Update  ## Metadata - Author: [[WordPress News Podcast - WP Minute]] - Full Title: Update - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #wordpress - #wp_minute - #legal_dispute Author: Matt Mullenweg Source: YouTube/WP Minute Update Reference: [Transcript for WP Minute Update](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18dy688BDu8) date created: {{date:2024-10-07}} {{time:19:45}} --- # Title: WP Minute Update: WordPress, WP Engine, and Open Source Drama ## Table of Contents:  - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ## 📝 Summary: This WP Minute update addresses the ongoing legal and emotional battle between Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and WP Engine, highlighting the community's mixed emotions and concerns over control, trust, and the future direction of WordPress. The podcast reflects on the implications of recent events, the potential damage to the community, and the role of independent voices in covering this unprecedented situation. ## 📖 Main Content: The update primarily discusses the current state of affairs between WP Engine and Automattic, including the ongoing legal challenges and the broader impact on the WordPress community. The podcast also touches on the difficulties faced by independent creators covering WordPress news, emphasizing the unique position of WordPress in the broader technology landscape, and the pressures that the community is experiencing due to these disputes. The speaker highlights the exhaustion and emotional burden felt by community members as they navigate these challenges. He expresses concern over how the community can heal from the damage and continue advocating for the platform's adoption. Furthermore, he notes the power dynamics at play, suggesting that both WP Engine and Automattic are engaging in a tug of war that has placed community members in the crossfire without their consent or influence. ### 🗒️ Notes - **Legal and Emotional Battle**: - Ongoing legal dispute between WP Engine and Automattic. - Emotional burden on community members trying to make sense of these events. - **Community Impact**: - Affects trust in the WordPress ecosystem. - Raises questions about leadership, community ownership, and decision-making power. - **Independent Content Creation**: - Difficulty in covering news as an independent content creator without resources or backing. - Concerns over legal risks associated with independent journalism. - **Power Dynamics and the Future**: - Emphasizes that the community has little say in the outcomes. - Suggests that WP Engine and Automattic are using the dispute for leverage, while the community pays the price. ## 📖 References: - Matt Mullenweg (2024). *WP Minute Update: WordPress, WP Engine, and Open Source Drama*. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18dy688BDu8) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase:  1. The ongoing legal conflict between WP Engine and Automattic is not just about business; it has put an emotional strain on the community. The general sentiment is that both companies are leveraging the situation for their gain, leaving the broader community caught in a battle they can't influence. 2. As the community tries to heal from the recent events, there's a need to reconsider how WordPress is managed and how contributors can continue to support the platform while facing increasing external and internal challenges. ## 📰 Newsletter: 🔥 **WordPress Drama Unfolds: WP Engine vs. Automattic** 🔥 WordPress, as you know, has been buzzing with drama lately. WP Engine and Automattic are in a full-blown legal battle, and it's impacting more than just the businesses involved—it's affecting all of us who live and breathe WordPress. If you’re like most of us, you’re probably tired of the power struggles and just want to get back to doing what we love: building with WordPress. 😤 We’ve been tracking every twist and turn in this saga, and if you haven’t caught up yet, this is the scoop you need. Hop over to [WP Minute Update](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18dy688BDu8) and stay in the loop with the latest updates. 🤓 Plus, while the corporate giants duke it out, let’s not forget what matters—our community, our creativity, and our shared love for WordPress. 💙 ## ✅ Action Items: This update aligns with my focus on open-source advocacy and community well-being by highlighting the fragility of the WordPress community when corporate interests overshadow collective values. The issues raised underscore the importance of creating sustainable support structures and fostering greater transparency in open-source governance—core themes I aim to champion in my professional role. Moreover, this analysis serves as a critical reminder of the need for more distributed decision-making processes to protect community interests and maintain WordPress as a truly open-source project. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: 1. Greater transparency in decision-making would increase trust and engagement within the WordPress community. 2. The decentralized governance of open-source projects reduces the risk of internal conflict and community distrust. 3. Emotional stress in open-source communities correlates with declining contribution rates during public disputes. ### 📊 Methodology: - **Survey**: Conduct surveys to gauge trust levels among WordPress community members before and after the WP Engine-Automattic dispute. - **Case Study Analysis**: Compare governance models from other successful open-source projects to identify best practices that could apply to WordPress. - **Data Analysis**: Track contribution rates on GitHub or other community platforms during the dispute to quantify community engagement trends. ### ❓ Questions: - How can the WordPress community regain trust after this highly publicized dispute? - What are the risks of having a centralized figurehead in an open-source ecosystem? - What lessons can other open-source projects learn from the WordPress vs. WP Engine dispute? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Investigate alternative governance structures for open-source projects that reduce reliance on a single entity. - Examine the impact of corporate influence on community-driven software development. ### 💡 Implications:  Research findings could help other open-source projects design more resilient and inclusive governance structures. Additionally, fostering best practices for handling internal conflicts in community-led projects could minimize the risk of such events damaging the broader ecosystem. