Why the WordPress Chaos Matters

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0:57This story from Sam. The community is in chaos. WordPress.org now requires you to denounce affiliation with WP Engine to log in. I'm going to be real. This is very confusing to me, editing it. I'm very much an outsider looking in, but I understand this is incredibly important to a lot of different people. So before we get to the main story, Sam, I've got three definitions here that I'd really like you to spell out. First of all, what is WordPress.org? I'm tired just thinking about the emails that I'm going to get after this, because every time I define any of these in any way, people email me to say I'm wrong, and they contradict each other.

1:45So no one really understands what the fuck this is. But so as I understand it, and I've checked this with many people, WordPress.org is part of the WordPress Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization. And it's a open source project. So it creates software that is open source. There's this big community of people who collaborate and develop tools and parts and pieces of the WordPress open source project. And that's the.org, which is very important. Right. And I put it in the wrong order. Yes, I put it in the wrong order. But when you say sort of WordPress software, broadly what you're referring to is basically the publishing tools and the CMS, which many websites around the web use.

2:44Okay, so they're connected to that. And then I guess just the other part that we need to define is what is WP Engine? WP Engine is an independent company that hosts WordPress sites. So as a company, you can take from the WordPress community project, open source project, and make your own kind of like what they've done, which is like a hosting service. You can kind of build off of it on your own because it's open source. And lots and lots of companies have done this. And you're kind of expected to, as part of using the WordPress project and taking part in that, you're expected to kind of give back and contribute back to open source in some way or another and kind of uphold the same values.

3:40And then I guess we should also define WordPress, the.com, the commercial entity, which is owned by Automatic, which is owned by Matt Mullenweg. It took me a long time to realize Automatic has two Ts because it's automatic, because it's Matt, which is foreshadowing for you. And so automatic funds and contributes to the code base of WordPress, the project. So they're separate things. Like in theory, you know. I feel like we should have a diagram. Yeah. WordPress.com though is, as Sam said, a for-profit entity. but it's also like a whole hosted version of WordPress where you can just go on there, pay them a monthly fee and spin up a WordPress site.

4:38It is sort of like Ghost Pro, which is what we use where we're using a version of Ghost, but it's all like one package where you can set up a website. on that entity. Does that make sense? I think most people are more familiar with.com. If you were going to say, I'm going to make a WordPress site, you're probably going to go to WordPress.com and you're immediately going to have all the tools right there. It's very easy out of the box. You're probably not going to get super into the coding of using the.work stuff, which you could. It's not that hard, but the.com is kind of like if you're just going to take home the full thing, without having to fuck with it too much.

5:26But then some people go to WP Engine as well, almost as an alternative way of doing that. So then with all of those definitions in place, and hey, if you didn't understand it, hit that rewind button. Just listen to that bit over and over again. Because I don't know, it's very, very crazy confusing, but I think we established it. So before we get into the news, really broadly, before we get into those specifics, What is the conflict happening here between these various parties? Because this has kind of been brewing for a little while, right? Yeah. Yeah. So in September, Matt Mullenweg, which I just mentioned, owns or he founded, he co-founded WordPress.org.

6:16He owns and founded Automatic, which owns.com. he posted he wrote a blog post on the wordpress.org site saying that WordPress engine basically accusing WordPress engine of not contributing enough to open source and also for confusing people by calling itself WP engine like confusing people into thinking that WP engine was WordPress like an official thing yeah yeah and have I Maybe I've been saying WordPress Engine. That's not what it's called, by the way. See, people are already mad at me. I can feel them. I feel my ears tingling. WP Engine is the name of the company. And he's like, well, it's confusing people because...

7:05What does the WP stand for? Who could say? You know, we don't really know. I'm just reading it as it's written in the document. I'm trying to be really careful right now. Well, yeah. And so Matt writes his blog and he's like, WP Engine confused my mom into thinking that they are part of my company, which, by the way, why is he talking about WP Engine with his mom? Who knows? You know, that may come to light someday. But yeah, so he's saying that they're confusing people and that they need to pay for a trademark license to use that name. He's pissed off. He's accusing their investors of not contributing enough to the open source project and kind of throwing out all these things.

