Can WordPress Be Saved from Its Creator? | Chaos Lever

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Chris: As the world slowly burns to the ground, it's going to be a lot easier for us to make s' mores.

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Ned: Where are we going to get the graham crackers, Chris? Those elves aren't going to grind themselves.

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Chris: I don't know what you have in your emergency bunker, but clearly it is not enough Graham crackers and marshmallows.

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Ned: No, but I have an overabundance of dark chocolate. So who's winning now?

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Chris: Is it because it's dark like your soul?

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Ned: Shut up. Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lover podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person who lives off of more than just electricity and the souls of the damned. With me is Chris, who is also not a soul of the damned. Hi, Chris.

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Chris: The souls of the innocent taste a lot better. Wait, did I say that out loud? We should start over.

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Ned: It's a nutty flavor that I almost always dislike, unless it's with dark chocolate. Then it's like a hazelnut and chocolate kind of thing.

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Chris: Yeah, but I mean, dark chocolate, it's.

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Ned: Like a cheat code, I suppose, though. Are you one of those freaks that's, like, wants the 98% cacao or whatever? Because that's garbage. It just tastes like dirt.

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Chris: No, if I wanted to punish myself, I would just read my journal.

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Ned: I have two very distinct memories of baking with my mother, and one is trying baker's chocolate, which she just let me do.

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Chris: That's like, yeah, go ahead, put your finger in the outlet. See how it goes. It'll be funny.

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Ned: It's a rite of passage. Right? And the other one is vanilla extract. I wanted to see how it tasted. Just let me do it.

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Chris: What's important is you're completely well adjusted.

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Ned: I'm doing great. How are you? Oh, but now here I am sipping my chai, which I'll avoid calling chai tea because that's TT.

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Chris: Oh, that's right. I always forget about that.

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Ned: Yeah, I got scolded and I was annoyed at that person, but I also took it to heart. I hate that. Like, I'm mad at you for telling me, but I'm also mad at me for knowing.

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Chris: How dare you be. Right?

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Ned: It's deeply frustrating, especially as when someone you don't like, like, is telling you, like, God damn, like, I just want you to be wrong. Like, it's. It's the bitch eating cracker syndrome.

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Chris: That's the one of my all time favorite onion headlines. Tragedy person you really hate just made an excellent point.

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Ned: It's like Jordan Peterson. Every once in a while he says something coherent and I'm like, fuck, man, like 99% of the time you are just blowing smoke. But every once in a while, I guess, you know, stop clock, that kind of thing.

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Chris: Yeah, he just quotes himself from 25 years ago when his brain worked.

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Ned: I mean, worked is a strong statement.

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Chris: 25 years ago he was fine.

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Ned: Sure, we'll give it to him.

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Chris: That's the spirit.

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Ned: Let's talk about some other really relentlessly annoying human. Matt Mullenweg.

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Chris: Oh, boy.

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Ned: What is it about tech billionaires that makes them start acting like children?

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Chris: Like, I think it's the billions.

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Ned: Well, that's the thing. I was wondering. Do you. Do you just reach a point where you have so much money that you forget to act how to act like a proper adult? Or do you just start out that way and money makes it worse?

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Chris: That one. It's that one.

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Ned: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because, like, I strongly suspect that Elon Musk was always going to be egotistical shitbag. But I'm pretty sure that the billions empowered him to make his problems everyone else's problems on the most public stages imaginable.

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Chris: Yep, no notes.

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Ned: I really enjoyed the black eye thing, though. That was hilarious. I don't care how he got it, it's still hilarious.

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Chris: I like the part where he was screaming about not being on drugs when he's got like 25 videos of himself in public, clearly on drugs.

