One thing you’ll see on every host that offers WordPress is claims about how secure they are, however they don’t put their money where their mouth is. When you dig deeper, if your site actually gets hacked they’ll hit you with remediation fees that can go from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
When a host is powered by WP.cloud, it doesn’t need to do this because hacks are so incredibly rare. (That’s why it may appear more expensive, but the total cost of ownership or being a WP.cloud-powered host is much lower when you factor in human time.)
One problem we’ve had on WordPress.com is we do all these amazing things and don’t tell anyone about it, something we’re trying to change with our focus this year on developers and developer tooling. One great example is we’re so confident about our security, if your site gets hacked we’ll fix it for free! We’ve actually been doing this for the better part of a decade, just never mentioned it anywhere.
WordPress has done a ton over the years to move the hosting industry around upgrading PHP and MySQL, PHP extensions, free SSL, and in general using our clout to advocate for user rights and freedoms from even the largest hosting companies, and I’m proud to say there are a good number, for example the ones you see at WordCamps, that have not just embraced these values but actually been more commercially successful as they’ve done so. I hope security and auto-upgrades not just for core but for plugins and themes becomes the next standard. (Jetpack does this for free, some hosts charge $100/yr per site.)
I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas had asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital.
While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved actually cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable. […] If left up to the editors, no new tool would ever be designed and no improvements would be possible.
This made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.
You may not have heard of Logan Bartlett, but he’s one of the most hilarious people on Twitter and does a really interesting podcast. (He had a cool episode with Marc Benioff recently.) We sat down for a discussion on managing through crisis, open source and AI, employee liquidity, future of WordPress, and more. You can watch on YouTube below or listen on Pocket Casts.
Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.
My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.
Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:
Let me go, I need to wander I’ll go around, seeking To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat) I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow To hear the birds sing I want to be born, I want to live Let me go, I need to wander I’ll go around, seeking To laugh, so as not to cry If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow To hear the birds sing I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)
Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.
One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!
Push and pull changes as a team by connecting a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site.
Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with one click.
Studio is an excellent tool to have in your development arsenal, and you can download it for free, explore the docs, and become a contributor on GitHub.
When Inc Magazine reached out to have David H. Freedman (website powered by WordPress) write a feature piece I was excited because though Inc wasn’t a magazine I have read much since I was a teenager, David seemed like a legit journalist who usually writes for better publications like The Atlantic. I opened up to David with a number of vulnerable stories, and allowed the photo shoot in my home in Houston.
Whether it was him or his editors, unfortunately the piece has turned out pretty biased and negative, even to the point of cherry-picking negative photos from the photo shoot they did in my home. It also has a number of basic errors which make me question the fact-checking and editorial integrity of Inc in the first place. Let’s go through it.
Although they have dozens of photos of me smiling, it starts with one where I look pretty morose. At least I got some Sonny Rollins and Audrey Hepburn in the background.
The article starts with a conversation David had with me while we were both in the bathroom, away from his recorder, where he remarked that the bathroom was really nice. I talked about visiting Google in 2004 when I first came to San Francisco and thinking they had cheap toilet paper, and how given that Automattic’s offices are barely used there’s no reason not to spend a few extra bucks on nice soap and toilet paper to give a better experience to employees and visitors. (For those curious, we use Aesop soap and Who Gives A Crap toilet paper, a brand that donates 50% of profits to charity.) I chose these brands because it’s what I use in my home, and I want people in our offices to have the same quality. David spins it thusly:
I ask him who at Automattic, the estimated $710-million company of which Mullenweg is CEO, is responsible for toilet paper and soap quality control?
“Me,” he says, beaming.
Of course, Mullenweg’s control of Automattic extends well beyond the bathroom walls.
Now you know how the rest of the piece is going to go! Factual errors mixed with bias. First, no credible business publication would put Automattic’s valuation at $710 million, our last Series E primary round was at $7.5 billion. That was 2021 and we’d probably trade closer to $5B now with current multiples, but still the article is an order-of-magnitude off.
David asked if there was a person responsible for choosing toiletries: of course not! We have better things to work on. The entire thing took probably 30 seconds of my time, from going to the bathroom in our New York office to sending a Slack message, and I haven’t thought about it since until David commented about our bathrooms being nice, while we were both in the bathroom and I was washing my hands. Okay, back to the article.
And it all began when Mullenweg got very annoyed, very publicly, at a $400 million company called WP Engine.
Once again, Inc is unable to distinguish between revenue and valuation.
On September 25, more than 1.5 million websites around the world suddenly lost the ability to make some routine software updates.
