Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has escalated the war of words against competitor SixApart with a new post that further attacks SixApart following a Twitter exchange Tuesday.
Some highlights from the post:
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress….
Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support….
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!…
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page…
For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.
Certainly SixApart’s history in relation to open source and caring about their community isn’t great (and I won’t be one to defend it). However Mullenweg’s comments are interesting given that Automattic’s biggest money earner Akismet is not open source (the service, not the plugin) and benefits from the the failure of WordPress to combat comment spam natively. Couple that with Automattic controlling WordPress as it was its own; some may suggest this a clear conflict of interest that disqualifies Mullenweg from taking the high moral ground. People in glass houses.
I personally prefer wordpress.com to typepad.com. For one, Wordpress is free vs. not free for TypePad. And two, I prefer the Wordpress functionality.
Both have serious IT issues when there’s lots of traffic and both do get sluggish so I’d be careful if i was Matt.
agree with jenkins.
ever look at what the average wordpress page is doing to your database? Wordpress alone might be quite speedy in its completely default state but the plugin architecture encourages iffy coding. Install a few plugins and you’ll easily start generating 50-odd DB hits for each page with all your category drilldowns, latest posts, popular posts, latest comments, related posts etc etc widgets down your sidebar. Sure, you can throw more code at the problem and install the wp-cache plugin, but that just adds another layer of complexity and doesn’t address the underlying problems of an inefficient API. There’s definitely room in this market for someone to come up with something beautiful, built from scratch, that takes lessons from what wordpress got right and what it got wrong.
Whatever is said in the war of words, WordPress is the leader, quite obvious.
Matt is young. Forgive him.
Just forget all of this stuff and use spaces!
can’t we all just get along. seems a little childish for people of their level.
A note to all,
Mr. Riley’s post isn’t an attempt to escalate this stupid war even more in any shape or form, just pure journalism.
Cheers.
Typo: Couple that with Automattic controlling WordPress as *if* it was its own;
sounds like the tantrums my 3 year old has …
SPAM isn’t something that can be fought just with a few regular expressions client-side. It’s something that requires a huge amount of data. Not a few hundred or a few thousand SPAM posts. It requires millions and millions of them.
Fighting comment SPAM or any other type of SPAM isn’t something that can run with a plug-in on a blog, without using a central service that actually does the fighting.
Akismet wouldn’t make any sense as a decentralized service. If they open sourced it and everybody could create their own Akismet-service, it wouldn’t work any more.
You shouldn’t comment on technical stuff, Duncan, because you obviously have no idea of what you’re talking about.
“Automattic’s biggest money earner Akismet is not open source…and benefits from the the failure of WordPress to combat comment spam natively.”
That’s three misconceptions in a single sentence.
1. Akismet is not Automattic’s biggest money earner (not even close)
2. The core Akismet algorithms cannot be open source – if they were, spammers could reverse engineer and bypass Akismet with ease
3. The failure to combat spam natively applies to all blog platforms, not just WordPress (hence the high popularity of Akismet on platforms like Movable Type)
Couple that with the fact that TechCrunch says it couldn’t live without Akismet, and your argument appears a little weak.
ICE BURN
Also, it’s not like WordPress is immune to scaling problems.
What are they….13yr olds!?!?! My stick is longer than yours..
Grow up..
I would assume that wordpress.com is their biggest earner
Isn’t this about the time when a third party steps in to grab market share while the two big dogs are having a pissing match?
mullenweg is a great name
“Automattic controlling WordPress as it was its own…”
Actually, it’s an acceptable open source model for a company to “control” an open source project. MySQL has pretty much the same model (perhaps even more controlling than Automattic). Your “glass house” reference might be (unintentionally) perfect: in a glass house, you get to see everything going on inside, even if you can’t participate.
what can tc say about mullenweg ?
nobody cares about this.
It’s unfortunate that a conversation intended to be about features and competition has evolved into a dialogue that doesn’t mention users or bloggers, and we’ll do our best to not adopt a negative tone. To clarify, at Six Apart, our audience for all of our platforms is growing very rapidly, with Movable Type powering sites like Huffington Post and ReadWriteWeb and BoingBoing and Gothamist and many of the other biggest blogs in the world. And we’re also rapidly expanding into new markets and geographies as well.
Just as importantly, we’re extremely focused on developing and shipping new features to the blogging community; For example, we spent yesterday developing and promoting things like the Yahoo Fire Eagle plugin, a first for any blogging platform. Finally, we’re thrilled to be part of the open source community, proud of the contributions we’ve made, and supportive and appreciative of everyone else who is. Now excuse us while we go back to creating even better blogging software.