7:51and then basically WordPress WP Engine, WP Engine, right, does like, sends him a cease and desist and is basically like, stop trashing us in public and or sends him and Automatic a cease and desist and then Automatic sends them back a cease and desist saying, you know, what I just said, accuse them of. Yes. And then WP Engine files a lawsuit, which we'll get into, but that's enough for right now. Yeah, that makes sense. So you have these accusations that, hey, you're taking this code base, but you're not contributing enough to it. It's a brand confusion thing as well. And then there's firing back and then firing back to the firing back, etc.

8:41etc. Last week, I think at this point, there was an update to a login page. What exactly was that update and what was it sort of asking users to do? So the updates on this is on the WordPress.org login. It says, so if you want to log into your account for WordPress.org, that gets you into like support forums and to be able to contribute. So contributors to the WordPress.org project need to log in using this. There's now suddenly, as of last week, a checkbox that you have to check before you log in or register a new account that says, I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.

9:29You have to check that. You have to agree to that before you log in. Which is complicated because a lot of people are affiliated with them because they're doing like, Like if they're part of the project, they're doing like consulting for them or they have clients who have clients who are of theirs. Like WFU Engine has a lot of, they have a lot of stake in this like ecosystem as does Automatic. They're kind of, I don't want to say competitors, but they're kind of doing the same thing. So it's a very tricky thing all of a sudden for community members and contributors to even just access.org because now they have to like, they're like, is this legally binding?

10:06um this is dragging us into this kind of like for-profit beef and we were on the non-profit side uh so it all gets very hostile and complicated and drags a lot more people into it that didn't really expect to be i think yeah and so they've basically like put up a wall saying if you're affiliated at all with wp engine we're like not gonna let you in uh in effect uh And you said, I mean, it sounds like that's quite confusing potentially for users, because as you say, well, they might be affiliated, they might not. They just want to log in and continue to do their job or their projects. I mean, how did users that you spoke to react to this login box change?

10:54I mean, they were freaked out. Um, it's, there's a Slack, uh, that is for people who are contributors to the project. And, um, they were asking, Matt's in the Slack and they're asking Matt all these questions. Um, and then Matt confirmed in the Slack that this box is part of him banning WP Engine from using any of WordPress.org's resources, which is a whole other part of this. people were asking like, you know, like what's the deal with this? Like, can you explain? And then he's just kind of saying like, well, it's your choice whether to check it or not. Lots of people lie all the time. And it's like, man, this is crazy.

11:38Like, what are you talking about? Like this is, it just feels like a, like very petty to them that this is even reached this level. So yeah, the folks I talked to were very upset. And then in the Slack, which is another kind of a part of this people were getting banned for even just like questioning it it seemed like there were a few contributors who had been contributors for a really long time um i mean you spoke to someone who'd been doing it for 10 years right yeah yeah like like a really like this has been part of their life and part of something they've been doing for a really long time um and got kicked out of the slack so now he doesn't have access to this community resource that he was using to help keep the project going.

12:23And he was like a really important part of this, like maintaining lots of different parts of the open source. So that's kind of the drama where we left it last week. And of course, much has happened since then. There's a whole lot of drama with like a plugin being altered and banned. Well, give me... I don't even know about the plugin thing. So give me your version of that. Before you do that, and this has come through, but I just want to stress, this is so... Besides being complicated, it's so messy. It is like messy, messy drama, drama to the 15th power.

13:11There's a lot of vindictiveness here. There's a lot of people who have been contributing to these projects for a long time, getting kicked out of communities that they were in for a while. There's a lot of Matt Mullenweg posting blog posts, then deleting the blog posts, then posting altered versions of the blog posts. He's going on other podcasts and it's super messy. And I know we're being very careful because it just is... One, it's complicated. Two, it's messy. like they're not in there's not a better word for it than like this is drama drama drama drama drama and it's like such a distraction um and it might be having a real impact well it is having a real impact on people because now they can't get in and they can't you know contribute potentially and yeah very distracting i think the worry is like it's gonna break because it's like the people working for Automatic are there and also my people contributing uh in the community like WordPress is running a lot of sites on the internet at this point I think it's like something close to like the the number that gets thrown around is like 40 percent I don't know if that's accurate um really but it's a lot of sites out there that depend on WordPress to function and if things are kind of imploding which they seem to be within Automatic and within the larger project and the foundation, that puts a lot of the internet at risk in the way it functions.

