Matt Mullenweg on the future of open source and why he’s taking a stand

If you're really open in open source, sometimes you have to stand up to bullies and you have to fight to protect your open source ideals. Please put your hands together for Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg has been making some questionable moves recently. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days.

20 plus years of good sentiment burned in days.

You were like a 100% beloved hero of open source and internet, and now you're like in this, a lot of people don't like you.

If you were kind of inside baseball with WordPress, there's actually a lot of people who have been unhappy with me over the years. Previously, like one percent of the world thought I was terrible, and now I feel like it's up to like four or five percent.

People that don't know what the hell is going on, what's just like the high level overview of what's going on?

There's a company called WP Engine. By 2018, they got bought out by a private equity firm called Silverlake. You know, since 2019, WP Engine has kind of changed a bit. They started using the trademark. They're offering something called WordPress. I refer to it as like a bastardized, hacked up version of it. (laughs) It's diluting our brand.

Why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy?

A lie gets around the world seven times before truth has time to, you know, get out of bed.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Matt Mullenweg. Matt is the co-creator of WordPress, which powers 40% of websites on the internet today, including whitehouse.gov. He's also the CEO of Automattic, which is valued at over seven billion dollars and owns products like wordpress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Gravatars, and Pocketcasts. There is a lot of drama these days around Matt and WordPress and within the open source community. So I thought I'd have Matt on to address many of the criticisms head on that he hasn't addressed in other places, and also just get the full story on what's going on. We also chat about what incepted him to spend over half his life at this point on open source and creating WordPress, also why products like LLaMA are what he calls fake open source, and his perspective on AI and open source, also how AI is actually trained on open source code and what that means for the future, and his approach for deciding what companies to acquire within Automattic. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion and Superhuman and Perplexity Pro and Linear and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta joining me for this very short conversation.