Has very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.
It has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.
Y combinator helped people notice it when they invested in a company called Automatic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/automatic However now that it's been acquired that reminder of Automattic not being named Automatic is gone.
Or they need the pay. It's all well and good to go "they could just leave" but then what? Spend 6 months looking for a new job only for everyone to go "sorry, the hundreds of thousands of layoffs from every other highly skilled tech workforce beat you to it"?
If you followed his months of mad ravings, he made it clear that Wordpress is not a true open source project. He has direct control over the project via Automattic appointments in the community, everything is designed to route through his circuitous network of shell corporations and trademarks (wordpress.org is fully under his control and he personally owns the Wordpress trademark - which the "project" licenses from him).
The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
When the rights were transferred to the WPF, Matt didn't disclose that the Foundation was essentially just him, and the two other nominal members were effectively absent.
When the rights were transferred, and a big deal was made of this, "It now belongs to the WPF, which ensures that no commercial entity or interest can affect what should be a community project", there was no mention of how, on that same day the WPF silently granted a "irrevocable, non-expiring, exclusive universal commercial licence" to Automattic.
Throughout all of this Matt has conflated Automattic, himself, WP.com, WP.org, the WPF to whatever is most convenient to himself.
Matt says himself "I am WordPress.org. It's not a part of the Foundation", but you'd be forgiven for thinking so, given that the website resides on the Foundations AS network...
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor.
Matt's claim, "My mom is confused and thinks that WPEngine is part of the open source project", is a deflection, and laughable coming from the man who runs wordpress.org as a "independent website" (that just happens to be running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.
I'm thankfully about 4 years out of making a living un-fucking WP sites but one of the strangest things about the ecosystem is about "for-sale" GPL software.
It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes.
I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin.
Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.
Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."
* Donated the WordPress trademark to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation in 2010
* Started bbPress (2004), the first WordCamp (2006), and Five for the Future (2014) which was contributing 3,786 hours/week to WordPress core
* Fought the 2010 Thesis dispute to establish that WordPress themes/plugins must be GPL
* Open-sourced Calypso (2015), Jetpack, and Gutenberg (2018)
* Kept WooCommerce GPL after buying it in 2015
* Founding member and platinum sponsor of the PHP Foundation since 2021, a tier starting at $100,000/year, which funds 12 PHP core developers
* Personally backed Matrix via Patreon from 2017, then Automattic invested $4.6M in Matrix/Element in 2020. Also acquired and open-sourced the ActivityPub plugin (2023)
* Drove the WordPress Foundation's $100,000 donation to the Internet Archive in Oct 2024, on top of $15,000/year each to Black Girls Code and Internet Archive since 2017
* Rescued Openverse (ex-CC Search, 700M+ open-licensed works) when Creative Commons dropped it in 2021
* 1,000+ sponsored WordCamps held in 65+ countries under the community model he set up
Sometimes I don't understand HN's skepticism of the hackers and nerds who have been in the community for decades and have a track record of doing, or trying to do, the right thing. Say what you will about his behavior, or his tone, or the way he approaches his online persona, but it's hard to find any commercial CEO who has towed the line of open source and giving back vs. making a living and employing thousands of people better than him.
If we gave "Open"AI a tenth of the grief we give WP and Matt, the world would be a very different place.
> * Donated the WordPress trademark to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation in 2010
Fallen at the first hurdle. The WordPress Foundation is Matt’s personal vehicle used to obscure his control over the WordPress ecosystem. He has misrepresented the foundations role for over a decade, it was only following the WP Engine debacle that the true status of the foundation and Matt’s personal ownership of WordPress.org came to light.
The spirit of Open Source is contributing to the world for the greater good, not building your personal fiefdom. Matt is rare because he’s one of the few people in Open Source who are so desperate to launder their reputation. Most either acknowledge their project as theirs over which they exert absolute control or they hand over control to the community. Matt pretended to be a benevolent steward for decades until his position was threatened. He has long since cashed in all the credit he earned for his Open Source contributions.
