from Hacker News

Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress

by dangrossman on 1/9/25, 9:49 PM with 54 comments

• by altairprime on 1/9/25, 10:24 PM

  Okay, this confirms a narrative I’ve been considering: Matt committed a degree of profit to his investors, and they’re not receiving it, so he’s chosen to attack WPE in order to reduce competition for revenue and drive paying users to his own product. (“My name is Matt Mullenweg and this is my favorite blog on the Citadel”, etc.)

  This is an obvious next step — until revenue increases or expenses decrease, Mullenweg’s corporation is no longer investing in Wordpress beyond the critical minimum necessary to present as if everything is fine. The “until WPE concedes” bit is just redirecting the underlying cause, which is that Wordpress.com isn’t increasing their growth in revenue year-over-year, which makes VC-style investors uneasy — they want hockey sticks, not dividends.

  The important thing when dealing with this sort of scenario is not to take the person’s accusations at face value, and not to let them distract you from discussing their own circumstances. If Mullenweg’s moves were intelligent and calculated, then what motivations would this psyops-style propaganda represent? That is the million dollar question that matters here, not the substance of whatever his latest attack is.

  “Are you so strapped for cash that you can’t afford to pay your lawyers?” is probably the simplest example of the kind of question that needs to be asked of this latest post. “How many months of runway do you have left before the lawsuit bankrupts you?” is the sort of question that the tech press should be asking. Dissecting the surface-level statements feels vengeful and just; discussing the obvious implications and making them the focus of press responses is much more impactful.

• by minimaxir on 1/9/25, 9:54 PM

  > We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.

  The only reason the lawsuit happened is because Matt started the feud. This is literally the "guy puts stick in own bike wheel then falls off" meme.

• by mthoms on 1/9/25, 11:36 PM

  Notably, Matt will still personally control what is and isn't allowed to be contributed to WordPress Core.

  Otherwise, the very first commit should be removing all the personally identifiable information and other telemetry sent back to Matt's personal website (WordPress.org) and WooCommerce.com that isn't properly documented anywhere. [0][1]

  At the very least, there should be code changes facilitating informed consent.

  Of course, even though that is in the best interest of WordPress users, Matt Mullenweg won't let that happen. Because, money.

  [0] https://duanestorey.com/posts/down-the-rabbit-hole-a-deep-lo... [1] https://x.com/SybreWaaijer/status/1875230654054752374

• by mrkramer on 1/10/25, 11:16 AM

  This is one of the most stupidest and toxiest moves ever; imagine Google saying: millions of devs and thousands of companies use Golang and they are not contributing as much as we do so we are going to drastically lower our contributions just to sabotage other devs and companies.

• by throw16180339 on 1/9/25, 10:10 PM

  Sheesh. My 6 year old niece has better control of her emotions than Matt Mullenweg.

• by kennethallen on 1/10/25, 1:13 AM

  I'm going to take all of my toys and go home until everyone promises to stop being mean to me.

• by wpinsider on 1/15/25, 4:05 AM

  Given Mullenweg and Automattic hired a full time ‘Executive Director of WordPress.org, does that mean that Automattic will contribute 5 hours to Wordpress beyond that?

  Also fascinating that Mullenweg is willing to back away from the WordPress people love, but won’t let others engage to take up the slack. Has he been blocking WPE and others contributions if they don’t line up with his/Automattic’s commercial interests all along? Is there another shoe to drop?

  If community members submit code to improve core by removing the dependency on .org and allowing users to choose will Mullenweg allow it in?

• by urda on 1/10/25, 7:30 PM

  Is there a leading Wordpress fork?

• by daft_pink on 1/10/25, 2:41 AM

  Reality is that Wordpress is not an application for Hacker News techie types who can just create their own whatever. It’s a website appliance where you can have someone design focused apply a design, mash in a few plugins and assign some slightly higher than minimum wage fresh employee to manage your website.

  We are not the target market for this product.

• by Kye on 1/9/25, 9:57 PM

  Petty