Matt Mullenweg
When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.Collection: Technology
I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad.Collection: Freedom
Everybody jokes about that old story about the world only needing five computers, but when you think about it, that's where we're heading.Collection: Computers
Technology is best when it brings people together.Collection: Best
Jeffrey Zeldman had an astonishing ability to craft a seductive coolness using educated references, dry humor, and retro/organic imagery.Collection: Humor
WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.Collection: Freedom
There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.Collection: Design
Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most effective URLs available today.
Captcha is the bane of the Internet. I can't figure them out myself half the time!
You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies.
You shouldn't restrict peoples' freedom on what they can and cannot do with code.
The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.
Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.
No matter what I do, I always come home to my blog.
I don't think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks... but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use.
If you still use 'admin' as a username on your blog, change it.
I think that all services will have downtime. No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google!
If you have a fantastic idea you're really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that's actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.
If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.
I hope that people have more to say than 140 characters will allow them in their life.
In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.
Just because someone uses Twitter doesn't mean they shouldn't use WordPress, and vice versa.
It turns out that social networks drive a heck of a lot of traffic to blogs.
If you were building a real-time game like one of Zynga's games, the WordPress model wouldn't work well for that.
Automattic's mission has always been very aligned with WordPress itself, which is to democratise publishing.
A lot of the early adoption of WordPress was actually from thousands and millions of individually hosted instances, so a lot of the people who ran WordPress were on their own.
If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.
I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy.
Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
Immunity to obsolescence is the only obsolescent-immune conceit of the past millennium.
Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.
It's good to work for someone else. Because then you appreciate it more when you are an entrepreneur.
I learned a ton of things during my time in CNET.
My job is such that I get to run new things every day, and I get to run new markets and new technologies. I enjoy that quite a bit.
Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience.
The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.
The center of gravity for an organization should be as close to what they make as possible. If you make cars, you need people in the factory. If you breed horses, be in the stable. If you make the Internet, live on the Internet, and use all the freedom and power it gives you.
The power of the web is not in centralization; it's not in closed systems or anything like that. It's in its open nature, and that's what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.
For WordPress to be world class, it needs to have a sustainable model.
Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.
Has anyone ever said, 'I wish I could go to more meetings today'?
I'm really good at making software for publishing.
There's something very real about helping someone one-on-one.
Sometimes, you have to be frustrated and do something unscalable and a waste of your time to be inspired.
In every aspect of life, I consider myself incredibly fortunate.
The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.
When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?
I don't care what hours you work. I don't care if you sleep late or if you pick a child up from school in the afternoon. It's all about your output.
Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?
It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.