Matt Mullenweg—Co-created WordPress as open source, powering over 40% of the web
Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress in 2003 as open source software under the GPL license. WordPress grew to power over 40% of all websites globally. Mullenweg founded the WordPress Foundation and Automattic contributed thousands of hours weekly to the open source project (prior to the 2025 reduction to 45 hours/week).
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Access & Information Freedom | +toward | secondary | +0.50 |
| Open Internet & Web Freedom | +toward | secondary | +0.50 |
| Open Source | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | +0.667 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (critical ×2) × confidence (0.50)