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MATT MULLENWEG


UNLUCKY IN CARDS


RIP QUINCY JONES

November 11, 2024MusicMatt

Quincy Jones had such an impact on the culture that it’s impossible to
summarize. His discography is amazing. I feel so lucky to have met him in 2012
when I was much earlier in my career, and he didn’t have any reason to give me
time, but he treated everyone as if they were important. We talked a lot about
his Count Basie and Frank Sinatra days. If you’re unfamiliar with him, the
Quincy documentary on Netflix is a good start. His musical fingerprints are
everywhere, including the super-catchy theme songs for Sanford and Sons and
Austin Powers.

He passed away last week, on November 3rd. As a tribute, here are ten albums he
was involved in from the jazz side that have been big parts of my life. I’ll
link to Spotify, but find them wherever you can:

 1.  Sinatra at the Sands, Quincy arranges and directs the Count Basie band.
     This live album is great to listen to, you also get Frank doing stand-up
     comedy.
 2.  It Might As Well Be Swing, Frank Sinatra.
 3.  Julian “Cannonball” Adderley.
 4.  Sonny Stitt Plays Arrangements from the Pen of Quincy Jones.
 5.  Ella and Basie.
 6.  The Genius of Ray Charles.
 7.  For Those in Love, Dinah Washington.
 8.  Dizzy and Strings, Dizzy Gillespie.
 9.  Quincy Here We Come, Benny Bailey. (The track Meet Benny Bailey has an
     excellent tribute on Manhattan Transfer’s Vocalese.)
 10. Social Call, Betty Carter.

I put all ten into one Spotify playlist if you want to check them all out.

View all 5 comments

It was a huge pain in the butt, because my mail-in ballot didn’t register
properly, but I found a last-minute flight to Houston and this morning walked
over to Congregation Emanu El and voted. It is our most sacred duty as a
citizen. I encourage every American to vote.

November 5, 2024


MICHAEL PALMISANO ON COLLIER

I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry
‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is
genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He
even has his own instrument now.) This reaction and breakdown from Michael
Palmisano, who is an incredible musician, go through Jacob’s amazing Little Blue
video is amazing.


November 3, 2024AsidesMatt View all 3 comments


DISRUPT INTERVIEW

November 1, 2024pressMatt

On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of
TechCrunch, you can view the video here:



Then yesterday Automattic filed its legal responses to the spurious lawfare from
WP Engine, Silver Lake, and Quinn Emanuel. It’s a bit long, but if you have time
give it a read, it’s the first time we’ve been able to put out our full story.

View all 2 comments


GPL CLARIFICATION

November 1, 2024Open Sourcegpl, pluginsMatt

A quick followup on my prior conversation with Theo.

During that chat, I talked briefly about a trademark infringer that was also
distributing nulled plugins. I said “Not illegal. Legal under the GPL. But they
weren’t changing the names. They were selling their customers Pro Plugins with
the licensing stuff nulled out.”

I want to be clear that my reference to legality and GPL was solely focused on
the copying and modifying of the code. That is one of the key freedoms of open
source and GPL: the right to copy and modify GPL code.

I was not speaking about their right to charge money for nulled plugins. GPLv2
prohibits that because they aren’t providing physical copies or support. This is
very different from reputable web hosts, who provide hosting and support for
websites and e-commerce stores.

View all 2 comments


KINDNESS AND TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT

October 28, 2024AsidesMatt

Back in June I recorded an episode with Jaclyn Lindsey on the Why Kindness
podcast, for their awesome non-profit kindness.org. You can listen to it through
Pocket Casts here:



This is kind of funny because I’m obviously in the midst of the big battle with
Silver Lake and WP Engine. I am a huge proponent of kindness, but sometimes you
have to stand up for what’s right if someone is taking advantage of you.

I’m continuing to do some select press, and will be appearing in a conversation
with Techcrunch’s Editor-in-Chief, Connie Loizos, at 10:30AM on Wednesday in San
Francisco at their Disrupt conference. It’s an amazing conference! Over 10k
people from all over the world, just started today. I’m glad they were able to
work me into the schedule, I think it will be a timely conversation. We may even
have an announcement to make.

One comment so far


MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH

October 20, 2024AsidesMatt

WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction
against me and Automattic. They say this is about community or some nonsense,
but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail
my First Amendment rights.

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.

View all 18 comments

There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.

The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a
secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the
apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later
helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged
about with some technical detail here.

Second, my dear friend Om Malik published a great conversation with Cloudflare
CEO Matthew Prince in his new newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech. Matthew and Om are
influential thinkers to listen to, and their discussion contains a lot of
interesting nuance about networks, censorship, and sovereignty.

October 19, 2024


THOSE OTHER LAWSUITS

October 15, 2024PersonalMatt

It’s a heavy day, and I’m sad to write this. Not sure where to start.