You’ll find dozens of examples of tech CEOs that spend some of their corporate budget on sponsorships of open source projects and events. Matt was relatively unique in 2006, but not in 2026.
- The Wordpress Foundation has one Chairman (Matt) and until last year had one publicly known employee (executive director, Matt)
- Founded several orgs... that contribute solely to WordPress Core. Which is basically his.
- Made Thesis give up their rights to their own non-derivative work. (If we say literally any CSS or PHP on top of Wordpress is derivative work, that's the same as saying no one is allowed to sell any WP services on their own).
- Jetpack, Calypso, and Gutenberg might be open source, but all depend on closed source infrastructure provided by Automattic (Gutenberg is also one of the worst things to happen to WP)
- Kept WooCommerce after consolidating it into his empire - woo hoo?
- He conveniently became the lowest tier contributor to PHP... right before he started his war
Literally outside of small token contributions, all he has done is contributed to projects that support his own bottom line.
It's not just about giving back. As someone who has made a living from web development, his arbitrary attack on vendors within the ecosystem was a massive rugpull. His whole justification is that people shouldn't profit from the ecosystem without contributing. Well that describes literally everyone using Wordpress for free. I have no reason to trust or use WP ever again - and I might as well go to a paid ecosystem where I'm not treated like a pawn.
VCs typically include clauses to be able to sack CEO and retain board control under specific circumstances. I've seen this happen in a small company I was at, to a CEO that didn't meet rather ambitious financial targets. AFAIK it is all very carefully designed and the power is extremely important to VCs, plus the legalities are well tested (since most losing CEOs will fight it in courtroom).
Depends on the rules of the company. Just because he can elect the board doesn't mean he gets to direct their every decision. They are supposed to have their own independent judgement.
Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
It was just a matter of time before he displayed his power with the nonprofit and wordpress.com which he controls personally, independently of the Automattic board. Maybe that is part of why the board gave him his control of Automattic back so quickly.
Davies was supposedly the one who originally cooked up the whole extortion scheme against major players in the WP space. WPE was just the first target of many that were planned. Not that Matt is absolved in any way, but it'll be interesting to see what falls out if and when he throws Davies under the bus.
That'd be the first time I hear about that angle. Mullenweg was pretty public about why he was doing it and it never felt like it was someone else's idea, given his level of commitment. It would be smart to find a scapegoat if you want to stretch your tenure a few years though.
I should probably emphasize "supposedly": I get my facts from the same news rags as everyone, and I at least skim the court filings. Matt has held personal grudges against WPE's leadership for much longer than this most recent affair, so it almost certainly wasn't entirely Davies' idea, might not even have originated with him. But when the CFO discusses at length then signs off on such a novel revenue scheme, that makes him a co-conspirator at least. Barring a settlement, I imagine more details will come out in open court.
You give Matt far too much credit. Matt wouldn’t listen to Davies. Look at what happened to Automattic’s legal counsel, one HN comment that didn’t align with Matt’s world view and he was canned post haste.
Davies perhaps explained to Matt how financially precarious Automattic’s position is but it seems very unlikely for a CFO to advocate for a batshit extortion plot that had no hope of success. Where did you hear that Davies was responsible for the extortion scheme? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
Some old twitter users still have animated gif avatars that stop being supported years ago. Maybe their approach is to just stop supporting it for new avatars and grandfathering whoever manage to upload one before.
What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?
Don’t underestimate Matt’s disregard for corporate theatre. A board voting to remove a CEO isn’t like firing an employee, there’s an assumption that obviously the founder would not use their elevated access to retaliate. As noted, Matt controls the majority of the voting stock, but he also controls WordPress as a whole. Removing the founder who controls everything against their wishes is basically impossible. Even if removing his access to Automattic’s corporate systems was possible, it takes one “I’ll revoke Automattic’s license to use the WordPress.com domain” to convince the board to blink and Matt is back. Mutually assured destruction. The board probably underestimated just how petty Matt is.
