Arguable that I started WordPress and both personally funded or through Automattic contributed more to it than any other entity in the world? Others of course can say they're WordPress makers, but you can't deny Automattic from being called that.
The GPL is a license for the source code to be open and free. No one has ever implied it defines anything else about how the software is used or interacts wit the world.
So what that they allegedly lied by saying and marketing they were giving back while not actually doing it? That's like saying you're cleaning a river while secretly dumping toxic sludge in it.
So what on degrading the experience? Imagine WordPress was a car, say a BMW Mini, and you're a dealer that buys Minis but then resell them without air-conditioning, safety features like airbags, or a dozen other things a reasonable person would expect from a Mini. But then you spend tens of millions of dollars marketing it as a Mini, actually charging more than most other dealers, but people get in and say this seems a bit odd, basic things don't work. Does that degrade the Mini brand and trademark? Quite a bit. (Again, trademarks have nothing to do with the GPL.) What you call something and how you market it matters, that's why we have large government agencies and laws to protect against this.
I've heard you say before "Change anything in WordPress, there's nothing you can do that I can't undo." Guess what gets broken when revisions are completely turned off: undo. If you want it back on you have to contact customer support for permission. For something you paid 20+/mo for and maybe even thought it was the official WordPress Engine thing.
It's actually the beauty of open source that we can align on a few primitives that are reusable in several different contexts to build radically different product experiences and world views. If you think of the phylogenetic tree of software this is exactly what you want to happen.
We don't disclose Pocket Casts revenue directly, but we invest $millions a year in its development and hosting. It gets very broad usage and has over ten million of listening hours a week. There are clients maintained and new features developed for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, Apple Watch, Android Phones and Tablets, and an open web version.
I don't understand why you went with a single licence valid for all platforms.
Clearly each client is a different product on each platform, even if it might have the same core functionality.
I don't know what the original price was and I understand why he is mad, but that was a poor business decision. If you overpromise that's kind of on you, plenty of companies have been burned by such behavior.
Howdy! There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.
We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.
The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.
As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.
We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.
> Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it. If it were true, you wouldn't have been having customer service respond to people complaining about this by trying to hock a paid subscription. In both emails and in your forums.
This is not a bug in the technical sense. At best, it is choosing to walk back a policy after pushback.
> we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account
This is, as of now, factually untrue. Only those who paid for the web version get that. It should have been for everyone, and hopefully now you will apply it to everyone. But when you first announced paid subscriptions you were very clear: those who paid for the web version get premium for free. And even that was only done because the web version was being locked behind premium, and only after pushback for your first plan of giving them one year free.
For those of us who bought the app on iOS and Android, the promise of "pay once, use forever" was broken a long time ago. It is only because the features being granted by that paid version were not actually very appealing that it didn't become much of an issue before now.
By adding ads into a product people paid for (your customer service representatives are lying in your forums by saying it's a "free product"), you've crossed a line. The answer now is to make sure those of us who paid for your app (not once, but twice) get the full version of it, just like the advertising promised us when we bought it.
The product has had several different owners over the years. I can't speak for all of them, but we're trying to do right by people now. If you send me your account info, I'm happy to upgrade it.
You want to do right by people? Then put a big notice in the app, on your website, in the forums, etc., and refund subscriptions for anyone who's paid based on previously faulty information. If you're having folks to reach out to you over HN where you'll manually upgrade their accounts and shrugging your shoulders at being double-paid, then this is more of a PR stunt than doing right.
Hey, I genuinely appreciate that. I thought that this subscription was added under Automattic's watch, but as you say it has been a confusing process so I could very well be wrong.
I've already reached out to your customer service via email including my account info, so if you could use that to get my account upgraded, I would be very grateful. I received a pretty swift response to my first enquiry, but your customer service representative on that occasion pretty much said "lol sucks to be you, maybe you should upgrade?" I considered this an incredibly unacceptable response, and said as much, again pretty quickly (all three initial emails went through within half an hour). It has been days since my second email and I have not received a reply. If you are, as you say, trying to do right by people now, your customer service does not seem to be on the same page as you.
There are also dozens of users in the same situation as me who have spoken up on Pocket Cast's official forums, and elsewhere on social media. It may be worth getting the customer service representatives on your forums on the same page as you, because so far they have been giving the same "lol, just upgrade" type response that I got in email. And getting someone to extend the same offer to users making the complaint on Reddit and other social media.
It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma.
The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.
The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.
Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on.
I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.
What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.
My constructive thoughts are:
1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price.
Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing.
2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users.
3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze.
Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.
> I appreciate that. I hope you do. But I do not for one second believe the truth of it.
Nor do I when I read passive-aggressive replies from Automattic on the Google Play store: "Hi Matthew! If you believe that your one-time payment entitles you to Plus access, which removes the ads, please reach out to us: [URL]. The banner ads help us sustain the app so we can continue making it available for free."
