
At this point, if he stepped down it would be seen as giving in. So highly unlikely until the legal dust settles a bit.
I also agree with other commenters that it's not a mental breakdown but more of a poorly executed strategy that's been in the works for awhile. To take Wordpress more into a closed source hybrid ecosystem.
And at this point, anything Matt does in favor of Automattic's business plan will blow up on social. My bet is this will continue for another 6 months at least until Automattic's revenue increases or flatlines.
But yeah, I'm curious about the mental toll when founders go through these types of hyper public events. The startup world needs a lot more discussion and guidance for mental health.
Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.
Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.
The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders.
I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong, they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert rationalization here}, and fight change.
If we're talking real-life dictatorships and republics, the latter make much better use of brilliant leaders' talents. In part by not having a power struggle at the end that, on a coin flip, decides if the work survives.
I'd argue that democracy is almost always a roadblock to a great leader's ability to execute their vision quickly and fully.
On the other hand, it often wins out in the long run by not losing as much when the inevitable terrible leader comes to power. (As well as providing a pressure release mechanism to prevent populist revolution)
Quickly and fully, sure. In the end, however, good ideas see daylight. (Even if it means the other side co-opts and renames it!) That doesn’t happen in autocracies because the same people remain in power longer; this means by the time the opposition dies everyone who supported or potentially remembered it (or the opportunity it was meant to capitalise on) is gone.
More than that, republics have historically been far superior at integrating other cultures. That process of appropriation means the source for good ideas is wider than the population, something autocracies can only achieve with money and thus not at scale and in limited scope. (Engineers working for the KSA aren’t changing its culture, they’re building a block.)
There can be some mal-incentives in democracies when it's in the opposition's interest for things to fail though (read: positioning for the next election).
Imho, that's more a US problem of an overly-visible executive (whoever that currently is), to the detriment of congressional visibility (i.e. 95% of congress supported this, including your congresspeople).
From a US perspective, parliamentary style systems, with checks to prevent German/Italian/Israeli-style deadlock when the party percentages don't line up, seem the superior implementation.
Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over wordpress.
Suddenly Wordpress's weird technical quirks and idiosyncrasies make sense.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Qq1SBFzByDw?t=28744s
Mullenweg After:
This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do ~all of the work anyway, there's no reason to do that work inside Matt's personal fiefdom.
> Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
> As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.
5 of those 45 hours are apparently the Executive Director of WordPress.org, so this is actually one full time developer working on WP. That is effectively pulling out, and the remaining time supposedly allocated should be very easy for a fork to replace.
Gotta love the scare quotes around "community".
> Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine.
source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
Do they really pay that many people to work on development? That's 100 fulltime jobs.
[0]: https://automattic.com/press/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240801231830/https://automatti...
I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't know full details. But, he's the one acting irrational in all this, so he's the one I'm most scared of.
And the files can certainly be edited as they aren’t immutable.
They are less resource intensive and easier to maintain, but aren’t immune.
(Running mostly static sites converted from Wordpress sites, but also running 10 year old+ word press sites that haven’t been changed in forever)
If you have Wordpress exposed to the internet, there's a lot more security stuff to deal with.
What would hacking an HTML file even mean.
After that I added a cron job that compared the hash of the index.html with a precomputed value. Didn't change often enough to be a hassle.
There's no DB with juicy data and no compute to abuse for mining crypto or running DDOS attacks.
Your source of truth for a static site will never be the deployed contents of the server (even if you do go that route). It will be your local Git repo or possibly your upstream Git forge.
Even in the rare case that such a simple case gets you hacked, you can throw away your entire setup and start over quite easily. Whereas all of the Wordpress/Drupal/etc/etc. options I'm aware of will require you to do your own database backups, if you are self-hosting, or else you are simply hosed (as the attacker could corrupt or erase the source of truth).
If you are with a hosted solution then obviously your security (and backups) will be as good as their security/backups, and all of this will be moot except for pricing.
I think static sites are a good technique that has vastly improved security over dynamic sites, but thinking that using them makes you invincible is faulty.
I'm not sure if Debian's packages are kept up to date with security patches, though. The latest changes to the wordpress package[0] were in December 2022 and and May 2024.
[0] https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/w/wo...
Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).
For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple hosting service.
Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the URLs in the original form, more or less.
I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.
I used open source tools, and I am a "hugo" newbie, so I make some trade off too.
Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso is a comment system very light).
Said differently, the person who will successfully and painlessly migrate wordpress to hugo is not an average case, but a minority.
