Unfortunately, this is for the best. WordPress powers a large percentage of the internet, and I'm not sure what's going on with Matt (who I've always liked) but something turned the past few years.
He's been behind unforced error after unforced error as CEO, and I hope a break helps him gain some perspective (although I don't see him being brought back).
WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
The unfortunate part is that he became someone you’re happy to see out. I think he’s absolutely become a net negative for Wordpress, but that wasn’t always the case.
Exactly. I am very thankful for the experiences and community that WordPress has given me that I seriously consider that maybe Matt has been victim of a social engineering attack to make him be perceived as a little bit unstable... kind of like what happened with the xz backdoor attempt.
But, to be honest, I am not too well versed in the drama. IIRC it started because someone was building something on top of WP but was basically reselling something that was already free without contributing back? Maybe I'm mixing things up and I should really hit the sack.
Nevertheless, my concern lies mostly with the overall security of the platform, as I can imagine serious financial interests (and geological ones, too) might take the time to push out someone that knows the platform inside out.
Matt has made like hundreds of bizarre decisions over the last few years. The WPEngine drama is a big part of it, but he's also been odd with Automattic's purchase and handling of Tumblr and other topics.
I have some sympathy for the guy. I've met him and he's genuinely kind and engaging. He has put his life into the project and company. I could be wrong, but I just don't think he matured quickly enough as the project and company changed. Not to say he's not smart - he is, but some of the antics make folks question the emotional maturity and sense of judgement, when compromise, conciliation and level-headedness are needed. I personally hope he seeks out the help he needs and leaves all the sniping on social media to others. A good outcome would be that he seeks healing, then concentrates on the stewardship of wordpress.org and steers the product in a collaborative and kind way.
Is it? The chief FINANCIAL officer took control of the company after Blackstone's investment in Automattic lost 50% of its value in the last two years. Has there been ANY case in which a private equity firm trying to recover lost investments did good for open source & the community?
The biggest one was probably 2 years back, the dispute with WP Engine, a hosting provider for WordPress. He used WordPress infrastructure to force all instances hosted there to break, then removed the extensions they built from the plugin store, and then replaced them under the exact same name and identifier with his own.
He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers. These comments were then of course used in subsequent lawsuits, which so far he's been losing.
He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.
> He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers.
As I recall, some of his posts indicated he was knowingly posting against the advice of his lawyers. Although he probably didn't discuss individual posts.
> He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.
It was actually a pretty nice offer. iirc it was a pretty decent severance, no questions asked.
The whole WP engine thing. I think it’s private equity buying a wordpress thing, but things got weird and it starting getting bad press. There was the hijacking of a plugin from them if I recall among other things (checkbox in login saying you weren’t affiliated with Wpengine)
Talking to a few Wordpress consultants they were getting questions from their clients which isn’t good.
Matt has seemed erratic from a casual outside view. If he’s having issues hope he pulls it together. The WP community is pretty good.
I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.
I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine?
I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
Open to correction here, but I understand it to be like this: the kernel of the contention is about the use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, not the software itself. Essentially, WP Engine is a commercial entity profiting from the use of the trademark. Regardless of how it has been handled, it does not seem to be a frivolous claim.
They were using the trademark on the website to describe WordPress the software project under nomitative fair use in the same way many, many hosting providers have been doing for decades. He openly admitted in online comments to trying (and failing) to extort their CEO in private to give Automattic huge payments, and if they declined that he'd destroy their valuation by cutting off their access and buy them for pennies on the dollar. Among other threats leading up to the lawsuit, which taken together made it look like a blatantly selective punitive measure for cynical reasons.
It doesn't help that the word "Wordpress" is used for all sorts of different, but overlapping things: wordpress.com for his private WordPress commercial host competing with WPEngine, wordpress.org for the WordPress Foundation he also controls, WordPress describing the open source GPL licensed project.
Google makes things much simpler to avoid misusing their trademarks by splitting Chrome for their commercial product and Chromium for the open source project.
And the part that is being litigated is whether that is, in fact, fair use, correct?
I like the comparison to Chrome and Chromium. I don't know the timeline of the whole wordpress IP. At this most it has arguably undergone genericization. That's why I think it's complicated enough that there is merit to arguments on either side.
No, WP Engine has been highlighting WordPress and using the word in a way that it did make a lot of non-technical people believe that WP Engine was 'WordPress'. In that, Mullenweg has a point.
I don't know about standard behaviour, some people consider behaviour normal that I consider slimy.
I heard at the time that a WP Engine employee had told someone that his/her pledged "full time assignment" had shrunk to a small number of hours per week after a while. That's hearsay, I heard it from someone who doesn't work at either of the two companies and it must be third-hand. But if that were the case, and if the pledge didn't say how long the full-time assignment would be kept up, some people would say that the promise was kept. Those people probably also would say that you shouldn't trust a handshake agreement, and please have a lawyer check the written agreement, and if you run an open source project, copy the policies Oracle has for JDK.
What I say is that there's a conflict waiting to happen, if one of the parties expects the pledge to be kept up for a significant period of time and the other expects to tiptoe away shortly later.
"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.
The purchase of Tumblr was basically Elon purchasing Twitter without the political gain. I'm amazed the purchase decision was ever made, and more amazed that it still exists after the hit to the user base.
And unlike the Twitter acquisition, Tumblr users basically universally hate its new owner. Twitter has plenty of Elon boosters, but I've never seen someone on Tumblr actually _like_ photomatt.
These appear to be a sort of AI-driven re-evaluation.
I am a sort of engaged cynic about AI but I am happy to chalk this one up as a straightforward win for the machines.
(I'm also quite intrigued about the other blog post regarding an MCP for Simplenote — I love the idea of an LLM's knowledge-base being accessible in such an instantaneous way)
That is sad but not surprising. I think they always had a bit more trouble with its sync system than they would have wanted.
I loved Simplenote for the longest time but ultimately simple pragmatism switched me to Apple Notes after dalliances with several task management apps.
He read the commit logs and understood much of what he read. That's deep understanding of the product. That alone puts him in the top few percent of CEOs.
Unfortunately, Mullenweg, for all his faults, is a very good open source project leader. He carried WordPress to success, and he kept it at the top and as relevant for two decades, successfully navigating a lot of trials while also creating a community and spreading open source culture. During all of this, he protected the community and the interests of the project's users to the maximum extent.
Again, for all his faults, he is a very good project leader. Not unlike Linus, who has the habit of going postal when any discussion about any change to the Linux kernel reaches the 'Linus in CAPS' stage of discussion. I dont see such stuff as bad things. But as side effects. I can live with those if the project is healthy enough.
In any case, if he does anything new, there would be a lot of people who would support him for those reasons. Yeah, he needs to mature personally somewhat. And that's not really easy when you are entering midlife and your parents are getting old and whatnot. But everyone passes through those hurdles. And he will also pass through them.
> EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins.
Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on pretty much whatever random system happens to be within eyesight.
The sandboxing requires CF workers though, as it depends on V8 isolates. Seems fair enough, but it'd be nice to see easily deployable cross-platform support someday for isolates or something similar, and not just for emdash.
But then ... WP is not tied to one hosting provider. There are no shortage of hosting companies out there to which you can deploy WP. In fact, many make it so easy it is ridonc.
He's been behind unforced error after unforced error as CEO, and I hope a break helps him gain some perspective (although I don't see him being brought back).
WordPress has been his life for 23 years. Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.