Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, March 31, 2005:
WordPress, Those Lying, Cheating, Rotten, Bastards
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Let me say right up front that I have no problem with making money or starting a business. What I do have a problem with is pretending to be a good upstanding citizen when you're really just using that as a cover to steal from the cookie jar.
In a quickly breaking story it appears that Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg has been using the main site for Wordpress, Wordpress.org, for SEARCH ENGINE SPAM!!!!!. Yes, the Wordpress.org website is currently home to over 120,000 "articles" which are about nothing and whose sole purpose is to generate traffic for Google ads.
On top of this, the money which is being generated under the guise of an open source project (as well as donations) is in fact being used for him to start Wordpress,inc and hire his first employee!
I must admit that I find this especially frustrating today because I've spent the entire day fighting off spammers on this blog. They appear to have found a way around the 1.5 security stuff and I was forced to go directly into the database and close comments on all my posts over a month old because I've gotten HUNDREDS of spams today. The stuff he's doing is no different than these comment spammers and it makes me sick to be using this product.
via Joseph Scott
Link to post that broke the story Waxy.org
Link to google showing content spamming: Goggle - Update interestingly in response to the uproar Google has already pulled down all the articles out of their index! Sweet. Click on the link and you'll see none come up. Some are still available at yahoo.
A few direct links to bogus articles: Bogus 1 Bogus 2 Bogus 3
Discussion
I don't see the problem with either of the practices.
First, what is wrong with deriving an income from one's open source work? Is he violating the license? No, right? Doesn't everyone say that programmers are supposed to come up with a way to finance their open source works?
Second, the ads are not the algorithmically generated spam ones. They are normal sponsored article ads like you see in magazines. And they are clearly labelled as being 'sponsored'.
Seems like your real problem with him is you object to someone doing anything to offset the costs of hosting a website that supports open source.
Created by Ed Sanders on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
Ed I removed that last comment because I'm not going to allow personal attacks of me on my own blog. I think we're at an impasse here so I'm going to shut down comments on this post.
Since you don't believe me you may want to checkout Slashdot on the matter. Lots of other people talking about this as spam not just me (including Google themselves).
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/196220
Created by Ian on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
Ed, I'm basically done with this back and forth but I would ask that you think a bit more logically about it. There simply is no good reason to spam the search engine with thousands of posts. Every person who clicked from Google onto that bogus wordpress page is one potential customer from a REAL mortgage company who may not be able to give them their business. This stuff isn't theoretical, it has a real impact on real businesses who are trying to do the right thing. If he couldn't afford the hosting then he should have pulled it down or moved it to Sourceforge, that's 100% free. Plenty of other open source projects have found ways to generate income without resorting to this type of stuff.
And so you don't post a thousand more messages I haven't donated to wordpress (luckily), but I did donate to Movable Type when I've used that in the past. Six Apart has had plenty of chances to spam the world, wonder why they haven't?
Created by Ian on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
And Ian, please state where you have found specific information about how he is financing his business. You state that he is not using VC or other funding - how do you know this private information?
Created by Ed Sanders on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
Ian, if you read his page where he asks for donations, you know that the money he has received goes towards hosting the free downloads, hosting the free forums, renewing domains, and donating $ to other open source developers. So when you say he is not sharing the money with others who help, you don't know what you are talking about.
Again I ask, how much did you donate to him, given that you not only use his software, but you make a profit from it, using it to promote your own business?
Created by Ed Sanders on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
I'm not saying he broke a law, I'm saying he broke peoples trust. All you have to do is read anything he's written about wordpress. He never came forward and said, hey I'm going to put up a bunch of bogus pages and make money off of search engine spam. In fact he's often talked about not liking spam and ways to get rid of it.
If it's not spam then why has Google and Yahoo removed him from the directory? Here read this:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Some key parts:
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.- hmm like 120,000 articles
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. - if you look many are the same and simply have different titles, etc
Avoid hidden text or hidden links. - like negative indexed links
He does have the right to make a business but what you're forgetting is that it's not "his" work anymore. There are alot of other people who contribute to Wordpress. Did he share the money with them? It doesn't appear so. I'm all for him starting a business, but he could have gone about it the right way. He knows everyone in the weblog world, he probably could have got VC funding or other funding easily. Instead he's chosen to break alot of peoples trust and I think it's a bad move.
Created by Ian on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
Ian, Matt wrote WordPress and opened the source, right? And he accepted a few donations for his work from grateful users right? And now he is starting a business. Why are you saying that because he accepted donations he should not have the right to make a business out of his work. How much money have you paid him for the work he did on the software that you yourself use?
Regarding spam, it is not spam, don't be an idiot. They are ads hosted on HIS OWN WEB SITE. He is not mailing ads to people and he is not posting ads on other people's web sites, right? Why shouldn't he have the right to post ads on his own web site? You have some reason for that? You yourself posted 'spam' (by your definition) at the end of your posting above, correct?
Created by Ed Sanders on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
WordPress.org Spamming Search Engines?
Yes, its been all over, & if you haven't heard/read, you should now read this, this is really BIG!!...
Created by Canned !! -- my Atropine on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
That's an interesting take on it Alex. I agree somewhat that Google should do more to prevent abuse, but I still think ultimate responsibility is with the people who do it.
Created by Ian on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
As much as I don't support this move by the WordPress guys, this is really Google's fault for enabling it. WordPress just got caught because of having a high profile site, hundreds of others are still doing it. Google makes absolutely no effort on limiting the sites that can carry AdSense ads, which generated an entire industry of empty content-void but keyword-filled sites that do nothing but display the ads. Hence the temptation - if you know someone, who created an empty page with the word "mortage" repeated in it several times, and proper Google ads shown, and then generating click-through traffic from porn, the model suddenly seems viable, especially since Google does nothing to stop this practice.
Created by Alex Moskalyuk on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
Are you serious? Think about all the people who donated to Wordpress who thought they were donating to an open source project and instead that money is going to him starting a business? You think that's right?
There is 0 information in those articles, they are nothing more than spam. And the point is that one of the biggest problems in the industry he builds software in is spam. If he didn't think anything was wrong with it why did he hide the links to them on the homepage? Why didn't he tell people he was doing it?
Imagine tomorrow you find out that Bill Gates actually is paying a bunch of hackers to write spyware so that he can make money on clickthroughs to Viagra popups. Don't you think that would be wrong?
Created by Ian on 03.31.2005 1:03 am
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