Technologists have identified the moment of conception, the instant life begins… for WordPress, that is.
Mike Little pinpoints this 2003-01-24 Matt Mullenweg blog-post as WP’s birth — Matt later updated it with: “This became WordPress.”
Sez Matt in this seminal posting:
My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay. What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name.
To which Mike commented:
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too.
Now WP is an .org, a .com, and a company called Automattic — whose workers have titles like Quantum Bug Creator, Outernationalist, and Happiness Engineer. Scott Berkun, their Anti-Chief of Non-Contradictions, recently revealed “How is WordPress.com made?.” It rundowns WP’s distributed ops, with an HQ in SF, CA, but most of their flock found around the globe:
(embiggen)
That’s the .com employees. For the .org side, see this Jon Cave video “visualization of all the commits made to WordPress up until the release of 3.1,” titled the “Road to WordPress 3.1:”
Road to WordPress 3.1 from Jon
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