I’ve been following the recent WordPress and WPEngine drama closely. I have not been involved with any WordPress related development for several years now, but I’ve always liked WordPress. Blogging, and later WordPress, were the reasons I started with web development and later built a career around programming.

I would rather not write anything about the entire thing, but two interesting things happened recently. First, the founder of WordPress published a post titled “My Freedom of Speech” on their blog (archive link).

Second, I noticed yesterday that bullenweg.com, a website chronicling the timeline plus other instances of the founder’s legal actions, got taken down under a legal threat. The text of the page now reads:

Bullenweg.com is no longer available following threats of legal action from Matthew Mullenweg.

Platforming the claims in the lawsuits, in particular, is shaky ground. I encourage you to read this article:

https://www.vulture.com/article/piers-morgan-apologizes-jay-z-beyonce-uncensored-jaguar-wright.html

It is important to me to know who is behind Bullenweg, and I believe the legal system provides ample opportunities to do so. That will take a few weeks, or if you reveal yourself now we can discuss next steps.

Here’s an archived copy and the last good copy of the page on GitHub. I have other thoughts on this, but of course, I would rather not invite legal threats, so I’ll leave by saying that these 2 events reek of the “Free speech for me, not for thee!” line of thinking that we have seen elsewhere recently.

If you want to read some insightful analysis, I’ve got some links.

Ernie Smith over at Tedium has written 2 good articles:

Kellie Peterson has written several articles over at Medium that I found via Hacker News discussion: Bullenweg.com is no longer available following threats of legal action. 2 interesting ones:

WPEngine also has a blog post with a timeline of events from their side: Ensuring Stability and Security: Recent Timeline. It appears that MattEngine is also still up.

This is the point where I’d ask you for your thoughts in comments, but let’s not all get sued. I wish you a fun weekend ahead!