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.
Hopefully the board will call his bluff, except he'll overreact in the most him way, wordpress will die, and we can all get on with our lives because there is no more wordpress.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This is your opponent's lawyer speaking. Don't let business decorum and scary legal words scare you. Keep posting through it like a real thought leader!
Ironic how hard he tries to seem like a man of a people and then posts about his million-dollar toys he buys from celebrities like John Mayer. Dude is the definition of out of touch.
Just when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.
This drama started in April 2025 and there were replies to my comments here on HN telling me WordPress is "dead" and that the community would soon jump ship. Neither happened (not even remotely), and instead of switching to a different CMS we're just using (on new projects) WordPress as a pure CMS with custom/detached front ends because WordPress is still the best/most mature CMS. 99% of my clients that had WordPress, still have WordPress because small businesses move slow, and most of the "AI WordPress killers" are just glorified chatbots which well, if you've ever tried to manage a large site with a nondeterministic "AI chatbot"... it's obvious why.
Directus is great. And free for small organizations and non-profits.
Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.
WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.
What relevance will WP have now that AI can build websites?
I see more and more vertical SaaS vendors bundling website migration/building/hosting in their offering. I suspect they may steel away many customers from WP, Wix and competitors.
What do you think?
Wordpress' security track record isn't great, but I'm worried whether it would be safer if everybody builds their own CMS using AI. Yes, as a general-purpose CMS it has more attack surface, but there are more people working to harden and fix it than for all the little diverse AI-generated sites.
I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
I really hate this company and how they operate. Key example, they sold a «lifetime» plan for Day One that was quite expensive. I used it a lot and went for it.
After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying.
Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying.
Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating.
Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 4.6 ms ] threadAlso “acquired”.
YC is such trash
This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.
The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
When the rights were transferred to the WPF, Matt didn't disclose that the Foundation was essentially just him, and the two other nominal members were effectively absent.
When the rights were transferred, and a big deal was made of this, "It now belongs to the WPF, which ensures that no commercial entity or interest can affect what should be a community project", there was no mention of how, on that same day the WPF silently granted a "irrevocable, non-expiring, exclusive universal commercial licence" to Automattic.
Throughout all of this Matt has conflated Automattic, himself, WP.com, WP.org, the WPF to whatever is most convenient to himself.
Matt says himself "I am WordPress.org. It's not a part of the Foundation", but you'd be forgiven for thinking so, given that the website resides on the Foundations AS network...
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor.
Matt's claim, "My mom is confused and thinks that WPEngine is part of the open source project", is a deflection, and laughable coming from the man who runs wordpress.org as a "independent website" (that just happens to be running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.
Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.
WordPress is still GPL licensed.
As someone who has contributed to WordPress: WordPress grew on the back of volunteers.
It would be unfair to most non-Automattic "volunteers" if he was attributed all/most credit for what it had become, especially pre-Gutenberg.
It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes.
I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin.
Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.
Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."
* Donated the WordPress trademark to the nonprofit WordPress Foundation in 2010
* Started bbPress (2004), the first WordCamp (2006), and Five for the Future (2014) which was contributing 3,786 hours/week to WordPress core
* Fought the 2010 Thesis dispute to establish that WordPress themes/plugins must be GPL
* Open-sourced Calypso (2015), Jetpack, and Gutenberg (2018)
* Kept WooCommerce GPL after buying it in 2015
* Founding member and platinum sponsor of the PHP Foundation since 2021, a tier starting at $100,000/year, which funds 12 PHP core developers
* Personally backed Matrix via Patreon from 2017, then Automattic invested $4.6M in Matrix/Element in 2020. Also acquired and open-sourced the ActivityPub plugin (2023)
* Drove the WordPress Foundation's $100,000 donation to the Internet Archive in Oct 2024, on top of $15,000/year each to Black Girls Code and Internet Archive since 2017
* Rescued Openverse (ex-CC Search, 700M+ open-licensed works) when Creative Commons dropped it in 2021
* 1,000+ sponsored WordCamps held in 65+ countries under the community model he set up
Sometimes I don't understand HN's skepticism of the hackers and nerds who have been in the community for decades and have a track record of doing, or trying to do, the right thing. Say what you will about his behavior, or his tone, or the way he approaches his online persona, but it's hard to find any commercial CEO who has towed the line of open source and giving back vs. making a living and employing thousands of people better than him.