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Ned: Mm. Yeah, it's cute. Anyway, we're not talking about that annoying human. Like I said, our story today deals with someone who is not technically a billionaire, although he is a multimillionaire. But he also bears all the harem hallmarks of being an egotistical baby who has lost all perspective on how to act like an adult. That person is Matt Mullenweg. And the topic is WordPress. Yay. I've been planning to do this for a while, but I was kind of waiting until something happened with all the various lawsuits that are going on, that's taking too long. But there was a story recently that spurred. It spurred me to write this, and it was the fact that the Linux foundation has created this new project called the Fair Provider Project. And we'll get to what it does, but it's basically taking the toys away from Matt and being like, no, you're in timeout. That's probably a good thing because whether or not you know it, you've probably used WordPress at least once today. According to WordPress's website, WordPress is used to power 43% of all sites across the web. That's a lot of websites. Probably too many websites for one person to hold the benevolent dictator for life title over.

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Ned: We'll come to that. But I don't know. Chris, have you used WordPress in the past?

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Chris: I am positive. I've definitely done that multiple times for short lived blogs where I would write one thing and be like this is stupid and then delete it and hope it was never archived anywhere. And it wasn't. Don't look it up.

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Ned: Yes, the Internet Archive is definitely not a thing. I certainly deployed multiple WordPress sites. Usually it was more of a managed endeavor. So there were lots of services in the early 2000s or like mid 2000s where you could just rent a virtual server and they would pre deploy the whole like WordPress stack for you and then give you the access to the control panel. So you didn't actually have to do anything. You could just kind of consume WordPress almost as a service. That was my intention.

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Chris: Sounds awful lazy.

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Ned: Indeed. Well, I had other things I was doing, allegedly. Like creating a webcomic strip about polygons called what the Hex.

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Chris: Spend a lot of time with my girlfriend who's from Canada. You wouldn't. She goes to a different school. You wouldn't know her nicely.

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Ned: Oh, that. What the heck? Still has some entries on the Internet Archive, but it is not available as a website anymore, which is sad. Anyway, where did WordPress come from? For that story, we need to whisk ourselves back to an earlier time when Web 2.0 had not yet happened. Twitter was a mere twinkle in Jack Dorsey's eye. Ooh, look, another tech billionaire babyman. And there was a young man named Matt Mullenweg who was just busy blogging about his ideas, politics, and general love of jazz music on the emerging World Wide Web.

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Chris: Is that true?

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Ned: All of that is true. Nice. In fact, the releases of WordPress are named after jazz musicians.

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Chris: And I learned something today.

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Ned: Yeah, it's probably the only interesting thing you're gonna learn all day. We're still very early in the episode, so apologize to everyone. So back in the early 2000s, blogging was still a relatively new phenomenon. The term blog, which is short for web log, had only been coined by Peter Merholtz in 1999. That was a whole year old. We did a whole episode on the history of using computers to share your silly thoughts last year when the WordPress drama was really starting. So that rabbit hole has been well and truly traversed. I'm not going to be falling down it once again. Go listen to that episode if you're interested. It's pretty good. People pretty much started using computers to do this almost immediately.

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Chris: I have things to say Ned, and.

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Ned: Everyone needs to know about as more people took an interest in writing a blog, software emerged to make the process easier. Not every proto blogger was also a programming techno wizard, although many of them were sort of self selecting group. So software like Movable Type and the Platform Blogger were created so Joe or Jane Normie could start documenting their inane ramblings in a public forum. One such solution was called B2. It was created by Michel Valdry, close as I'm going to get in late 2000. He based the solution on the programming language php and the database backend mysql his goal was to create something that was simple to use, moderately performant, and very easy to install. He also made the consequential decision to distribute the software under a GPL license, something that is relevant to this very day. While not a programmer by trade, Michel hacked together a serviceable solution that meant.

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Chris: What said so he is a programmer?