14:43So just very quickly, the plugin thing happened late last week where .org took over a super popular WP Engine plugin and just took it over and invoked some kind of guideline and it feels it feels that feels vindictive but you know who knows really and then also a couple weeks ago Matt offered people working at Automatic this big alignment offer where if they didn't agree with him and his actions they could take a it's basically a severance agreement where they got paid out um and were told you know you're free to go which a lot of people took it was like 159 people took that offer uh god knows how many stayed because they need health care and like and need a job um yeah while your boss is doing these various things you know like i just i want to work on wordpress yeah yeah it's like i'm here to do a job i'm here to do my coding job not uh not get involved in all this drama so uh i will say that uh yes you know allegedly 478 million websites built on wordpress that's according to a particular hosting provider uh who would potentially have at least some insight into that but so that's uh as yeah and of course if it continues maybe there could be a dramatic impact on at least some of those sites right you mentioned this lawsuit and that's going a little bit back in the timeline i think but like i mean we don't have to do a play by play of what is exactly but is it just like a more formal sort of manifestation of the beef here Like, what is the lawsuit?

16:49The lawsuit is from WP Engine against Automatic, and it accuses them of extortion and abuse of power. Well. We'll leave that there. Based on everything else we've just said, I will leave that there. I mean, it's, you know, we link to it in the story, the lawsuit, but basically, you know, WF Engine is accusing Matt and Automatic of not letting them have the freedom to run their company the way that they want to, even though that's kind of what was agreed upon. That's the premise of why they built their company on WordPress. Yes, because as an open source license, you're supposed to be able to go use it, and you can't or you shouldn't just add extra terms later when you feel like it, that sort of thing.

17:46And I guess I just leads to our last thing, which is sort of what's the latest in that it seems that Mullenweg is now making potential enemies with other high profile people in this space. There was sort of a blog post and then a response to the blog post. I mean, what's happening there is it is it just more of the same or i mean it's more of the same i actually have not had time to read way into what's going on but um yeah i don't know jason did you read the dhh blog yeah i mean the the short version of it is there's a beef between matt mullenweg and david Heinemeyer Hansen, better known as DHH, who is a race car driver slash open source developer, better known in this world for his open source development.

18:40He created like Ruby on Rails, he created Campfire, which was like an open source version, like a predecessor to Slack, and a couple other pretty big tech software things. Very successful, highly successful. He runs the software development firm called 37signals. And basically, DHH criticized Matt Mullenweg and then Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post basically railing against DHH and that claimed he was not as successful as he should have been because companies like Slack took his general idea and made them into gigantic companies. So he was pretty much, to paraphrase, saying like, you're not as successful as me, more or less.

19:37And then he edited that post to be like, sorry, I was mad. and that all happened in like the last 24 hours as we're recording this and yeah it's not it's not the sort of communications you expect from a senior person or a leader of um a company and not just a company in the organization but one with this very very important to the internet and i know it sounds like it sounds like oh we're on one side we're just talking about drama that sort of thing and that is true in some way because well they've got they've done that they've brought upon themselves but there is like significant impact here for people's jobs for the tech industry and potentially the web you know writ large depending on what happens now so i hope people don't listen to this and then just think oh you know this is like silly gossip or something because no this could actually be very very real and it is very very real for a lot of people as well yeah people are really scared for their jobs i think people are it's i mean we've all worked at an unstable workplace.

20:41Like many people work at places where they don't have any control over the whims of the people, the higher ups, the executives, the owners, the CEOs, what craziness they get up to. Not saying mass doing craziness, but like, you know, can relate to a workplace where things are unstable and confusing and people are leaving en masse and taking offers to like shut down whole departments. And it's just, it's not fun. And it's honestly very scary for a lot of people because they need this stable work. And it's just, you know, it seems to be this drive from this one kind of beef that's occurring. I think without knowing the intense specifics of open source licensing and these specific projects and their histories and all of that, there is like probably space to have some sort of nuanced conversation about like open source contributions and licensing and who can profit off of open source software and in what ways and how is that ethical and naming conventions like should something like WP Engine like should they should it be called WordPress Engine is WP Engine okay like are they contributing enough to the project and in what ways are they contributing to the project?

22:06Blah, blah, blah. Like all of this sort of thing. These are conversations that we've sort of talked about before. And I think that we most talked about them when there was like a social engineering attack on this really important part of open source software. And it's like in general, open source software, it can be the case where there's like a few people who contribute to a project and then a bigger company takes and spins that off and makes a lot of money on it. And the people who contributed to that project feel taken advantage of in some way. I'm not saying that's what's happening here. I'm saying like that is a constant topic of conversation.

