Matt Mullenweg on open source, WordPress, and the WP Engine conflict

Executive overview

WordPress powers 40% of the web, built on the principle that software freedom is a prerequisite for real freedom. When a private-equity-backed company began misusing the WordPress trademark, degrading the product, and negotiating in bad faith, Mullenweg went public — triggering a lawsuit and a wave of online criticism.

The conflict exposes a deeper tension: who controls open source when commercial interests diverge from community values?

Open source only stays free if its stewards are willing to fight for it — even when that makes them the villain in the story.

The WordPress and Automattic ecosystem

• WordPress is a fork of abandoned open-source project B2; Mullenweg co-founded it at 19
• Now powers 40% of all websites — 10x the share of its nearest competitor (Shopify at ~4%)
• Automattic (~1,700 people, 90 countries, fully distributed from day one) generates ~$500M ARR
• WooCommerce, originally 35 people in South Africa, now represents the majority of Automattic's revenue
• The plugin/theme ecosystem (60,000+ items) is the true moat — impossible to replicate on a proprietary platform
• Automattic runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, and Beeper

The WP Engine dispute

• WP Engine was bought by private equity firm Silver Lake in 2019; contribution to WordPress core then dropped sharply
• Began using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks in confusing ways — surveys showed 20–40% of users thought WP Engine was officially associated with WordPress
• Stripped the post-revisions feature from their WordPress installs to cut database costs, breaking the undo functionality
• Months of negotiation stalled; WP Engine appeared to be preparing a lawsuit while ostensibly bargaining
• Mullenweg went public at WordCamp US; WP Engine filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit (via Quinn Emanuel) days later
• Automattic blocked WP Engine's access to WordPress.org; a fork of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin (renamed Secure Custom Fields) was created after security issues emerged — later reversed by court order
• As of the interview, ~45,000 sites had left WP Engine

Open source philosophy and AI

• WordPress uses the GPL license: four freedoms — use, inspect, modify, redistribute (viral: any redistribution must carry the same freedoms)
• Meta's Llama is not truly open source: its license restricts commercial use above 750M monthly active users, which violates the freedom-to-use-for-any-purpose principle
• AI models trained predominantly on open-source code — Mullenweg sees this as validation, not exploitation
• Long-term: proprietary software utility approaches zero; open-source becomes the foundation of humanity's infrastructure
• AI agents building on WordPress (vs. custom codebases) means users inherit continuous security audits and updates for free

WordPress governance and the trademark structure

• WordPress.org has always been personally owned by Mullenweg (not a nonprofit — IRS denied that application)
• Trademark was originally under Automattic; later moved to the WordPress Foundation as a compromise, with Automattic retaining the commercial sublicensing right
• Community governance is radically delegated in practice, but Mullenweg retains final authority — by design
• Gutenberg (the block editor) is the proof case: it would never have passed a community vote, but is now central to WordPress's relevance; 200+ releases since launch
• Real-time collaborative editing (peer-to-peer via WebRTC) is the next major Gutenberg phase
• Succession planning exists; the goal is to pass stewardship to a single leader, not a committee

Acquisitions and the Automattic portfolio

• Tumblr: bought for ~$3M from Verizon in 2019 (previously sold to Yahoo for $1.1B); still not profitable, but migrating its ~500M sites to a WordPress backend
• Day One: founders still in place; taken to Android and web — the model Mullenweg prefers
• Turnarounds (like Tumblr) are the exception; most acquisitions are acceleration plays or acquihires
• Automattic pays the same salaries globally regardless of location

Building open-source communities

• "Don't just build a product, build a movement" — give people something to believe in beyond utility
• The "code is poetry" tagline and naming WordPress releases after jazz musicians are deliberate culture signals
• True platforms: the ecosystem makes more money than the core does; proprietary platforms (Facebook, Shopify) eventually claw back successful third-party builders
• Community participation spans code, design, documentation, translation, support, and events