Notices by photomatt@mastodon.social, page 2

The talented Felix Arntz has given an incredible Christmas gift to the WordPress community with his fast, light, and accessible Snow Fall plugin, which is live on this site and you can install on yours. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays! Search for “snow fall” in your plugin dashboard and install his version, make your site cozy for the holidays.

https://ma.tt/2024/12/falling-snow/

State of the Word Tokyo

It's a dream come true being here in Tokyo for State of the Word 2024. We're going to be in an amazing venue that looks over the city. Most of WordPress and Automattic's senior leadership is here, and we'll also have several hundred folks from the local community and press. We've gotten so much inspiration over the years from Japanese culture, we wanted to make this event really "of the space" so we're doing a few extra things this year.

https://ma.tt/2024/12/state-of-the-word-tokyo/

UH Magazine, Revisting My Alma Mater

My father attended University of Houston, and it's where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University of Houston student to co-founding WordPress and leading Automattic. I was surprised they put me on the cover of the physical edition!

https://ma.tt/2024/12/uh-cover/

DrupalCon Singapore

This week, DrupalCon Singapore is bringing together an incredible community of Drupal platform creators, developers, and supporters. Last year, I had the chance to share the stage with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and the conversation stuck with me. It highlighted the profound impact we can have when communities like ours come together to push the boundaries of Open Source and shape the future of the web.

https://ma.tt/2024/12/drupalcon-singapore/

Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic.

https://ma.tt/2024/12/wpai/

Bezos at Dealbook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s71nJQqzYRQ https://ma.tt/2024/12/bezos-at-dealbook/

Age-gating

I'm not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it's appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer. See also: Australia's Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are lots of other less controversial examples, like adult websites, or ordering alcohol online or through an app.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/age-gating/

Carmack & Rogan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udlMSe5-zP8 https://ma.tt/2024/11/carmack-rogan/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/welcoming-harper/

Observer Article

Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/observer-article/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/rip-quincy-jones/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/i-voted/

Michael Palmisano on Collier http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YtK1BRfTU https://ma.tt/2024/11/michael-palmisano-on-collier/

Disrupt Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn_HzfI_sW0 https://ma.tt/2024/11/disrupt-interview/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/11/gpl-clarification/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/10/kindness-techcrunch/

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…

https://ma.tt/2024/10/first-amendment/

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…

https://ma.tt/2024/10/cloudflare-stories/

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.

https://ma.tt/2024/10/other-lawsuits/

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:

https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/