Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I'm writing this newsletter in part for an audience — in other words, you the reader, and others like you — so when I'm deciding what to write about, I do try to take into account what you might be interested in reading about. But I'm also writing this newsletter for myself, and in this case what I care about trumps (sorry) what my readers may or may not be interested in. And I think this is about something important that goes beyond just WordPress.
Update: After publication, Matt sent me a message on Twitter with a link to a Google doc that lists some corrections and clarifications related to some of my comments here. My response is at the end of this post.
I care about Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for a number of reasons, some personal and some professional. On the personal side, I've been using WordPress to publish my blog for more than two decades now, and I've helped countless others with their WordPress-powered blogs and websites over the years. It has its quirks, but it is a great system. I've tried Drupal and Squarespace and literally everything else, and I keep coming back to WordPress. On the non-personal side, the Columbia Journalism Review — where I was the chief digital writer for about seven years, until a month or so ago — runs on WordPress, as do hundreds of thousands if not millions of other websites (WordPress likes to boast that it powers more than 40 percent of the sites on the web.)