I’m surprised TechCrunch is still posting about this manufactured pissing match. It’s not news to anyone, nor is it even all that important.
As the previous thread indicated, most people who have any experience with MT and WP recognize that both platforms have pros and cons and you choose the one that best meets your needs.
6A is taking the high road, which is smart. I wish Matt good luck with his inflated ego. He should be careful or it’s going to get deflated pretty quickly one of these days.
One thing to remember about Akismet is that there really is no way to make it free unless you’re going to cover the storage and bandwidth of keeping an updated spam server. They already provide a free option, and the paid one is more than worth it for the people who need it.
I don’t know, I guess I never got the argument that it was bad they charge for Akismet.
@21 – take Perl out from Movable Type and it will be as great as WordPress.
People just don’t like cgi and perl, given php these days.
Well, unless Six Apart is only after [just a couple of] big-name sites.
Or well, another way put, Perl is great, bin-cgi, nah..
>Or well, another way put, Perl is great, bin-cgi, nah..
haven’t used cgi-bin for sooooo looooooong that even forgotton how it’s called!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, each of those two platforms have their uses. I use them both for totally different things. I think we’ve already heard enough, and I’m ready to just move on already.
are there other industries that have this level of public sparring that tech companies have? I think overall it just makes us all seem like a bunch of sniping, immature brats sometimes. Maybe in fashion & music they trash talk but in any other industry do they?
Comment #3 said “There’s definitely room in this market for someone to come up with something beautiful, built from scratch, that takes lessons from what wordpress got right and what it got wrong.”
Please check out Graffiti – http://graffiticms.com
I am a developer on the project. It is super simple to use, yet elegant and poweful. V1 was just released last month, and some great plugins are being built right now. And with its plugin architecture, many don’t even need to hit the database as the necessary data is passed to them by Graffiti.
At the end of the day, wordpress is still the best all around blogging platform.
Couple that with Automattic controlling WordPress as it was its own
The same goes for DHH and rails, but WP and rails are still both 100% open source. Without leaders the software wouldn’t have grown.
Duncan, how about more original posts instead of responses to other peoples blog posts?
@Andy (#18)
It’s ironic that you compare Automattic business model to MySQL since that is the same business model Six Apart is following with MT and that Matt and Lloyd Budd criticize 6A as not being sincere or real open source. I’m not saying you have to like either business model, but Automattic lashing out is the pot calling the kettle black.
@Rob Poitras
“WP and rails are still both 100% open source.”
Is 100% of the code behind Wordpress.COM open source though? As an outsider to that community its been very confusing to me. I understand .org is 100% opens source and GPL’ed. I understand wordpress.com is a hosted services. I also understand that Automattic holds controls (legal right) to the “WordPress” name (as a trademark? Unclear on this also.) If I wanted to create a wordpress.com clone today — could I do it? Is 100% of the code available and is it what I see at Wordpress.org. The way people site the way WordPress can thrash a server under load it seems like some major architectural changes and code had to be made. (This is similar to what happened with TypePad which began as MT and was modified for a massive distributed hosted environment.)
This sort of sniping goes on between Anil and Matt all the time within comment sections all over the blogosphere. This is the first time Six Apart has mentioned WordPress inline on a search engine optimized, title-bait post on their own blog.
If I had nothing to do all day like Six Apart and write passive-aggressive comments and posts spun by marketing all over the blogosphere all day, instead of helping my business and community of users succeed everyday in a very real way, one would have to think about where all their clients and users are/have been going. I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you?
Six Apart does all this with 100+ employees, and Automattic, with less than 20 employees, have really been giving them a run for their money. Bottom line is that Six Apart is pissed that such a small company can take down such a lumbering, grossly inefficient one.
And, I thought I’d mention that Anil’s site is down as I type this comment.
He should probably file a ticket with MT support, since he cannot fix that problem himself.
Cylence, I’m still disappointed you want to make this conversation about individuals and personalities instead of what helps bloggers as a whole. For the record: No, my site isn’t down. But I certainly would be the first to admit I’m just a blogger, not an infrastructure expert, so it’d be entirely possible that I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
Again, I’ll point out that yesterday, we released the Fire Eagle plugin for MT. Today, we’re working on making MT’s performance and scalability even better. Anything that encourages that sort of focus on the part of all of us competing in the blogging is a good thing, and I hope we can move the conversation in that direction.
@Cylence
“And, I thought I’d mention that Anil’s site is down as I type this comment.”
No problems here. Have you tried it from multiple locations to be sure its not just something on your end.