Hi Matt,
I purchased the Android app in 2016. I never signed up for the paid syncing service, but never had ads within the app until this week. Is it the new policy that users who purchased the app but never paid for syncing will now have ads, or is this a bug?
Appreciate you being public in places like this. I sent a similar message to Pocketcasts support but received an AI that seems to disagree with your comment here.
That might be a bug, thank you for purchasing back in 2016, we acquired it in 2018 and open sourced it in 2022. Send me your account info and I'll get it tagged properly.
Are you lying or just not aware of what is going on in your own company? I paid for Pocket Casts many years ago and am now seeing ads. I just emailed support and got a form email that basically said, "Nah, pay us $40 a year."
> There might be a misunderstanding: Anyone who has ever paid for Pocket Casts, even before Automattic acquired it, should not see ads. If you did, that's a bug and we'll fix it.
This is not true for people, like me, who only bought the Android version. We were not tagged with "Champion", but this was stated: "you’ll still have access to the mobile app features you paid for".
This was in the description of the app at the time:
"There are many more powerful, straight forward features help you make Pocket Casts yours and in case you were wondering, here’s what Pocket Casts DOESN’T have: ads, episode limits, pushy trials, feature bloat or plugins.
It. Just. Works."
Now I have ads, and when I try to dismiss them I am greeted with a pushy sales pitch for a subscription.
Life is too short for this, and I've moved on to another app. But perhaps this is insightful as to why some users are frustrated and upset.
I also purchased the lifetime no-ads option, and now get ads. Support says you have to buy a subscription. This is a widespread issue that seems to be affecting most if not all users. If you check the reviews on the play store there are many hundreds of 1 start reviews over the last few days and the app rating has dropped from 4.2 to 3.7.
A thread was also pointing out in the google support forums for another app that did the same thing, ignoring a no-ads purchase and forcing a new subscription, and google asked to report the app from the store as this violates their terms of service
Hi Matt, I originally paid for the Google Play version back in 2011 and the iOS version in 2012, but unfortunately I am also seeing adds now. Thank you for commenting publicly here, when I wrote to support I just got an automatic response. It seems that I am also affected by the bug. Would you please be able to fix the issue with my account? Thanks again.
BTW, for builders, I think having some of these "golden ticket" accounts of your earliest adopters and promoters is a good strategy. The best marketing is word of mouth and seeing people love and use a product. We have some across Automattic where you can get a lifetime Jetpack or WP.com subscription for free for doing something awesome.
It was pretty different in a way that brought millions of people into WordPress, but it has evolved in a way that makes a lot of sense to people, clarifying what WordPress is, what the host is, and what the application layers on top of it are. And the new AI / Telex / Studio stuff is super cool.
Please see my response to Matt's sibling comment. If this is truly your own opinion, and you can't see that it is just laughably wrong, then you're definitely working in the right place!
Please tell me where you can run arbitrary PHP code in the cloud for free, I'm curious to see how they manage that and what limits they put before they start charging.
We've invested a ton in products like WordPress Studio, which let you run unlimited local copies of WordPress with however many plugins, themes, etc you want.
I'm talking about how from something like 2005-2017, you couldn't install plugins at all.
Then from 2017 until apparently the last couple months, you had to upgrade past the Free, Personal and Premium plans to the $25/mo Business plan in order to install plugins.
Now it looks like its just your free tier can't do it - I suppose that's fine. 20 years of providing a bastardized simulacra of wordpress was long enough!
All other hosts have always provided full-fledged wordpress with plugin installation with all plans
But, of course you knew all of that and were just trying to misdirect people, yet again. I now fully expect some half-truth pedantic response about a technicality about dates, plan names, or a niche host who also provides a simulacra.
As the lead of the software I do have an opinion about which functionality is core to the user experience and which isn't. The WP.com paid plans offered a ton, including unlimited traffic, 24/7 support, stats, multi-datacenter replication, and dozens of more features above what most paid WP hosting plans offer, but we reserved custom code at the higher-priced plans. Due to getting more efficient over the years, we can now offer it on all paid plans, but that wasn't economically feasible before. There are dozens of other WordPress Multi-site hosts like Edublogs that offer the same trade-off we used to, it's built into the core code. I'm sorry that wasn't a good fit for your needs, but it has worked well for millions of people over two decades.
Maybe you think Coca-cola should taste a certain way, and want to sell that to consumers, but without commercial rights to the trademark you can't do that under the Coca-cola brand, you have to call it something else.
As you know, this discussion has nothing to do with the WordPress trademark (which, among plenty of other things, you lied about for many years)
It has to do with you calling WP Engine a "hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress" for turning off post revisions, which are an extremely minor part of WordPress (and could be turned back on upon request).
