The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)

If you're really open and open source, sometimes you have to stand up the bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Put your hands together for Matt Mullenwick. Matt Mullenwig has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. Twenty plus years of good sentiment burned. In days. You were like a hundred percent beloved hero of open source and internet, and now you're like in this a lot of people don't like you. If you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, it's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. Previously like one percent. Um The world thought I was terrible. And now I feel like it's up to like four or five percent. People that don't know what the hell's going on. Well it's just like the high level over here, what's going on. There's a company called WPNG. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silver Lake. You know, since 2019, WPN has kind of changed a bit. They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress. Yeah, refer to it as like a

A bastardized hacked up version of it. It's diluting our brand. Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy? A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know, get out of bed. Today my guest is Matt Mollenweg. Matt is the co creator of WordPress, which powers forty percent of websites on the internet today. Including Whitehouse.gov

He's also the CEO of Automatic, which is valued at over seven billion dollars, and owns products like WordPress.com. Tumblr. Woo Commerce, Gravitars, and Pocket Casts. There is a lot of drama these days around Matt and WordPress and within the open source community. So I thought I'd have Matt on to address many of the criticisms head on that he hasn't addressed in other places.

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