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Ned: Yes, Sort of. Kind of. Not really. So he created a solution that met the needs of burgeoning bloggers, and it caught the eye of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, two strangers who both had an interest in blogging and software development. Over time, Michel was unable to keep up with the B2 project, and Matt and Mike created an official fork of the code, calling it WordPress. Michel blessed the fork and Matt and Mike were off to the races. Importantly and portentously, the fork carried with it the GPL license, as it must, since since GPL is a copy left protection. What the hell does that mean? Allow me to explain. For those who are not familiar, the GPL or GNU Public License is a software license created by Richard Stallman to enshrine four freedoms for consumers. The freedom to run the program for any purpose, commercial or nonprofit the freedom to examine the code and alter it the freedom to redistribute copies to others of the original code and the freedom to distribute your own version to others so you can run it, you can copy it, you can look at it, you can give it to others, you can change it and give that to others.

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Ned: Pretty cool. What's also pretty cool is it comes with the restriction that any copies of the software also inheritance the GPL freedoms and restrictions, meaning that the code and any code that uses it also falls under the gpl. It's known as a viral license, which sounds Bad. When you say it that way.

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Chris: Based on your description, it doesn't get better.

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Ned: No. The rights granted by GPL follow the software into any associated project and infect the that project as well. If you want to use GPL protected code in your software, your software now must also be distributed under gpl. What exactly it means to use GPL protected code and the boundary at which someone else's project becomes part of yours can be a fuzzy boundary. Like if I copy and paste the code from a GPL project directly into mine. That's pretty straightforward. Okay, now I have used that code. I am now under GPL as well. But what if, like, my software uses a compiled executable that's GPL protected, but I only access it through public facing APIs for that software? Does that make my project GPL? Or like, what if my software is built from multiple projects? How far does that infection range? If one component of my software uses that GPL but the other 5 components don't? Are they all under GPL? Can I cordon it off? Like, does the virus analogy work in this sense? I don't know.

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Chris: Is GPL in the room right now?

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Ned: It's. It's pointing a gun at me. It's very uncomfortable. This is the sort of thing that you have to litigate in court. I'm not even going to try to figure it out here. Going to go with the most common example, which is I have some code in a repository. I made a fork of that code. That fork necessarily has to carry the GPL license, because that's what happened with WordPress.

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Chris: Okay.

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Ned: In May of 2003, version 0.7 of WordPress was released as the official successor to the B2 project. And over the course of the next year, Matt, Mike and a host of other contributors worked to streamline and standardize the code Michel had written. The code that they inherited was inefficient, inelegant and insecure. But it did work. Matt and Mike decided that rather than rewrite the code from scratch, which is a very painful endeavor, they would gradually refactor it over time to streamline it and make it more efficient. And they did have some very quick wins. Version 0.71 had a 300% performance boost just by being more judicious with database calls. Turns out you can cache the answer from a database. You don't have to ask every time. Oh yeah. So there are a lot of quick wins like that. But if you know anything about WordPress, you know how hopelessly insecure it is. This is why in 2004 WordPress was nowhere near the industry leader for blogging software. That crown belonged to Movable Type and their hosting platform. TypePad. An organization called Blog Census reported in February of 2004 that movable type had a 70% market share for self hosted blogs.

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Ned: What do you do when you capture the market? You abuse your position of power to extract money. Of course this is before the era of ads really. So you just had to get your users to pony up at sweet, sweet money. Movable Type is still around. Like I checked, they're still a going concern, but not nearly as popular as they once were. They were also never open source. You could, you could get the code, but it was not under any kind of open source or permission permissive license like gpl. If you downloaded the bundle, you got the source code in the bundle, you could make local modifications and patches to the code, but you were not technically allowed to distribute the software with your changes. But for most users that was just fine, right up until they released Movable Type 3.0, which had new licensing terms. Suddenly, if you wanted to host more than one author or more than three sites on your Movable Type instance, you had to purchase a license from the parent company. Six Apart wasn't particularly expensive, but Mark Pilgrim, a user of Movable Type, wrote an influential post that essentially said this license change is bullshit.

