Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and Automattic, recounts how he and Mike Little decided to fork Michel Valdrighi's abandoned open-source blogging software, b2/cafelog.
Assertion Partly supported
Mullenweg: Wix violated copyright by making derived WordPress code proprietary
“What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took our code, and then the code they derived from it, so the modifications they met, were, they said were proprietary and secret to Wix. And so what w…”
Assertion Supported
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CNET pioneered modern content management systems with hundreds of daily authors
“And so they invented a lot of, like, what we call CMS, or content management systems, because they were the first to really have hundreds of authors and thousands and thousands of posts and be publishing every day.”
Disclosure
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”
Opinion
Mullenweg: Employee job-hopping is the fault of companies, not workers
“I think that the people joke about, or they criticize that people jump between companies. There's no loyalty anymore. But I think that's the fault of the company, not of the people. It's that they're not treating people like they want them around for 20 years.”
Insight
Early WordPress beat enterprise CMS software purely on speed and ease
“And it's true, the software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways, but it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use.”