It’s curious why Matt Mullenweg would be hyping this up when it contains “WP” in the name, like WP Engine. “FreeWP” sounds just as much like something that would cause brand confusion.
Also, the FreeWP announcement post seems like a manifesto to remove Matt from stewardship of WordPress and to start some sort of class action lawsuit. With bits like:
“On the legal front, I’ve secured a suite of domains for WP Class Action. This independent initiative aims to address the issues plaguing our community head-on.”
and
“Change isn’t just coming — it’s here. Consider this your wake-up call to those who’ve held the reins for too long. FreeWP stands ready to ensures WordPress remains free, open, and genuinely community-centric.”
Is Matt just really trying to promote forking of software? Is he hoping people point and laugh at FreeWP? Does he want the project to get off the ground so he can go after them with trademark claims? It doesn’t make sense to me.
This isn't even a fork—looking at the text on this site, I think it's just this guy Vinny deliberately trolling Matt by registering a bunch of WP domains and flaunting them. If so, he succeeded at the goal of provoking an asinine response from WordPress.org (aka Matt).
From the author [0]:
> I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.
See the FAQ for more evidence that this is mostly just Vinny trolling so far [1]:
> Well, what does ‘wp’ mean?
> We found some notes referencing “word processing” and “web publishing,” and there’s even a mention of Wendell Pierce, who played Detective William ‘Bunk’ Moreland in the popular HBO series The Wire. It seems to be related to one of those topics.
> It’s also rumored the singsongy vibes really sealed the deal.
I am not sure who is trolling who here. Maybe they both are trying to troll each other, but both don't really look great.
FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight. And the WordPress community, for a big part, looks still very novice and in-experienced and a decent junk of community members might fall for this and put at least some (and more than they should) eggs into that basket.
Matt just seems to troll and knows that "FreeWP" is no competition at all. And continues on his path of eccentric and very weird behavior.
It's not a fork. I'm "Vinny," and I've been a part of other communities outside of WordPress. Matt seems to be very concerned about it because while the site is just a placeholder, the real work is organizing the community, which I know he knows I am doing.
> FreeWP seems like a completely meritless attempt at a fork / initiative. Potentially even just an attempt by "Vinny" to move himself into the spotlight.
This is why I think it's a troll—it's so completely devoid of substance that I think it must be deliberately void, and getting Matt to respond was the only point. The OP specifically says they don't intend to fork, and they have a goofy FAQ with an intentionally-absent mission statement.
They used to, until the WP Engine fight began. The trademark policy was updated a few days after Matt started publicly beefing with them. There’s now the following on the trademark policy page: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
They said that consistently right up until they changed the trademark policy to call out WP Engine by name:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
"Consistently" is not an adverb I would associate with Automattic/WordPress.org/WordPress Foundation/Matt's behavior in recent months.
The issue with WP Engine isn't the WP in the name. That's fine and part of how WordPress wants it. The issue is they use the word WordPress to define the services they provide. Which is why it's completely bonkers that there is a trademark dispute since they provide managed Wordpress hosting so using WordPress to describe providing WordPress hosting is normal and expected.
No, they updated the trademark policy to call out WP Engine specifically with a petulant mini-rant:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
I'm not a lawyer but the lack of donating is not grounds for a copyright violation. Part of having a copyright is defending it. This is why we occasional see a Goliath beat up on a David. If Goliath lets the David slide it could undermine Goliath's status as actively defending his copyright.
In fact, Matt shoots himself in the foot. You don't become a billion dollar company overnight. Zero to thousands. Thousands to hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands to millions. Silence all the way. But billions and it becomes a copyright violation??
That's so ridiculous that only the stupid or the insane would believe it. Or both.
But this isn't about copyright. It's Matt looking for revenue and then manufacturing a flimsy excuse to demand money. Up to recently most of the WP Community drank the MM Kool Aid. That's not the case any more.
Despite the number of factors, the criteria is fundamentally similar across circuit courts. A trademark infringement will depend upon, among other factors:
- strength/distinctiveness of plaintiff trademark;
- proximity/competitiveness of plaintiff and defendant’s business;
- comparative quality of plaintiff and defendant’s products;
- evidence that the imitative trademark was adopted in bad faith; and
- sophistication of consumers in relevant markets, and evidence of confusion.
IDK, some of those read as if you can't wake up one morning and then decide you've been violated.
For example, if WP Engine acted in bad faith, why was it bad faith in 2024, but not prior? It's difficult to argue bad faith when you watched - and enabled? - a company to go from zero to "billions".
If fact, that lens applies to most of this list. These conditions existed all along and MM & Co was silent.
On the other hand look at Apple (Computers) and Apple (Records). Once Apple Computer enter the mmusic market they had to negotiate with Apple Records because Apple Music's change in direction would cause confusion in the market.
Extinguish? Maybe not. But if you don't defend your trademark your argument for violation dilutes more and more as time goes on, true? "Billions" feels like a long time. "Billions" - and how MM went about it - feels very much like a "trademark troll".
Even if he wins the battle. He's lost the war. The community no longer trusts and respects him.
Thanks to that, I normally find consistency in what he says. The forking post about FreeWP makes sense.
Especially because there is some amount of joking in both freewp.com and the post. I like how Matt refers to him as a former WordPress community member.
I feel like ClassicPress[^1] is a bit of a better approach to the whole "I just want basic Wordpress that works" - It seems like it's pretty stable and already has a community behind it.
The thing is, the current version of Gutenberg is not a bad editor for writers and editors and absolutely the way WordPress needs to go to stay relevant. If Matt did one thing right in the last couple of years, it was realizing that. The way he went about it, seems to have been not always the greatest, but it's an absolute must.