First, WP Engine doesn’t host 1.5 million WordPress sites. This was easily checked on our website WordPressEngineTracker.com, which as best we can tell from crawling the web, looking at domain registrations and public data from BuiltWith and W3Techs, they probably had ~745k sites on September 25th, so the second number in the piece is off by 2x. Second, those sites could still do software updates using WP Engine’s tools or by uploading new versions, it was just the connectivity between WP Engine’s datacenters and WordPress.org’s that was impacted for a few days.
WP Engine had royally pissed off Matt Mullenweg for not contributing enough to the open-source community, in his opinion. Mullenweg claims he had been in negotiations with WP Engine for months to get them to cough up their fair share one way or another, but finally decided the company had dragged its feet for too long, leading him to break off talks and go public with his ire.
No, the negotiations, and what they were doing wrong, was abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. I also think it’s lame how little they’re involved in the software their entire business is built on and their ability to serve customers was dependent on free server resources and bandwidth from WordPress.org, but our negotiations were about trademark use.
Mullenweg controls the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit that oversees WordPress’s open-source software, the website that serves as the gateway to WordPress resources, and the WordPress trademark.
False, false, false. First, I do not control the WordPress Foundation. I am one of three board members, so by definition am not in control. The other two board members could remove me at any time. Second, the Foundation does not oversee the core software, or the WordPress.org website! This is super clear in WPE’s legal filings, in the about pages of the respective websites, by talking to anyone who understands this. Really shoddy journalism.
In person, Mullenweg comes off as surprisingly chill when we meet on October 22, given all the angry online noise and employee turmoil surrounding the WP Engine beef for the past three weeks. He is a young-looking, animated 40 with a near-constant grin, and his neat beard and shawl-collar cardigan sweater contribute to his laid-back air.
I’m quoting this just to show they would occasionally say something nice before twisting the knife or going back into inaccuracies. A “near-constant grin” they couldn’t capture in photos.
Two days later, a comment popped up under the post from a U.K. coder named Mike Little: Would he like some help?
Three obsessive days later, Mullenweg released the results and followed a friend’s advice to name it WordPress— only after checking to make sure the domain names WordPress.com and WordPress.org were available. This domain ownership would prove critical.
It’s true that Mike Little commented a few days after my blog post in January 2003, but WordPress’ first release wasn’t until May 27th, 2003. Not “three obsessive days later.” This fact could have been easily verified by digging deep into obscure sources like the Wikipedia entry for WordPress.
Though there are different versions of open-source licenses, the general idea is that anyone can freely download and use the software, and anyone can modify it as they see fit, and then release it as their own version. But the original developer of the fork retains the trademark rights. And when it comes to WordPress, the rights belong to Mullenweg.
A 2020 study commissioned by WP Engine calculated the value of all business driven by WordPress to be $600 billion, and growing rapidly. No one gets a bigger piece of that pie than Automattic.
Okay, now after saying Automattic is worth $710M and WP Engine is worth $400M, you’re now breathlessly quoting WPE’s PR slop claiming the WP ecosystem is $600B (it’s not, probably closer to $10-15B/yr) and then immediately pivot into saying that Automattic gets the biggest piece of that pie, something clearly not true based on our revenue versus everyone else in the ecosystem.
Mullenweg had another complaint: WP Engine was violating Automattic’s trademark rights over the WordPress name, based on the fact that WP Engine freely used the abbreviation “WP,” and that “WordPress” appeared throughout their website.
I’m quoting this just to point out how bad the quality control is at Inc Magazine: the link for “another complaint” doesn’t work, it has the code <a href="http://@photomatt">another complaint</a>. They can’t even make sure all the links work in their published articles! I presume this was trying to refer to a tweet of mine, but no one reading the article will be able to know what it was. I would like to know, because our trademark complaint had nothing to do with “WP”, it was about the use of “WordPress” and “WooCommerce.”
Inc Magazine already runs on WordPress, though they use a needlessly complex and expensive custom front-end instead of just serving the site natively. Maybe in their next re-architecture they can take the money they save by getting rid of their lame headless implementation and put it towards fact-checkers and better editors.
Whenever Mullenweg is accused of being too controlling, he often points out he turned over control of WordPress software to a non-profit called the WordPress Foundation. He created the Foundation in 2010, and did indeed assign it all WordPress rights.
I have never said that, and it’s not even factually accurate or possible for me to assign all WordPress rights.
But few people who have looked at the Foundation take its independence seriously. Mullenweg is chairman of its three-person board. Little is known about the other two members, and their names don’t appear anywhere on the Foundation’s website.
The names of the other directors do appear on the Foundation website, for example in this October 17 blog post that says “WordPress Foundation Directors: Mark Ghosh, Matt Mullenweg, and Chele Chiavacci Farley.”
Now the article includes a picture of me at the computer, and out of the hundreds they have with my eyes open, they for some reason chose this one where my eyes were closed.