Dead easy. Took an afternoon to do everything, including fiddling with DNS and trying different themes, etc.
> THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND (…)
I think the real issue is people being fooled with the false concept of ‘community’, times and times again.
Communities do not exist in practice. What you have is a vast pool of users (in this case I also include plugin and theme devs), and a minority of core contributors, which are either individuals or companies, usually both. Those are driving the project forward and making decisions.
This distribution can be applied to many open-source softwares, but also projects like mozilla, wikipedia, etc.
People do not understand to what extend the no-guarantee of FOSS software is applicable. All your projects can be broken from a day to the next and you cannot expect any compensation.
But that’s ok because you got the software for free, right?
I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.
Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.
Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images.
someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.
ect ect
AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience.
Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it".
[0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway
As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.
For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.
Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
Or if you're really making some big time e-commerce stuff, then you're better off with bespoke solutions than something hacked together with WordPress.
Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.
This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
Yes.
It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.
Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly.
A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.
Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
Slap some workflow/approval process.
And you have a product!
And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!
I'll take the compliment anyway :)
HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and you're already running at the speed of WordPress.
HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].
I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3 narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all using torch.rb instead of pytorch.
[1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/did-breaking-backward...
As for a "rich ecosystem" and "40%+ global market share" — popularity has nothing to do with quality.
Many of are free, and you can often build your own. You can easily extend it without plugins, but you're doing your future self a favor if you stuck your new features in one (so you can update themes etc easily in the future).
>> Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
Hard disagree here. Whether you are using ACF for custom fields or post types, doing it manually takes more time but is not that difficult. Its typically a set of actions you wouldn't do often either.
I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article stream might be another matter.
When you write down all the demands, there aren't much options left. Drupal and Opencart are used, but WordPress is used for 90% of the sites mostly due to demand/requirements.
The answers really are helpful and will tell folks a lot about the world. If you don't understand how WP and Drupal ended up where they did (and why Joomla, Cake, etc ad infi are no longer around), then I suggest that you try to answer the question your asking, or at least pay some attention to the answers you get.
WP had, for quiet a while, a much better and conceptually easier admin system. Even that system was clunky and hard to train non-tech folks to use. But it was better than Drupal and more interactive than Joomla.
You might not accept that answer, but that really was a lot of it in my experience.
I hate WP for a lot of reasons, but its not like the many "serious professionals" who have built software for it were doing so for unworkable reasons. I found it much of a pain the ass, but if you know what you're doing and develop the correct skill sets it is far from a nightmare.
Eight ball yoda says… bad trip sitter he did seek, hmm?
First it makes people purge (vomit profusely) because the MAO enzymes normally break down the psychoactives in the stomach, and it reacts violently when the enzymes are inhibited with MAOIs. It's likely a reaction to something else in the plant because the psychoactives absorb into the stomach before they throw up.
The technical name for what happens next is "full disassociation" which can best be described as the brain disconnecting from the sensor organs and then hallucinating whatever it wants in their place. The actual experience people have varies all over the place. Lots of trip reports of people seeing god, or aliens, or seeing their life flash before their eyes.
It's popular among the Silicon Valley crowd in general from my experience, but specifically the ritualistic experience in the Amazon. Freebasing DMT isn't as popular.
Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been affected by it. Just a guess, though.
I know a lot of people I would be wary of if they were to consume psychedelics, given how they already act towards people with restraint.
Generally the critique is that it leaves one too unchanged. It's all sparkle and no lasting insight. Fun, but otherwise kind of pointless. Like it's missing its other half.
The Ayahuasca comments in this thread are the people putting their own narrative on it, and as the OP of the thread, this was not my intention at all. This thread has just become made-up gossip.
I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust Rust core, but that's probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn't have to bring along a new software distribution.
PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution.
A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum.
This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works).
The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard.
Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that.
This sucks.
I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage.
I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at.
This sucks.
>I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
Sorry ;)
I mentioned writing CMSes, and one of them was in Perl (using CGI). I still wake screaming, sometimes, and that was probably 25 years ago.
With me, it had to do with the languages I wrote (C and Perl), that required CGI to publish. CGI did fine, but it's fairly primitive. Just another system text pipe (which, TBH, is pretty much what is going on, under a Webserver).
But for most folks, CGI is unapproachable. That's what PHP gives people. It was so easy to use, that anyone that could edit an HTML file, could also write powerful programs in PHP. It was integrated into the Webserver, not the system (as far as the user was concerned).
