> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”
If you’re doing this type of accusation in the company wide announcements channel, odds are you’re never coming back. A board coup rarely happens without a good reason, but a “leave of absence” isn’t a firing. It’s still pretty bad, but it’s not a firing. However, crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued.
The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.
I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.
I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:
1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.
2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.
WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.
[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit
[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
WP Engine didn't make ACF, they acquired the company that acquired the OG creator of the plugin.
Their contribution to the plugin was a switch to a subscription-based model and they also started reaching out privately to theme authors with ambiguously-worded emails that could be interpreted as them forcing you to stop bundling the plugin with your theme (we had a lifetime license) and directing customers to their sales. Personally I chose not to engage with that communication.
The fight between Matt and WP Engine was messy and I agree with most of your points but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
He didn't say they made it, he said they _own_ it.
The issue was not that forking of ACF in and of itself was controversial. It was that they hijacked and repurposed the original WordPress Community page and distribution to point to their own, including any subscribers to the existing project in the name of "security".
One could argue that because WP Engine was banned from accessing the WordPress.org infrastructure, it could technically be seen as a form of supply chain attack and brought up questions about trust and possibly monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
I wasn't correcting the parent post. I was being sceptical regarding them contributing by owning ACF because they just bought the plugin with the intention to squeeze its userbase for more money for a product that was more or less complete at the moment of acquisition. Or, to paraphrase it, they hijacked and repurposed the original ACF pricing :)
The supply chain attack was shitty and uncalled for but still very tame. I think launching a fork as a separate entry would have been sufficient and less drama.
Surprisingly two wrongs made a right and the average customer got a little bit unfucked by not having to pay for the ACF PRO subscription if they don't want to.
> but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
I think you can make the case that in principle this fork was a good idea. (Though I personally feel ACF is architecturally bad)
What I think is unarguable is that the way that fork happened, including the commandeering of the slug to pervert the auto-update mechanism, was both improper and self-destructive, and was pretty indicative of the impairment of Matt’s decisionmaking and seriousness.
I agree, introducing it into the core should have and could have been a constructive move way before given how important the plugin is in the WP ecosystem.
When and how it happened was a hilarious plot twist nobody expected.
> I agree, introducing it into the core should have and could have been a constructive move way before given how important the plugin is in the WP ecosystem.
There was a (stalled) core Fields API effort.
The project lead abandoned core WP development ironically because of Matt's behaviour:
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
Wordpress dropped the ball on hosting. Their offering was mediocre and barely used by businesses. They were more focused on adding features to the core product than a Business friendly hosting solution. WPEngine isn't even that amazing. It's common sense features that most people running Wordpress wouldn't do at a high premium(regular backups, forced updates, etc.). If he put 10-20% of the effort into offering plain solutions for businesses they wouldn't be in the position they're in
> WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core.
Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS.
The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
Of course it was thought of from day one. It was explicitly allowed from the outset.
Anyone who ever licensed something gpl and was then suprised that someone else made a business selling services or otherwise employing the software, is simply, I won't say an idiot but let's say thoughtless. It's possible to be unthinking for other reasons than being incapable.
Unless they were not suprised and never genuinely subscribed to the ideals and theory of open source in the first place, but just wanted the cache that comes with it, as basically a marketing tactic to get popular fast & easy that they don't really intend to honor the moment it becomes inconvenient.
The GPL never cared about or even slightly tried to inhibit or control commercial use of software. It ONLY cares about the end user being empowered.
WPEngine sound like complete soulless sucks, and I wouldn't give them a dime of my own money by choice, but that doesn't matter at all and doesn't harm WordPerfect or anyone else. WPE using the software and not doing a thing but adhering to the GPL is being exactly a perfect GPL citizen. Matt, by trying to enforce any kind of extra terms on a user of GPL software, is the one violating both the letter and spririt of the GPL, which is just super extra rich considering what his whole attempted argument has been.
But anyway the point I meant to say was "the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of"
Yes it was explicitly thought of all along. It's neither a goal nor an anti-goal, it's simply expected, and expected that traditional business models will be difficult when the user can have the source, and irrelevant either way, wthether someone tries, or not, succeeds, or not.
It's like ownership of property. If I sell you a car, I have no legitimate interest in what you do with the car. You can do something I would totally hate. It's none of my business. The author of GPL software similarly has no interest in what a user does with the software other than adhering to the GPL terms. Using it and giving nothing back other than what the GPL requires is 100% fine and upstanding.
I'm still wondering who's the target audience for something like Gutenberg.
- A bastardized version of React whose state is stored in...HTML comments and WordPress shortcodes. It's extremely brittle and even simply updating an article can put its content into an unrecoverable state.
- Some components are done in javascript client side, some are done PHP server side, there's virtually no clear idea when to use which.
- It's incredibly developer hostile compared to basically any existing WordPress Visual Builder. We're at version 23.9 and it still breaks its API and behavior to the point of forcing full component rewrites (see the changes between Blocks v2 and v3 in WordPress 7.0)
- Its full editor capabilities are basic at best. The default components are incredibly shallow, and to get even a somewhat decent layout you're at the mercy of third-party developers, by that point you could've avoided many issues going straight to Elementor or WP Bakery.
- It's incredibly confusing for the end-users! The default behavior of the editing tools is to appear only when a block is selected, which is kinda difficult when the blocks themselves are invisible. Also, the "everything is a component" approach means that every paragraph, every list, every heading is a standalone gutenberg component with his own properties that could affect every other block on the page. Writing something requires constantly going back and forth from the "Component Tree" view just to make sure there's no empty components floating somewhere disrupting the page when viewed on a tablet.
It's...truly the worst of every possible worlds, and much of its issues are blatantly self-inflicted. I genuinely can't think of any reason to use it compared to any other alternative.
They were targeting Medium-users with Gutenberg, which in my opinion was a misread of the growth and direction of WordPress. Even after blogging died, WordPress was still always focused on being a blogging platform. Back in the early proposal/RFA days of Gutenberg, the debate between Mullenweg, the WP Core steering team, and most vocal of the WP development community was really whether there was this "silent majority" of WP users, or whether the software should cater better to developers/power users. Mullenweg, and most of the other core steering members, believed that the silent majority were interested in an easier WYSIWYG visual editor, and they used SquareSpace and Medium as the benchmarks. Even in 2017 this was kind of justifiable, online writing/publishing didn't really seem like it was being hollowed out like it would be just a few years later.
I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past.
I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. If a stranger sees me violently coughing and sneezing in public, they would be correct to say that I’m evidently physically ill. They’re not trying to diagnose whether the illness is a common cold, Influenza A, Covid-19 or any other respiratory disease.
> I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said.
This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).
I think there's also, from some people (sometimes including myself), a negative reaction to armchair diagnoses of mental illness. I think it's a problem because it's a faux medical diagnosis made by someone who is not qualified to make it, based on public statements and coverage that are too far removed from the reality of the personal situation to be a fair judgment.
If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it.
Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.
actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated
as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"
it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones
you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not like that. You are free to read his posts from the WP Engine lawsuit, including his post on hacker news, or his prior posts from some tumblr moderation drama. To me, the consistency and degree of his actions crosses the boundary of "bad day at work" and lands firmly in the "crazy guy in the park screaming at squirrels" territory. In fact, I'd argue that if he doesn't have tech wealth and was instead working a more traditional white collar job he might have already ended up just like that.
> Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill?
Because calling someone mentally ill is a serious thing to do, and doing so without being qualified to offer that diagnosis is irresponsible and cruel.
> I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
If you can't understand the obvious, huge difference between those things, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
Because some people would go insane without having an external authority to appeal to; the extant systems of academia and qualification create an "objective" truth these peoples' psyches can cling to.
because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without
it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is no longer used in official diagnoses. it's a boundary condition grounded in compassion. advocating for using a new word doesn't need some soapbox tantrum about the fatuousness of the modern world a la Ignatius J. Reilly
That's not what anyone is saying. There are many classes of human (and non-human) condition where it's best to allow a subject-matter expert to diagnose, and where armchair diagnosticians can do a lot of harm. This is one of them.
The idea that you can "diagnose" someone with a mental illness based on reading their court filings and things they've written online, without ever speaking to them in person, is... well, just bonkers. It's irresponsible, at best.
Someone can exhibit anti-social behaviors without having a mental illness.
This is as frustrating as people I know who are constantly saying "I think so-and-so is autistic/has ADHD". Yes, sometimes it's correct, but often it's not, and the outward symptoms of those two conditions often lead to a true diagnosis of something else entirely.
how is that in any way what I am saying? you are not describing the actual condition. you're ascribing what you see as anti-social or negative behaviors you heard about an individual (who has not disclosed any diagnosis) to a complicated illess that requires years of training to formally diagnose
this bloviating about free speech when all anybody is asking you to do is to not be an asshole is so overwrought and childish
becase most people are not qualified to distinguish mental illness from emotions, stress etc, and obviously you are not either. A broken, protruding bone is obviously broken and protruding; you see it with your eyes and you know that it's broken. Mental illness is much tougher to diagnose because you're looking at symptoms, not the actual brokenness. You said it yourself - you are a layperson, not a doctor, which confirms that you are nowhere near qualified to diagnose mental illness. Your "argument" stinks of ad hominem.
Someone "naked on the street, screaming at a wall, eating a pigeon or whatever" could be having a bad trip on some drugs, not necessarily mentally ill. The drugs will wear off, and they will be a regular neurotypical person again. But by slapping a mental illness label onto that person, you've proven that you have no clue what you're talking about, and you shouldn't be diagnosing anyone.
Our brain is designed through evolution to slap labels, aka engage in hasty generalisation. The world is much more complex than that.
Hard disagree. Physical ailments like the one you describe are indeed simple to armchair-diagnose, but psychological problems are not that.
Even for physical issues, there's a lot of grey. A bone protruding from an arm is one thing, but how about, say... a rash? Could be lots of things. An ephemeral pain with little or no visual manifestation? Who knows.
Why do you think that mental illness is necessarily a protruding bone and not a rash or an ephemeral pain?
Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
They did not in fact diagnose anything, "mental illness" is not a specific condition in the DSM. You'd have a valid point if they confidently stated he had bipolar disorder or something.
Sure, it's not, but it's a term used to describe a wide collection of conditions that are in the DSM.
In some ways, asserting that someone has "a mental illness" is worse than saying they have something specific, like bipolar disorder. It's lazy and dehumanizing, and takes away their agency.
Yes, buy NPD *is* in the DSM. While I'm not a mental health professional (read: I can't diagnose with any authority), I would still say that Mullenweg consistenly exhubits many / most of the symptoms of classic NPD.
Saying someone is showing signs of mental illness isn't a diagnosis. It's saying someone looks like they need medical attention. That's a fair thing for a layman to say.
> We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
These are, in some senses, less compassionate than saying someone needs help getting back to who they once were.
> Saying someone is showing signs of mental illness isn't a diagnosis. It's saying someone looks like they need medical attention.
That's fair if the target is someone you know and interact with personally. Lazy armchair diagnoses from internet posts is something entirely different.
Similarly I've stopped saying "It's crazy that..." and changed it to "It's wild that ..."
What do you call it when tamer words are more impactful? Example: I've found "Dum-dums" > "stupid idiots". Is it because they're less triggering for emotional responses to the words themselves?
I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.
Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.
There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.
(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)
These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.
He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.
I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
> founding fathers of the United States
that may in fact, be the case, but chances are someone today of similar disposition would not be able to do the same.