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Ned: While the short term change wasn't that bad, it was going to cost him about 550 bucks to true up for all of his licensing for however many sites he was hosting. He was worried that in the long term Movable Type would keep tightening the screws since he was now a captive audience of theirs. That's a familiar story. Microsoft gonna let that hang in the air for a moment. Anyway, Mark publicly declared that rather than paying the licensing fee, he was gonna move all of his sites to WordPress and donate. The money have gone to Movable Type, to the WordPress Foundation. Or not even the foundation, just to the WordPress Project. The foundation didn't exist yet. We'll get to that. This was the beginning of a mass migration of sites to WordPress and Matt was relentless in his PR campaign to bring users over from Movable Type. There's a quote from one of the high ups at Movable Type. During the blow up of their license change, there were a lot of angry blog posts given the platform about the license change. And when he would go into the comments to leave feedback, he would find Matt had already visited every single post and suggested they migrate to WordPress.

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Chris: Well, you did say relentless.

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Ned: He was. At the same time, one of the defining features of MovableType was their plugin system that allowed developers to extend Movable Type's functionality by writing plugins for the platform. WordPress 1.2 introduced plugins for WordPress which added feature parity just as folks were in the process of switching over. They were pretty pumped about that. We could dig into every iteration of WordPress as it graduated from 1.2 to 1.5 to its current version, which is like 6.8. But you know what, there's a free ebook that already does most of that. And this doesn't need to be a 12 hour episode. I mean, it could be. Maybe it should be. Do people want that?

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Chris: We should ask, what's the definition of computer?

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Ned: Oh, God, don't even start. We did an episode about that instead. I just want to set up a few key things. First, WordPress was under GPL from the beginning. Matt is one of the project founders and he was only 18 when things took off. So we can forgive some of his early behavior on being an 18 year old.

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Chris: A literal child.

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Ned: Yeah. Yes. And number three, making money ethically is difficult. In fact, I'd say the more money you have, the more challenging it is to be ethical about that.

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Chris: Right? I mean, that's really the statement. Making money while you're doing things ethically is not hard. Making a bazillion dollars ethically, that's different.

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Ned: Yeah. Okay, so now things are about to get confusing. Due to a series of unfortunate namings. WordPress's code and their community are hosted under the domain WordPress.org. if you want to contribute to it, if you want to help with the docs, if you just want to access their community resources, you have to create an account on WordPress.org that is where the open source project lives. All that kind of jazz. WordPress.org relies heavily on donations and has ever since the first few years. It did attempt to find ways to monetize and support the project. An early attempt to drum up some cash was hosting ads on the WordPress.org website as posts. This was clearly link spam, but it was not labeled as such. And worse, Matt and others didn't control what was being shown. And the hoster for WordPress.org was overwhelmed by the sudden spike in traffic. This happened in like 2004 or 2005. It was an absolute debacle. People were very angry about this and it still haunts Matt and the company to the present day. So don't do that.

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Chris: Don't. Don't do that.

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Ned: The next idea was to host WordPress for others. This makes sense. And that venture became known as WordPress.com. the simple decision to name it WordPress.com has caused no end of confusion on the part of end users and community members. WordPress.org is the home of the open source project and community. WordPress.com is the home of the hosted WordPress sites. Since the name is so similar, it was common for users of WordPress.com to lodge support issues with WordPress.org and vice versa.

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Chris: Yeah, I'm sure everyone enjoyed that a lot.

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Ned: And due to this current day, because it's still a problem. Despite this naming blunder, WordPress.com actually managed to start making a lot of money. At the same time. Matt's mistake over the link spam drove him to create a plugin called Akismet. Akismet. I don't know how to say it. I've only ever read it. It's an anti link spam plugin for WordPress sites with free and paid options. It's got a base level of just blocking stuff so people can't leave spammy comments and stuff like that or backlink you to spam, but then has paid options that are more robust. Akismet took off in popularity and became its own project and entity. To bring WordPress and Akismet under a single umbrella, Matt founded the company Automatic, spelled with two T's so his name could be in it. This was December of 2005. At this point, he's 21. We're still not making the best decisions. I'll allow it.

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Chris: I can't believe I've never made that math in my head before.

