photomatt
Welcoming Harper
As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammerly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I'm very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic's products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere.
photomatt
Observer Article
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.
photomatt
RIP Quincy Jones
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.
photomatt
I Voted!
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.
photomatt
Michael Palmisano on Collier http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YtK1BRfTU https://ma.tt/2024/11/michael-palmisano-on-collier/
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Disrupt Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn_HzfI_sW0 https://ma.tt/2024/11/disrupt-interview/
photomatt
GPL Clarification
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.
photomatt
Kindness and Techcrunch Disrupt
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.
photomatt
My Freedom of Speech
WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this 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…
photomatt
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…
photomatt
Those Other Lawsuits
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.
photomatt
Response to DHH
I'll just remind everyone at the start that this a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn't because we were both traveling. However, "Automattic is doing open source dirty" is an abomination of a headline, and David's second post Open source royalty and mad kings, is just sloppy. So I'm forced to reply publicly:
photomatt
Everyone’s An Owner
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…
photomatt
Rhino Dehorning
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.
photomatt
CNBC on WP Engine
Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.
photomatt
@yatil I admire Zeldman a lot, too, and I think you misread his post.
photomatt
Automattic Alignment
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.
photomatt
On with Theo / T3.gg
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.
photomatt
Where is Lee Wittlinger?
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…
photomatt
Multidots Support
Anil Gupta has made an amazing commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. I applaud the way he runs his business.
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