If we gave "Open"AI a tenth of the grief we give WP and Matt, the world would be a very different place.
Fallen at the first hurdle. The WordPress Foundation is Matt’s personal vehicle used to obscure his control over the WordPress ecosystem. He has misrepresented the foundations role for over a decade, it was only following the WP Engine debacle that the true status of the foundation and Matt’s personal ownership of WordPress.org came to light.
The spirit of Open Source is contributing to the world for the greater good, not building your personal fiefdom. Matt is rare because he’s one of the few people in Open Source who are so desperate to launder their reputation. Most either acknowledge their project as theirs over which they exert absolute control or they hand over control to the community. Matt pretended to be a benevolent steward for decades until his position was threatened. He has long since cashed in all the credit he earned for his Open Source contributions.
You’ll find dozens of examples of tech CEOs that spend some of their corporate budget on sponsorships of open source projects and events. Matt was relatively unique in 2006, but not in 2026.
- Founded several orgs... that contribute solely to WordPress Core. Which is basically his.
- Made Thesis give up their rights to their own non-derivative work. (If we say literally any CSS or PHP on top of Wordpress is derivative work, that's the same as saying no one is allowed to sell any WP services on their own).
- Jetpack, Calypso, and Gutenberg might be open source, but all depend on closed source infrastructure provided by Automattic (Gutenberg is also one of the worst things to happen to WP)
- Kept WooCommerce after consolidating it into his empire - woo hoo?
- He conveniently became the lowest tier contributor to PHP... right before he started his war
Literally outside of small token contributions, all he has done is contributed to projects that support his own bottom line.
It's not just about giving back. As someone who has made a living from web development, his arbitrary attack on vendors within the ecosystem was a massive rugpull. His whole justification is that people shouldn't profit from the ecosystem without contributing. Well that describes literally everyone using Wordpress for free. I have no reason to trust or use WP ever again - and I might as well go to a paid ecosystem where I'm not treated like a pawn.
Edit: Nice try, Matt.
VCs typically include clauses to be able to sack CEO and retain board control under specific circumstances. I've seen this happen in a small company I was at, to a CEO that didn't meet rather ambitious financial targets. AFAIK it is all very carefully designed and the power is extremely important to VCs, plus the legalities are well tested (since most losing CEOs will fight it in courtroom).
Of course usually hand-picked boards don't go against their benefactor, and they're not keeping their seats.
That they did in this case says something about just how bad the situation will be.
Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
> As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said.
mhm, ok.
Davies perhaps explained to Matt how financially precarious Automattic’s position is but it seems very unlikely for a CFO to advocate for a batshit extortion plot that had no hope of success. Where did you hear that Davies was responsible for the extortion scheme? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
I remember this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789765
From his LinkedIn, he left two months after.
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
(eg, page 24 of https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... )
https://www.dwell.com/article/mirene-tugboat-stewart-brand-r...
This could not be a more clear case of projection - you are being the exact monster you tell people your enemies are being.
Give this up and seek help. You're not the amazingly self-actualized person you think you are.
Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.
WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.
I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying.
Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying.
Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating.
Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
[1]https://dayoneapp.com/blog/the-next-chapter-of-day-one-at-au...
[2] https://medium.com/day-one/day-one-goes-premium-424492fd0a5b
Either they kept introducing even worse policies, or they allowed them
Either that or he somehow has control over IT and is just shit posting and controlling Slack.