Color and Voice

entrepreneurship, design, development, django, jquery, video. A professional creative and developer in Eugene Oregon. Love my family, my work and the outdoors. 
« Back to blog
Viewed 7176 times
Favorited 0 times
Filed under
December 7, 2009

TWiST #26 with Matt Mullenweg | This Week in Startups (TWiST) - Using Open Source to Build a Company

via thisweekinstartups.com

Awesome interview with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress. He make a great argument for open source as a business advantage. Not only has he made a great argument, but he's living it. Wordpress.com, the service built from Wordpress.org has 200+ million unique visitors a month.

Matt is a really laid back guy, and seems to have a solid and stable approach. I have since moved to Django personally, but I'm a big fan of Wordpress if you have to use PHP.

The most interesting thing for me was his discussion of HOW he used the open source community to make incredibly customizable software. Plug-ins baby.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments (4)

Dec 08, 2009
Andrew C said...
Mmm - not sure how I feel about that. I too love Wordpress and use it almost exclusively - but one of my good friends who works for Push Button Labs is/was developing a framework to work with Wordpress. Well - it came down to Mullenweg basically wanting other developers not to profit from any of their own products using his 'open source' project - though clearly he gains a ton from having other devs do "free" work that boosts Wordpress.

That's really shady if you ask me.

Dec 08, 2009
Andrew C said...
Here is their project btw: http://onepresscommunity.com/
Dec 08, 2009
Matt said...
Andrew, I don't remember anything about OnePress, but helping developers grow and prosper is one of the things I spend a lot of my time on.

The only thing I could imagine is perhaps their theme isn't GPL which makes it in violation of WordPress' license, in which case we wouldn't feature it or link to it from WordPress.org.

Dec 08, 2009
Dave Merwin said...
I'm not sure I agree Andrew. I've profited a great deal in the past from using Wordpress and I never had a conflict with the Wordpress community. In fact, I've seen people conduct business in the Wordpress.org forums.

Can you explain what you mean by: "basically wanting other developers not to profit from any of their own products using his 'open source' project"?

Leave a comment...

 
Got an account with one of these? Login here, or just enter your comment below.
Posterous-login    Connect    twitter