In 2022, a lawyer recruited two people who took care of my Mom—an assistant and
one of her dozen nurses—to resign and demand a million dollars each, or they
would publish horrible things about her in a lawsuit. I refused. The lawsuits
were filed. Luckily, the accusations are so sick, twisted, and outrageous that
they refute themselves. There’s some weird sex stuff, and also claims that my
Mom is racist. I am sad for whatever mind could even imagine such things.

I won’t link or quote them because they don’t deserve that, but the lawsuits
have been part of the public record and available to anyone with a web browser
since 2022. The lawyer sent them to every major media publication and gossip
rag. You’re just hearing about them now because any journalist who spent five
minutes calling around easily saw how spurious the claims are and didn’t run
with the story. They’ve been dredged up as part of the smear campaign against me
in my battle with Silver Lake and WP Engine.

My advice for any other founder: As you gain wealth this may happen to you with
household staff as well. Never settle. It just creates an incentive for more
people to make stuff up. Even if it’s messy, fight the claims in court as I am
doing. It’s the only way to deter people trying to make a quick buck. These
cases are common, and the media is used to them.

Now for some good news! I’m happy to report that since these two people left, my
Mom has had no errors in her medication (previously, she had to be hospitalized
twice and almost died because of medication errors). She’s back to the weight
she was in her 30s and isn’t in a wheelchair all the time anymore. She’s just
moved into a new home we’ve been remodeling together for the past 5 years. She
still has 24/7 RNs, but the new nurses have been fantastic and feel like an
extension of our family. We’re looking forward to celebrating the holidays
together with my sister, lifelong family friends like the Ornelas family, Mom’s
four dogs, and some of my fifteen godchildren who live in the area.

I may be wrong or dumb about many other things, but I sincerely believe in the
sanctity and beauty of every human life, regardless of any background. We are
all God’s creation. My Mother taught me these values, and I have done my best to
uphold them in my life’s work building open source, WordPress, and Automattic.
It’s part of why I give so much back.

View all 29 comments


RESPONSE TO DHH

October 14, 2024Automattic, WordPressMatt

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.

View all 27 comments


EVERYONE’S AN OWNER

October 12, 2024AutomatticMatt

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It
was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and
goodbyes are always hard.

On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for
leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our Woo team had ~350
people in person at a meetup in Tulum. I had five minutes to talk, and over the
weekend, I had been brainstorming with finance and HR for something nice we
could do for everyone who stayed. We couldn’t give them all a six-month bonus,
which would have cost ~$126M, but we did take how much we spent on severance for
the 159 people, rounded up a bit, and granted everyone at Automattic 200 shares
of A12 stock, so about a $12M bonus for the employees.

What’s A12 stock? This is probably the first time you’re hearing about it, we
haven’t had a chance to talk about this publicly much before.

Usually, options or common stock in a private company is fairly illiquid, with
rare opportunities to sell or lots of restrictions like what Uber had; it’s not
an efficient or predictable market. Options are “nice” because they can defer
taxes, but you still have to exercise them, and they can go underwater. Also, as
a fully distributed company, we have people in 91 countries, so security and tax
laws around options make them not worth it in most places outside of the US.

When thinking about a stock plan for Automatticians, we thought, our most
sophisticated investors have nice protections like a 1x liquidation preference,
what if we gave that to employees, too? So to summarize, A12 is a special class
of stock available only to buy if you’re a current Automattician with these
characteristics:

 * There are twice-a-year windows to buy. You have to hold for 1 year, but then
   there are quarterly windows to sell, which is very predictable.
 * Automattic maintains the internal market, and provides a backstop so you can
   always sell the shares at what you paid for them or more, like a 1x
   liquidation preference.
 * Current employees can buy, but former employees are eligible for every
   selling window, there’s no politics like can happen with tender offers. It’s
   reliable and predictable.
 * Unlike options, A12 stock never expires. Once you own it, you own it.
 * Initially we only allowed $25k/year of A12 to be purchased, but as our
   business has scaled we now allow up to $1M/yr of A12 stock to be purchased.
   (Remember, the company has to backstop the purchase price.)
 * A12 is just economic rights, it doesn’t have any voting rights.
 * A12 stock can be transferred to a trust.
 * The price is set by an external firm, just like our 409a. Because that
   process discounts us so much for being private, it’s a pretty good deal
   compared to what investors would pay for a share.
 * We’ve mostly moved away from options, which really only work for already
   wealthy, sophisticated hires. We pay very generous base salary (which banks
   love, makes it easier to get a mortgage) and then people can make a personal
   decision whether the characteristics of A12 fits with their financial
   planning alongside index funds, stocks, and bonds.

We’ve been running this program since 2016. The main downside risk for A12
holders, which isn’t that different from common stock, is that we go out of
business and can’t keep our commitments. But that’s true of any stock
investment, and we have a pretty solid track record.

We want everyone to have an owner mentality, so we’ve also now started granting
1 share of A12 stock to every new hire.