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Ned: Yeah, it's there.

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Chris: Maybe I just didn't want it to be true.

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Ned: Yeah, just like Milli Vanilli, I didn't want it to be true.

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Chris: Blame it on the rain, man. Blame it on the rain.

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Ned: Yeah. Yeah. So what we have now is a for profit company whose employees are also responsible for helping to maintain the software that that drives the hosting company's profits. The people working@WordPress.com now need to serve both the interests of the WordPress community and Automattic's investors. Guess who typically wins in that tug of war? Yes, that was rhetorical. Yeah. For his part, Matt chose to stay in charge of the core WordPress project as the lead developer, along with five other people. These are the folks who have the final say in what is committed to code and how the project is steered and how WordPress.org is managed out of this team of six, three of them work for Automattic, including Matt. I'm not saying that Automattic drives all the decisions for WordPress, but they certainly have a lot of influence and Matt has the final say. That's that whole benevolent dictator for life thing. That's great when they're benevolent, but you can't forget about the dictator part. Now let me introduce one more organization to the field to make things even more confusing. The WordPress Foundation. This is not the same as the. Org or the comm.

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Ned: The foundation is a nonprofit 501c3 that was founded by Matt and oversees the names and logos of WordPress as well as some other brands like Wordcamp, BuddyPress and Openverse and WooCommerce, which is an open source ecommerce plugin for WordPress. If you want to make your WordPress site an e commerce site and sell things, you're probably using WooCommerce. WooCommerce is also owned by Automattic. They were acquired. I don't remember exactly when. Prior to the founding of the WordPress Foundation, Matt personally held the trademarks for WordPress and everything else. So this is was his way of like taking it outside of himself. But he still owns, or at least is the head of the WordPress Foundation.

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Chris: Right. So it's. It's a foundation with a group of people working in it in name only.

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Ned: More or less.

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Chris: Much like how Facebook is a public.

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Ned: Company, but it's completely managed by Mark because he has a controlling share and there's no way for him to be ousted.

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Chris: Right?

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Ned: Yeah, this is a similar scenario. God, this seems like it's a common theme, doesn't it?

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Chris: So weird.

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Ned: Matt Mullenweg is well known for being outspoken and occasionally making rash decisions. For instance, before he created WordPress.com, he tried to found a company called WordPress Inc. Doesn't this guy know any other words? He did this during a meetup after convincing one person to agree to the idea and be the first employee. He then jumped up on stage and announced it. Without any kind of business plan, funding or financials. Employee number one was never paid a salary and the whole project was abandoned pretty quickly. But not before they went and rolled out that whole debacle with the ads in the blog posts. According to his Wikipedia article, Matt is happy to start disputes in public and let the court of public opinion settle them. He accused Wix.com, which also helps you build websites and E commerce things. He accused them of reusing WordPress components without honoring the GPL. He also criticized GoDaddy for not contributing enough to WordPress. He disbanded a slack group around project sustainability for questions over his overlord status and had a public feud with a transgender Tumblr user last year because Automatic also owns Tumblr, which is weird, but okay. He also called WordPress hosting company WP Engine A Cancer while on stage at Wordcamp.

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Ned: He likes spicy takes. He definitely seems like the type of guy that would start out as a fun hang. We're just chilling until he has a few drinks and then he starts going on and on about GPL and fluoride in the water and how it's turning all the frogs gay. There's a lot there to unpack, but I think we can just focus on what happened with WP Engine.

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Chris: Yeah, 12 hour episode, et cetera.

