This is very entertaining.
In order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays, we’re going to be pausing a few of the free services currently offered:
- New account registrations on WordPress.org (clarifying so press doesn’t confuse this: people can still make their own WordPress installs and accounts)
- New plugin directory submissions
- New plugin reviews
- New theme directory submissions
- New photo directory submissions
We’re going to leave things like localization and the forums open because these don’t require much moderation.
As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you.
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine.
He was being a massive dick, got spanked, and now he’s pouting? Am I reading this correctly?
Yep. While WP Engine definitely aren’t heroes here, Mullenweg has been mixing his business and the Wordpress org for a long time, and the licensing terms he decided upon for WordPress and the initialism WP didn’t support the “special case” situation he tried to force WP Engine into.
If he had just kept his damn mouth shut and changed the usage/licensing terms so that commercial resellers over a certain size had to pay back into the costs for support, this wpuld have never been news.
I highly doubt he’s been told that he must provide free support, and I suspect that he’s just been told that by his own rules he must provide the same free support for them that he provides to all of the other users.
Is he… okay?
People are saying he’s lost the plot, but he has a point doesn’t he ?
I don’t know the details, but as I see it, he put a powerful tool in the hands of the people, for free. The ecosystem grew, money was made - in the case of WPengine plenty of money - But they weren’t prepared to kick back
Whilst it’s permitted under the license, if they haven’t made any contribution to the project, it’s pretty shitty
It doesn’t matter anymore if he had a point.
Matt Mullenweg thinks he is Wordpress. He has been leveraging his position for his own financial gain for 20 years. He’s been pulling egotistical power moves like this the whole time, just against much weaker opponents. But now he’s taken on a private equity venture with more financial backing than him, and he’s about to get wrecked because he’s been a complete amateur trying to extort them.
My prediction is this will finally dethrone him and shift Wordpress to a true community run model.
A judge told him to stop using his nonprofit to actively sabotage a competitor to his business and he goes crying to everyone that it’s “free labor” to not block them.
He used to own a stake, sold it, tried to create a competitor, then tried to make life harder for his competition.
There was a decision pathway where he didn’t make himself look like a fool. Making people log in and confirm their business is not affiliated with wp engine was the most cringe business move.
