Well, to be clear, WordPress.com didn’t exist 20 years ago, nor did Automattic. So this domain wasn’t given away to a billion dollar company, it was given to an open source developer to build a platform to bring more users and exposure to open source software. Which absolutely happened.

We’re talking 20 years ago, which is a lot earlier in the story of open source software! All the scandals over the past several years related to companies profiteering off open source software hadn’t happened yet.

>Non-profit project that gives away expensive stuff to multibillion/trillion dollar companies, for free?

So like most of succesful FOSS projects?

TL;DR:

The guy was registering domain names for known open source projects in the hopes of getting up to 10% of the company.

I do not feel pity for him.

Interviewer: How did you acquire the WordPress.com domain name? Mullenweg: Oh that was messy. Interviewer: Yeah from what I read it looked messy. Mullenweg: I feel like, someone else owned it. Interviewer: Yep. Mullenweg: And there was this guy who had gone around, I don't re-, like, Rick Johnson the Third might be his name. Interviewer: Rick Johnson, yep [33:00]. [inaudible] names. Mullenweg: Oh wow, I cannot believe I remember that. Interviewer: That's pretty good. Mullenweg: So yeah, this was one of these things where this guy had registered the domains of a bunch of open source projects. Java, Drupal, WordPress, many others. Sometimes he registered them from scratch and sometimes he bought them. And, and WordPress.com was one of the ones he had, so I had .org and .net and he had .com. And he had this OpenDomain thing where he wanted like 10% of your company, or something ridiculous. And he, he would've done very well if we'd actually had done that, but. It was something unreasonable... Or that it was like 10% of revenue instead, or 5%. And eventually, we kind of got him down where we would, he would give us the domain and transfer it, and we would link to OpenDomain in the footer. Of WordPress.com, which, we did. I don't remember exactly when or how it went south. But there was something around... I think one, I started to feel bad about this because he was using the WordPress thing as sort of a, a proof of, a social proof when, when he was going to other open source projects or buying other trademarks. And that felt bad. And then two, I don't, again I don't remember the exact things but I recall distinctly him coming on our forums. And WordPress.com had just started, and again for historical context, there were a lot of blogging services that had started and then gone out of business and lost everyone's content at the time. So one of the biggest concerns about WordPress.com that people had was that we were going to lose all of their writing. There was a journalling site, not LiveJournal but a different one, like Live Diary or something like that, I think it had diary in the name. That actually my friend Elisa was on. Who was, Elisa was one of the first five WordPress users. That had literally just lost everyone's content and gone out of business. I feel like weblogs.com had gone through a similar thing, there'd just been sort of a spate of these. So that was one of our biggest concerns. People were like, I don't know who these Automattic guys are. I don't know what WordPress is, like I don't want to put my life on something and then have it go away. And so he came on our forums, and said... Oh wait, I've remembered something, so part of the way we got the domain from him was he started taking donations. First he set up a WordPress blog on WordPress.com and then he started taking donations there.