> if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal.
(Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.
A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...
It's quite apt that you mentioned Jobs, given that many former admirers have reconsidered their admiration for him in the light of his often being an inconsiderate jerk. One can be a winner as far as technical and business achievements are concerned, but ultimately a loser due to how they generally treat other people.
In my case, I'll take Woz over Jobs any day. Steve Jobs is not my hero.
Matt, for clarity, if you see this, since this is a thread I kicked off perhaps by being imprecise and certainly by being somewhat critical:
I am full of admiration for what you have achieved, I believe you should feel proud of it, and I think we in the wider WP and web world have benefited greatly from your assertiveness and confidence for literally decades. I think perhaps the tech industry has taken for granted what WP represents and what it has held at bay.
I also see that things are going badly wrong, and having experienced a couple of years of severe burnout where I too came fully unglued and have not exactly covered myself in glory, I worry.
As I have said elsewhere, I think there is a future where a lot of real differences and temporary difficulties are in the past.
I hope for you that you get to that place, and I think stepping back from the things you built that can look after themselves, and focussing your energies on your health and the broader things that have mattered to you is the way forward.
I can see people have taken issue with me saying “mentally ill” when I might have said “unwell”. But I say this because I think I think you are burned out while unable to take your hand off the tiller, that burnout is real illness, not just a series of bad days at work, and because I think it’s disingenuous to use euphemisms that diminish seriousness.
I think that you should sit back, let them take your hand off the tiller, and take the time to look at what you have accomplished and see what it will look like going forward.
“Cause I can see the future, and it's a place / About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter”
My best wishes again and my apologies if this thread has been especially annoying.
>We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.
I strongly disagree with the premise.
Aside from that, "WordPress" is 100% controlled by one guy. A guy who has repeatedly demonstrated total and complete disregard for the community. Ergo "we" don't "have" WordPress; It's something we're allowed to use (until Matt decides to ban us for an arbitrary, petty reason that doesn't even require articulation).
That's not something that belongs to a proverbial "we". That's the point.
Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about.
In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells".
In the context Matt established himself, "dinosaur" is pretty tame, no?
Yes, two wrongs don't make a right. I'll tone it down. But if you're going to police the comments, kindly consider applying the policing equally. Just because someone is a quasi-famous tech celebrity, it shouldn't give their behaviour a pass.
Edit: I just noticed that elsewhere in this thread he calls his opponents (myself included) "idiots", yet there's no policing on that comment. Apparently, it's only "dinosaur" that crosses your red line.
It's not the pattern, it's the fact he suddenly had a change in personality in 2024 causing him to destroy the community he created for no obvious reason. Then ignored basically everyone around him and doomspiralled until he got fired.
Not just the WPEngine stuff, but he went on a sabbatical at the start of 2024, got in a fight with the trans community (death sentence in tech), starts posting to WPDrama's subreddit asking what drama he should start in 2025, randomly fires people on the company Slack, etc.
I've never seen someone gleefully torch their relationships and career like this unless they were undergoing a mental health crisis.
You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness.
I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way.
That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it.
WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his.
WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery?
Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other?
Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit.
Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them.
Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants?
Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception.
There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc.
(I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)
That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner.
This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this
There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole.
He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.
That is a question of interpretation. But based on my own life experiences I think there is enough evidence that he is in deep, rolling burnout.
He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis.
No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns.
Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.
Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai).
Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.
You could say "he's behaving irrationally" or even "he seems to be experiencing severe burnout".. But your exact phrasing is way too close to an "online diagnosis" (which is not a valid way to assess a mental illness - afaik no psychiatrist would ever diagnose anyone without ever talking to a person). On top of that, it's too close to an ad hominem - even if you didn't mean it that way.
Everyone is fighting their own demons. Some people are neurodivergent, but nothing good ever happens from an unsolicited "diagnosis" or slapping labels like "unglued". Every one of us can snap under enough pressure. Let's not go there.
Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession.
Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here.
So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.
I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion.
I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue).
I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
"His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
I think these responses show how much stigma is attached to mental illness, that people abhor someone placing the label on someone else. Despite the fact that, for anyone familiar with it themselves or in loved ones, it's a lot more prevalent and in many more shades and gradients than probably most people realize.
I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
For goodness’ sake, I didn’t “diagnose” him or try to.
If I were to get more specific than “mentally ill” that would be a diagnosis.
But “mentally ill” is not a diagnosis and it wasn’t an attempt at one.
I mean it colloquially based on my own really similar, serious experiences with coming quite unglued due to burnout that eventually rendered me unable to work but before that made me act irrationally against my own interests in a way that has caused me negative consequences.
I consider myself to have been mentally ill. I think it looked like that to people I scared and shocked.
But this wouldn’t be a “diagnosis” either, not least because the healthcare industry doesn’t want to admit or address that it goes further than mere occupational health “thing”.
So would you please fucking stop imagining I did something more specific so you can call me out for doing it.
> There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
Dude, if you use this term, someone out there is going to associate it with "Mullenweg has a diagnosed illness for which therapy or drugs may be appropriate."
You may not like this, but it's a fact. This fact is just a dictionary lookup away.
Please calm your outrage about the world as it is, and accept that there is an established use for this term.
> I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness.
You don't know anything about this person, and your case seems to rest on "I know because I've been through it" which assumes your experience is the same as a total stranger's.
I don't know why I get so much hate for saying this and people find it so hard to accept, but I'll say it again.
The term for a formal disease of the mind, as used by the medical practice, is currently "mental disorder."
Not too long ago, the term doctors used was "mental illness."
Therefore when you say someone has a mental illness, you have to think about how the entire medical profession has used that term in the past, and how that may influence perceptions. It is a term that potentially brings in connotations that the individual has been diagnosed with a specific disorder in the DSM-V and this may be leading to doctor prescribed drugs, therapies, different outcomes in court cases, and many other things.
I'm sure many people including OP don't intend to imply that when they use the term. And this is also why you would never call "work stress" a mental illness. Work stress is cause that can absolutely make you unhealthy. It may or may not be exacerbating a mental disorder which a doctor may or may not have formally diagnosed yet. We can have compassion for somebody who's suffering without jumping to the conclusion that they've been diagnosed with a DSM-V disorder. As non-doctors, we should!
These distinctions matter. It's merely paying respect to the facts on the ground, as well as the person in question when we describe their situation accurately.
In recent memory of companies I've worked for, even the absolute WORST executives haven't gotten fired. They always announce that "it's time for another adventure" or "I am taking a break". So I am not shocked they didn't fire him, although the board is now probably wishing they did.
Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing.
Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired.
Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
In fairness, I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days, unless you live in a town of 300 people. There's a lot of antisocial behavior that goes unreported.
But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.
Got fired because she redeemed two orphaned bottle deposit slips worth 1,30€ (in 2009, so more like 1,50€ in today's money /s). Caused a nation-wide discussion.
I would argue there is a broad difference in ethicality and reason between the bottom and top of the food chain, making these examples less clear cut. If your plan as a low level employee doesn't work out you still get fired and the consequences are far greater.
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
I think if we are just looking at the media:
Most journalists wouldn't consider some nobody stealing $20 to be newsworthy in itself.
Most corporate scandals receive extensive media coverage. Even a CEO who was merely incompetent instead of corrupt, is still likely to get some bad press.
Now, you are completely right that the non-media consequences are very different – significant chance of criminal record (although in many jurisdictions, there are mechanisms which first-time offenders on minor charges can use to escape getting one) vs a multi-million dollar severance payment.
The issue with "golden parachutes" – if someone's employment contract creates an entitlement to a severance payment (and in some jurisdictions employment law creates one even if the contract itself doesn't) – then you generally have to pay them unless you terminate for "misconduct" (often even "serious misconduct"). The problem with terminating for "misconduct", is it creates a big incentive for the terminated employee to sue to try to get the severance payment they'd otherwise receive, and the larger the payment, the bigger the motivation – which creates an expensive legal and PR headache. The PR issue is especially acute for senior executives–a junior employee suing over a severance dispute will get a lot less media coverage than a former CEO doing it. So, unless the conduct was extremely egregious, there is a strong incentive for the employer/board to just pay the severance out and make the legal and PR headache go away.
There is also the issue that the next person stepping into their shoes to clean up the mess is being recruited exactly during this time. And if your company gets a reputation for not paying out prenegotiated severances or nitpicking over them, it makes the next candidate that much more wary.
You are comparing robbery with ineptitude. They are two different things. If your ineptitude makes a 20$ loss you may not be fired as well. Billion dollars wasted at corp still is not billion dollars at the exec pockets (that would be theft and he would be facing charges). That the exec pockets millions regardles of the losses incurred by corp, even when it sounds awful to you or to me, is a problem between the corp and the exec.
So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Weird to see so many posters suddenly pop up that are anxious to protect investors (who have the access and means to protect themselves) at the expense of harming employees and workers. Glad to see you all getting into the ultra-capitalist spirit of Hacker News I guess?
Bad companies who do bad things should fail. Why are you so obsessed with protecting criminals from consequences? If an exec is sexually harassing employees should they still be protected? What if the bad behavior is abusing workers and committing wage theft? Should that still be swept under the rug? Forgive me for not really caring about the stock grants of people who are in the top 10% of earners. Actual working class people aren’t getting equity
The person I was replying to talked about executives being fired with no reason given. So "protecting criminals" is something you pulled out of your own imagination and warrants no response. Have a nice day.
That’s the whole point of why they should disclose, because you don’t know if it’s poor performance or something legitimately bad. I simply gave examples of something that I don’t think anyone with a conscience would support. You very much give the impression that you would prefer scandals hidden, regardless of legality, because that’s what’s best for your pocketbook.
> Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it?
Yes. There is far too little truth and justice in this world, most especially for corporate executives.
> I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Of course, me too buddy, me too. But some things are more important, don't you think? It would be a much much better world if the wealthy and powerful had to think carefully before acting. Think carefully before that action of misconduct. Bear the responsibility for their actions. Be afraid of the consequences.
And on the flip-side, if it's an exec at another company getting tarred and feathered by the media for their incompetence, it means they probably won't end up at my company in six months' time and do the same thing.
If it was up to me we'd be stripping them of any and all assets they gained during their tenure for malfeasance. Let them roam free, and let them sleep freely under a bridge.
Yes, I’d prefer that investors know that the new executive is not going to continue the same crap and same level of poor judgement. Want them to know the replacement is looking to do more than wear a golden parachute.
Imagine if investors actually thought the personnel change was a positive one…
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute.
Getting pushed out of a position is very career damaging at the executive level. Those golden parachutes are pretty rare, too. Most of the executives I know from companies you haven't heard of (and some that you maybe have) who were pushed out took a huge hit to their careers after that. The best play is to start calling up executive recruiters and try to get any job as soon as possible once the writing is on the wall that you're being fired.
And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days.
> And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days
and come on, you know exactly what is meant here. An individual steals something, they get punished. Executives of the largest banks create a scheme that ultimately crashes the world economy and nobody goes to jail. Quibbling on the example's use of $20 is just strange
Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.
People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.
But the fact that she went on leave just as it became clear that Anthropic looked to be hitting escape velocity is suspicious, although not dispositive. When she was hired, her health issues also stopped her from coming into the office, but she still worked from home.
