Wordpress

WordPress democratized publishing on the web more than arguably any other single piece of software. Before WordPress, building a website required either technical skill or money to hire someone who had it. WordPress made it possible for anyone, a blogger, a small business owner, a nonprofit, a journalist, to publish on the open web with minimal friction. As of the mid-2020s, WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, a figure so dominant that it essentially is the default infrastructure of the web's long tail. Its open-source model and plugin ecosystem created an entire economy of developers, designers, and agencies, and its commitment to the open web, anyone can use it, modify it, host it anywhere, stood in contrast to the walled-garden platforms that came to dominate social media. WordPress kept alive the idea that the web is something you can own a piece of, not just rent from a platform.

WordPress owes its existence to an act of open-source abandonment. The original blogging software it was forked from, b2/cafelog, was created by Michel Valdrighi, a French programmer, in 2001. When Valdrighi stopped maintaining it without explanation, Mullenweg wrote a blog post in January 2003 floating the idea of a fork, and Mike Little left a comment volunteering to help, which is effectively the founding moment of the project. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck Tremoulet, a friend of Mullenweg's, and the project's tradition of naming major releases after jazz musicians (Miles, Duke, Coltrane, Mingus) reflects Mullenweg's personal love of jazz. Additionally, the long-running rivalry and eventual public feud between Mullenweg and WP Engine in 2024 exposed deep tensions about who controls and profits from open-source ecosystems, a debate with implications well beyond WordPress itself.