Matt Mullenweg on Open Source Ideals, the WP Engine Fight and Why Llama Isn't Really Open

Mullenweg introduces himself as the co-founder, at 19 with Mike Little, of the open source WordPress project, and the founder of Automattic after leaving CNET when his idea for a hosted version was rejected. Automattic now has over 1,700 people in about 90 countries, fully distributed and asynchronous from the start, and he became CEO in 2014. Its products include WooCommerce, which he calls an open source Shopify and which now accounts for half of revenue, as well as apps like Beeper, Day One and Simplenote.

He also runs WordPress.org as lead developer, does angel investing through Audrey Capital, and co-owns a North Beach jazz club called Keys. WordPress has grown to over 40% of all websites, he says, roughly ten times the next platform, Shopify at around 4%, thanks to the flywheel effects that open source projects like Linux and Wikipedia enjoy. Running Tumblr, he adds, has been the hardest thing he has attempted.

Lenny also asks about the Bay Lights, the LED art installation on San Francisco's Bay Bridge. Mullenweg made an early angel investment after a conversation with Ben Davis, later mortgaged his condos to donate the final million or so, and is on the board of the nonprofit Illuminate. He describes a barbell approach to philanthropy: work on basic needs, but also on things that lift the soul, such as free public art.

Mullenweg grew up broke in Houston, shaped by a performing-arts high school, jazz, and an economics teacher who led a Federal Reserve Challenge team to nationals. He bartered websites for music lessons, which exposed him to open source software, while his engineer father worked in a Microsoft, proprietary world. Early-internet culture, from Slashdot to web-standards advocates, completed the mix.

Combining that with the philosophy he studied, he concluded that open source is the most important idea of his generation, and that the founding fathers would be advocates today. If our lives are increasingly controlled by software, he argues, we are not truly free without fundamental freedoms attached to it. WordPress uses the GPL, which grants the freedoms to use, inspect, change and redistribute software, and requires that anyone sharing changes pass the same freedoms on.

WordPress itself began as a fork of an abandoned project called b2, which he had used and contributed to. He also recalls an early Andreessen Horowitz meeting where Marc Andreessen grilled him and Automattic's first CEO about building a business on open source and remote work. It felt like the worst meeting ever, he says, but the firm expressed interest the next day.

Mullenweg explains his criticism of Meta's Llama: you can download and run it locally, but a clause requires a license from Meta once you pass a high monthly-active-user threshold. That means you lack the freedom to use it for any purpose, and thresholds are ambiguous; WordPress products reach billions of visitors a month. He still praises Meta as a large open source contributor through React and PHP engine improvements, and guesses, with no inside information, that the label may relate to European regulation.

On AI more broadly, he finds it beautiful that models are trained on open source code, since the license explicitly allows it. He predicts the utility of proprietary software tends toward zero over 50 or 100 years, noting that rockets to Mars will run on an open kernel such as Linux or BSD rather than Windows NT. He encourages developers, designers and PMs to give even a few hours a week to open source.

For newcomers, Mullenweg suggests picking a project you use and, for WordPress, joining the groups at make.WordPress.org for code, design, accessibility, support, translation, documentation or events. He says he learned to code largely while building WordPress. Asked about AI agents, he notes Google has said about 25% of its code is AI-assisted and expects a majority of open source contributions to approach that level within five years.

He is most excited about automated scanning for the roughly 60,000 plugins and themes, where security issues arise far more often than in core, which he says has had no remote exploit in five or six years. Humans cannot review a code base of well over 100 million lines. He also expects models asked to build a website to install WordPress and customize on top of it, so users get an audited, updated core for free.

Maintenance, he says, is the real life cycle of software, which is why technical debt fascinates him. He admits parts of WordPress and WordPress.com embarrass him, calls himself the unhappiest WordPress user in the world, and says this year's focus is back to basics: improving rough corners and ruthlessly cutting features that are no longer relevant.

Mullenweg credits economics and jazz for his approach: economics for thinking about incentive systems, jazz for collaboration. His advice is not to build only a product but a movement, giving people a philosophy to believe in. He points to the footer tagline "Code is poetry" and to naming roughly 60 releases after jazz musicians, plus meetups, forums, office hours and town halls where people can contribute.

The real moat, he says, is the ecosystem of about 60,000 plugins and themes, since the core features of a CMS could be written by a few developers in weeks. He argues a true platform is one where the ecosystem makes more money than the core, and that companies building on proprietary platforms often get the rug pulled when they succeed. With open source, even if Automattic turned evil, anyone could fork the code.

Mullenweg says WP Engine was once a respectful, contributing WordPress host, but after being bought by private equity firm Silver Lake in 2019 it stopped contributing to core and used the WordPress trademark in confusing ways. Surveys, he says, found 20 to 40% of people thought it was officially associated. He also says WP Engine turned off the revisions feature, which saves every change to a post, to cut costs, and he calls the result a "bastardized hacked up" version.

He says Automattic asked for a trademark license and was offered or negotiated many term sheets over about 18 months while WP Engine stretched things out. He believes they were also preparing a lawsuit, and links the stalling to a failed attempt by the private equity owner to sell the company. He says he was naive, having met 99% ethical business partners in the past.

At WordCamp US in September, after WP Engine would not negotiate, he gave a talk criticizing private equity's effect on open source and WP Engine's behavior. Mullenweg says WP Engine then launched, on the Monday, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit through the law firm Quinn Emanuel against him personally, WordPress.org and Automattic, and is spending heavily on lawyers and PR. He had warned colleagues that a smear campaign would follow.