“He should probably file a ticket with MT support, since he cannot fix that problem himself.”
Come on, really? That sort of baseless comment doesn’t support your argument it undermines it.
actually, i don’t really mind the pissing match or the competitive attitude, as long as it results in product improvements for customers / users
fwiw, i use both companies’ products (Wordpress, Typepad) fairly regularly, and while there are many great points about both, i also think everyone needs to continue to aim higher…. there is certainly more to be done for making the web publishing user experience simpler & better.
to be honest, the overall pace of innovation that’s occurred since the original FrontPage product was introduced by Vermeer back in ‘95 has been relatively slow.
so matt, anil, others… feel free to wack those nerf bats all over the place, if that’s what it takes to keep you motivated
- dave mc
Matt’s the biggest reason people both love and hate WordPress. Recently, there are more reasons to hate, unfortunately. He’s way immature and doesn’t know much about morals. I don’t like to sound like a broken record, but some of you may remember the polemic on TechCrunch about his buddy stealing my username and my WordPress subdomain and then Matt throwing threats and lies and changing the FAQ and terms overnight to cover things up and trying making us all look stupid (but thanks to http://www.archive.org and Google’s cache he got caught). He needs to learn a lot about the right ways to do certain things and be like the big guys!
Nerd fight.
VOX is just a terrible product, it lacks professionalism. There is no comparison.
I was an avid WordPress user until I realized that every major update completely broke the APIs I used in my plugins. It became easier to just ignore the api’s and hack through to the database, etc, directly. Which defeats the whole purpose of an API…
The infamous database connectivity problems are also very embarrassing. WordPress isn’t designed to handle more than a handful of simultaneous visitors without massive tweaking or caching. It gets even worse when plugins get involved.
I also started getting pissed off at Matt whathisname. First, using wordpress.org to host spam pages to make money. Then stealing a guy’s wordpress.com blog. Lying to users about his conflicts of interest. Actively interfering with alternative spam control methods.
I didn’t like Movable Type, but I decided to give it a try. It’s biggest plus was that Matt’s name was not attached. My site now loads instantly…even in dynamic mode (which uses PHP).
I miss some of the features of WP, but having seen what they’re doing with WP 2.5, I’d be missing out on those features in WP anyway.
– Pissed of former WP user.
Never thought much of MT. I love WP, loved it since when it was still B2. Kubrick was largely responsible for WP’s likability early on and my favorite part of WP is still K2… so I’m keeping an eye on Habari. That’s where Heilmann, Chris Davis and friends have gone.
http:/www.habariproject.org/ *
*(unfortunately, you may have to visit some other time since there appears to be a bug with the site
WP’s widgets, dashboard, UX and API are weaker than they should be this long after Automattic “getting serious” and Toni joining the team. I love WP to death, just saying…
Also have to agree with Jorge’s (38) last sentence which is echoed in other comments re: plugins, API, upgrades, etc.
I’m excited about 2.5 but not holding my breath… although I’m sure it’s going to help attract new users.
http://www.habariproject.org/ (still broken just forgot a slash)
You can keep copy/pasting this idea, but that doesn’t make it true. Note that there are two non-Automattic employees with commit access to WordPress (I am one of them). We don’t have the conflict of interest of which you’re accusing Matt. We’re not facing pressure from Matt to keep anti-spam improvements out of WordPress. That’s a straw man. If you haven’t read the response I wrote the last time you brought up this particular accusation, you should do so now.
Who cares about Akismet when there’s the superior http://defensio.com/ now?! Who cares about Gravatar when there’s the superior http://www.openvatar.com/ now? I wish great success to the Habari project so that soon we can say – Who cares about WordPress when there’s the superior http://www.habariproject.org/ now?
Chris, you caught us with our pants down! We were enabling Twitter interaction from the Habari Project site and had to upgrade curl, hence the dash of downtime. Things should now be working smoothly once again.
Please visit the Habari Project site to see how our project is different – hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
I prefer MT. Wordpress is tooooo difficult to maintain.
Just one more reason why Matt and the rest of Automattic should invent in some ethics training. It’s a pity that Toni doesn’t see that. Considering that he sees very little, it doesn’t surprise me.
And would folks please stop calling Wordpress open source and stating that Matt develops open source software. That’s far from the truth. One simply has to look at wp.com to see so.
if wordpress isn’t open source, then I believe techcrunch is paying something for the use of wordpress software.
Just one more reason why Matt and the rest of Automattic should invent in some ethics training. It’s a pity that Toni doesn’t see that. Considering that he sees very little, it doesn’t surprise me.