WordPress Is Eating Itself Alive

WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still working next Friday. This is the full timeline: how a blog fork in 2003 became a movement, how Automattic became a company, how WP Engine became the target, and how one keynote at WordCamp US turned into cease and desists, lawsuits, forked plugins, mass resignations, and a preliminary injunction. And it's the story of a pattern that keeps repeating in open source — from Redis to Terraform to Elasticsearch — where the same loop plays out with a different logo every time. #WordPress #OpenSource #TechHistory #WPEngine #Automattic #TechInvestigation ⏱️ Chapters: 00:00 A 90-Day Fall From Trust 00:53 How WordPress Won the Web (2003) 05:44 The Automattic Movement 09:03 One Man, Three Power Centers 11:44 WP Engine and Private Equity 14:44 The GoDaddy Precedent 17:36 WordCamp US 2024: The Break 22:26 Cease and Desist Wars 25:35 Fighting Their Own Community 28:04 The Court Steps In 30:00 The Open Source Loop CONNECT WITH ME ON SOCIAL MY 12K+ DISCORD 💬   / discord   📸 Instagram:   / lewismenelaws   🎚TikTok:  / lewismenelaws   🐣 Twitter:   / lewismenelaws   My gear 💻 https://liinks.co/lewismenelaws