There’s drama going on right now in my industry, and I felt compelled to comment on it.

As you know, I build websites using the WordPress platform. This is an opensource software for building websites which is free to use (you just need a server to run it on, and the skill to run it),

There’s a WordPress conference called Wordcamp US going on right now. I didn’t go for various reasons (money, and also, to me WP just is a tool I use, not the focal point of my business), but I did just hear about the closing keynote which was just given Friday evening.

The keynote talk was given by Matt Mullenweg. For your reference, Mat is both the owner and CEO of Automattic ( this is a major player in WordPress, and the company which originally developed WP). He is also the head of the committee which decides the future development of WordPress. The public might not have heard of him, but Matt is arguably the face of WordPress.

You can catch the important parts of Matt’s keynote at around 7h10m in this video (the conference was streamed live all day, and then the video uploaded to Youtube). In this video, Matt talks about the importance of maintaining a healthy open source ecosystem, and how the major players should support that ecosystem by donating their developer’s hours writing and updating core code for WordPress.

(Yes, I know that is a lot of background, but I needed to explain the context.)

Matt then goes on to single out one of the larger hosting companies, WPEngine, who Matt thinks is not donating enough developer hours to WordPress. He puts WPEngine’s CEO up on the screen, and encourages people to move their sites away from WPEngine.

It’s worth noting that Matt had previously publicly criticized Godaddy, another major WordPress hosting company, for basically the same thing (he called GD a parasite, among other things).

EDIT: And I just noticed that Matt also published a blog post on the 17th which says basically the same thing as his keynote.

Second EDIT: And he also published a post on the WordPress.org blog.

The reason I am interested in this is that I am in awe of Matt. I don’t really like the guy professionally, but I am in awe of his ability to massively screw up in such a public way. I mean, I have screwed up before, but never at such a scale.

• For starters, there’s how Matt felt entitled to demand labor from privately owned companies. (I don’t like using the word entitled, but it fits here.)
• There’s also the fact that Matt, as the CEO of Automattic, is directly attacking his competitors – and at a professional conference no less.
• And then there’s how everyone is now going to be talking about the drama Matt caused, making that so the first thing people will hear about WordPress is the drama instead of how you can build a great website with WP.

But enough about the drama. Let’s move on to: Is Matt right?

Well, he is (probably) factually correct in that some of the larger hosting companies in the WordPress ecosystem do not donate enough developer hours to WordPress. Where we may differ is whether they should be donating those hours.

While I can’t speak for the companies, and I am not very good at reading minds, I can think of a good reason why they’re not donating those hours.

The thing is, there are more than a few people in tech who think that Automattic, and more specifically Matt, owns and controls WordPress. I’ve said this, and people whose opinion I respect have said this. There are even people in tech who will admit we’re right, but defend the situation with “well, someone has to control it” (I have literally been told this).

The reason I bring this up is that these companies might share this viewpoint, which means they are balking at donating their time to a competitor. And can you blame them?

And that brings me to what is perhaps Matt’s greatest blunder; in criticizing a competitor, Matt is going to bring everyone’s attention to WordPress being Matt’s personal fiefdom.

Impressive, no?