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Ned: Yeah, yeah. WP is not WordPress. While WordPress.com is probably the biggest hoster of WordPress instances, it is definitely not the only one out there. I never used it, at least for my early WordPress sites. I think I did eventually use it for something, but anyway, WP Engine also hosts WordPress instances, as implied by their name, and they make a decent chunk of change for doing so. And they're also not huge contributors to the open source project, which is fine. It's open source. There's nothing in the GPL that says you have to contribute back time or money to the software you receive. That's one of the core freedoms. You can take the software and run it how you want. Matt doesn't see it that way. And so in a blog post on WordPress.org he called WP Engine a cancer to WordPress. Why are they a cancer? Well, you see, Todd, Chris, whoever you are, WP Engine turns off revisions by default. That's when you update a post. It'll save the previous version so you can roll back to it. How does that make it a cancer? Well, according to Matt, revisions are a fundamental component of WordPress to help you ensure you don't lose data, which is admirable enough.

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Ned: Sure, WP Engine chose to disable that feature to save database space. You know, saving revisions, that takes up space. But they're not exactly hiding the fact. It's clearly documented when you sign up for the service and it's in their docs. Like, this is not a closed secret that no one knew about. And this is open source GPL software. They can run it however they see fit. Matt believes this outrageous action breaks the trust and sanctity of our software's promise to users, end quote. To which I say, if people really care about revisions, they can just use one of the other hundreds of WordPress hosting companies out there, or you can just put in a ticket and request that they turn on revisions. They'll do it. Matt's real problem with WP Engine is over the confusion of their relationship with WordPress and also the fact they don't contribute back enough. Some people see WP Engine and just assume that they're an official WordPress entity. Probably because he's created so much other naming confusion. They're not. But I could see that maybe he's also super pissed that WP Engine is owned by private equity and only contributes back 40 hours a week to the project.

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Ned: Now we we on Chaos Lever are not the biggest fans of private equity. I think if he had got on stage and said that WP Engine is owned by private equity and private equity is a cancer on the industry, people might have been swayed by that argument. Every encounter I've had with private equity has been distinctly negative. But Matt's mean completely fair.

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Chris: Sometimes it's been sneakily negative.

[00:30:37.23]
Ned: Fair. It has never been positive. Let's go with that. But Matt's main beef is really the lack of contribution back to source, something that WP Engine is not required to do. It'd be nice. They don't have to. This is where we could have a cogent discussion of what responsibility companies have to give back to projects. That could be a genuinely interesting discussion with valid opinions on both sides. Chris, what do you think?

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Chris: I think pie is better than cake. I wasn't listening. What was the question?

[00:31:14.08]
Ned: I mean, it's worth serious consideration. There are open source projects out there that are like holding up all of the infrastructure of the modern Internet. Think of things like open SSL that don't have nearly enough contributors giving back and supporting them. WordPress is not one of those projects. So like, I get it, but bad example. We talked to the guy who wrote Curl a few weeks ago for day two DevOps. Super nice guy by the way. And yeah, if you want to chuck some money or time some way, maybe give it to him. Because Curl and Libcurl underpins a ridiculous amount of things. And he's like, it's him and like three other people, right?

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Chris: And one of those people is actually his dog.

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Ned: Might be, but that's not what happened with WordPress and WP engine. So instead, let the shit show commence. So after Mullenweg got up on stage and then wrote A blog post accusing WP Engine of being a cancer and possibly infringing on WordPress's copyright. WP Engine sued Matt Mullenweg to withdraw his comments. And then Automattic sent a cease and desist letter to WP Engine claiming they had violated WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. The WordPress foundation that owns those trademarks sneakily tried to change their trademark policy page after the suit so it would be more robust. But you know, the Internet Archive is a thing. Oops. Matt Mullenweg then banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org which is how they get plugin and theme and software updates, which is bad. WP Engine sued and asked for a preliminary injunction, at which point Mullenweg temporarily allowed plugin and theme access for a little bit. And then WordPress.org added a checkbox to the login page that forced you to claim you weren't affiliated with WP Engine before you could log in. That was pretty childish. And then this one's wild. There's this plugin called ACF that helps you add forms to your WordPress pages.

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Ned: The plugin is maintained and written by WP Engine. WordPress just took control of it because it's hosted through WordPress.org that was friggin wild. And then Matt went and created a page to track how many websites had moved off of WP Engine since he started his campaign of Cancer, whatever. And then he claimed that Automattic would reduce their contributions to match WP Engine. So they were doing like several thousands of hours of work on the WordPress project every week, and they claimed they were going to drop it down to 40 hours a week, which is like a lot less.