He says the talk was also the moment to explain why WP Engine would no longer be allowed to sponsor WordCamps, after years of trying to include it. Lenny summarizes the grievances as unlicensed trademark use, no contribution back, hollowing out and cutting corners, and Mullenweg agrees, adding that the pretense of good-faith negotiation pushed him furthest. He also says he is "a lover, not a fighter" and that such fights come around about once a decade.

Asked how it feels to go from beloved open source figure to villain, Mullenweg notes that WordPress users disliked the visual editor and Gutenberg too, and that Gutenberg prompted a fork called ClassicPress. He estimates that previously about 1% of the world thought he was terrible and now it is perhaps 4 or 5%. He adds that negative reactions are felt more strongly and that angry people are likelier to post reviews.

He says 98% of core developers have stayed, and that arguing on Twitter and Reddit rarely changes minds, with factual comments of his getting downvoted into hiding. What helps, he says, is credible support from people such as Marc Benioff, core contributors and international communities like Japan's, which keep him balanced and optimistic enough to do good work.

Lenny reads a complaint that the feud makes WordPress look unstable to C-suite buyers. Mullenweg says he hopes it ends soon, that WP Engine could end it tomorrow while Automattic is only defending, and that competitors are leaning into the story. He says the numbers, including commits, plugin updates, downloads and installs since September 20, look healthy, and that the drama has raised awareness of WordPress.

On the trademark, he says WordPress.org has always been his personal property and that the trademark was first registered under Automattic. Later he wanted it out of the company, but the IRS denied nonprofit status for the software itself, so the WordPress Foundation received an educational remit. The compromise placed the trademark with the foundation, gave him a license for WordPress.org and left Automattic with the commercial license and sub-licensing rights.

He describes the tripartite structure as inspired by the three branches of government, with checks and balances by design. Lenny compares the confusion to OpenAI's unusual structure, and Mullenweg adds that it was all public from the beginning.

To the question of why he does not hand the project to a community board, Mullenweg replies that hundreds of volunteers already do the day-to-day work, but that he is the final decision-maker. Other open source projects with board structures have been less successful, he says, and great software tends to reflect a leader's vision. Gutenberg, the block editor, would have lost a vote, he says, but a few core people committed to a long bet that was painful for the first three or four years.

Gutenberg now has about 200 releases on a strict two-week schedule, and its next phase is real-time collaboration like Google Docs, built peer-to-peer with WebRTC. Mullenweg says he thinks about succession and wants to pass the role to a steward rather than a committee. He notes the check on his power is that the community can fork the software, so the role is more like a mayor's than a CEO's.

Lenny ties this to the "founder mode" theme. Mullenweg adds that WordPress shows an open source project, a nonprofit and a for-profit working in concert, with Automattic's Akismet and the free WordPress.com adding to its success. He says some critics who want leadership roles lack commit status and have not climbed the meritocracy.

On the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, Mullenweg says that after WP Engine's lawsuit Automattic blocked its access to WordPress.org, which stopped the plugin updating while security issues were found. Automattic shipped an update and renamed it Secure Custom Fields. A judge then granted a preliminary injunction, so it was reversed, WP Engine regained access, and Secure Custom Fields now lives as a separate fork that the WordPress project supports.

On why so many see him as the bad guy, he says nuance does not fit in short posts, and that social networks are tuned to promote outrage. A sentiment analysis Automattic ran found about 8% negative on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram but 52% on Twitter. He says untrue claims can get 700,000 views while corrections get 20,000, and that mainstream media and podcasts have been more balanced.

He says he will use longer formats, WordCamp Asia Q&As and town halls instead of Twitter. WP Engine, he notes, has done no podcasts or press, whereas he believes that when you are in the right you should tell the story rather than leave it to lawyers.

Mullenweg calls Tumblr a great competitor and product innovator under David Karp. It sold to Yahoo for about $1.1 billion at the same time Instagram sold to Facebook, languished through Yahoo, AOL and Verizon ownership, and was sold to Automattic in 2019 for a reported $3 million. He notes bidders offered more, including a porn company, and that Verizon wanted a good steward.

He says it was "free like a puppy" because Automattic took on liabilities including an FTC investigation and lawsuits, plus a team of about 185 that burned a lot of cash. Tumblr had 15 to 20 million monthly active users, over half under 25, and a large LGBT+ share. He ran it personally for a few years and says it is still not profitable, being subsidized by other Automattic businesses.

The plan is to power Tumblr with WordPress on the back end, giving users themes and plugins, which means migrating around half a billion Tumblr sites invisibly to users. Mullenweg also wants to move beyond ad-driven models toward subscriptions or first-party promotion, since he thinks advertising incentives contribute to negative dynamics on other social networks.

Mullenweg says he would not do another turnaround like Tumblr for many years. Most acquisitions are products that are already doing well, which Automattic accelerates, or acqui-hires. He gives Day One, whose founder is still there, and WooCommerce as examples; WooCommerce was a company of about 35 to 40 people in South Africa and now accounts for the majority of Automattic's roughly half-billion dollars in annual recurring revenue.

Lenny asks how this differs from private equity. Mullenweg agrees private equity is not bad per se and says Automattic has investors who own small stakes without control, whereas Silver Lake controls WP Engine. He says over-optimizing and dark patterns, such as difficult cancellations, are the risk, and cites a tracker site showing about 45,000 sites leaving WP Engine. Judge acquirers by their track record, he says, and Automattic aims to be an acquirer of first resort.

In closing, he says his life missions are to democratize publishing and commerce, and more recently messaging through Beeper, which brings multiple chat apps into one. He likes working on projects at different stages: WordPress is mature, WooCommerce is where WordPress was in 2010 and Beeper where WordPress was in 2003. He adds that Automattic is hiring, particularly for design and product, and pays the same salaries globally.