Matt Mullenweg: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, this is totally fair because it's complicated, but people are saying this has been private. This has all been very public and documented on the internet from the beginning. So WordPress.org has always been me personally, and I think because it's... part of the reason we started there is . com was not available when we started. So that's why we started on the .org and things like that. But I think people also assume .org means nonprofit or something, and that's sometimes true but it's not always. It's not a requirement of the .org domain. Then when I founded Automattic and when we did register the trademark that actually was registered under Automattic. So it used to be, for the first five years of the project or whatever, that Automattic just owned everything outright. And again, I had investors and the board and that was under the control of that. Now, as Automattic became more successful I was able to consolidate some voting rights and other things and at least later advocate. Also remember, I was like 21 when all this was happening, so I was not maybe the most savvy about legal stuff or didn't always have the best advice. So later as I learned more, I was like, "Oh, I want to actually take this out of the company and create a nonprofit." And so we ended up creating a nonprofit. Now the rules around 501(3)(C) nonprofits run the IRS are actually very strict. So that's also something as people assume, it's like, oh, doesn't the nonprofit run the software, and we applied for that originally and it was denied by the IRS. So we actually weren't able to put WordPress.org or the software itself under the nonprofit, but we were able to have sort of an educational purview. So what was eventually approved was sort of running the meetups and other things for WordPress, doing educational stuff. We sponsor a lot of learn to code or running workshops in other countries. We have this cool thing called do_action where we'll do a weekend where we take a bunch of nonprofits and build websites for them and stuff like that. So the nonprofit does a lot of exciting things there and then also negotiated with the investors and everyone at Automattic to actually put the trademark under the foundation. Now the compromise there was that Automattic at this point is running WordPress.com. So to continue running that, which at the time had already tens of millions of users and everything, it needed a commercial license. And so the compromise is that the foundation would kind of own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org because obviously I need that. And then Automattic would retain the commercial license and the ability to sub-license that, so to sell that to others. So this was kind of the grand compromise and create this tripartite structure. I was very inspired by the three branches of government. and the ability to sub-license that, so to sell that to others. So this was kind of the grand compromise and create this tripartite structure. I was very inspired by the three branches of government. So there's sort of power in each of those that I think sort of checks and balances each side of it which is on purpose. Wow. Okay, I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused. This makes me think about OpenAI had a really strange structure and that got them in a lot of trouble, and it feels like when you're 21 you're like, "Oh, this makes a lot of sense. What a great concept we've come up here," and then all this complexity just adds to a lot of confusion around what's going on. So thank you for addressing that. Another, there's a kind of related question I've seen a couple of times is just why don't you let that .org be run by a community. Why not just give that up to someone else and not just you that's there?…

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