And ClassicPress is the fork of Gutenberg deniers who think a, now, below-average WYSIWYG editor is the way... or...
all the alternative "Page Builders", which are in itself a multi million dollar business, and are horrible usability & code-wise. The two newer big ones, Brick and Breakdance seem fine, but are much more complete website builders than editors. And also something that you don't want end-users to touch.
Gutenberg is atrociously bad for blogging types — and there are a lot of blogs out there. I agree that WP needed an official page builder, but it doesn’t belong in the core; it should be a plugin.
Btw, Gutenberg is a plugin and its rating in directory (2/5) is telling[1]. Meanwhile, Classic Editor[2], a plugin that disables most of Gutenberg, is used in +10 million websites and a 5/5 plugin.
Since we're here - what are people using these days to prop a quick web property up for a friend, for example, that's not such a PITA?
I recently told a friend I'd throw up a site for him for his dog grooming business, and naturally went to WP. I figured I'd just a simple free theme that was close and modify it to my liking if possible and it was anything but trivial. Free basic themes take a lot of digging to find, they're built on two(?) Wordpress theme-builders, or maybe some other proprietary theme, often include other weird addons, etc... I don't remember it being so convoluted- but I guess I am getting old in this space.
I send friends + family to Squarespace for simple websites, or Shopify for e-commerce. Works well!.
Squarespace has design templates, a gallery of blocks, domains (what's a DNS?), news section, email marketing, signup forms etc. all built-in making it easy and one-stop
Shopify is Shopify and doesn't need much of an introduction.
Squarespace is comically overpriced for a simple site. I don't understand why people recommend it so soften for "non-technical family member needs an essentially static site."
> Squarespace is comically overpriced for a simple site.
Most customers are SMB's and $20-30 a month is nothing, considering how critical websites are. It's a third of the price of accounting software and gets you a day of Google or Facebook ads. The old alternatives of Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising would run 10x+ that.
No offence but I'm not sending either of those sites to anybody not a techie or a nerd. cPanel, NVMe, SSL certificates? That's _after_ you get through the confusing choices on the homepage of premium, managed, virtual server?
It needs to be easy to use and understand like opening and using Microsoft Word. That's what the online choices are.
My brother has barely typed up a letter since high school and I sent him to Squarespace. Without even asking me anything, he had a great looking website up in a day with a domain, logo and everything.
Multiple non-technical friends setup businesses (especially during lockdowns) and almost all got on with setting up Shopify with zero assistance from me.
I value my time more than anything - $20-50 a month is nothing and the results are better.
Sometimes you just need to get into and understand the mindset of 90%+ of potential users and what they need. That's why these companies are household names and I've never heard of either site you sent me - and I'm _very_ online.
Well Squarespace is a household name because 90% of their operating budget is ads repeating their name over and over. But yes for an SMB the difference between $5/mo and $30/mo is nothing and Squarespace does have a nice onboarding process. But for an individual $5/mo and $30/mo is a completely different tier of service. The kinds of things people use personal sites for is not worth 1.5 Netflix subscriptions.
If you’re looking for something low effort but nice looking, Squarespace does a nice job. It can be frustrating if you’re trying to do something really custom — though you can likely make it happen if you’re stubborn enough.
If you’re looking for something you can really build from the ground up easily with, then my go-to is Craft CMS. You need to do things by hand, but it’s easy to build out data models, and the system is sane and easy to predict.
A few years back I helped my 70-year-old father-in-law (who's not remotely technical) get set up with a Squarespace site for a project of his and after initial configuration he was able to run it himself for years. At the time the big reason why I picked it over WordPress was that I knew that I'd be on the hook for maintaining a WordPress site. He just needed something he could post on occasionally and mostly forget about, and Squarespace worked great for that.
They should make a reality tv show about the OSS community would have been less predictable than "Days of our lifes" and would have even more staying power.
On a more serious note, given that a triple-digit number of employees have taken buyouts over Matt's behavior, it must really suck to be one of the employees who now has to do other people's jobs in addition to their own.
If I worked for Automattic, I'd take a buyout even if I didn't object to Matt's behavior, just because I know how much it always sucks to be one of the employees stuck at a company after a walkout or a layoff.
To be fair, it's not accurate to assume or even imply they left because of Matt's behaviour. As even you go on to say, the incentive to leave - full stop - was there. Why not take advantage of the opportunity?
The whole "but once you leave there will be a Scarlett Letter on your HR folder's head (i.e., you will never be allowed back)" just sounded silly. Who knew Matt was a Taylor Swift fan?
I mean, isn't the entire problem related to the fact that most of WordPress core development is still getting funded by Automattic? That's why a fork doesn't really matter, the resources to build WordPress seem to mostly come from one source. Even players with a lot more resources like WP Engine didn't or couldn't work a lot on WordPress so I'd be surprised if a random fork would matter.
Just some domains the community can have. They seem to be so important to all this.
After all, isn't domains/trademarks/IP the reason why Matt feels he can lord over the .org as if it doesn't belong to the community and should be controlled by a robust foundation?
I already didn’t like Wordpress and would recommend against it just because of maintenance issues but this drama is a whole new layer of something else.
“I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear.”
It’s curious why Matt Mullenweg would be hyping this up when it contains “WP” in the name, like WP Engine. “FreeWP” sounds just as much like something that would cause brand confusion.
Also, the FreeWP announcement post seems like a manifesto to remove Matt from stewardship of WordPress and to start some sort of class action lawsuit. With bits like:
and Is Matt just really trying to promote forking of software? Is he hoping people point and laugh at FreeWP? Does he want the project to get off the ground so he can go after them with trademark claims? It doesn’t make sense to me.