Executives do not get fired like other employees. They have contracts that usually prevent standard dismissal unless they have done something illegal. When they are 'fired', they are still a protected class. Hence the narrative spin: a new 'ceremonial' role, spending time with family, etc. etc.
Make no mistake, he has been fired. It just looks different than a call with HR or a manager and office security telling you to pack up your $hit and leave.
Sounds like it's something that must have been painful, all around.
Boards really don't like doing things like this, as it signals instability, and shareholders hate instability. That's why so many boards leave clearly non-optimal CEOs in place, so often.
This is not something that has been a focus of my attention, except when it was shoved into my face. I'm really too old for that kind of agita.
I do run a couple of WP sites. I'm considering switching a couple to static sites, (via a generator, or maybe LLM-generated static sites), but I need one of them to remain WP (for now), as that hosts my blog.
My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.
I don't know how it's "completely solved" unless you can point me to an existing, complete solution. Providing a nice backend with a WYSIWYG editor and access control as well as varying level of customization is not a trivial problem for anyone, technical or non technical, and you can easily mess it up.
You don't need a backend. You don't even need a static site generator. Just sit a non-technical person in front of Claude Code and tell them to tell the computer what they want (including what the content should say). For something as simple as a static site (that the user can themselves look at and read) there's nothing to mess up -- if something looks out of place, a non-technical user can just tell the computer that and it will fix it. "Computer, add a page to the blog with this content: <pasted text>" -- "Computer, the banner looks weird on phones but not on desktop, please fix it."
My wife (no CS background, no programming experience, schooling in music and law) is about to submit her first several apps to the App Store. I don't think she has had to even look at a single line of code. Yes, they work.
I ... need to get out of my evidence-based bubble in which I'm observing real non-technical users in the real world? This is not a discourse bubble. I'm not getting my talking points from other people. I'm drawing conclusions based on what capabilities I've observed the AI giving to non-technical users.
Just vibe code your own mini cms on top of your static site. Seriously though, I did this recently with mine and have had great results. It's not a Gutenberg WP experience, more like a decapCMS kind of thing.
There are quite a few CMSes that do static builds natively. If you hand one of those to Claude Code, you can get a more flexible and maintainable result more quickly. You can also point Claude Code to a CMS starter project in folder A And a vibe coded static site in folder B and pull them together.
That being said... if you're the sole author of your site, anything goes and yeah, you probably don't need a proper CMS. I certainly built my own share of 100-line Perl static site builders back in the day.
Matt "photomatt" Mullenweg is fundamentally incapable of not crashing out. It's very predictable for anyone at all familiar with the WPEngine saga, or slightly earlier, his personal beef with Tumblr user predstrogen (which involved him following her off of Tumblr after he banned her to harass her on Twitter).
I think his recent screwing over of that custom fields plugin team and cutting off access to the plugins repo for WPengine was really a dumb move that has lead him to where he is now.
I don’t have any skin in the game with this, and I don’t use WP. It appears Matt needs help right now. I don’t think he’s reacting rationally based on what he’s posting online or allegedly inside his former organization. I don’t know him, but it’s hard seeing people in a difficult time who need help.
This doesn't really sound like an accusation. It sounds like fact. It'd probably hold up under a deposition in a courtroom. I really don't think the board has any reason to even dispute this account of events.
> If you’re doing this type of accusation [...] odds are you’re never coming back. [...] Crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
...one exception comes to my mind, and it's Steve Jobs. Probably a total outlier case, but, still.
It Jobs a long time to come back, though, and it looks like he had to prove himself (as a businessman) in other ways while he was in exile. The board seems to have been filled with different people at the time it came back. It's probably much harder to come back under the same board with the same people, and it doesn't sound like Jobs was an exception to that aspect.
I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society.
They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
I just came here to say that I tried setting Wordpress up for someone a couple weeks ago and the entire admin experience felt like someone designed it WHILE AT burning man.
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.
I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.
Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.
Automattic has exclusive commercial rights to the WordPress trademark. That was the self-dealing deal he made when he "gave" the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. He can start a new commercial WP company, but it won't have that trademark so would be limited in the same ways he was trying to force on WP Engine etc.
> He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project
The only thing he has that can't be moved or recreated are the trademarks. In an extremely short span of time everyone went from Xfree for their X server to Xorg, and Xfree limped along for a bit before falling over. This is the beauty of open source.
I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.
> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground.
I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.
IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.
Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board?
Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.
If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.
While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
> While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board
This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story.
In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.
And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.
No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.
Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!
Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?
Hey, that's me! Unfortunately that's only reasonably complete through mid-February of 2025; i had some health issues and was never able to catch back up.
" WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still working next Friday. This is the full timeline: how a blog fork in 2003 became a movement, how Automattic became a company, how WP Engine became the target, and how one keynote at WordCamp US turned into cease and desists, lawsuits, forked plugins, mass resignations, and a preliminary injunction "
The community was already starting to turn on Matt well before 2024. He's appointed himself release manager for every version of WP since 5.0 in 2018, which is how Gutenberg managed to land in core in such a half-baked state.
I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.
The Wordpress community got so big, that inevitably it attracted leeches. Unfortunately, Matt chose to address a home-infestation problem with a firethrower.
I’m a bit relieved. Only knowing it superficially through its larger public actions, Automattic used to be one of the “good guys” companies to me. I envisioned myself applying there at some point. This has obviously changed over the last 1-2 years.
I don’t doubt that the good parts were largely Matt’s work, but well ... I think a lot of us followed his semi-recent public actions.
I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage?
Still, he has done a lot of good for the internet and world at large. I don’t want to discount that. I just hope he manages to chill a bit.
Man, in a thread he links to his tweet from 2024 that mentions using disappearing messages on Signal which the WPEngine lawyers are now using against him.
So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal...
EDIT: also his bright pink X profile image is abusing HDR to make it extra annoyingly bright and the rest of my screen dim on my phone. Very off-putting behavior but pretty on character.
I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.
Voting shares and board of directors are two different mechanisms. Just because he holds 80%+ of voting shares, doesn't mean he can control who runs the company. Shareholders can make up (elect/remove) directors on the board, the board decides who can run the company (or other officials). His vote against was likely true, but if the board is 4 seats and he only has one vote, that's 25%.
A lot of this is pretty typical, but what's interesting is what happens next. He could just remove members of the board with his 80%+ control, and build a board that backs him. I assume they have investor agreements that prevent that.
Regardless of who he puts on the board, directors have legal obligations to the SEC and all shareholders. If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
People seem very angry about my comment, which perhaps indicates why WordPress is in such chaos. The SEC has significant enforcement powers still, and investors can mount lawsuits against shareholder oppression.
Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is thoroughly controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before.
Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.
Good riddance! His neurotic public harassment of anyone who is remotely aligned against him (cf. Tumblr moderation and AspirePress) is simply childish and leaves much to be desired.
His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.
a) you don't want the WPEngine case going to trial and that is coming to a decision point soon. chances are the new CEO and board settle.
b) wordpress is being absolutely obliterated by ai. work for commercial plugin authors and agencies has dried up while the platform and ecosystem see major security issues and worms exploit a large number of sites every week.
wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial.
founder CEO distracted by expensive lawsuit while facing existential threat to project that will require complete attention and a lot of skill to steer out of
Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing).
Indeed. I'm very grateful for Woocommerce, but since I use a tiny subset of its features, I'm "vibe coding" my own alternative with way less surface area and less bloat.
Unless there's a full on scandal or emergency, boards don't force CEOs out quickly. This would have been building for years with multiple rounds of trying to de-escalate and get the situation under control.
Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to.
If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can't be gotten rid of so easily.
I read a lot of people saying so many things about Matt from the outside. As an Automattician for 9 years now, what I see from the inside is the best work environment I've ever been part of, and the best I've heard of compared to what colleagues describe at other big tech companies. Automattic is the most diverse and fair company I've seen, with an open and transparent culture.
He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella.
I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
After reading about his behavior over the past couple of years, I'm sad that it took this long. He has far too much hostility for the community to continue.
Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.
Who uses WP outside of legacy installs? I used to love it 15 or so years ago for side hustle work, but over time it gained weight and vulnerabilities, whack-a-mole. Plug-ins were nice, but that <?php...> inlining wasn't. I don't hate PHP, the things were just clumsy and messy inside the loop and I wasn't smart enough. What's the replacement these days in case I need to set up something simple quickly? Not Square Space or Shopify, although those are good products imo.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.
HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
Hopefully, WP will get better. At the moment, WP itself, its ecosystem, and community are such a cesspool. It should not be used for anything more than just basic blogging. Even then, there are better alternatives. Especially in this day and age, when an AI model can easily write you what you need. It can write you something better than the trash adware on the plugin/theme store.
Good, get him the fuck away from Wordpress. Though frankly, a better solution might be for businesses to ask themselves whether or not they need Wordpress anymore.
In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
WordPress dominance of the web has certainly peaked, but history indicates there will be several years in which to continue to extract comfortable profits while riding it down. e.g. Oracle, a database that almost no business has actually needed in decades.
I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.
Sure, but, even with AI and the technical competence to steer it, it's still a pretty big lift to switch from, e.g. WordPress with billing and various other stuff to some ad hoc other thing. Even when I decided I was done with managing content in WordPress and moved it out to a Hugo static site for my company website, I still kept the commerce stuff in WordPress just because it works and we know it works from a decade or so of operation.
I'm certainly not deploying new WordPress sites, partly because of how weird and hostile Mullenweg has made the WordPress ecosystem for no good reason. I don't even necessarily disagree with the sentiments behind his words and actions, but the methods and how far it's gone in terms of lawfare is just silly and destructive.
Anyway, they won't get decades like Oracle has gotten. But, they've got a few years of comfy margins ahead if they don't blow it up too badly.
They'll continue to have plenty of existing passive revenue as long as WooCommerce users continue to use Stripe, and large enterprises continue to buy in to WP.com VIP.
This rings true to me. I am looking at setting up my own online store, and if you sell (legal!) stuff which Shopify Payments disallows, but Stripe does allow, you end up looking at WooCommerce (a very popular WordPress plugin) pretty fast.
Yeah, regardless of other aspects of Automattic's behaviour, flagging that an identically-pronounced single letter variation of their registered company name might be a confusingly similar brand for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
I don't see how this is FUD. Both a sibling comment and my parent pointed out that there's more to the story than simply "claiming the word automatic." They provided extra context (which the article didn't).
I am merely relating my experience that stuff like this is common with 404 Media. They'll omit nuances - whether intentionally or just being shoddy.
"Windows", "Word" and "Excel" are just plain English words, but it appears you can trademark them for specific industry. Maybe you have to make it more specific. Like "Microsoft Windows"?
I run payments engineering at Automattic, on the WooCommerce side. Speaking for myself.
The company statement is on TechCrunch. Mark Davies, the CFO, is interim CEO, and Mary Hubbard told TechCrunch that WordPress.org is unaffected. I won't guess at the board's reasons.
Nothing about how my teams ship has changed since the news broke. The repos are public if you want to watch.
I've worked under Matt for years and I'm grateful for the company he built. People can argue about the rest.
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
> The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder.
What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.
Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.
Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.
Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.
it's personal only in the sense that Matt had been doing an absolutely awful job leading the company for several years, and the board had fiduciary obligations to intervene
this is not a bad day for founders; it's Matt having gotten to the end point of his value as a leader
Don't get me wrong: getting to a point where you have 2,000 employees and a 7 billion dollar valuation is a massive accomplishment. He was clearly very effective at various parts of the company's history. But it scaled beyond the point where his skillset and personality could continue to credibly steer the ship
So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..