At the time I first encountered PHP, ColdFusion was an industry standard for that kind of thing, but it was a commercial product, locked to a single vendor. PHP gave hosting companies a fairly simple package (for free) they could compile into their Webserver, that would give their customers that power.
Nerds have no issue, using things like CGI, but most folks aren't nerds, and we sometimes have a real hard time, understanding that. Nerds that do, often become rich.
So I was literally trying to know more. (And I understand a bit better now, thanks.)
I think that anything that will interact with remote browsers, should go through a Webserver. Many utilities actually have their own built-in webservers (not sure that’s always a good thing).
Because the simplicity results in various footguns, just like most programmers probably shouldn't use C these days ?
("Webserver" sounds like an extra layer on top, like how Python allows you to (mostly) forget about memory handling issues ?)
Is it also because simplicity either doesn't add performance here, or is it just because the performance is rarely needed ?
It’s what systems programmers would like, because we don’t like things that get in the way. However, most folks aren’t systems programmers. They want padding and safety nets.
It can be used in shared scenarios, but it's nowhere near as automatic as "every file with a particular extension" like PHP...
This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is by far the most simple kind of PaaS.
The combination of Wordpress's defaults, its ease of use by designers, and the ability for one server to handle hundreds of installments, means that almost nothing can replace it.
Is that still a thing? Why would an application on a server share anything other than the kernel?
Wordpress optimized hosts will have "servers" sharing the apache, the kernel, the php libs, even the DB instance. The effective burden of an additional host is tiny. Which is perfect for a local cafe's webpage which might be lucky to get a hit an hour.
Now how do you think you'll compete on price by using containers when your competitor can host a 100x the cafe web pages? The cafe owner does not care that they are sharing a php lib instance. They care that their 7 paragraphs appear when the page loads.
I'm actually not sure that fcgi is that bad, even for other languages, but most shared hosts will probably limit what you can do in terms of resources.
- use mod_php which must start an interpreter instance for each request and has to dump all associated resources (db handle and the like) and memory when the request is served
- use something like FPM that has a pool of workers ready to communicate with the web server, which is more or less what every other languages do, if not via fast-cgi just by proxying an application server
Another way is event-driven, async PHP application server, but again it's not any different than similar solutions in other languages.
Now why people think PHP is low-resource ? That's all rose tinted glasses, because back in the days when everyone just used mod_php on cheap shared hosting for low-traffic websites, the execution model made it possible to get away with leaky apps since all memory was flushed at the end of the request.
If you want to go low-resource, use something like Go which is both much faster than PHP and has a lower memory footprint or choose an execution model that shares resources between requests (available in any JS, Python, Ruby, whatever you like).
Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10 years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to work around them.
Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account. By far the best option for most people was Wordpress.
If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time machine, then go back to that time and write something better in PHP.
There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".
Ex-Wordpress users are just going to diffuse into all the other decent options that already exist. Or stick with a Wordpress fork that caters to them. Though note that Wordpress isn't going away. How many Wordpress users even know who Mullenweg is?
The idea of cobbling together yet another blog platform that will somehow capture these users better than Wordpress plus all the decent incumbents is some good ol fashioned developer hubris. :P
Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product sense there
Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs never got there neither
PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress.
There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.
Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)
Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of another plugin.
Leads to practically maintenance free sites.
Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and dynamic features of a proper cms.
After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for years without intervention.
I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not still written in PHP, and then installable through the various turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous).
Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a whole community of contributors onboard who already make their living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt something with little traction.
WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as its moat.
However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)
I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.
And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy.
WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.
Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
WordPress: Joost/Karim Fork
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801
Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
And if it isn't, really, who cares. It's not a particularly well built or unique piece of software. Maybe it's time for something else.
I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in different communities.
I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you. That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your business exist in the first place.
- someone who has been happily using wordpress for her site since about 2000
I had a comment where Matt refused to believe what I said about ACF but this doesn't make me hate him. I don't care about wpengine at all and they can go to hell instead of hurting WordPress any further. They are just using an open-source project to make money and not giving back.
People are fighting with the original creator of the software and supporting 3rd party for-profit companies like wpengine. For what reason? This is clear propaganda.
Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the server that serves the frontend.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
Aside from finding CMSes to be overly heavy and restrictive, this is why. You never know when they're gonna go off the rails (pun intended). If I can't just do everything in vim/notepad++ and a terminal I'm not super interested.
Same reason why I'm skeptical of game toolkits like Unity.
The biggest thing in that category was Mysql "flipping" with the Oracle purchase. But people quickly migrated to postgres (which more-or-less is the same for smallish projects) and MariaDB as a Mysql fork exists as well. And I'm sure some people just kept using Mysql as well without having to do anything.