Like most theme vendors in the early years of that small sub-industry, it sold its themes under a proprietary—that is, non-open-source—license. But in 2008, Mullenweg cleaned house of all theme vendors who refused to switch to an open-source license. Only Thesis held out.
In response, Mullenweg offered to pay Thesis users to switch. He also reportedly paid $100,000 to acquire the domain name “Thesis.com” from a third party and had the name direct to an Automattic blog about theme design.
Themes in WordPress are linked and integrated in a way that the GPL license applies to the PHP code, so if you publish and distribute a WordPress theme the PHP needs to be GPL. There has only been one person to dispute this, Chris Pearson from Thesis, no lawyer or the thousands of successful themes since then have tried to violate the GPL license. Chris is a clown, and the only source for saying that 100k was paid for the Thesis.com domain, I will say now that the domain was bought for a small fraction of that. Again, no fact checking or citing sources.
Thesis eventually gave in. But many in the WordPress community were put off by what they saw as Mullenweg’s vindictive, bullying behavior, and some eventually even left WordPress for other publishing platforms because of it.
It’s funny to talk about the last big controversy in WordPress world being in 2010, I think it actually speaks to our stability. Since 2010, when “some eventually even left WordPress”, the platform has grown market share from under 10% to 43%. I think in a few years we’ll look back at WP Engine as inconsequential as Thesis, and Heather Brunner as credible as Chris Pearson.
Some are leaving WordPress entirely. Cernak of Northstar Digital Design has already decided to abandon WordPress (and WP Engine) for a much smaller, rival website-development platform called WebFlow. “I can’t depend on WordPress if Matt is going to make changes based on whatever he happens to want at the time,” he says.
Wow, they found one person leaving WordPress for Webflow. Is that cherry-picked, or a trend? Again, you can go to third parties like W3Techs to see the relative market share, and see that we’ve gained share since September and Webflow has been flat. Northstar Digital Design “is a creative agency specializing in digital marketing, blockchain technology, web development & design” with 5 followers on X/Twitter. Their website lists no clients or portfolio. It’s unclear how many sites they are responsible for. But this Cernak character is quoted like he’s some authority or representative of a trend. Maybe he’s more credible on blockchain technology.
When I ask Mullenweg if he is feeling traumatized by the pervasive criticism, he tells me about the time he was playing in a Little League game when his teammates saw, through his thin white pants, that his underwear had cartoon characters on them. “They started laughing. That was traumatic for me. But now it’s a funny story,” he recalls. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.”
Whether or not anything about the current crisis ever seems funny to him, he insists it will all end up as a beneficial experience. “The best things come out of adversity and clashes,” he says. “We’re going to come out of it way stronger.”
This is a true story, I was very open and vulnerable with the journalist.
In a prepared statement emailed to Inc., a WP Engine spokesperson said that “we are encouraged by and supportive of the ideas we see being shared by leaders within WordPress and adjacent open-source platforms to reimagine how key elements of the WordPress ecosystem are governed and funded….” It is a clear plug for pushing Mullenweg out of his BDFLship.
Oh finally, WP Engine talks to the press after months of avoiding interviews and conferences. This is a great statement given WP Engine can barely fund and govern itself, much less the broader WordPress ecosystem, and I doubt the broader WordPress hosting ecosystem would prefer Silver Lake and WP Engine holding the reins of WordPress.
There’s more slop in the article but I’m not going to go through everything. I know a lot of entrepreneurs follow me and I don’t want your takeaway to be “don’t talk to journalists” or “don’t engage with mainstream media.” When Inc reached out I thought back to when I was a teenager reading Inc and Fast Company, and how those magazines were inspiring to me, I didn’t think as much about their decline in editorial quality and relevance. I read David’s other pieces and thought he had some great insight, but this is a good example of where a decent journalist can’t overcome a crappy editor and quality control. I probably wouldn’t be excited to work with Inc Magazine again while Mike Hofman is in charge as editor-in-chief, he’s clearly overseeing a declining brand. But I will continue to engage with other media, and blog, and tweet, and tell my story directly.
We’ll see if Inc Magazine has any journalistic integrity by their updates to the article.
The talented Felix Arntz has given an incredible Christmas gift to the WordPress community with his fast, light, and accessible Snow Fall plugin, which is live on this site and you can install on yours. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays! Search for “snow fall” in your plugin dashboard and install his version, make your site cozy for the holidays.
It’s a dream come true being here in Tokyo for State of the Word 2024. We’re going to be in an amazing venue that looks over the city. Most of WordPress and Automattic’s senior leadership is here, and we’ll also have several hundred folks from the local community and press.