If they'd done those two things Wordpress would probably have been far less successful. Which certainly is a way of making WP Engine not even want to do what they did. Heck, they would probably not even exist.
WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.
As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.
> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.”
If you’re doing this type of accusation in the company wide announcements channel, odds are you’re never coming back. A board coup rarely happens without a good reason, but a “leave of absence” isn’t a firing. It’s still pretty bad, but it’s not a firing. However, crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued.
The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of why WordPress was ever taken seriously. Given the level of control he has, it was used pretty judiciously for the longest time.
I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
But as I say, he has come unglued. I'd be surprised if he returns to the job. I wish him well as I think anyone who has made money because of WP should. Things have gone wrong but there was a long run of things going remarkably well.
I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he evidently cannot see it. I hope, but am not hopeful as it were, that he sees that this is a message from the world to change track. I would instead expect to see a bit of revenge.
I am saying this as someone who has had repeated and ongoing issues with WP Engine as a hosting platform: no, Matt Mullenweg was not even valid in his basic assumptions motivating his lawsuit against WP Engine. The idea that a hosting platform is leeching off the WordPress ecosystem is absurd, for two reasons:
1. WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core. They are already a beneficial part of the ecosystem.
2. WP Engine was contributing back to the WordPress ecosystem, just not Matt Mullenweg's corner of it.
WordPress is a modular platform and plugin and theme developers are just as important to WordPress's continued success as core development is. WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API[0]. ACF is what lets you add arbitrary fields to WordPress's page edit screen without having to write a bunch of custom metabox hooks and forms. It was a huge timesaver before things moved to page builders[1] and it's still useful even if you're using a page builder.
[0] Formerly Content Construction Kit
[1] Full disclosure: I hate Gutenberg. It is not WordPress, it's a React development kit tumor shoved inside WordPress. Any other page builder would be preferable.
> WP Engine happens to own Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), which is basically WordPress's answer to the Drupal Fields API.
The speed with which Matt hijacked that plugin was one of the funniest parts of this saga. All while complaining they don’t contribute!
WP Engine didn't make ACF, they acquired the company that acquired the OG creator of the plugin.
Their contribution to the plugin was a switch to a subscription-based model and they also started reaching out privately to theme authors with ambiguously-worded emails that could be interpreted as them forcing you to stop bundling the plugin with your theme (we had a lifetime license) and directing customers to their sales. Personally I chose not to engage with that communication.
The fight between Matt and WP Engine was messy and I agree with most of your points but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
He didn't say they made it, he said they _own_ it.
The issue was not that forking of ACF in and of itself was controversial. It was that they hijacked and repurposed the original WordPress Community page and distribution to point to their own, including any subscribers to the existing project in the name of "security".
One could argue that because WP Engine was banned from accessing the WordPress.org infrastructure, it could technically be seen as a form of supply chain attack and brought up questions about trust and possibly monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
I wasn't correcting the parent post. I was being sceptical regarding them contributing by owning ACF because they just bought the plugin with the intention to squeeze its userbase for more money for a product that was more or less complete at the moment of acquisition. Or, to paraphrase it, they hijacked and repurposed the original ACF pricing :)
The supply chain attack was shitty and uncalled for but still very tame. I think launching a fork as a separate entry would have been sufficient and less drama.
Surprisingly two wrongs made a right and the average customer got a little bit unfucked by not having to pay for the ACF PRO subscription if they don't want to.
> but I also do think that forking ACF into SCF was a net positive for the community.
I think you can make the case that in principle this fork was a good idea. (Though I personally feel ACF is architecturally bad)
What I think is unarguable is that the way that fork happened, including the commandeering of the slug to pervert the auto-update mechanism, was both improper and self-destructive, and was pretty indicative of the impairment of Matt’s decisionmaking and seriousness.
I agree, introducing it into the core should have and could have been a constructive move way before given how important the plugin is in the WP ecosystem.
When and how it happened was a hilarious plot twist nobody expected.
> I agree, introducing it into the core should have and could have been a constructive move way before given how important the plugin is in the WP ecosystem.
There was a (stalled) core Fields API effort.
The project lead abandoned core WP development ironically because of Matt's behaviour:
https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/fields-api/
Finally a sane comment. If you actually watched the interview with Theo, he openly admits to just randomly throwing in a demand of arbitrary percentage of their sales. The whole episode is actually insane.
Wordpress dropped the ball on hosting. Their offering was mediocre and barely used by businesses. They were more focused on adding features to the core product than a Business friendly hosting solution. WPEngine isn't even that amazing. It's common sense features that most people running Wordpress wouldn't do at a high premium(regular backups, forced updates, etc.). If he put 10-20% of the effort into offering plain solutions for businesses they wouldn't be in the position they're in
> WordPress is free and open source software, developed under reciprocal licensing (GPL). Hosting companies are neither legally nor morally obligated to contribute back to WordPress core.
Many an old open-source project ran into this trap. Elasticsearch is one good example. Back when the old GPL era open-source projects were invented, the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of - and certainly not at the scale of Amazon AWS.
The only counterexample was Wikipedia's MediaWiki, it similarly is GPL but from the start it was clear that there would be at least one commercial side actor - Wikia, nowadays called Fandom.
Of course it was thought of from day one. It was explicitly allowed from the outset.
Anyone who ever licensed something gpl and was then suprised that someone else made a business selling services or otherwise employing the software, is simply, I won't say an idiot but let's say thoughtless. It's possible to be unthinking for other reasons than being incapable.
Unless they were not suprised and never genuinely subscribed to the ideals and theory of open source in the first place, but just wanted the cache that comes with it, as basically a marketing tactic to get popular fast & easy that they don't really intend to honor the moment it becomes inconvenient.
The GPL never cared about or even slightly tried to inhibit or control commercial use of software. It ONLY cares about the end user being empowered.
WPEngine sound like complete soulless sucks, and I wouldn't give them a dime of my own money by choice, but that doesn't matter at all and doesn't harm WordPerfect or anyone else. WPE using the software and not doing a thing but adhering to the GPL is being exactly a perfect GPL citizen. Matt, by trying to enforce any kind of extra terms on a user of GPL software, is the one violating both the letter and spririt of the GPL, which is just super extra rich considering what his whole attempted argument has been.
But anyway the point I meant to say was "the idea of third parties taking open-source software and just making a shitload of money with it was unthought of"
Yes it was explicitly thought of all along. It's neither a goal nor an anti-goal, it's simply expected, and expected that traditional business models will be difficult when the user can have the source, and irrelevant either way, wthether someone tries, or not, succeeds, or not.
It's like ownership of property. If I sell you a car, I have no legitimate interest in what you do with the car. You can do something I would totally hate. It's none of my business. The author of GPL software similarly has no interest in what a user does with the software other than adhering to the GPL terms. Using it and giving nothing back other than what the GPL requires is 100% fine and upstanding.
Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and president of Fandom, so I think it’s in a pretty similar position to WP.com in that regard.
I'm still wondering who's the target audience for something like Gutenberg.
- A bastardized version of React whose state is stored in...HTML comments and WordPress shortcodes. It's extremely brittle and even simply updating an article can put its content into an unrecoverable state.
- Some components are done in javascript client side, some are done PHP server side, there's virtually no clear idea when to use which.
- It's incredibly developer hostile compared to basically any existing WordPress Visual Builder. We're at version 23.9 and it still breaks its API and behavior to the point of forcing full component rewrites (see the changes between Blocks v2 and v3 in WordPress 7.0)
- Its full editor capabilities are basic at best. The default components are incredibly shallow, and to get even a somewhat decent layout you're at the mercy of third-party developers, by that point you could've avoided many issues going straight to Elementor or WP Bakery.
- It's incredibly confusing for the end-users! The default behavior of the editing tools is to appear only when a block is selected, which is kinda difficult when the blocks themselves are invisible. Also, the "everything is a component" approach means that every paragraph, every list, every heading is a standalone gutenberg component with his own properties that could affect every other block on the page. Writing something requires constantly going back and forth from the "Component Tree" view just to make sure there's no empty components floating somewhere disrupting the page when viewed on a tablet.
It's...truly the worst of every possible worlds, and much of its issues are blatantly self-inflicted. I genuinely can't think of any reason to use it compared to any other alternative.
They were targeting Medium-users with Gutenberg, which in my opinion was a misread of the growth and direction of WordPress. Even after blogging died, WordPress was still always focused on being a blogging platform. Back in the early proposal/RFA days of Gutenberg, the debate between Mullenweg, the WP Core steering team, and most vocal of the WP development community was really whether there was this "silent majority" of WP users, or whether the software should cater better to developers/power users. Mullenweg, and most of the other core steering members, believed that the silent majority were interested in an easier WYSIWYG visual editor, and they used SquareSpace and Medium as the benchmarks. Even in 2017 this was kind of justifiable, online writing/publishing didn't really seem like it was being hollowed out like it would be just a few years later.
I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past.
I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. If a stranger sees me violently coughing and sneezing in public, they would be correct to say that I’m evidently physically ill. They’re not trying to diagnose whether the illness is a common cold, Influenza A, Covid-19 or any other respiratory disease.
> I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said.
This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).
I think there's also, from some people (sometimes including myself), a negative reaction to armchair diagnoses of mental illness. I think it's a problem because it's a faux medical diagnosis made by someone who is not qualified to make it, based on public statements and coverage that are too far removed from the reality of the personal situation to be a fair judgment.
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes.
We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)
> it is super-reddit to diagnose
If I see a person with a broken bone protruding from their arm, I don't need an undergrad med-terms class to know "this person needs medical attention" even if I am not qualified to render it.
Similarly, there are certain thresholds of human behavior that indicate mental illness -- you don't have to be licensed to treat it in order to recognize that there is a serious problem.
actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated
as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"
it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones
you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not like that. You are free to read his posts from the WP Engine lawsuit, including his post on hacker news, or his prior posts from some tumblr moderation drama. To me, the consistency and degree of his actions crosses the boundary of "bad day at work" and lands firmly in the "crazy guy in the park screaming at squirrels" territory. In fact, I'd argue that if he doesn't have tech wealth and was instead working a more traditional white collar job he might have already ended up just like that.
> Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill?
Because calling someone mentally ill is a serious thing to do, and doing so without being qualified to offer that diagnosis is irresponsible and cruel.
> I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
If you can't understand the obvious, huge difference between those things, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
Because some people would go insane without having an external authority to appeal to; the extant systems of academia and qualification create an "objective" truth these peoples' psyches can cling to.
because it contributes to stereotypes and increases stigma around mental health. this leads to even more social isolation and self-doubt for people with those disorders which worsens their quality of life, something that is already much lower on average than those without
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-disc...
it's the same idea as not calling people the 'r' word and why that word itself is no longer used in official diagnoses. it's a boundary condition grounded in compassion. advocating for using a new word doesn't need some soapbox tantrum about the fatuousness of the modern world a la Ignatius J. Reilly
There is nothing more stigmatizing and dehumanizing than the idea that there is a class of human condition that is taboo to describe in words.
That's not what anyone is saying. There are many classes of human (and non-human) condition where it's best to allow a subject-matter expert to diagnose, and where armchair diagnosticians can do a lot of harm. This is one of them.
The idea that you can "diagnose" someone with a mental illness based on reading their court filings and things they've written online, without ever speaking to them in person, is... well, just bonkers. It's irresponsible, at best.