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: 1. **Visual Learners (Spatial)**: - **Improve**: Adding infographics or visual timelines summarizing the dispute could aid understanding. 2. **Aural Learners (Auditory-Musical)**: - **Present**: The podcast format is ideal for auditory learners. 3. **Verbal Learners (Linguistic)**: - **Present**: The detailed verbal explanation of events supports verbal learners. 4. **Physical Learners (Kinesthetic)**: - **Improve**: Suggest including interactive activities, such as role-playing community decision-making scenarios. 5. **Logical Learners (Mathematical)**: - **Present**: The explanation of the governance structure and its implications provides logical progression. 6. **Social Learners (Interpersonal)**: - **Improve**: Encourage community discussions on potential solutions for governance issues. 7. **Solitary Learners (Intrapersonal)**: - **Improve**: Add reflection prompts for individuals to think about how this affects their role in the community. 8. **Naturalistic Learners**: - **Improve**: No references to nature; suggest including metaphors about ecosystems to explain community dynamics. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - **Screen - Document Tags: [[automattic]] [[governance]] [[Matt Mullenweg]] [[open source corporate contribution]] [[wordpress contribution]] [[wpdrama]] [[wp engine]] - Summary: re: Automattic vs WP Engine, where I stand in covering it, future of WordPress content. Follow the audio podcast in your favorite app https://episodes.fm/1668197782 - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18dy688BDu8 welcome back to the wp minute if you are just listening to this podcast then you are listening to it in your podcast player on the wp minute feed you might be saying where has this feed been it's been quite some time since I've published something on the five minute take of the wp minute I wanted to let you know that most of the interviews actually not most all of the interviews have been appearing on the wp minute plus channel so make sure you go and subscribe to that eventually I probably will set up a redirect from this particular feed that you're listening to it on to go to the wp minute plus but I'm just kind of reserving for now that you go over to the wp minute plus And subscribe to that in your podcast player because that's where you're going to get all of the uh interviews that I've been doing and will be doing in the future for WordPress so if you've been living under a rock there's been a lot of stuff happening in the WordPress news cycle since uh Work Camp us last week and it's you know a bit of a time to maybe chime in individually personally I've been talking to a lot of folks on the live streams on Twitter in the wp minute slack channel of course if you're not a member there check that out the wp.com support you can join for as little as five bucks you know a lot of folks been saying hey can't wait for your in-depth analysis or what are your feelings on this stuff and where do you see WordPress going leadership etc etc one I I would say we're still far too early to understand like where this is going you know you can follow along all of the updates that we've been tracking at the wp minute in a blog post automatic versus WP engine we've been just chronologically archiving the events as they as they take place we're not you know we don't have any inside Scoops we don't have any folks on either team giving us information we're just waiting for it to show up on Twitter or get reported from other outlets and just keep a a journal of all of this stuff to maybe look back on it one day earlier in the week or last week at this point I had a small panel on the wp minute live stream Brian cords Courtney Robertson and we were chatting about you know what was happening and that was very early back then and Matt joined for five minutes and sort of weighed in on with his opinion and that actual live stream was or the the tweet that I put out which was the five or six minute clip of Matt coming into the live stream I had posted on the wp minute Twitter account and that actual tweet or X poost was cited in the wp engine official lawsuit complaint letter to automatic along with the two other you know major streamers that Matt appeared on for um quite some time and that was slightly eye opening that well one it was kind of nice to see we we actually got some coverage for the work that we did when largely there's been an interesting take on WordPress news over these last few weeks so that was interesting but it also started to really you know Buzz the Tower of what are we doing here like this is this has gone far beyond something that I thought was a you know open-source debate you know to put it into perspective like my thoughts on all of this stuff was I've always covered WordPress news from the perspective of what I call the bluecollar digital worker inside of of Wordpress you know the person who is just trying to do good work with WordPress and be a good WordPress citizen what whatever that means to that person and and and just have a platform that maybe represents that that individual so it's either freelancer designer developer Boutique agency small product maker somebody just interested in what's happening with WordPress and WordPress is maybe part of their toolkit of solving client needs or something like that and that that's the perspective I've always had when criticizing WordPress when analyzing WordPress when criticizing the top brass of Wordpress and this has been something that is super unique right obviously right it's an understatement of the of the year right there now in the last you know 15 20 years of us being here this is the most crazy things have ever gotten and by crazy I mean damaging right things that this is something that is that can truly damage if not has already damaged the community and those peering into the community earlier in the year I made a sort of pack I think I published it on the wp minute or I talked about it on on the podcast where I only wanted to really create content