For all the tech I listed here, I think Rails is the one that would be hardest to a drop-in replacement for. Everything else is "generic." Text editors (not that I particularly care if a text editor is updated frequently (or at all most of the time)) and nix-like environments are basically hot swappable.
But IME when something has some sort of custom environment and that's the only way to deal with it (dashboard, special IDE, etc.) that's when you have the biggest risk of having a bad time.
WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin development not count now?
Mullenweg stole the Custom fields plugin from WPEngine. So no, plugin development doesn't could when he can steal the plugin away from you.
That is a minor issue in the disagreement.
The bigger issue is that WPEngine had its access to Wordpress cut off on very short notice for questionable reasons.
This obviously had a negative impact on WPEngine’s business, but also on all of the business that WPEngine served. I think the latter part is what has a lot of folks up in arms — the collateral damage was really tone deaf (imho).
Astro FTW!
I've also been focusing on the rise of Bluesky and my move from extreme skepticism to tentative acceptance. That's been more fun to write about.
Some quick searching seems to indicate that the web is about 79% PHP, and that ~44% of websites are using WordPress.
The big caveat of course is that wordpress being installed on a domain does not mean that entire domain is powered by wordpress. I'd bet for most of them it's just the landing/marketing pages and/or a blog section.
The problem is that there's a bit of a black hole in CMSs right now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and ordinary users who can host/create content on the CMS. Strapi was almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your average business trying to make a website.
Static site generators can be too limited and simple, Drupal is not particularly user friendly, and tons of other CMSs don't have enough plugins for marketers to cram into their sites.
Anyone considering e-commerce now will probably use Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix are good for simpler sites but not for multi-author news type sites.
I feel like the only option is a fork at this point.
I'll give you an example: https://newyorkyimby.com/
This is a relatively simple site that posts housing development news for New York. Ultimately they're not going to need a super complicated front end. Most sites just want a theme and deployment.
If Strapi had a non-headless mode and had themes I'm sure it could be used for the many millions of these small sites that run Wordpress.
Additionally Strapi isn't a great choice for blogs or portfolio sites, it's simply too much to set up for most people. I think the barrier to entry is what prevents it from becoming great. If a random person can start a blog, then more developers are going to want to work on it, meaning more plugins, meaning more of a reason to use Strapi. A feedback loop that got Wordpress to where it is.
Shopify is so big because they make setting up a site extremely easy, and now there are tons of plugins and themes to use on your Shopify store, which only gives people more of a reason to use Shopify.
They just use wordpress.
It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than I can handle currently.
If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or comment.
One of my current clients recently had his WP install taken over, and SiteGround took it down for offensive content.
It’s just a basic informational website for his consulting business, and he never logs into it or makes changes to it. He has no idea how anyone hacked it.
It really baffles me that this is still a thing in 2025, and that people can’t get a basic Shopify type of experience for creating informational websites and blogs where they can set it and forget, and focus on running their business. They should be concerned about how their content website is growing their business and overall bottomline; not if they have been taken over with offensive content or not based off of basic security best practices.
Community: rebuilt.
I think this "fork" idea comes from a bizarre cancel/woke culture influence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
If 2025 Matt tried to fork b2/cafelog back in 2003, I think a good number of people in the PHP and blogging communities would have told him to, very kindly, fork off.
Or, all that money and power corrupted him over the years.
Dokuwiki is also a neat old-school alternative that basically treats files on disk as articles/pages, so no (other) DB needed.
* Kirby: https://getkirby.com/ * Grav: https://getgrav.org/ * Statamic: https://statamic.com/
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/de...
Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with total control of the frontend.
Has been fun to switch and fast.
I wrote an exporter from WP to Grav [1].
I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if you know Python. You don't need to know Python, but in the off chance that one day in the future you want to write your own plugin...
If what you need do is a great fit for a static site, then that will be a much easier to deal with.
For a majority of Wordpress use I am involved in a static site would not offer a majority of the features needed.
No tracking, adverts, paywalls, or bloat. I'm also bringing a little nostalgia back with ASCII art headers (optional of course).
Here's my blog on it: https://lmno.lol/alvaro
Wrote a bit about how I got to build my own service https://lmno.lol/alvaro/blogging-minus-the-yucky-bits-of-mod...
I don't like drama. Why is it in trouble just now and it has not been an ongoing process?
Ha. IDK buddy, be careful what you wish for.