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Chris: Why would he do that?

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Ned: Well, I suspect there's some less than pure reasons, which I'll touch on in a moment. Mullenweg then blocked accounts on WordPress.org of many contributors over rumors of them planning a fork of the software because they didn't like what he was doing. And then Automattiq saw an exodus of 159 people leave over this whole kerfuffle. And BlackRock, which owns part of Automatic, wrote down their investment in automatic by 50%, which, wait a minute, I thought private equity was evil, Matt.

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Chris: Hmm.

[00:35:06.13]
Ned: So I, like, I can't prove anything but the fact that he was like, we're going to drop our contributions way down. He says it's to encourage other people to contribute more, but I suspect it's the fact that he has a lot less of the staff than he used to, and he wanted them working on stuff that makes money. So this was a convenient excuse to be like, well, if you're not going to work on it, we're not going to work on it either. Which is how adults act. I know that's a lot, and the one thing I want to point to is the way that mullenweg was able to arbitrarily restrict plugin theme and update access and take over WP Engine's plugin repository and distribution. That's an abuse of power and a major problem with the benevolent dictator for Life model. Ideally, WordPress.org should have a board that oversees the project and is not directly affiliated with companies like WP Engine or Automattic. Or it could be handed over to the Linux foundation, which can handle both code and trademark management. Speaking of the Linux foundation, to stop Matt from pulling another mullenweg the next time he gets a bug up his ass about something, they have introduced the Fair Package Manager project and fairs in all capitals, so I assume it stands for something, but I didn't look it up because it's going to be a backronym and I hate those.

[00:36:33.19]
Ned: The project is an open source Mechanism for distributing WordPress plugins, updates and themes and more, and it functions by, quote, seamlessly replacing existing centralized services with with a federated open source infrastructure. End quote. Which means instead of Matt or any other individual being able to shutter access to the existing package manager or force a company to run their own homegrown solution, which is what WP Engine is currently doing, they can instead use this new Fair project which is decentralized and also allows you to host stuff in particular locations so you can align with GDPR. I think of this as a very necessary first step, and hopefully one of many to move WordPress into the hands of someone with admittedly less spicy takes. Maybe a level headed group that doesn't have a vested financial interest, or at least a distributed financial interest. Or we could stop using WordPress.

[00:37:33.02]
Chris: Oh, that's an option.

[00:37:35.14]
Ned: I mean, I was going to say I don't think we technically use WordPress anymore, but I'm not entirely sure about what PodPage uses in the background, I suspect it might be heavily modified WordPress.

[00:37:47.15]
Chris: It can all be very mysterious.

[00:37:50.14]
Ned: I can say that my personal website definitely doesn't use it because it's Hugo, but I have no idea about some of the other sites that we use to host things, so I don't want to use it.

[00:37:59.09]
Chris: Are you telling me to go? Where did you tell me to go.

[00:38:04.02]
Ned: Go fuck yourself out of here. Who's spicy now? So this is going to be an ongoing problem with all of these types of projects, and ideally the people in charge of the projects will realize that they need to hand the reins over to a responsible group so that you can have this sustainableness of the project. But unfortunately, most of them are so egotistical that that's not a realistic option. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you friend. You accomplished something today. You can go sit on the couch, fire up WP engine and create a blog about how much you love grapes and iris clogged dancing. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lover or go to our website chaoslover.com where you'll find show notes, blog posts in general. Tom Foolery we'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta ta for now.

[00:39:26.06]
Chris: Speaking of Tom Tom from MySpace. Man, that's the way to do it.

[00:39:32.18]
Ned: Hell yeah.

[00:39:33.04]
Chris: Hundred something million dollars F off. Live on a Caribbean island for the rest of your life. You won.

[00:39:39.10]
Ned: Stop.