that was enabling WordPress to thrive and this was based off of you know a talk that Joseph Hayden champos gave in 20 at the end of 2023 into 2024 about sort of maybe WordPress is hitting this plateau and it's and in order for WordPress to continue to thrive it's it's going to need more human representation right so not another feature or an enhancement but people need to lift up WordPress the software the community the adoption the advocacy for it and I was I was 100% behind that I mean I'm still 100% behind that but it was at that turning point of of having attempted to do like hard critical WordPress Community news for so long and let's face it to be sort of like I wouldn't say ignored but it it it was always largely just looked at like content that was either oh you know it's just drama right when a lot of the debates we've been having for many years have been true like moments in time that we we need to have this discourse about whatever the topic was but so many people maybe up until this point or certainly continued past this point have always looked at WordPress news as just drama as things that were were were just inary to to Wordpress and didn't really make a difference to the to the greater open web or even development right you know it's it's not an area that I claim to be an expert in but a lot of folks are kind of always looking down at WordPress and you know this is the this is not the coding environment you should be in you should be using nextjs you should be using all these other things and WordPress sort of you know always push to the side which I always found laughable having seen WordPress grow so large uh and to be at this like adoption level that it's at for it to be like totally ignored is is kind of weird to me but anyway like when we look when I look at like creating this content and and seeing how people were either just dismissing it because it was drama air quotes or it's such a small audience from a business perspective like a lot of people don't really care about what's happening until you get to this this massive WordPress versus WP engine thing so I made this sort of pack to say you know what I'm not going to really get steeped into this into this content that can either be dismissed or is just not for people right the the whole like creating content WordPress news stuff I was sort of tired of it um am tired of it especially after these last couple of weeks so I made a pack to only create content that I help that I thought was helping people right either people in the community or users on board to Wordpress right do a lot of education on the wp minute YouTube channel how to use Gutenberg how to use 2024 now heading into 2025 really want to focus uh my efforts in into those areas one because it's a lot more gratifying and it's where the money is right like the no way about it like the bigger audience is for people who are trying to learn WordPress and use WordPress in their daily daily lives and not so concerned about like what Mullen WG is doing or you know you know critically breaking down what Josephus says about the project and you know the ins and outs of of how this thing is built then you get to a week like the last two weeks that that we've had and it just throws like that mental curveball at you where it's like okay this is this is very important but also it's something that is it's difficult to cover in in for many reasons one because you know when you start getting so close to this legal all this legal stuff that's happening you're like wait a minute like this is just we're just a little blog here like I don't you know there's no way I I can be intertwined in a WP engine and autom IC lawsuit I mean I'm not worried about it we're not putting out anything that is you know we're not doing any opinion pieces on this we're just having these open discussions not leaking anything that we don't know it's why I said I only pulled information from what's publicly available and that we can at least vet from you know the two Brands automatic and WP engine and it's just like we're just not we're we don't we're not there right we're not this Mega Media machine we're not part of some conglomerate that has you know lawyer lawyers legal counsel and and and money to back any of this uh up in in the event of like a legal catastrophe and that's always been my case with with WordPress news and media I won't go too deep into it but that's something that has always been challenging in this space a lot of people always always said oh this WordPress news stuff is important like you should be covering all this stuff you should be attacking and going after and doing like this deep Research into like the ongoings of automatic you know well before stuff like this and it's like well you know how how how can I do that when when nobody invests heavily into uh WordPress media right it's not like our sponsors as lovely as they are you know are giving us a war chest of money in order to you know hedge these you know hedge these risks of of really doing some like deep dive you know journalism on what happening and second to that is it's a super small audience so it it's just like a perfect storm of like oh yeah this is like important stuff at the same time people people don't pay attention to it because they do dismiss it or they do get tired of it and they just want WordPress to do the thing for them which is WordPress but so let's cycle back to what's happening right now and I think one of the biggest things for me anyway is I really wanted to keep a broad perspective a balanced perspective in this and for the the last few podcast episodes that i' I've done about uh the topic it has been with like an open mind where I was looking at I looked at it and I said is WordPress at this point that we've never been at before is like is that what's happening here like we we're really testing the boundaries of commercial WordPress versus open source WordPress Matt as a leader how far can a large entity like WP engine go before we're like hey can you give back a little bit more than you do in in time and hours because we do want WordPress to you know Thrive and survive and and and yeah and get more cool features but we need more manpower and this is open source at the end of the day so I'm looking at it from that lens you know up until