[swozey]

And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9/mo for a decade and have never once interacted or known who Mullenweg is.

And they can thank mysql.. and apache.. and php..

Take your money and be happy.

I met some of the worst people (CEOs) working in webhosting. Some truly awful people became very rich.

edit; I thought this was referencing old drama. This is brand new. www.reddit.com/r/wpdrama. I don't know anything about Mullenweg, I don't mean to sound like I'm calling him awful specifically.

[sillysaurusx]

Could anyone summarize the drama? I’ve been poking around the subreddit, and it’s clear something is going on (https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7931urG9ho) but it’s not clear what he actually did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7eoTXQnwhh is as close to an explanation as I’ve found, but it seems tangential to whatever kickstarted the drama in the first place.

[swozey]

I don't know the minutia and I'm thankfully nowhere near the webhosting industry any longer but Wordpress dominated my life for almost 20 years- I'm pretty sure it can be summed up with "WPEngine is taking all of our enterprise/etc business and I'm mad.." And he's trying to get rid of the opensource (he dropped their monthly dedicated hours from I think 2k-4k to 45, just 45 hours) to funnel people to wordpress.com.

Which, honestly I really do get from his end money wise, because I have friends in that industry who are worth hundreds of millions today from lucky breaks, timing, etc. and I'm still a wee-engineer.

But he made those choices, he was always the CEO. I didn't start with the funding my rich friends had.

[bigiain]

Its hard to get the full picture of Mullenweg's behaviour in a summary, but I guess the TL;RD from my point of view goes something like:

Matt decides WPEngine are making "too much money" and "not contributing enough" buy selling hosting for WordPress, an open source (GPLv2 or later) project. He tries to blackmail them (using legally questionable trademark claims) to the tune of something like 8 million bucks a year or he'll"go nuclear" on them. WPEngine pushes back, and Mullenweg does his best to destroy WPEngine's reputation and business starting with his WordCamp conference keynote, and following on by blocking access to the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo/website for WPEngine and all their hosting customers sites, meaning millions oi WP sites could not install new plugins or get critical security updates. WPEngine lawyers up to get that access back, and to seek damages. During the drama, it come to light that contrary to most people's understanding, wordpress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and there is zero accountability for Mullenweg who owns Automattic (a WP hosting company and direct competitor tp W|PEngine), owns the wordpress.org website (a critical piece of infrastructure hard coded into WordPress core), and the WP Foundation board consists of a guy who sold his WordPress related company to Mullenweg a decade or so ago, a finance person with no visible track record of ever having anything to do with software or open source or WordPress, and Mullenweg himself.

There's way more, but my TL;DR is likely already TL.

This covers it in detail (scroll down and start from the first September 20th, 2024 entry for the "current drama)

https://www.joeyoungblood.com/technology/timeline-of-wordpre...

And a long list of what happened and when, backed up with links: https://github.com/bullenweg/bullenweg.github.io

That used to exist at bullenweg.com until Mullenweg sicced his lawyer on it.

[bigiain]

This brand new drama (well, August/Sept vintage drama) reveals a _lot_ about Mullenweg.

I, for one, am happy to specifically call him awful.