Linked List: October 5, 2024

Saturday, 5 October 2024

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring the week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

CNBC: ‘WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg Goes “Nuclear” on Silver Lake, WP Engine’ ★

Another good overview of the Automattic/WP Engine saga, this one from Ari Levy at CNBC:

Mullenweg may be openly enthusiastic and grateful for the employees he still has on board, but the WordPress community is a mess. Many WP Engine customers are suffering, and Automattic is gearing up for a legal fight against a private equity firm with over $100 billion in assets.

Hard not to be reminded, somewhat, of the righteous indignation fueling Steve Jobs’s end of life crusade against Google for creating Android. Some big fundamental differences, of course. WordPress is GPL open source and iOS isn’t open at all. It’s the righteous fervor of the founder/leader of the company that’s reminiscent.

The Verge Summarizes the Nasty WordPress/Automattic/WP Engine Feud ★

Emma Roth does the yeoman’s work of summarizing the complex and fast-moving legal feud between WordPress’s commercial arm and WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider:

Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly clear: he’s in charge of WordPress’ future.

Mullenweg heads up WordPress.com and its parent company, Automattic. He owns the WordPress.org project, and he even leads the nonprofit foundation that controls the WordPress trademark. To the outside observer, these might appear to be independent organizations, all separately designed around the WordPress open-source project. But as he wages a battle against WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, Mullenweg has muddied the boundaries between three essential entities that lead a sprawling ecosystem powering almost half of the web.

To Mullenweg, that’s all fine — as long as it supports the health of WordPress long-term.