The Ledger
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Mullenweg details the complex commercial and non-commercial WordPress trademark licenses
“And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of, ah, own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org, you know, because obviously I need that, and then Automatic would retain the commerc…”
Mullenweg plans to hand WordPress to a single successor, not committee
“If or when I'm gone, I don't want to pass it to a committee. I want to pass it to someone else who can, you know, have a role similar to mine, and really sort of, ah, try to be a steward.”
Mullenweg claims 98% of WordPress core developers remained despite public dispute
“98% of all the core developers have stayed and contributed and are working on the next version and are supportive”
Mullenweg: Automattic pays equal salaries globally, regardless of employee location
“Another interesting thing is we actually pay the same salaries globally. So whether you're in California or Italy or Nigeria or wherever, we pay global salaries.”
Mullenweg: True platform freedom only exists when building on open source
“And again, you don't have freedom unless you're building on open source. That's why more and more companies and people are choosing if they're gonna build a business on top of something else, if you build on an open source, you have that guarantee. Even if you…”
Mullenweg admits Tumblr remains unprofitable and subsidized by Automattic
“Still not still not profitable, so we're still subsidizing it from the rest of Automatic's businesses”
Mullenweg: Automattic replaced 85% to 90% of Tumblr's team after acquisition
“Tumblr, I think we ended up ultimately replacing like, 85, 90% of the team as well.”
Mullenweg: Internal sentiment analysis showed 52% negative reaction on Twitter
“We ran a sentiment analysis recently. We were kind of like looking at different social networks, analyzing all the comments, and we found actually that the negative, you know, the sort of devil horn fraction on like what was it? Like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instag…”
Automattic is migrating 500 million Tumblr sites to run on WordPress
“Actually we're in the process right now of migrating the half a billion Tumblr sites to WordPress. Probably one of the largest data migrations.”
Mullenweg: Automattic generates roughly $500M annually, mostly from WooCommerce
“Automatic makes about half a billion dollars a year now, and WooCommerce is a majority of that.”
Mullenweg confirms Automattic acquired Tumblr for roughly $3 million
“Automatic ended up buying it for a de minimis amount. I think it's been reported. We bought it for like three million dollars.”
Automattic expands core mission to messaging with upcoming Beeper relaunch
“You know, I have these life missions to democratize publishing and commerce. We added a new one last year, which is messaging. So it's in beta mode right now, but relaunching in a few months is a product called Beeper, which takes all your Telegram, Instagram …”