Automattic

Automattic Creed

I’ve mentioned several times why I think Automattic is an awesome company to work for (no, I don’t work for them, yet). Here is another example. This is a bit that goes on the offer letter that new potential employees get. This is what the company stands for.

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Read the rest of the story as told by Matt.

GoDaddy is being sold to Silver Lake

According to GigaOm:

Go Daddy, the largest domain registrar and a web hosting provider, is reportedly close to being sold to a group of private equity firms including KKR and Silver Lake Partners. The purchase price is about $2 – 2.5 billion, according to several news outlets.

That’s the same Silver Lake that helped so much to screw up Skype. If you haven’t yet found an alternative to GoDaddy, you should be looking. That reminds me that Automattic has become a domain registrar quite some time ago and I haven’t heard any updates on that.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Here comes yet another product from Automattic and WordPress.com team – Jetpack.

This is a WordPress plugin that brings WordPress.com goodies to your self-hosted WordPress site. The project is starting off with just a few, most requested, bits of functionality, but according to this blog post more is coming.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, LaTeX. We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

Automattic becomes domain registrar

Matt Mullenweg reports in his blog that Automattic became a domain registrar.

As some folks have noticed already, Automattic is now a “real” domain registrar (ID #1531). This has been a goal of mine for several years now, chiefly because I am a bit of a domain collector myself and I’ve never been completely satisfied with the domain buying or management experience on any of the usual players. Second, custom domains are a popular feature on WordPress.com and should become even more popular with some changes we’re introducing this month and it’ll be good to be able to provide a fully integrated experience for our users there. It’ll be a few months while we build all the tools necessary to begin taking advantage of our registrar status so in the meantime we’ll continue to use Godaddy, who has been an excellent partner.

These are excellent news! I do agree with Mutt that current domain registration and maintenance experience is a pain in the back. No matter which registrar you choose, there is always something awkward about it – prices, support, control panel, etc. I am using GoGaddy for a few years now, and while they provide excellent discounts and DNS hosting uptime, their control panel is horrible. Yet, it’s still better than most.

Automattic on the other hand, is a company known for it’s humanity in policies and user interfaces. WordPress being just one of such examples. Them becoming a domain registrar gives me great hope of having a better domain registration and maintenance experience one day.

WordPress trademark moves to WordPress Foundation

These are some serious news! Matt Mullenweg announced that his company Attomatic is giving away its core brand name – WordPress – to WordPress Foundation.

Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.

This is huge!

This reminds me of those times when open source software started its way into the enterprise. Most people weren’t taking it seriously. A lot of people were laughing at it. Yet, one by one, company by company, open source made progress. These days, there are no doubts about the benefits of the open source software, both inside and outside of the enterprise. It brings plenty of benefits to the table. But yet there are companies that are built around closed source software which are doing fine.

Similarly to the above trademark news. We had a few examples of a company giving the source and trademark to open source community and some sort of foundation. But that was usually a desperate move, a panic attack. Often, such a move would bring in new blood and save the application or the company.

This time, with WordPress, it’s not a desperate move. It is a well thought through and calculated decision. It is the right thing to do.

WordPress is what it is mostly due to the huge and dynamic community of its users and developers. It’s them who make the most of it, and it’s them who push WordPress forward. It makes the most sense that they, as a community, via the non-profit WordPress Foundation, own the WordPress trademark.