💀 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 3]  ## Metadata - Author: [[Chris Pearson]] - Full Title: 💀 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 3] - Category: #articles - Document Note: Short Summary for [💀 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 3]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) The Frustration of Contributing to WordPress Core through WP Engine - A Summary [00:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=6) Matt is unhappy with WP Engine for not contributing to WordPress core. [02:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=127) Contributing to WordPress core is inefficient and time-consuming. [04:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=244) WP Engine hesitant to contribute to WordPress core due to potential negative repercussions [05:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=359) Matt Mullenweg's behavior raises concerns regarding support and legal advice. [07:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=473) Domain negotiation and trademark violation [09:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=595) Matt Mullenweg accused of hypocrisy and fraudulent behavior. [11:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=716) Matt Mullenweg's questionable tactics are revealed [13:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=823) WordPress is facing a decline due to drama and complexity. [15:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=939) Matt Mullenweg spearheaded the end of WPEngine's dominance. --------------------------------- Detailed Summary for [💀 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 3]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0) by [Merlin](https://merlin.foyer.work/) The Frustration of Contributing to WordPress Core through WP Engine - A Summary [00:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=6) Matt is unhappy with WP Engine for not contributing to WordPress core. - Matt wants 5% of WP Engine's gross revenue to be contributed to the WordPress core development. - The process of contributing to the WordPress core is complex and involves a strict system and significant time investment. [02:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=127) Contributing to WordPress core is inefficient and time-consuming. - Dealing with unnecessary questions and political maneuvering is frustrating. - Contributing to WordPress core results in a lot of wasted time and energy. [04:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=244) WP Engine hesitant to contribute to WordPress core due to potential negative repercussions - Matt Mullenweg's tactics of pressurizing companies to commit code by threatening a 'scorched Earth' approach - WP Engine favors a transparent submission process for contributions to maintain integrity of WordPress [05:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=359) Matt Mullenweg's behavior raises concerns regarding support and legal advice. - Mullenweg's actions may negatively impact the WordPress ecosystem as a whole. - It is puzzling that he seems to have backing from his board and legal team despite the perceived risk. [07:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=473) Domain negotiation and trademark violation - Brokering process for domain purchase, initial negotiations, and involvement of Matt Mullenweg. - Trademark dispute and violation following the domain purchase. [09:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=595) Matt Mullenweg accused of hypocrisy and fraudulent behavior. - Matt has a history of hypocritical behavior regarding trademarks and a pattern of attacking others when upset. - His actions are seen as capricious and unchecked, leading to ugly consequences. [11:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=716) Matt Mullenweg's questionable tactics are revealed - He attempted to hinder competition by paying people to switch - His dubious behavior may result in consequences for the WordPress ecosystem [13:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=823) WordPress is facing a decline due to drama and complexity. - WordPress lacks enthusiasm and is plagued by drama, making it stale in the eyes of the community. - The complex and outdated nature of WordPress is hastening its decline. [15:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0&t=939) Matt Mullenweg spearheaded the end of WPEngine's dominance. - Large beasts like WPEngine take time to decline. - Matt Mullenweg's actions marked the downfall of WPEngine and Wordpress. - Summary: Give back... OR ELSE! If you don't see the truth now, you're never going to see it. (PS: It's so over.) - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa7Ije6_r0 so here's where we're at let's summarize all this we know that Matt is not happy with WP engine we don't really know why he's tried to couch it under the terms of them not giving back in the form of contributing uh I think he wants 5% or the equivalent of 5% of what the company's uh gross revenue is to be that much energy and money equivalent or whatever be put into contrib to the WordPress core but this is another topic worth visiting as well it's not that easy it's not that simple uh each WordPress product release each new release of Wordpress has a team appointed to lead it there's usually a different leader of each team there's usually a theme talk about that in a second and there is also a very uh strict sort of way you get new uh commits into the WordPress core it is if you can imagine let's say I've got a little piece of code that I want to get in the WordPress core I've already got the code made i' I've you know tested on my sites I know this would be a good addition to core so I've got to go on the I've got to first get my login credentials to talk to all these people I've got to submit my uh proposed changes to this special system the track system that they have it's going to go get viewed by a bunch of people there's going to be a back back and forth people will always object to something it's it's nauseating process I hate involving others in that way this is how some software works I think it's a joke of a way to do it I'm just telling you this is how WordPress does it I think it's an absolutely substandard way of operating doesn't matter what I think this is what they do and this is what anyone who wants to contribute must deal with so basically if I have this piece of code I've already written the piece of code I already have it just stick it in the damn core and move on it's not the like that now I'm going to let's say I spend a you know few hours building that code now I'm going to spend like at least 10 hours of my life interfacing and back and forthing with uh the people involved the the the commitment team the core commit team for whoever's leading at this go round going to deal with all this nonsense and all these questions and all these whatabouts and what if and all this nonsense and then you know some tweaked version of the thing we'll finally make it in the