Someone can exhibit anti-social behaviors without having a mental illness.
This is as frustrating as people I know who are constantly saying "I think so-and-so is autistic/has ADHD". Yes, sometimes it's correct, but often it's not, and the outward symptoms of those two conditions often lead to a true diagnosis of something else entirely.
how is that in any way what I am saying? you are not describing the actual condition. you're ascribing what you see as anti-social or negative behaviors you heard about an individual (who has not disclosed any diagnosis) to a complicated illess that requires years of training to formally diagnose
this bloviating about free speech when all anybody is asking you to do is to not be an asshole is so overwrought and childish
Without the certifying board, one might wonder about the nature of problem described.
becase most people are not qualified to distinguish mental illness from emotions, stress etc, and obviously you are not either. A broken, protruding bone is obviously broken and protruding; you see it with your eyes and you know that it's broken. Mental illness is much tougher to diagnose because you're looking at symptoms, not the actual brokenness. You said it yourself - you are a layperson, not a doctor, which confirms that you are nowhere near qualified to diagnose mental illness. Your "argument" stinks of ad hominem.
Come on, if you see someone naked on the street, screaming at a wall, eating a pigeon or whatever, are you really going to think:
"I don't know if this person is mentally ill or not, I need an expert to come here and apply the DSM-V"?
Oh and also, the DSM-V is not even used to diagnose those things ...
Someone "naked on the street, screaming at a wall, eating a pigeon or whatever" could be having a bad trip on some drugs, not necessarily mentally ill. The drugs will wear off, and they will be a regular neurotypical person again. But by slapping a mental illness label onto that person, you've proven that you have no clue what you're talking about, and you shouldn't be diagnosing anyone.
Our brain is designed through evolution to slap labels, aka engage in hasty generalisation. The world is much more complex than that.
Addiction is a mental disorder within the mental health spectrum, and it matters.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41449521/
But nice try with the throwaway account and everything. 8/10, pal.
You can have a bad trip on a drug without being addicted, or without having any mental illness whatsoever.
Nice try dismissing something someone said for invalid reasons, "pal".
Hard disagree. Physical ailments like the one you describe are indeed simple to armchair-diagnose, but psychological problems are not that.
Even for physical issues, there's a lot of grey. A bone protruding from an arm is one thing, but how about, say... a rash? Could be lots of things. An ephemeral pain with little or no visual manifestation? Who knows.
Why do you think that mental illness is necessarily a protruding bone and not a rash or an ephemeral pain?
I wonder if GP would change his mind if he had witnessed Matt posting through the lawsuit in this very own website.
Just for the record, I did see him posting on HN, and he seemed highly motivated by $$$ (and pride). He certainly seemed rational, other than the fact he shouldn't have been posting here. Businessman makes bad business decision and doubles-down. Not quite insanity.
They did not in fact diagnose anything, "mental illness" is not a specific condition in the DSM. You'd have a valid point if they confidently stated he had bipolar disorder or something.
Sure, it's not, but it's a term used to describe a wide collection of conditions that are in the DSM.
In some ways, asserting that someone has "a mental illness" is worse than saying they have something specific, like bipolar disorder. It's lazy and dehumanizing, and takes away their agency.
Yes, buy NPD *is* in the DSM. While I'm not a mental health professional (read: I can't diagnose with any authority), I would still say that Mullenweg consistenly exhubits many / most of the symptoms of classic NPD.
NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder
> it is super-reddit to diagnose someone
Saying someone is showing signs of mental illness isn't a diagnosis. It's saying someone looks like they need medical attention. That's a fair thing for a layman to say.
> We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!"
These are, in some senses, less compassionate than saying someone needs help getting back to who they once were.
> Saying someone is showing signs of mental illness isn't a diagnosis. It's saying someone looks like they need medical attention.
That's fair if the target is someone you know and interact with personally. Lazy armchair diagnoses from internet posts is something entirely different.
"Mentally ill" is just a polite way of saying "out to lunch". I like the old phrases too - so much more color. But whatever man.
He's as crazy as a coocoo clock.
Similarly I've stopped saying "It's crazy that..." and changed it to "It's wild that ..."
What do you call it when tamer words are more impactful? Example: I've found "Dum-dums" > "stupid idiots". Is it because they're less triggering for emotional responses to the words themselves?
"it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes"
It is super-HN to inflate something and then object to the inflated fabrication, and to throw stones while living in a glass house.
> He is surely very evidently mentally ill.
I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner. I suspect that many people, myself included, would struggle in similar situations.
Occasionally a person can find themselves in a place where quitting is the best option for everyone involved, but the person at the centre is so dug in that they don’t even consider the possibility.
> I don’t think that’s accurate or helpful.
There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.
(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)
These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.
He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.
I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.
I'm no expert, but I suspect that a pattern of lashing out against opponents during in a high stakes business dispute would not typically be considered clinically significant on its own. I don't know how you or others in this thread are intending to use terms like "mental illness" or "mental health issues," but generally I don't think they're appropriate unless you're talking about problems where there's evidence of an underlying dysfunction and no other obvious immediate cause (like exhaustion). Of course, some may argue it's not appropriate to diagnose public figures either way.
I dont know any clinical information, but some (many, in fact) people assume mental illness when someone behaves in such a way that they believe their world view and mental model is absolute and fight to the last tooth and nail against any opposing view points (to the detriment of their own well being and others).
Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.
> the greatest scientific minds
if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
> founding fathers of the United States
that may in fact, be the case, but chances are someone today of similar disposition would not be able to do the same.
> if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.
Then no one has a scientific mind.
It's a spectrum, not a binary. Newton was into alchemy. Watson got into race pseudoscience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease has a nice long list.
Sane people adapt themselves to the world. The insane ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the mentally abnormal.
(Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...
and people misuse this quote to justify unreasonable behaviour that does not progress the world.
If you win (like Jobs against Flash/Adobe) you're a hero, if you lose people trash your name.
A lot of stupid people are swayed by the bots paid by the dark PR firms that PE engages to astroturf things and two-brain-cell "technical" YouTubers that have never optimized milliseconds off code that runs billions of times a day, never set up a rack that terabits flow through...
It's quite apt that you mentioned Jobs, given that many former admirers have reconsidered their admiration for him in the light of his often being an inconsiderate jerk. One can be a winner as far as technical and business achievements are concerned, but ultimately a loser due to how they generally treat other people.
In my case, I'll take Woz over Jobs any day. Steve Jobs is not my hero.
Matt, for clarity, if you see this, since this is a thread I kicked off perhaps by being imprecise and certainly by being somewhat critical:
I am full of admiration for what you have achieved, I believe you should feel proud of it, and I think we in the wider WP and web world have benefited greatly from your assertiveness and confidence for literally decades. I think perhaps the tech industry has taken for granted what WP represents and what it has held at bay.
I also see that things are going badly wrong, and having experienced a couple of years of severe burnout where I too came fully unglued and have not exactly covered myself in glory, I worry.
As I have said elsewhere, I think there is a future where a lot of real differences and temporary difficulties are in the past.
I hope for you that you get to that place, and I think stepping back from the things you built that can look after themselves, and focussing your energies on your health and the broader things that have mattered to you is the way forward.
I can see people have taken issue with me saying “mentally ill” when I might have said “unwell”. But I say this because I think I think you are burned out while unable to take your hand off the tiller, that burnout is real illness, not just a series of bad days at work, and because I think it’s disingenuous to use euphemisms that diminish seriousness.
I think that you should sit back, let them take your hand off the tiller, and take the time to look at what you have accomplished and see what it will look like going forward.
“Cause I can see the future, and it's a place / About seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter”
My best wishes again and my apologies if this thread has been especially annoying.
P.S. I quite like Gutenberg!
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This is rude and plainly horseshit.
We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.
I have been critical and I dunno, maybe I spoke fully out of turn, though it was from real concern.
But reading this makes me regret saying anything.
>We still have the web at all basically because of Wordpress.
I strongly disagree with the premise.
Aside from that, "WordPress" is 100% controlled by one guy. A guy who has repeatedly demonstrated total and complete disregard for the community. Ergo "we" don't "have" WordPress; It's something we're allowed to use (until Matt decides to ban us for an arbitrary, petty reason that doesn't even require articulation).
That's not something that belongs to a proverbial "we". That's the point.
> This is rude and plainly horseshit
It's rude but...the Steve Jobs self-insert stage entrance is straight out of The Onion.
> You're a dinosaur
Why is this necessary?!
Dinosaur is often used to describe someone who has grown out-of-touch with their industry. It aptly describes the technical skills Matt was just breathlessly boasting about.
In case you missed it, Matt's boast was part of his attack on people like me who disagree with him ("stupid people swayed by bots") and his direct personal attack on YouTuber Theo Browne, whom he described as having "two brain cells".
In the context Matt established himself, "dinosaur" is pretty tame, no?
Yes, two wrongs don't make a right. I'll tone it down. But if you're going to police the comments, kindly consider applying the policing equally. Just because someone is a quasi-famous tech celebrity, it shouldn't give their behaviour a pass.
Edit: I just noticed that elsewhere in this thread he calls his opponents (myself included) "idiots", yet there's no policing on that comment. Apparently, it's only "dinosaur" that crosses your red line.
FWIW, I think Theo is great.
> yet there's no policing on that comment
I flagged his comment.
I think your comment was stronger without the personal insult. So I engaged.
It's not the pattern, it's the fact he suddenly had a change in personality in 2024 causing him to destroy the community he created for no obvious reason. Then ignored basically everyone around him and doomspiralled until he got fired.
Not just the WPEngine stuff, but he went on a sabbatical at the start of 2024, got in a fight with the trans community (death sentence in tech), starts posting to WPDrama's subreddit asking what drama he should start in 2025, randomly fires people on the company Slack, etc.
I've never seen someone gleefully torch their relationships and career like this unless they were undergoing a mental health crisis.
You are forgetting that he is a rich and famous person. Those people can't be mentally ill, they can be eccentric, bizarre, funky or outlandish. But never actually mentally ill, that word is reserved for the plebeians like us.
It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness
But when the same person was extremely professional, kind and helpful, six months before a sudden shift in behaviour?
People change. A change may or may not be the result of mental illness.
I know many people who have changed greatly for the better because of life experiences or their own choices, and many people who have changed for the worse. We all do it to some extent, though maybe not dramatically or publicly.
He was unprofessional for years, see the firings of 2024
Right but that is part of this long rolling episode that started with the WP Engine thing, which is really when he began to act in an unhinged way.
That is really when the sudden shift in his public manner happened. It has been going on that long. He should have stepped back as either Automattic CEO or Wordpress BFDL at least a year ago IMO; the ACF/SCF debacle settled it.
WP and the community around it would have been better for it if he had.
When crooks are stealing from you and no justice can be found? He is right to be unhinged.
WP Engine were not 'crooks' stealing from him.
WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his.
WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery?
Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other?
Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit.
Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters.
Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them.
Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants?
Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".
What crooks?
Exactly. Don't use "mental illness" as an excuse, he's just incredibly arrogant.
I guess Hacker News went full Reddit, we have mentally unwell (self proclaimed mind you) commentors proclaiming other people mentally ill. The irony.
I don’t use or even read Reddit.
But thank you for your thoughtful input or whatever.
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There's different types of mental illness.
For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?
No, absolutely not.
An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.
To be fair, it is different because it impairs perception.
