Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in November 2009, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In November 2009, at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, something happened that stopped many people in the tech world. Matt Mullenweg — the creator of WordPress, the face of open source publishing, the man who built his entire reputation on the idea of free and open software — took the Microsoft stage with the company’s Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, to help launch Windows Azure.
The reaction was immediate. Confusion. Doubt. Speculation. And underneath it all, a real question that hints at something bigger than a conference appearance: What does it mean when the lines between open and closed, independent internet and corporate platform economy start to blur?
This question has only become more relevant since then.
What really happened at PDC 2009
The original Blog Herald coverage treated the appearance as a mystery — a question mark over Mullenweg’s loyalty. But the full picture was a bit more nuanced than initial headlines suggested.
Mullenweg Moved to the PDC stage To demonstrate that Windows Azure can support MySQL, PHP and Apache – an open source stack that powers WordPress. His company, Automattic, was announced as one of Azure’s first production customers. The specific project was a new site called OddlySpecific.com built on SQL Azure. WordPress.com itself wasn’t moving anywhere; existing infrastructure remained in place.
Mullenweg addressed the tension directly on the WordPress VIP blog a short time later: arguing that the partnership is not a contradiction of open source values, but rather an extension of them. Embedding the open web stack deeper into Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure meant more developers could use familiar, free tools in the new environment. As he said at the time, once you’ve tasted freedom, it’s hard to go back.
That didn’t stop the speculation. At the time, German-language tech commentary captured the mood well. Observers have noted a conspicuous silence around the financial details of the arrangement, suggesting that a Microsoft acquisition of WordPress could be in play — a migration first, then an outright buyout. The question lingering among observers after the conference was: “Is Matt a customer or an employee? Neither seems to fit.”
It was a reasonable thing to be curious about. The appearance was a marketing coup for Microsoft — the open source community’s most visible figure standing on a proprietary platform. Whether Mullenweg fully appreciated how he would read to his community at the time is a separate question.
No one had yet mentioned the bigger change
In retrospect, the PDC 2009 moment was an early signal of what the tech industry would do for the next fifteen years: Microsoft’s gradual, then accelerated, shift toward open source.
The company has previously been openly hostile to the movement — its executives used words like “un-American” and “cancer” to describe open-source software. By 2009, this position had already begun to soften. Azure’s support for PHP, MySQL and Apache was part of a deliberate strategy to reach developers wherever they are, not just those in the Microsoft ecosystem.
The transformation continued after that conference. Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 7.5 billion dollars. He became one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. Today, it sits alongside Google, Meta, and Amazon as a major force in open source infrastructure. A company that once viewed open source as a threat now depends on it.
For Mullenweg, the Azure look seems in retrospect to be an early expression of a philosophy he would later articulate more publicly: that open source software is strengthened, not weakened, by running on proprietary infrastructure. The goal is to reach. Purpose is everywhere. The platform below is less important than the freedom of the code above.
What this moment reveals about platform relationships
There’s a quieter lesson here for bloggers and independent publishers, one that doesn’t require taking sides in a decades-old corporate alliance.
Every creator who publishes on the open web is already walking some version of this tension. You can write on WordPress, which is open source software, but you’re probably hosting on AWS, Cloudflare, or a provider governed by their own terms of service.
You distribute through Google Search, which operates its own ranking system. You can earn money through ad networks that run on property stacks. The open web and the platform economy are not two separate things. They are deeply involved.
Mullenweg’s PDC appearance made it visible in a way that was hard to ignore. The open source advocate on the Microsoft stage isn’t a contradiction – it’s a snapshot of how the internet actually works. The question worth sitting on isn’t whether or not to engage with proprietary platforms. How to do this without losing independence makes your work worthless in the first place.
It’s a question that Mullenweg himself continues to openly wrestle with in the ongoing debate over WordPress governance, contributor obligations, and the relationship between commercial hosting providers and the open source project they’ve won.
The PDC moment was an early chapter in a much longer story about what it means to run something open in a world that prizes scale and production.
What bloggers can take away from this
The 2009 conference appearance is worth checking out, not for its gossip value or whether Microsoft is secretly trying to buy WordPress, but for its depiction of strategic pragmatism in the independent web.
Building on open source principles doesn’t require ideological purity about what infrastructure you’re working on. What this requires is clarity about what you are protecting: your ability to own your content, move it freely, publish it without asking for permission, and serve your audience without a platform intermediary being able to take it away.
WordPress still has more power 40 percent from the internet. This scale was built in part through a pragmatic platform token that raised eyebrows in 2009. The principle of the lesson does not matter. This principle is not about never refusing to share the stage with someone whose values differ from yours at the level of the work itself—in code, in licensing, in society.
The open internet is not fragile. But it requires attention.
