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> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyo

> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.

ibejoeb 15d ago
I don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.
- miguelxpn 15d ago
  He bought Pocket Casts.
  - ibejoeb 15d ago
    Then released under the MPL
    - subarctic 15d ago
      Nice i didn't realize it was open source now
    - miguelxpn 15d ago
      Oh, I had no idea. When you said opened I thought you meant founded, my bad!
  - stronglikedan 15d ago
    Was it open source before he bought it? If not, then he indeed opened it.
- legitster 15d ago
  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).
  - FireBeyond 15d ago
    Matt made a big deal of transferring rights. 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.
runjake 15d ago
> He really hasn't advocated for much 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.
- larodi 15d ago
  LLMs will surely fix this ubiquitous position of WP very soon.
  - hungryhobbit 15d ago
    Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do. Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
    - jmathai 15d ago
      I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
      - joeguilmette 15d ago
        Ironically, the antiquated model of a bunch of source code and a database sitting on a computer is something coding agents really like. WordPress and a nice page builder with MCP is actually a joy to use, and the absolutely enormous catalog of plugins that are easily extensible and endlessly modifiable makes it so easy to work with when building via agent. Having worked with WordPress for over a decade, I find it hilarious that WooCommerce (the bane of my existence that has inexplicably paid my rent for a gigantic chunk of my adult life) is easier to use and better positioned for building with AI than Shopify. The future is actually pretty bright for WordPress I think.
throwaway9010 14d ago
[flagged]
- reticulates 14d ago
  > * 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.
- legitster 14d ago
  - 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. Edit: Nice try, Matt.

> WordPress founder and a key advocate for the open source community This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.

ibejoeb 15d ago

I don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.

miguelxpn 15d ago
He bought Pocket Casts.
- ibejoeb 15d ago
  Then released under the MPL
  - subarctic 15d ago
    Nice i didn't realize it was open source now
  - miguelxpn 15d ago
    Oh, I had no idea. When you said opened I thought you meant founded, my bad!
- stronglikedan 15d ago
  Was it open source before he bought it? If not, then he indeed opened it.
legitster 15d ago
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).
- FireBeyond 15d ago
  Matt made a big deal of transferring rights. 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.

runjake 15d ago

> He really hasn't advocated for much 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.

larodi 15d ago
LLMs will surely fix this ubiquitous position of WP very soon.
- hungryhobbit 15d ago
  Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do. Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
  - jmathai 15d ago
    I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
    - joeguilmette 15d ago
      Ironically, the antiquated model of a bunch of source code and a database sitting on a computer is something coding agents really like. WordPress and a nice page builder with MCP is actually a joy to use, and the absolutely enormous catalog of plugins that are easily extensible and endlessly modifiable makes it so easy to work with when building via agent. Having worked with WordPress for over a decade, I find it hilarious that WooCommerce (the bane of my existence that has inexplicably paid my rent for a gigantic chunk of my adult life) is easier to use and better positioned for building with AI than Shopify. The future is actually pretty bright for WordPress I think.

throwaway9010 14d ago

[flagged]

reticulates 14d ago
> * 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.
legitster 14d ago
- 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. Edit: Nice try, Matt.