There's good evidence that depressed people are better at detecting simple sadness in others, and there's some evidence that depressed people are better at correctly predicting when things will have neutral or negative outcomes, but beyond that it gets a lot hazier, because depression messes with empathy, tends to project itself onto the world, and because non-depressed people will mirror your sadness when talking to you, etc. etc.
(I'm not talking about depression, though, but burnout, which is its own animal.)
That is mental illness. It doesn't imply that a virus took hold of your brain cells. It can be inability to cope with the real world. I suspect most of us will go through it at some point in our lives.
I think he has cultivated a group of yes-man to surround him and that he is so out of touch with non-WP reality that he thought he would be seen as a hero defending open-source ethics. He didn't account for the fact that everyone that he doesn't pay isn't under his spell, and that everyone saw the selfishness behind the heroism.
> I think he found himself in a situation that he could not cope with in a rational manner.
This framing is so generous and I'm grateful for it. Thank you. Makes me optimistic about public discourse to see iterative reframings toward observations like this
There's no need to diagnose Mullenweg when his behavior could easily be explained by being a run-of-the-mill arrogant asshole.
He never seems to have broken from reality or suffered a mental breakdown. He seems to just treat people (including his employees, customers, and competitors) like garbage who are beneath him.
That is a question of interpretation. But based on my own life experiences I think there is enough evidence that he is in deep, rolling burnout.
He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis.
No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns.
Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.
Agree as well he has lost his mind in the battle and does not appear to be trustable in such a competitive market at current state of things (well .. ai).
Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.
You could say "he's behaving irrationally" or even "he seems to be experiencing severe burnout".. But your exact phrasing is way too close to an "online diagnosis" (which is not a valid way to assess a mental illness - afaik no psychiatrist would ever diagnose anyone without ever talking to a person). On top of that, it's too close to an ad hominem - even if you didn't mean it that way.
Everyone is fighting their own demons. Some people are neurodivergent, but nothing good ever happens from an unsolicited "diagnosis" or slapping labels like "unglued". Every one of us can snap under enough pressure. Let's not go there.
It certainly and very clearly was not an ad hominem. Stop projecting things onto what I said so you can criticise me.
Good post, especially this
> I am of the opinion that his broad charge against WP Engine was valid; I think he handled it insanely.
I cannot believe how he handled it. Had he not crashed out, he may have succeeded in getting things right.
Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession.
Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here.
So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.
I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion.
I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue).
I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
"His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
I think these responses show how much stigma is attached to mental illness, that people abhor someone placing the label on someone else. Despite the fact that, for anyone familiar with it themselves or in loved ones, it's a lot more prevalent and in many more shades and gradients than probably most people realize.
It is not just stigmatized. It is criminalized. A diagnoses can strip you of numerous rights.
I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
For goodness’ sake, I didn’t “diagnose” him or try to.
If I were to get more specific than “mentally ill” that would be a diagnosis.
But “mentally ill” is not a diagnosis and it wasn’t an attempt at one.
I mean it colloquially based on my own really similar, serious experiences with coming quite unglued due to burnout that eventually rendered me unable to work but before that made me act irrationally against my own interests in a way that has caused me negative consequences.
I consider myself to have been mentally ill. I think it looked like that to people I scared and shocked.
But this wouldn’t be a “diagnosis” either, not least because the healthcare industry doesn’t want to admit or address that it goes further than mere occupational health “thing”.
So would you please fucking stop imagining I did something more specific so you can call me out for doing it.
> There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
No there aren’t. Don’t be silly.
Yes, there are.
Dude, if you use this term, someone out there is going to associate it with "Mullenweg has a diagnosed illness for which therapy or drugs may be appropriate."
You may not like this, but it's a fact. This fact is just a dictionary lookup away.
Please calm your outrage about the world as it is, and accept that there is an established use for this term.
> I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness.
You don't know anything about this person, and your case seems to rest on "I know because I've been through it" which assumes your experience is the same as a total stranger's.
> I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness.
Goodness me. Sit and think about that for a while.
> Goodness me. Sit and think about that for a while.
You're quite right, let's think further about this.
- A person racing to meet their deadlines.
- Another sweating through a difficult meeting.
- A third using some terrible company software for the first time and feeling his blood temperature rise.
- A fourth softsoaping an angry customer over the phone when all he wants to do is tell him where to do.
By your definition, each of these types are undergoing a spasm of mental illness, since work stress is mental illness.
But then your definition is total bollocks.
I don't know why I get so much hate for saying this and people find it so hard to accept, but I'll say it again.
The term for a formal disease of the mind, as used by the medical practice, is currently "mental disorder."
Not too long ago, the term doctors used was "mental illness."
Therefore when you say someone has a mental illness, you have to think about how the entire medical profession has used that term in the past, and how that may influence perceptions. It is a term that potentially brings in connotations that the individual has been diagnosed with a specific disorder in the DSM-V and this may be leading to doctor prescribed drugs, therapies, different outcomes in court cases, and many other things.
I'm sure many people including OP don't intend to imply that when they use the term. And this is also why you would never call "work stress" a mental illness. Work stress is cause that can absolutely make you unhealthy. It may or may not be exacerbating a mental disorder which a doctor may or may not have formally diagnosed yet. We can have compassion for somebody who's suffering without jumping to the conclusion that they've been diagnosed with a DSM-V disorder. As non-doctors, we should!
These distinctions matter. It's merely paying respect to the facts on the ground, as well as the person in question when we describe their situation accurately.
In recent memory of companies I've worked for, even the absolute WORST executives haven't gotten fired. They always announce that "it's time for another adventure" or "I am taking a break". So I am not shocked they didn't fire him, although the board is now probably wishing they did.
Had a President make a big ordeal about leaving "for health reasons". His LinkedIn had him at a new company within a couple months doing the same thing.
Had a CISO leave for "personal" reasons. Talked to him a couple years later and yeah, he was fired.
Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
In fairness, I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days, unless you live in a town of 300 people. There's a lot of antisocial behavior that goes unreported.
But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.
> I don't think stealing $20 makes the local news these days
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Emmely
Got fired because she redeemed two orphaned bottle deposit slips worth 1,30€ (in 2009, so more like 1,50€ in today's money /s). Caused a nation-wide discussion.
I don't think anything will beat
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15148829
School principal fired and loses $130k pension for overfilling coffee (about 50 cents).
It was the being fired that made the news; not the stealing.
I would argue there is a broad difference in ethicality and reason between the bottom and top of the food chain, making these examples less clear cut. If your plan as a low level employee doesn't work out you still get fired and the consequences are far greater.
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute. Its a fucked up world.
I think if we are just looking at the media:
Most journalists wouldn't consider some nobody stealing $20 to be newsworthy in itself.
Most corporate scandals receive extensive media coverage. Even a CEO who was merely incompetent instead of corrupt, is still likely to get some bad press.
Now, you are completely right that the non-media consequences are very different – significant chance of criminal record (although in many jurisdictions, there are mechanisms which first-time offenders on minor charges can use to escape getting one) vs a multi-million dollar severance payment.
The issue with "golden parachutes" – if someone's employment contract creates an entitlement to a severance payment (and in some jurisdictions employment law creates one even if the contract itself doesn't) – then you generally have to pay them unless you terminate for "misconduct" (often even "serious misconduct"). The problem with terminating for "misconduct", is it creates a big incentive for the terminated employee to sue to try to get the severance payment they'd otherwise receive, and the larger the payment, the bigger the motivation – which creates an expensive legal and PR headache. The PR issue is especially acute for senior executives–a junior employee suing over a severance dispute will get a lot less media coverage than a former CEO doing it. So, unless the conduct was extremely egregious, there is a strong incentive for the employer/board to just pay the severance out and make the legal and PR headache go away.
There is also the issue that the next person stepping into their shoes to clean up the mess is being recruited exactly during this time. And if your company gets a reputation for not paying out prenegotiated severances or nitpicking over them, it makes the next candidate that much more wary.
You are comparing robbery with ineptitude. They are two different things. If your ineptitude makes a 20$ loss you may not be fired as well. Billion dollars wasted at corp still is not billion dollars at the exec pockets (that would be theft and he would be facing charges). That the exec pockets millions regardles of the losses incurred by corp, even when it sounds awful to you or to me, is a problem between the corp and the exec.
Robbery and ineptitude are different things, but the situations described by OP are often special blends of the two.
So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct? This is likely to cause the price of the shares to drop, including any ESPP and stock grants you and your coworkers have vested. Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it? I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Maybe if there were consequences, there wouldn't be so much corruption that leads to these silent firings.
Satisfaction? It’s about truth and justice, investors deserve to know about executive malfeasance
Weird to see so many posters suddenly pop up that are anxious to protect investors (who have the access and means to protect themselves) at the expense of harming employees and workers. Glad to see you all getting into the ultra-capitalist spirit of Hacker News I guess?
Bad companies who do bad things should fail. Why are you so obsessed with protecting criminals from consequences? If an exec is sexually harassing employees should they still be protected? What if the bad behavior is abusing workers and committing wage theft? Should that still be swept under the rug? Forgive me for not really caring about the stock grants of people who are in the top 10% of earners. Actual working class people aren’t getting equity
The person I was replying to talked about executives being fired with no reason given. So "protecting criminals" is something you pulled out of your own imagination and warrants no response. Have a nice day.
That’s the whole point of why they should disclose, because you don’t know if it’s poor performance or something legitimately bad. I simply gave examples of something that I don’t think anyone with a conscience would support. You very much give the impression that you would prefer scandals hidden, regardless of legality, because that’s what’s best for your pocketbook.
> So you would prefer a media circus and investor scrutiny when your employer's executives are fired for failures or misconduct?
Yes, as a warning to the other executives.
Signed,
The Shareholders
> Is the satisfaction of seeing an executive dragged through the mud worth losing a chunk of your net worth to you, no matter how much the exec deserves it?
Yes. There is far too little truth and justice in this world, most especially for corporate executives.
> I'd rather keep the money, personally.
Of course, me too buddy, me too. But some things are more important, don't you think? It would be a much much better world if the wealthy and powerful had to think carefully before acting. Think carefully before that action of misconduct. Bear the responsibility for their actions. Be afraid of the consequences.
And on the flip-side, if it's an exec at another company getting tarred and feathered by the media for their incompetence, it means they probably won't end up at my company in six months' time and do the same thing.
If it was up to me we'd be stripping them of any and all assets they gained during their tenure for malfeasance. Let them roam free, and let them sleep freely under a bridge.
Yes, I’d prefer that investors know that the new executive is not going to continue the same crap and same level of poor judgement. Want them to know the replacement is looking to do more than wear a golden parachute.
Imagine if investors actually thought the personnel change was a positive one…
Investigated, prosecuted and jailed (if necessary).
So all the people companies are better off, not just you and other shareholders.
You know, the opposite of two-tier justice system.
"Someone! Think of the shareholders!"
> Steal 20$ out of a cash register and make the local news. Waste a billion dollars at a corp and make insane decisions and ride out on a golden parachute.
Getting pushed out of a position is very career damaging at the executive level. Those golden parachutes are pretty rare, too. Most of the executives I know from companies you haven't heard of (and some that you maybe have) who were pushed out took a huge hit to their careers after that. The best play is to start calling up executive recruiters and try to get any job as soon as possible once the writing is on the wall that you're being fired.
And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days.