core and I get my contribution but we're talking about serious nashing of teeth to get there and lot of wasted just so much like so much energetic waste time waste money waste energy waste all this stuff I have a very clear grasp of this because I've been running my own company for freaking I don't know 16 and a half years I know what it takes and what all this stuff is and like how much time is required of me to deal with others in like a political fashion and a Communications type fashion to get uh something approved right uh I don't need that own approval I run my own company I come up with new code it's already in there right now there's no discussion there's no politics There's No Nonsense it's already over it's a super efficient activity by contrast the way commits happen in the WordPress Corp is about as inefficient as it could possibly be it is I mean huh it is super super inefficient like pretty much nothing is getting in if only immigration ran this way right uh anyway that's a joke because WordPress is super leftist they want to run their stuff like a tight ship but no no no you're not allowed to do the same what a joke I just hate the the hypocrisy in all this like it's so naked and people don't seem to see it and they still want to be bootlick and stuff like come on it's disgusting bro figure it out anyway anyway bottom line is it's really uh it's a pain in the ass to contribute to the WordPress core you're going to deal with a lot of waste it's mostly wasted time it's like 95% wasted time 5% yay I get my commit in WordPress who cares who cares another thing that's problematic is the team that's leading the WordPress uh next WordPress release might be really uh you know have a lot of animosity toward you I'm a white man uh a few years ago there was a release team that was all female and supposed to be like uh lgbtq allies also like all female and that like that was like the theme you think they're going to be that happy about receiving a code commit from Chris Pearson really so there's more to this and so if you're WP engine if you're a business who has to make rational decisions you know you have to throw out the emotion the D the dumb stuff you have to look at this and say well I'm going to be paying at least one employee possibly a few employees to waste 95% of their time to get this Co the commit into WordPress core and the only reason I'm doing this is because Matt is forcing me to do so or else he's going to do this scorched Earth go nuclear go to war you know this terrible rhetoric that's what he's going to do to you if you don't comply Well Company like WP engine has decided that well he hasn't said anything yet maybe he'll never say anything it's not definitely not worth it to them to try and contribute to the WordPress core it's not easy enough if they had a way to like for companies to to submit they could you like a get thing they could show like how many of these things these companies have proposed to me that would that would that would do it because it shows that they are actively making changes like I'd rather see that that's more honest because then we would know how much crap the the development team doesn't allow to get through or maybe we could law them and say oh they're keeping so much junk at Bay they're really keeping you know keeping up the Integrity of Wordpress we would know more about it is my my point it'd be more transparent than whatever this extortionist crap is right now my God so anyway all right I'm going to I'm going to wrap up this video I am going to do another one which you know well I'll discuss sort of the psychological impacts and what what customers real world people are actually saying here but I'm going to leave some predictions here number one I don't think there will be any consequences for Matt Mullen WG whatsoever uh number two I think by if you read through the uh the the wp engine cease and assist letter the one they sent to automatic you get the I I got a very clear s now I don't know if this is true or not but I got the sense that Matt mullenweg behaved in a way in the way that he did because he felt like he had the support of his board and his legal advisers if that's true they got a lot of questions because the board to to me like this is suicidal this is really stupid like there's no sense in drumming up all this negative energy around around the ecosystem I think it's only going to hurt WordPress in as a whole it hurts the whole ecosystem it doesn't just hurt WP Engen it's not going to hurt just Matt mull it's going to hurt everybody associated with WordPress and make other people want to look away from WordPress like that seems obvious to me but also the legality of this like I mean I'm looking at like how is mull not like just putting himself out in traffic naked here he's going to get run over by a semi this seems really really stupid every way you slice it but again we've only got WP engines cease and assist letter to automatic now I saw today that automatic released their so I I'll cover that in the next video and also the the psychological response people but um yeah so that it's not a pretty situation I don't think Mullen WG will have any consequences I think he had the backing of his board and legal and I just do not understand that at all given the information we have right now so there must be more to the story they must feel like they have a better case I don't know what that is uh I don't see how they could though given the the track record of the last 14 15 years doesn't make any sense to me also uh because this kind of hinged on a a trademark Claim about the use of WP I just got to mention my own uh trademark history with Matt mullenweg in particular I tried to buy the thesis. comom domain in 2014 actually had a multi-year process in this but 2014 it came to a head I wanted to buy this domain and uh in the negotiations the dude who was uh the broker he's a very smart guy apparently so he talked to me we didn't we didn't get to a price you know I told him I wanted to spend you know over 10,000 but not too much more if I could I think something like that like just I want I didn't want to set too high of a a bar going in you know want to set expectations low so then he uh ends that call and in the meantime after talking to me he went right to Matt Mullen he's like who's this guy hate or who hates Chris Pearson and he found Matt mull he's like shoot I can get this offer up way up he emails me back and says that mullenweg says he pay 100 grand for it for thesis. and I remember thinking my God like what a snake this broker is but damn kind of Kudos he found mullenweg and mullenweg was mad enough to try and spend 100 Grand on the.com to take it away well I kind of laughed that off I didn't really think it was serious uh I was like there's no way I'm going to pay that and I think if he buys it he's violating my trademark so I guess we'll do that well he did buy it and then he immediately violated the trademark because he used it to point to theme shaper.int themes so this was an