All while - rather than "reserv[ing] custom code at the higher-priced plans" (which is yet another baffling lie) - for the first 12+ years, custom code and plugins (the core of Wordpress and open-source) were completely unavailable[0]. And then for another 8 years it was only available on $25+ plans.
So, I reiterate: WP dot com is/was the most hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WP anywhere.
But, apparently by your logic, when you cheat the IRS via self-dealing and lie to the entire WordPress community about relinquishing control over WP, only to secretly take it back in the same day, that gives you the right to sell RC Cola as Coca Cola - causing endless confusion to newcomers about what Wordpress really is. It was "WordPress with an asterisk" [1] as you yourself recently put it - except there was never any asterisk anywhere, and especially so til 2017.
You're really not good at this Matt. You should get off the internet.
p.s. Lest you claim, like you have so many times when faced with criticism, that I am a paid shill for WP Engine: No one should use either of your services.
My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.
The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
You can look at reviews of the event, people had a good time. International visitors have been down due to political and immigration issues outside of our control.
Being there on the ground, it did feel a little spread out, lots of pockets of people connecting, but the venue was pretty huge. We'll try to keep things tighter in Phoenix next year. The upcoming WordCamp in India looks like it will be double the size of any previous ones.
Some people choose to attend other camps because they are concerned about the US border issues. If you zoom out, we're also trying to spend time on various events, such as Campus Connect, which don't show up in those numbers. However, indeed, we haven't yet reached our pre-COVID in-person attendance levels, which peaked around 40k/yr across all camps, and we're now around half that. COVID hit us pretty hard, and we haven't yet figured out the right formula for everything, but it's showing positive momentum in meetups, camps, and the new educational events.
One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.
If you could hypothetically turn back time to prior to what is now called the 'WordPress drama', would you personally choose this same path again, or would you do things differently?
Not OP but, IMO one can only speculate. The answer you will most likely get would be that one will have chosen to execute these moves before WPEngine existed turning back time much earlier than the actual start of the drama/legal battles itself.
Have you thought about licensing future additions to WordPress under AGPL? I believe it can be done [1]. This will disallow private forks and require companies to publish any changes they make.
It would disallow private forks of WordPress (require them to share the modifications) but I don't know whether WPEngine and other hosts have any private modifications or they all use stock WordPress.
It's been almost a year, I'm curious if there's been any serious discussions about settling this case (e.g. a proposal both sides were actually actively considering/negotiating)?
I’d describe my personality as curious, open-minded, and calm under pressure — I like exploring ideas deeply and listening before I speak. But I do get worked up when fighting for open source principles.
Hi, Matt. Why, in late 2025, should I opt to use PHP and WP for a blog or a web site instead of just using Rust and Tokio?
If I use Rust, my web site will be blazingly fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, and it can power performance-critical services that run on embedded devices and easily integrate with other languages. Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. And that's on top of how Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling. I can even use Rust to supercharge my JavaScript, one module at a time.
It depends on your goals, your customer needs. All technology is just a means to an end. Languages and frameworks are easy to switch between once you understand programming fundamentals. We run production Erlang code at Automattic. Use the right tool for the job. Don't start with a language; start with a problem to be solved.
The idea is that if something would have been a compile-time error (ex: using a method that doesn’t exist), but you don’t see that compile error because you don’t have a compiler, the error is still there. It’s just that you won’t see it until the associated code happens to run. Essentially the compiler can catch whole classes of bugs early on. Just because it’s annoying to be told your code has bugs doesn’t make that better than having bugs and just not being told.
Computer nerds should probably use Rust and Tokio. Then they can spend hundreds of evenings tinkering with their oh-so-superior contraption of a website, muttering how silly everyone else's websites are.
But everyone else who just want to put their small business website up that their marketing assistant can easily edit, will just pay someone on Upwork to pop up a WordPress site for them in a day or so, with everything they need included, so they can spend their time on value-added activities.
The GPL is a license for the source code to be open and free. No one has ever implied it defines anything else about how the software is used or interacts wit the world.
So what that they allegedly lied by saying and marketing they were giving back while not actually doing it? That's like saying you're cleaning a river while secretly dumping toxic sludge in it.
So what on degrading the experience? Imagine WordPress was a car, say a BMW Mini, and you're a dealer that buys Minis but then resell them without air-conditioning, safety features like airbags, or a dozen other things a reasonable person would expect from a Mini. But then you spend tens of millions of dollars marketing it as a Mini, actually charging more than most other dealers, but people get in and say this seems a bit odd, basic things don't work. Does that degrade the Mini brand and trademark? Quite a bit. (Again, trademarks have nothing to do with the GPL.) What you call something and how you market it matters, that's why we have large government agencies and laws to protect against this.
I've heard you say before "Change anything in WordPress, there's nothing you can do that I can't undo." Guess what gets broken when revisions are completely turned off: undo. If you want it back on you have to contact customer support for permission. For something you paid 20+/mo for and maybe even thought it was the official WordPress Engine thing.