this point and I'm trying to understand if this is where we're at like this is just a new Crossroads that WordPress is at never been here before never been explored let's see what happens but the more Time Marches On and the more stuff I see come out I feel like it's just we're in the M middle of something that no one on the open SCE Community side has control o over like we thought we had control over like WordPress and the direction of Wordpress and and that was a big no and which is something I felt for a long time but something that I feel like gets a lot of people into air quotes trouble in the space at least like thinking about WordPress like you think you own it you think you have the the control over the direction and the feedback and you get like 2% of it and 98% of it is really directed by Matt so I thought we were just at like this critical moment in the history of Open Source WordPress but really now feeling like it's we're just kind of just getting taken advantage of possibly by both parties because we don't have a say in it and it's if they don't reach an agreement then I assume it's just going to get continue to get uglier and uglier As Time Marches On and really that's all it feels like to me right now is is just that a legal a legal match that none of us have a say in but ultimately it hurts us maybe more than it hurts their brands I mean they're both probably going to take a hit if they haven't already you seen some things come out on Twitter about people leaving and I can't confirm any of that and I don't have the desire to confirm it because what am I going to do with this content that doesn't help WordPress Thrive right and I'm trying to look at it from that lens I want to inform people and be there for people but I certainly don't want to make a mistake and also at the same time like not be burdened with that kind of that kind of weight in this open- Source journalism place that I found myself in the last uh couple of years which I totally realize I asked for but it's also you know this is something that is you know quite substantial and unprecedented from what we've seen up until this point so I feel like it's been much more of yeah we're just getting taken advantage of and it's not this fight for open source it's not this fight at the crossroads of like where open source WordPress has been pushed to more than it has been like manipulated scenario you know and I know there are people out there that it's easy for them to say well we've been saying that about you know Matt for a long time but I can still hold two thoughts to be true is I don't know where we where WordPress would have been without his push for open source WordPress up until this point I don't know if it's any better after and make no mistake like I don't think it's going to change and even if it did like what do we get from that we get a board of directors maybe you know unless Matt has some kind of epiphany or changes how he wants to do it you know this is uh this is still largely his his playground has been always and I have challenged him in a lot of areas again representing the the blue collar digital worker but I have no intent to really challenge this because one is way above above my pig grade and two that think it's going to get manipulated from from both sides and really just need to let this thing play out largely so that's all I have to say about that and you know where where I'm at right now I don't think that uh I I was hopeful we we might have seen something by the end of the week whether that's an agreement from WP engine to pay the licensing fee and and this is what I mean about this stuff is it's all back room dealing right now I'm really starting to feel like both sides are just pushing to negotiate and I don't think either party wants to continue on a a legal War which might last for years for this kind of thing and I think there will be some kind of agreement that's hit but but that also means like all of this emotional tug of war that both parties seemingly put us through it just sucks for everybody and yeah emotionally just drained from it like like I'm sure a lot of people are and I want to get back to the work of like is this a salvageable experience anymore that of like the community like what happens now with like I WordPress the tech and the software will continue but but how do you repair like this this damage on the community when it was already it already took a hit from covid and economy and you know events local events and you know really try to you know get those things moving again and you know the constant stress of like hey I'm a I'm a WordPress developer we're using Wordpress and like the whole technical techn Tech world going I can't believe you still use that thing like there's so much weight on top of a a Community member and that feeling of how do you give back to this thing how do we repair From This Moment moments still going it's there's not even a finale yet not at at least of 3:00 on October 3rd 3 3 p p.m. Easter on October 3rd so probably not the most uplifting podcast that you've you've listened to or watched but yeah that's that's where at with highlighting this content like I said I'll I'll continue to track it from a timeline perspective on the wp minute website you know but short of any kind of you know dust settling or some kind of Milestone being hit I don't know if I'm going to be talking about it all too much and really just focusing on continuing with the software and the education and some other good stuff I hope coming out of Wordpress so there it is uh much longer WP minute today just wanted to let you know again just to reiterate WP minute plus is the feed where I do all of the interviews sometimes are on the the YouTube channel live streamed as well there's two YouTube channels there's WP minute and WP minute podcasts where this podcast will be and where some of the um live streams go check those out if you want to stay subscribed search for WP minute Plus in your favorite podcast app it'll also be linked in the show notes right at the top of the show notes of this episode so you can just click that and subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app we'll see you and I'll talk to you in the next episode, Update, WordPress News Podcast - WP Minute, 01j9m2fcm4y0jm4d2dyp9sywrs.