It’s in keeping with the spirit of WordPress that its Terms of Service are simple, freely available to be repurposed by others, and, the tiniest bit quirky.
WordPress co-founder, and part owner of its tech-tools parent Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, pointed out there’s a ‘here’s a treat’ buried in the ToS.
Speaking recently in Wellington, he reckons that so few people actually read these legal bits, putting in a hyperlink is a nice surprise for those who bother. Go have a look yourself.
The San Francisco based open source enthusiast was on a whistlestop tour around Japan, Indonesia, Australia and NZ, spreading the word and looking to add to the globally-spread development team.
The scarily young Matt seems pretty savvy and modest all at once. His photo and bio is buried, alphabetically on the Automattic page (though he did point out the pun on his own name in the parent brand).
Part of the savviness comes from a 1970’s computer science graduate dad who encouraged his then six year son to play with the home computer’s code in the late 1980s – with the proviso he fixed what he broke!
A fair bit of looking under the hood later in 2004, Matt was looking around for, and failing to find, simple blogging software or platforms.
So, along with Mike Little he built the open source, free, WordPress. They quickly realising they couldn’t do it alone, and encouraged others to come into development team.
As well, they set up Auttomatic.
He describes Jetpack as the site’s tool with the most promise. This allows plugins that are available on WordPress.com to be available on self-hosted WordPress installs, powered by the cloud.
More than 130 Wellingtonians attended the Shed 6 presentation, including a colleague Harry.
Harry can’t code, but he too was impressed with the open nature of what Matt’s helping create in the net, and dispersing it around the world.
With only 22% of the internet sites, there’s 78% to go says Matt.
His lofty goal is to democratise publishing.
He might just do it Harry reckons.
P.S. – In case you can’t find the tasty treat, check out paragraph 16
sticK - science, technology, innovation & commercialisation KNOWLEDGE 
I caught the Auckland event, was an eye opener. WordPress is one of the most successful idealist tech projects I can remember. Matt Mullenweg did a good job explaining how the business part of the operation works alongside the open source ‘change the world’ part.
They have an interesting business model alright Bill. That mix of commercial and free is one they seem to have got right
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