Our legal team has their hands full right now with the Silver Lake / WP Engine
stuff, but we’d like to open source our docs around this so other companies can
offer the same thing easily, I’ll see if we can make time for that in the next
few weeks.

We also announced something else cool for employees on Monday around our Grand
Meetup in 2025, but to know that secret you have to work with us. We are one of
the most open companies, but we can’t publish everything!

View all 3 comments


RHINO DEHORNING

October 7, 2024TravelMatt

Yesterday in the African bush was great, I saw giraffes, zebras, warthogs,
leopard turtles, elephants. Today wasn’t great: I witnessed a rhino shot with a
tranquilizer from a helicopter, then it was held down, had its horns cut off,
and then shaved down. I have some photos and videos from the event but I’m not
going to share them, because I think it’s really tragic. While this was
happening I put my hand on the rhino’s belly to try to send it love, because I
can’t imagine how confusing and terrifying the experience was.

Let’s back up: Why does anyone care about rhino horns? First, you have to start
with how dangerous false ideas and memes can be. Rhino horns are 92-95% keratin,
just like your fingernails, the rest is basic stuff like melanin, calcium salts,
magnesium, sulfur, nitrogen, amino acids, and phosphorus. There is nothing
special or magic about a rhino horn that you couldn’t easily obtain many other
ways.

However there is a dangerous infovirus going back thousands of years that rhino
horns can cure various ailments, from cancer to fevers, and have aphrodisiac
properties. To quote Scientific American:

> Some purchase horn chunks or powder for traditional medicinal purposes, to
> ingest or to give others as an impressive gift. Wealthy buyers bid for antique
> rhino horn carvings  such as cups or figurines to display or as investments. A
> modern market for rhino horn necklaces, bracelets and beads has also sprung
> up. […]
> 
> On the bright side, traditional Chinese medicine experts have increasingly
> joined the fight to reduce the demand for rhino horn. When China officially
> banned the international trade in 1993, it followed up by removing rhino horn
> as a medical ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine’s pharmacopeia  and
> curriculum. […]
> 
> “Traditional Chinese medicine has a history of 3,000 years and we have been
> educating the public for less than 30 years,” Huang notes. “Therefore this is
> an ongoing education.”

Regardless of the reasons, there is a price for rhino horns. I was told the
larger front horn would get about $300,000 on the black market, and rhinos have
been poached to near-extinction. Combine that with South Africa’s 33%
unemployment rate, some people turn to crime or poaching to make money. It’s
cheaper and faster to kill the rhino and take its horn than tranquilize it as
the game reserve did.

I don’t want to criticize the people at the game reserve. They clearly cared for
the animal quite deeply, and while it was tranquilized, they provided other
veterinary help for it, like removing ticks. They also put a tracker on its
foot. They say they lock the horns in a vault… why? Burn it, toss it. The
thinking is that reserves that are known for de-horning will attract fewer
poachers.

This is obviously a middle solution, and I hope ten years from now we’ll look
back at this as a point in time we learned from. On the demand side, it seems
like aggressive education campaigns could help decrease demand for keratin from
rhinos. On the anti-poacher side, I think drones will be able to secure
perimeters far more securely than fences currently do. It would be fascinating
for an economist like Tyler Cowen to dive into these issues.

View all 2 comments

Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and
Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone
‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.


October 5, 2024


AUTOMATTIC ALIGNMENT

October 3, 2024AutomatticMatt

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last
blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and
there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic,
there’s been a parallel debate and process.

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!

View all 25 comments


ON WITH THEO / T3.GG

September 29, 2024press, WordPressMatt

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.







View all 20 comments


WHERE IS LEE WITTLINGER?

September 28, 2024AsidesMatt

Lee controls the board of WP Engine. The board is why WP Engine hasn’t done a
trademark deal for their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.

You hide behind lawyers and corporate PR when you’re wrong, not when you’re
right.

I’m replying on Twitter, I’m commenting on Reddit and Hacker News, I’m dropping
into livestreams with ThePrimeagen and WPMinute. I’m talking to journalists
whenever they reach out, and I’m happy to go on any large credible podcast or
show to discuss these issues.

Lee could do the same. Why isn’t he?

Lee is a managing director of a $102B private equity firm, he is probably richer
than me. (Though I doubt he gives back as much.)

“Because their lawyers are telling him not to.” Why do you think their lawyers
are telling them not to?

Open invite: Lee, let’s debate this publicly. Propose a neutral venue and
moderator.

View all 4 comments

Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud
the way he runs his business.

September 27, 2024


ON THEPRIMEAGEN

September 26, 2024pressMatt

I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague
pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.



Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner,
the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve
heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists
live?

View all 3 comments


WPE & TRADEMARKS

September 26, 2024WordPressMatt

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.

Further reading:

 * Automattic’s cease and desist to WP Engine.
 * WP Engine is not WordPress.
 * WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org.

View all 10 comments


CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS

September 25, 2024PersonalMatt

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.

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