22:44And this is like a very nuanced thing that people are going to need to continue talking about. But like what is happening here is there is like a central figure, like in this case, Matt Mullenweg has like a very, he's very outspoken. He's very powerful. And rather than having like the nuanced conversation, it's like playing out in court. It's playing out in like on social media. It's playing out in people getting, feeling like they have to take a buyout to leave their jobs. People feeling like they're being kicked out of a community that they work on, so on and so forth. And it's like, at the core here, there's a very important thing.

23:37But the way that it's playing out feels, frankly, to me, like very immature, very, like I said, messy. And people don't like that. Yeah, for sure. All right, we'll leave that there. I'm sure we'll have more updates in the future. but we'll be right back and then when we return we're going to talk about how Jason used AI to apply for a crap ton of jobs while he was having breakfast, I think We'll be right back after this

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28:47All right, and we are back. This is one that Jason wrote. Quote, I applied to 2 ,843 roles, end quote. the rise of AI-powered job application bots. This is crazy. First of all, walk us through the story you tell at the top of the article. Sort of where were you, what was happening, and then what were you doing? Yeah, so I was at a coffee shop working and I had found this thing called Auto Jobs Applier AI Hawk bot on GitHub. and it does what it says in the name. It automatically applies to jobs for you using AI. And specifically, it does it on LinkedIn. And it's a Python script that plugs into OpenAI, more or less.

29:44Or you can use it with Gemini and a couple other LLMs. And I had seen it going a little bit viral on Twitter earlier that week. and so basically i wanted to see if it worked so i installed python i like set up the script and i am in this coffee shop i've ordered my food what did you what food uh i'm trying to narrative it was scrambled eggs there was a sausage involved there was uh a salad i was in taiwan which may be important um i and will be the subject of future stories um but anyways that was the important part i don't know why you're saying anyways that's like crucial context so you have this food yeah i have this food yeah to be totally honest it was the first coffee that i had in a month which is good it went well the coffee went well um didn't get too jittery from it.

30:48So that was a win. But I typed I clicked enter, like I had a terminal window up, which is really cool. Anytime you're in the terminal, it's very cool. And you're hacking essentially. It's true. Yeah. And then you change the color scheme to be like green and black. And then you're definitely hacking. So what happens when you hit enter? So I hit enter and the script starts running and like all of the so like lines of text, start going. And the bot is essentially explaining what it's doing. And so it opens up a Chrome window. It navigates to LinkedIn. I had already logged into LinkedIn. So it had access to my LinkedIn.

31:27And it starts searching for jobs. And it starts searching for jobs according to parameters that I had given the bot. I pre-programmed it into the bot according to the readme file that I had. It wasn't like that complicated to do. That was probably like a configuration file or something. It was a configuration file. And basically, in that configuration file, I give my name, my address, my work history, stuff like that, like basically a very basic resume of my life. And then I also gave it information about the types of jobs that I wanted. So in this case, I had software engineering, marketing, I had communications.

32:15I originally had editor and writer in there because that's the types of jobs I had in the past. And it starts searching through LinkedIn for any jobs that meet this description. And when it finds it, the bot clicks on this button called Easy Apply, which is like you can apply directly on LinkedIn. and that's a native LinkedIn feature. It's a native LinkedIn feature where you can just go through the entire application process on LinkedIn. It doesn't send you to a second website. So you're applying on LinkedIn itself. And so then the bot in the terminal says generating resume, generating cover letter.

32:59I can see it reading the job description more or less. It will intake it and show, like, hey, this is a job at Brilliant Earth, which is a jewelry company. And it was like a social media job at a jewelry company. So it read that and it said like, oh, blah, blah, blah. We have precious gems and we're looking for someone who's passionate about jewelry. And I could see that it was reading that or the LLM was intaking that information. And then it generated a cover letter, it generated a resume, and it uploaded them into LinkedIn. And it also answered a bunch of questions. It would input my name and address.

33:48A lot of job applications ask if you have military experience because there's all these... Not because they're going to ask you to join their militia, but because there's job incentives for hiring veterans and things like that. Sometimes there was a question like, what makes you qualified to work here? And it would generate an answer to that question. And then I would see it click through all these menus and click apply. And I set this up right after I ordered my food at the cafe. and by the time I had finished eating the food, I had applied to 17 jobs. That's crazy. So it was like, it was maybe like 45 minutes and it had applied to 17 jobs.