We’ve gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really “of the space” so we’re doing a few extra things this year. My presentation will include Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura, but also part of it will be in Japanese and presented by Junko Fukui Nukaga. We’ll have piano performances by Aiko Takei. After the presentation and Q&A we’ll do a panel in Japanese with Mieko Kawakami (one of the top novelists in Japan, on par with Haruki Murakami), Craig Mod, Hajime Ogushi, and Genki Taniguchi.
For those who can attend in person, we’ll have a reception afterward with some unique gifts including posters from a local Kanji artist and nice sweater to keep everyone warm this winter.
If you’d like to livestream at home, you can do so on Youtube here:
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Francisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading Automattic. I was surprised they put me on the cover of the physical edition! I wish my Dad were still around to see it.
The piece explores my commitment to open-source, my vision for democratizing online publishing, and the values of creativity and adaptability that have shaped my path. It’s an honor to reflect on these experiences with my alma mater.
The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. It is inconvenient and important. It’s also short, so I’m going to quote the First Amendment in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This means that, with rare exceptions, the government cannot tell you not to say something.
Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach
The First Amendment says I should be able to state facts and my opinions about WP Engine. However, the New York Times is not required or compelled to publish them in their newspaper and distribute them to their subscribers.
WP Engine is free to publish whatever GPL code they want to the world. WordPress.org should not be compelled to distribute it or provide it free hosting.
Quiet For A While
After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction. I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights to promote others’ speech. However, I hope others speak up on our battle with WP Engine, and I will boost their speech wherever I can.
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.
A few bullets to his core points:
The headline “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is not fair.
Automattic did not work on a deal with WP Engine for 18+ months because of the GPL, or them using “WP” in their name, it was because of their abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. Trademarks must be protected, as evidenced by Rails trademark policy.
Our C&D is about public trademark abuse; theirs is about censorship, and doxxes private messages. They have since filed a kitchen sink lawsuit that embroils all of WordPress.org.
Updating ACF to Secure Custom Fields in our directory was to provide users of our plugin directory the best, safest, most secure code. It included a security update that still has not been merged by the ACF team.
We will merge any improvements ACF makes to their GPL code going forward and will also include enhanced functionality in the coming days to provide a secure and free drop-in replacement for ACF. If WP Engine didn’t want this to happen, they should not have published their code under the GPL or distributed it through WordPress.org’s directory.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.
It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.
However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a long time now” (10:22), “I hate this shit, I hate when people are assholes and they get away with it because I’m doing it for the greater good, the fake nice guy shit. I’ll take an asshole over a fake nice guy any day, people whose whole aesthetic is being nice, I hated it.” (11:25), “Honestly I’d rather the license just be explicit about it than this weird reality of ‘If you get popular enough you can still use it but the guy who made WordPress is going to be an asshole to you.’ That seems much worse than most open source models.” (14:39)… it goes on.
Ouch!
However, one of my colleagues Batuhan is a follower of Theo’s and suggested I engage with him. It turns out we were both in San Francisco, and he was game for a livestreamed, no-conditions interview at his studio. I believe discussion is the best way to resolve conflict, that’s why my door is open to Lee Wittlinger, Heather Brunner, Brian Gardner, or any WP Engine or Silver Lake representative who wants to talk to resolve things.
Saturday afternoon I went to Theo’s studio, we had a vigorous two hour debate and discussion with some real-time chat polling that also changed my mind on a few things, and his, too. I left feeling like I had a new friend. ️And met some awesome cats. Check out the video.
I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play.
In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with them for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along. Finally, I drew a line in the sand, which they have now leapt over.
We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks. WP Engine has refused to do either, and has instead taken to casting aspersions on my attempt to make a fair deal with them.
WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means. If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.
I knew going to war with Silver Lake, a $102B private equity firm, they would pull out every dirty trick to try to smear my name, do oppo research, imply I’m a mafia boss trying to extort them, etc.
I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now. I would like to offer up one piece of evidence for the public to consider, which is the IRS accounting of my 501c3 charitable donations.
This is something I’ve tried to keep quiet, because true philanthropy isn’t about recognition. As you can see, my personal liquidity goes up and down but I give back as much as I can when I can.
2011: $295,044.60
2012: $401,121.00
2013: $2,088,890.88
2014: $98,648.00
2015: $101,947.00
2016: $42,300.00
2017: $51,562.50
2018: $606,957.68
2019: $620,802.65
2020: $607,452.48
2021: $2,151,602.26
2022: $2,780,054.20
2023: $2,276,425.06
If Lee Wittlinger, who controls Silver Lake’s investments in the WordPress ecosystem, or Heather Brunner, the CEO of WP Engine, would like to publish their charitable contributions over the past 12 years, they are welcome to do so.