absolute violation of my trademark I opened a trademark dispute and what they do in these cases they actually appoint like a little kangaroo court before it goes to any like real thing and the it's I can ICA and they're like the domain registar governing body for domains since it was about thesis. comom that the dispute was about the domain so they have this little kangaroo CT I forget what it's called but three people and they're they're like people in the industry okay who get appointed to this board well one of the three people on the board of my case was a freaking investor in automatic like like come on man I've got no chance if the board is bought out so anyway the kangaroo Court found that Matt was not in violation of my trademark shocking okay it was clear I had a lawyer he was like dude this was this is a joke this was rigged against you but whatever it didn't matter I wrote about on my site I've got it all on there on pei. comom if you want the the history of Matt buying fis.com for $100,000 just to spite me but I I bring that up to show that he has a record of hypocrisy about trademarks he once thinks his way or the highway which is super hypocritical about this open you know he when you lead with openness and open source and inclusion and all this crap and then behave in this way way you're a fraud you're a fraud Matt Mullen wag you're a fraud because of your behavior your actions make you a fraud and that is ultimately what I don't like in this I just don't like liars I don't like people who try to use very vague legal justifications for the actions they take I don't like when people are capricious when they try to attack others who have upset them like I'm mad I'm going to go on war against you like what what kind of behavior is this and I also think that there is like a uh a spiritual or energetic layer to this if you are obsessed with somebody and have and want to attack them because they're doing something you don't like that person owns you spiritually energetically they're your boss they're your king and that that says its own thing you know about the whole situation about Matt about the players involved but it also leads to some really really ugly consequences if this Behavior goes unchecked over time Matt has been a loose cannon now for 14 and A2 years doing this kind of thing he's not suffered any consequences at all never any uh you know as far as this torous interference with WP engine is concerned he did the same thing with me back in the day I talked to lawyers about it they're like dude you're going to get crushed you're right but you're going to get crushed you know for example after uh 2010 he wanted people to stop using says he was paying people to switch he was buying them memberships to other themes just so they would stop using my stuff he went behind the scenes and told my competitors that he was going to be helping them and uh basically did everything he could behind the scenes to destroy me now fortunately for him I'm not the type of person who holds grudges or does that because I don't want my energy to be held captive by him he's a low Vibe person why would I like that would just cost me more I've already been cost you know I've already paid a very high cost in the situ I'm certainly not going to give up more uh to a demon but um I think this is amazing because Matt stepped on so many rakes over the years for no reason at all and but he's avoided the scrutiny but I think this time might get him there's a good chance that this might get him but even if it doesn't it doesn't matter it doesn't matter to me I don't care uh you know we have to we have to live with ourselves at the end of the day and I question whether or not a lot of people who are operating in these ways are able to do that uh do that for real you know you can't can't lie to yourself at the end of the day I think we all kind of get this but uh I don't know I'm just rambling now but the bottom line is Matt's not a good guy he has a a track record of behavior showing that he's not a good guy he's not a consistent operator he's not a principled operator and he's taken the WordPress ship down with him but this was always inevitable because his conduct has never been checked and so what this will amount to in the end like I said Matt will suffer no no personal consequences no direct consequences from from his behavior in this case but the entire WordPress ecosystem so this is this is officially the beginning of the end it was already it WordPress is still oh it Powers most of the internet or whatever yeah that's great but long ago many years ago now at least six years ago WordPress reached the state of we use it but we don't really care about it we're not excited about it there is no WordPress Community anymore nobody's talking about stuff and excited somebody does some new thing in WordPress and tweets about it and it freaking crickets nobody cares and the reason nobody cares is because of the non-stop drama the capriciousness in the ecosystem you don't know who's going to be in the crosshairs next because it doesn't matter if you operate according to Matt's wishes now you might run a foul of his capricious wishes later and get penalized then so you know the these uh these energetic currents don't go away you can't just dismiss them you know and eventually it's it's rotting out WordPress on the inside there's no enthusiasm already so like the spark of life was already gone it's already dead but now this is officially the beginning of the end there will be a replacement for WordPress at some point and the only thing that is you know holding back those floodwaters right now is the fact that so many large companies service providers like WP engine and plugins essential plugins that do critical stuff like e-commerce features and this kind of thing is because those exist the second there are reasonable alternatives for both WordPress is screwed uh people know they understand intrinsically that there's a simpler solution out there for websites they understand that WordPress has gotten too complex is unnecessarily complex and still retains a lot of this stuff uh that's difficult to understand or that makes things harder to teach new people because they have to maintain all this Legacy stuff because it's 20 21 years old and that's the reality of software anything that has to carry a legacy burden for long enough is going to become Obsolete and WordPress is already heading there anyway but these types of uh stupid stupid public missteps just you know they just accelerate the demise all right I don't like that any more than you probably do I don't think that's great I'm not saying WordPress going to be dead tomorrow it's not going to be like that really large beasts take a really long time to die and this will be the case here as well but uh Matt Mullen wag you know stuck the spear in the carcass of Wordpress today it's done and he's the reason why and it was always going to be this way, 💀 Matt Mullenweg vs. WPEngine [Part 3], Chris Pearson, 01j8wkmptem7t95fw9krdn3zdw.