Mullenweg has gone 'nuclear' against tech investing giant Silver Lake

23 pointsposted 9 months ago
by emrah
(cnbc.com)

30 Comments

meltdownMatt

9 months ago

Headlines like this are reinforcing Matt’s narrative that this is somehow about private equity. Does anybody believe that he’d be acting any differently if they had different ownership? He’s jealous of their revenue and success and is willing to resort to criminal measures to take them down.

FireBeyond

9 months ago

The thing that hasn't got a lot of attention so far is that Automattic sold their stake in WPEngine TO Private Equity.

And that the other active board member of the Foundation is the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm, appointed by Matt himself.

So I don't really buy it when he talks about PE as leeches (they often are, but I think it's an appeal to popular opinion in this case.)

bhouston

9 months ago

If you are going to trash a specific person in every single comment you make ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=meltdownMatt ), please do it using your own account, otherwise I think you are an involved party, like someone associated with WPEngine.

meltdownMatt

9 months ago

Of course I’m an involved party: every Wordpress developer and user is an involved party.

Matt has (in Slack) advised everybody to obtain their own legal council before they sign in to Wordpress’s support forums/plugin index/issue tracker/community resources again. (Many long-time contributors who cannot afford to hire a lawyer to deal with Matt’s whims have unfortunately decided this means they can no longer contribute.) Matt’s explicit stated (in Slack) intent is to require everybody to be involved in the conflict and choose sides. I’m sure not on Matt’s side, so I guess that means I’m on WP Engine’s, despite their mediocre service and contributions.

But no, I won’t use my own account. Matt seems rather vindictive and I wouldn’t want to risk my employer being subject to that.

grujicd

9 months ago

As a passive bystander, I was amused by all this drama. However, after reading "Fallout" thread on reddit, I realized it's not amusing at all to a lot people. Some lost contracts, some are very worried about their business, jobs and entire careers.

That's all doing of one man. He deserved all the trash talk he gets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g0ycb1/the_fall...

znpy

9 months ago

While i generally agree with what you’re saying, in this specific case i’d like to side with gp: given the current behaviour by automattic and Matt from wordpress i wouldn’t be surprised by retaliation against a specific individual for speaking their mind.

So it makes sense to allow for anonymous dissent (as long as it stays civil)

knowitnone

9 months ago

we don't know what he has extorted from other non-private equity funded companies.

LegionMammal978

9 months ago

As I understand it, Mullenweg has explicitly said in his video interview [0] that no other company is currently paying an 8% license fee. The WordPress Foundation trademark policy page [1] states (since Sep. 24) that its only commercial sublicensee is Newfold Digital, and Mullenweg mentioned this in the same interview, but I don't think that the sum that Newfold pays has been disclosed anywhere.

[0] https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM

[1] https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

yzydserd

9 months ago

“WordPress powers roughly 40% of all websites”

Is that true?

They say it is … https://wordpress.org/40-percent-of-web/

As far as I can tell, the stat is for websites whose CMS is known, which is a far far smaller number.

stefanos82

9 months ago

If we can trust data from websites such as https://w3techs.com/ then yes, it must be more or less true.

troad

9 months ago

I love stats like this.

Endless hype cycles for web stacks behind us, endless hype cycles yet to come, and meanwhile everyone in the real world is merrily pottering along with the same PHP + jQuery config they've used for decades.

mthoms

9 months ago

>The next day, in a post titled, “WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote that even his mother didn’t know the difference, and he said WP Engine is “profiting off of the confusion” and “needs a trademark license to continue their business.”

>His mom wasn’t the only one confused.

>Bob Perkowitz, president of environmental nonprofit ecoAmerica, told CNBC that he’s known Mullenweg for 16 years and is even an investor in Automattic. For a number of his organizational and personal websites, Perkowitz said he’s long been a WP Engine customer. Tuning in remotely, he heard Mullenweg’s WordCamp presentation.

>“I always thought that was part of WordPress,” Perkowitz told CNBC in an interview, referring to WP Engine. “They’re misleading, and they don’t contribute to the community.”

>Perkowitz said he’s having his website administrator migrate all of the websites to different hosting companies.

Can you imagine being a 'journalist' and using an Automattic investor and personal friend of Matt's as a source to support the claim about WPEngine being misleading? I mean, seriously? Who cares what this guy thinks, he's hardly neutral (or even well informed).

Besides, does anyone believe someone would invest in the WordPress hosting company and then pay to host his sites somewhere else? I don't buy it. Not for a second.

snowwrestler

9 months ago

I think it’s very plausible that this guy was an investor in Automattic but that his nonprofit tech team picked WP Engine to host their organization’s sites. It’s a good service!

Undoubtedly Matt connected him with the reporter to provide a supportive quote.

And I bet his tech team absolutely loved to get an emergency edict from their president to change all their site hosting ASAP.

s1artibartfast

9 months ago

I buy it. Seems like a relevant person to interview IMO.

datavirtue

9 months ago

Sounds like Mullenwag is screwing the pooch.

davidgerard

9 months ago

yeah. Nobody cares about WP Engine, they care that Mullenweg is randomly fucking with the plugin and theme repo that everyone depends on. If WP Engine disintegrated into dust tomorrow, Mullenweg would still be the guy that fucked with the repo that everyone depends on.

datavirtue

9 months ago

Yeah, he needs to shut the fuck up and let the thing that he bet on play out. Looks like he is surrounded by yes men. This is how family businesses and founder led companies always end up. Backwards, inefficient shit holes. I told my kids that if we start a business I'm the one washing dishes.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

gfourfour

9 months ago

This seems like an extremely petty fight

nikolay

9 months ago

[flagged]

bravetraveler

9 months ago

Weird measure, but okay. Nearly two-decades-long Linux contributor here. I don't know where that lands RE: percentile or relevance. You decide, clearly.

The license is what matters. Like, 'material' if you want to get technical terms out

gamblor956

9 months ago

It seems like Matt has leeched from the free work provided by thousands of people to enrich himself to the tune of several hundred million dollars...

Silver Lake might be bad, but if so Matt is worse. Just this week he kicked a bunch of long-standing WordPress contributors out for having the nerve to question his insanity.

FireBeyond

9 months ago

And maybe Matt shouldn't have sold Automattic's stake in WPEngine to ... checks notes ... Silver Lake.

nikolay

9 months ago

Well, somebody needs to pay the salaries of those WordPress.org FTEs, right?

enkonta

9 months ago

No. He's acted like a petulant child.

ImPostingOnHN

9 months ago

Doing good doesn't justify doing bad, and judging bad behavior doesn't require the judge to be a saint.

> I am surprised so many people here are against Matt

Perhaps that is a clue that he's in the wrong, and a hint to understand why.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

knowitnone

9 months ago

I hope Matt loses his pants but that would be a horrific sight I would only wish that on Putin.

tolerance

9 months ago

This is a well written news article as far as its structure and the ease in which it conveys an informative narration of events, with a dash of personality, is considered.