> And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days
and come on, you know exactly what is meant here. An individual steals something, they get punished. Executives of the largest banks create a scheme that ultimately crashes the world economy and nobody goes to jail. Quibbling on the example's use of $20 is just strange
Ah, but they take the big risks, you see. Someone has to do it.
Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.
See his other comments in HN in the previous wp “incident”, simply said he _is_ nut
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Hello matt this is your lawyer speaking. I am advising you today to please keep posting this shit
I'm just posting to say hi to the various paralegals and clerks putting together their exhibits in the case. Hope you're having a good one!
Those phrases often imply that they were fired or asked to resign - although the deniability can be useful, which is why they’re so often used. As a recent example, Fidji Simo went on leave from her role at OpenAI several months before leaving. Although I don’t know for sure, I would suppose that she was essentially fired when she went on leave, and the subsequent success of Codex after she went on leave confirmed the decision to fire her. It’s possible that, if Codex hadn’t been a success, she might have been brought back, so putting her on leave was useful for optionality.
People go on leave regularly for health reasons, and Fidji Simo has been quite open about her health. Unless you have evidence of your claim, the official explanation is simplest. That's especially the case here since firing someone on health leave can expose you to lawsuits under labor law in the US and many other countries.
Fidji Simo has well documented chronic health issues so there’s no reason to assume that the ostensible and actual reasoning are far apart there.
But the fact that she went on leave just as it became clear that Anthropic looked to be hitting escape velocity is suspicious, although not dispositive. When she was hired, her health issues also stopped her from coming into the office, but she still worked from home.
Firing a CEO makes your company look bad. Even if you are firing them, you don't say you're firing them.
Like sama? (Hope I don't get dang'ed for being political, especially against a ycombi founder...)
Spend more time with my family :).
Executives do not get fired like other employees. They have contracts that usually prevent standard dismissal unless they have done something illegal. When they are 'fired', they are still a protected class. Hence the narrative spin: a new 'ceremonial' role, spending time with family, etc. etc.
Make no mistake, he has been fired. It just looks different than a call with HR or a manager and office security telling you to pack up your $hit and leave.
Sounds like it's something that must have been painful, all around.
Boards really don't like doing things like this, as it signals instability, and shareholders hate instability. That's why so many boards leave clearly non-optimal CEOs in place, so often.
This is not something that has been a focus of my attention, except when it was shoved into my face. I'm really too old for that kind of agita.
I do run a couple of WP sites. I'm considering switching a couple to static sites, (via a generator, or maybe LLM-generated static sites), but I need one of them to remain WP (for now), as that hosts my blog.
My impression was that the major argument against static site generators is the unfriendly UX for non-technical contributors to the site, and with LLMs that problem is completely solved.
I don't know how it's "completely solved" unless you can point me to an existing, complete solution. Providing a nice backend with a WYSIWYG editor and access control as well as varying level of customization is not a trivial problem for anyone, technical or non technical, and you can easily mess it up.
You don't need a backend. You don't even need a static site generator. Just sit a non-technical person in front of Claude Code and tell them to tell the computer what they want (including what the content should say). For something as simple as a static site (that the user can themselves look at and read) there's nothing to mess up -- if something looks out of place, a non-technical user can just tell the computer that and it will fix it. "Computer, add a page to the blog with this content: <pasted text>" -- "Computer, the banner looks weird on phones but not on desktop, please fix it."
My wife (no CS background, no programming experience, schooling in music and law) is about to submit her first several apps to the App Store. I don't think she has had to even look at a single line of code. Yes, they work.
You need to get out of your bubble. That's all I can say.
I ... need to get out of my evidence-based bubble in which I'm observing real non-technical users in the real world? This is not a discourse bubble. I'm not getting my talking points from other people. I'm drawing conclusions based on what capabilities I've observed the AI giving to non-technical users.
You only need a WYSIWYG if you're the one doing the actual writing. /s
Just vibe code your own mini cms on top of your static site. Seriously though, I did this recently with mine and have had great results. It's not a Gutenberg WP experience, more like a decapCMS kind of thing.
There are quite a few CMSes that do static builds natively. If you hand one of those to Claude Code, you can get a more flexible and maintainable result more quickly. You can also point Claude Code to a CMS starter project in folder A And a vibe coded static site in folder B and pull them together.
That being said... if you're the sole author of your site, anything goes and yeah, you probably don't need a proper CMS. I certainly built my own share of 100-line Perl static site builders back in the day.
It's easier to generate a static site using a WP hidden behind a VPN than building a mini cms on top of a static site.
Matt "photomatt" Mullenweg is fundamentally incapable of not crashing out. It's very predictable for anyone at all familiar with the WPEngine saga, or slightly earlier, his personal beef with Tumblr user predstrogen (which involved him following her off of Tumblr after he banned her to harass her on Twitter).
Who knows, maybe he can try and blackmail them too[0] to get his way. It's worked out great so far.
[0] https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...
I think his recent screwing over of that custom fields plugin team and cutting off access to the plugins repo for WPengine was really a dumb move that has lead him to where he is now.
I don’t have any skin in the game with this, and I don’t use WP. It appears Matt needs help right now. I don’t think he’s reacting rationally based on what he’s posting online or allegedly inside his former organization. I don’t know him, but it’s hard seeing people in a difficult time who need help.
This doesn't really sound like an accusation. It sounds like fact. It'd probably hold up under a deposition in a courtroom. I really don't think the board has any reason to even dispute this account of events.
> If you’re doing this type of accusation [...] odds are you’re never coming back. [...] Crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
...one exception comes to my mind, and it's Steve Jobs. Probably a total outlier case, but, still.
It Jobs a long time to come back, though, and it looks like he had to prove himself (as a businessman) in other ways while he was in exile. The board seems to have been filled with different people at the time it came back. It's probably much harder to come back under the same board with the same people, and it doesn't sound like Jobs was an exception to that aspect.
You very rarely fire execs these days, the main reason being you don't want them to sue the company over their loss of reputation.
You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society.
They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
It seems that the typical CEO has enough yes-men that it bruises their ego to have anyone suggest that they aren't great in any respect.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
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For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
Well shit. I'm a huge fan of the band Artic Monkeys but I know nothing about festival guides. Is there a connection?
No. In this case “Arctic Monkey” is just the pseudonym used by the guide writer.
Given the long lines and the mud this year my "idea" would be to skip future festivals.
I like how somehow this was the final straw.
Maybe he forgot to submit his PTO into Workday.
I just came here to say that I tried setting Wordpress up for someone a couple weeks ago and the entire admin experience felt like someone designed it WHILE AT burning man.
> line is so perfectly on the nose
Hehe.
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.
"Unfortunately" for whom? I'm pretty ok, even happy, with him out.
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.
it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.
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.
Unfortunate this was the result of 23 years, not unfortunate it's happening.
The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief
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.
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> Unfortunately, this is for the best.
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?
Can you provide some examples of these errors? Asking genuinely.
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.
... and that's how screenshots of hn comments ended up in this federal court order [1, pg. 24]
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
This was not an error:
> 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.
No reason given?
Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
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.
He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"
Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
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.
That's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.
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.
WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
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.
Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
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.
That's a small part of what's being litigated. The rest of what's being litigated is unfair trade practices, monopolization, promissory estoppel, defamation, and computer fraud/abuse. (Seriously, there are 18 causes of action in the Third Amended Complaint, which is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... . There are also counterclaims, which are here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... )
> nomitative fair use
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.
They do not. It's GPL
Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.
It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
> Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.
Is this not the standard expectation? Does one typically add a gratuity when contributing to OSS?
> It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
So they kept the promise?
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"??
"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.
Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
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.
Wow I had no idea Pocket Casts was open source now. I still have a subscription because it's a perfect app I use every day.
And Simplenote.
Which is no longer in active development
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093
They clearly changed their mind.
That "no longer developed" note is from September 2025.
They made a bunch of non-trivial improvements in 2026: https://simplenote.com/blog/
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.
Huh. I still remember back in the Gutenberg launch era and all the drama around it (2018) the internet saying he was the devil for profiting from WP.
> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.
Unfortunately.
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.
IMO.
Yeah, it's unfortunate when anyone goes off the deep end.
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.
He still contributed a lot to the world during the good times.
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Classicpress may be worth checking out.
https://www.classicpress.net/
em-dash by Cloudflare looks interesting in terms of replacing Wordpress.
by garnering enough of an ecosystem to cause a migration will be the bigger challenge.
of course some people will say in the age of agents will people need to visit websites ;)
Am I looking at the right thing?
https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
> 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.
It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
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.
A CMS that can only run on one hosting provider?
It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
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.
The whole USP for emdash is sandboxed plugins. Sandboxed plugins only work in Cloudflare.
Why is this getting downvoted. Is it because of a general anti-cloudflare sentiment?
> Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.
Preach.
Seems to twist perception that reality is a fractal when it's recursive and eventually exits (everything dies).
Explains religion, politics, and similar longtermism memes.
I think it is easy to underestimate how big of a deal this is. Matt has a stranglehold on Automattic and Wordpress, it is not possible to remove his control over the ecosystem and he is volatile. Ousting him as CEO is almost certain to cause a major reaction from Matt, so, for Automattic to make this decision is a very big deal. The right decision for the long term but the hard decision. I expect we will see Matt try to punish Automattic’s board, it will get worse for Automattic before it gets better.
Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150
I'd definitely take away his access having seen how vindictive he has been throughout the WPE saga, for everyone's sake
If he has 84% voting share, can't he just fire the board?
Firing the board is the least Matt-like option. He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project, I think it is more likely that he starts his own Automattic splinter company and removes Automattic from the WordPress project. I’d guess he is already filing incorporation docs for Antimatter Inc. or some other Matt themed name.
Automattic has exclusive commercial rights to the WordPress trademark. That was the self-dealing deal he made when he "gave" the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. He can start a new commercial WP company, but it won't have that trademark so would be limited in the same ways he was trying to force on WP Engine etc.
> He has absolute control and ownership over the WordPress project
The only thing he has that can't be moved or recreated are the trademarks. In an extremely short span of time everyone went from Xfree for their X server to Xorg, and Xfree limped along for a bit before falling over. This is the beauty of open source.
Laundermatt?
Checkmatte?
But seriously if I had to recommend something, not escalating seems best for everyone involved.
Aftermatt
New-mattic (pneumatic)?
Intimatte - non sequitur.
Matthatter
In most venture-backed companies no, because board seats are one of the things you give major investors in exchange for their money.
In this case? Possibly! Ann Dunwoody and Sue Decker look like independents, and he might be able to unilaterally replace either or both of them.
I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.
> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground.
I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.
IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.
Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
Good information, thank you!
> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board?
Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.
If he's lost the confidence of the board and does that, how much is his company worth?
Does it matter? He owns it and doesn't plan to flip it, and they have enough income to go on for a long time.
He is self-described "post-economic" after all.
If Mullenweg attempts to fire the board that just suspended him, he would be weaponizing proxy votes against the very investors who originally granted them. While founder proxies are often structured to be irrevocable, using them to purge the board would almost certainly trigger a massive legal battle, attempts by investors to breach or revoke the proxy agreements, and severe financial instability for the company.
While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board, executing that move would ignite a corporate civil war rather than a clean transition of power.
> While he technically holds the votes required to disband the board
This is very unlikely. True Ventures almost certainly controls at least one seat. (Until Phil Black left last year they actually held two seats, but that doesn't mean they had the right to. Either way, at the moment it's just Toni Schneider.)
I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story.
In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.
And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.
No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.
Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!
[1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305
Thanks for sharing your story. How do you feel about the more recent behavior, though - the WP engine lawsuit, the buyout, etc.? Does that align with the person you saw and knew back then?
Couldn't agree more.
Here is the whole saga until May 2025: https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
Hey, that's me! Unfortunately that's only reasonably complete through mid-February of 2025; i had some health issues and was never able to catch back up.
Hope you’re doing better these days!
https://mullenweg.wtf/ picked up after that
There is also this video that dropped last week if people are interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8zIESRyVs
" WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still working next Friday. This is the full timeline: how a blog fork in 2003 became a movement, how Automattic became a company, how WP Engine became the target, and how one keynote at WordCamp US turned into cease and desists, lawsuits, forked plugins, mass resignations, and a preliminary injunction "
The community was already starting to turn on Matt well before 2024. He's appointed himself release manager for every version of WP since 5.0 in 2018, which is how Gutenberg managed to land in core in such a half-baked state.
That lead me to a number of good sources, especially this:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/24/automattic-vs-wp-engine/
which links to a lot more
I already knew Matt was throwing a tantrum and refusing to address conflicts of interest. However WP Engine also do not come out of it looking good. Nor do a lot of people in the WP community. Matt is a problem, but it does not look like he is the only problem.
The Wordpress community got so big, that inevitably it attracted leeches. Unfortunately, Matt chose to address a home-infestation problem with a firethrower.
Great way to put it. Ignoring collateral damage too.
I’m a bit relieved. Only knowing it superficially through its larger public actions, Automattic used to be one of the “good guys” companies to me. I envisioned myself applying there at some point. This has obviously changed over the last 1-2 years.
I don’t doubt that the good parts were largely Matt’s work, but well ... I think a lot of us followed his semi-recent public actions.
I’m a bit surprised they didn’t pull the plug earlier given they could have. Hasn’t he already caused vast damage?
Still, he has done a lot of good for the internet and world at large. I don’t want to discount that. I just hope he manages to chill a bit.
I briefly worked in the web agency SaaS space and hoooo boy, I have never known a more gossipy or dramatic industry.
That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg
It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.
He's really tweeting through it today: https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies
From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.
Man, in a thread he links to his tweet from 2024 that mentions using disappearing messages on Signal which the WPEngine lawyers are now using against him.
So many people (including DannyBee, himself a lawyer) were telling him on HN how opposing counsel would be analyzing every post looking for any kind of angle to give them an edge, and it was very much in his best interest to step away from his computer. But, in reply he said his own lawyers said it was fine so no big deal...
EDIT: also his bright pink X profile image is abusing HDR to make it extra annoyingly bright and the rest of my screen dim on my phone. Very off-putting behavior but pretty on character.
Thanks for this.
I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.
Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.
I'm shocked. I always thought that Matt held the majority of the voting shares, and that the board of directors was mostly there as a rubber stamp.
Voting shares and board of directors are two different mechanisms. Just because he holds 80%+ of voting shares, doesn't mean he can control who runs the company. Shareholders can make up (elect/remove) directors on the board, the board decides who can run the company (or other officials). His vote against was likely true, but if the board is 4 seats and he only has one vote, that's 25%.
A lot of this is pretty typical, but what's interesting is what happens next. He could just remove members of the board with his 80%+ control, and build a board that backs him. I assume they have investor agreements that prevent that.
Regardless of who he puts on the board, directors have legal obligations to the SEC and all shareholders. If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
> If he wants that level of control he would need to take the company private, and various investor agreements probably prevent this.
Since when was Automatic a public listed company?
It is not. They did take VC funding however, which is when the board and the investor agreements came into force.
I should have said: establish sole ownership.
People seem very angry about my comment, which perhaps indicates why WordPress is in such chaos. The SEC has significant enforcement powers still, and investors can mount lawsuits against shareholder oppression.
https://www.dandodiary.com/2023/10/articles/securities-enfor...
Enforced by checkboxes on every login form, no doubt. Less sarcastically: I hope his corporate access is thoroughly controlled; we've seen him in 'full force', before.
Article says no change for .org... this will almost surely become interesting.
Good riddance! His neurotic public harassment of anyone who is remotely aligned against him (cf. Tumblr moderation and AspirePress) is simply childish and leaves much to be desired.
His behaviour has shown him to be unfit to be a CEO.
Quick, somebody back up the WP Plugins repository.
I am so curious why now, what changed? The WPEngine saga was started two years ago.
from my own observations:
a) you don't want the WPEngine case going to trial and that is coming to a decision point soon. chances are the new CEO and board settle.
b) wordpress is being absolutely obliterated by ai. work for commercial plugin authors and agencies has dried up while the platform and ecosystem see major security issues and worms exploit a large number of sites every week.
wordpress and automattic haven't responded to this well, at all. at times it is often straight denial.
founder CEO distracted by expensive lawsuit while facing existential threat to project that will require complete attention and a lot of skill to steer out of
How is the WPEngine case going anyways?
Glancing at the docket [1] in an attempt to answer this myself... looks like the trial is scheduled for a bit over a year from now [2].. A ton of fighting over discovery... a motion asking for fairly monster sanctions for spoilation of evidence [3] (to be argued on the 30th). Claiming in [3] with what appear to be pretty solid receipts (as far as we can see through the redactions anyways) that Matt was willfully destroying communications related to the case and subject to the discovery - and Automattic's lawyers lied to the court that they preserved them (naturally Automattic's lawyers have a reply with an entirely different interpretation of events if you go look for it... but at least at a glance WPEngine seems more convincing).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
Just side note that AI is not destroying one of the largest e-commerce platform, Woocommerce on top of Wordpress.
Ok, Shopify is then.
If you've ever used Woocommerce, the one thing you want to do is stop using Woocommerce.
Indeed. I'm very grateful for Woocommerce, but since I use a tiny subset of its features, I'm "vibe coding" my own alternative with way less surface area and less bloat.
A Shopify monopoly (and thus a shopify payments monopoly) would be very rough for a number of reasons
Unless there's a full on scandal or emergency, boards don't force CEOs out quickly. This would have been building for years with multiple rounds of trying to de-escalate and get the situation under control.
Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to.
If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can't be gotten rid of so easily.
This is a completely reasonable take and I'm stunned you're getting downvoted for it.
> I'm stunned you're getting downvoted for it
It's a reasonable hypothesis. Saying it's "probable" is nuts.
Matt is a creature of social media and has a lot of minions and sockpuppets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It never ended.
Touché, reworded it to be clearer on what I meant :).
I am surprised it has taken the Automattic board so long, just don't understand that.
Long overdue. Matt needs to get some professional help or support, some of his actions have been incredibly harmful to the WordPress community.
They should have voted on if pineapple deserves to be on pizza while they were at it. The guy had to go.
I read a lot of people saying so many things about Matt from the outside. As an Automattician for 9 years now, what I see from the inside is the best work environment I've ever been part of, and the best I've heard of compared to what colleagues describe at other big tech companies. Automattic is the most diverse and fair company I've seen, with an open and transparent culture.
He might not be perfect, but all of this was created under his leadership. That starts with a genuinely unique hiring process that lets the company find people who fit well, and it extends to the way he delegates to leaders below him so they can do their best, while still letting anyone, in any position, share their thoughts on anything. On top of that, there are all his contributions to open source, alongside the products and services under Automattic's umbrella.
I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
> I'm not sure what the intentions are behind the attacks on him, but I know from my experience that they aren't fair.
The entire saga is easily discoverable through an internet search. If you care to learn, you can read about it pretty easily.
It's impressive this took so long.
I had the opposite thought: I'm impressed the board did anything at all, given how useless they are at most companies.
After reading about his behavior over the past couple of years, I'm sad that it took this long. He has far too much hostility for the community to continue.
Wordpress was an amazing piece of software. They could have a future in the AI era which has a similar issue in standardizing content managing platforms, but what a fumble. And over something with such a small moat as a hosting platform for businesses.
Breaking news big tech guy gets to do nothing and still get paid
Who uses WP outside of legacy installs? I used to love it 15 or so years ago for side hustle work, but over time it gained weight and vulnerabilities, whack-a-mole. Plug-ins were nice, but that <?php...> inlining wasn't. I don't hate PHP, the things were just clumsy and messy inside the loop and I wasn't smart enough. What's the replacement these days in case I need to set up something simple quickly? Not Square Space or Shopify, although those are good products imo.
A huge chunk of the web is WP.
Bypass paywall at either https://web.archive.org/web/20260909213058/https://www.404me... or https://archive.ph/7J5TB.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/993022/wordpress-automattic-ce... also has a writeup which takes some quotes from the article (and a statement by Automattic).
At least he’s going out with class
This is likely how they pull out of the disasterous legal actions Mullenweg has taken.
Finally
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.
HN needs to allow some html in comments so we can put ‘lmao’ in <blink> and <marquee> tags
Reminds me of the first season of Succession
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This is fantastic news. Matt is an ass and unfit to lead a small HOA, let alone a company and open source project.
Hearing stories about HOA as a non-US person I think he is actually quite suited leading one.
pro tip: don’t go public. don’t get a board. maintain full control.
Hopefully, WP will get better. At the moment, WP itself, its ecosystem, and community are such a cesspool. It should not be used for anything more than just basic blogging. Even then, there are better alternatives. Especially in this day and age, when an AI model can easily write you what you need. It can write you something better than the trash adware on the plugin/theme store.
I guess when people vote the same way, it’s technically a conspiracy?
No, it's called "voting".
That was my point. My sarcasm mustn’t have come through.
No, a conspiracy would require that they all got together in secret to plan to vote that way. Which is hardly necessary in a case like this.
Finally.
Finally.
The more I see, the more convinced I am that Silicon Valley was actually a documentary.
Good, get him the fuck away from Wordpress. Though frankly, a better solution might be for businesses to ask themselves whether or not they need Wordpress anymore.
In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
WordPress dominance of the web has certainly peaked, but history indicates there will be several years in which to continue to extract comfortable profits while riding it down. e.g. Oracle, a database that almost no business has actually needed in decades.
I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.
Sure, but, even with AI and the technical competence to steer it, it's still a pretty big lift to switch from, e.g. WordPress with billing and various other stuff to some ad hoc other thing. Even when I decided I was done with managing content in WordPress and moved it out to a Hugo static site for my company website, I still kept the commerce stuff in WordPress just because it works and we know it works from a decade or so of operation.
I'm certainly not deploying new WordPress sites, partly because of how weird and hostile Mullenweg has made the WordPress ecosystem for no good reason. I don't even necessarily disagree with the sentiments behind his words and actions, but the methods and how far it's gone in terms of lawfare is just silly and destructive.
Anyway, they won't get decades like Oracle has gotten. But, they've got a few years of comfy margins ahead if they don't blow it up too badly.
They'll continue to have plenty of existing passive revenue as long as WooCommerce users continue to use Stripe, and large enterprises continue to buy in to WP.com VIP.
This rings true to me. I am looking at setting up my own online store, and if you sell (legal!) stuff which Shopify Payments disallows, but Stripe does allow, you end up looking at WooCommerce (a very popular WordPress plugin) pretty fast.
The uptick in Webflow usage alone would suggest the damage has already been done.
>Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”
What is wrong with these people?
I was curious what this meant, so I looked into it.
They asked Automatic.css to change their name: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1omrtrk/automatt...
Automatic.css is a paid CSS framework specifically for WordPress.
Legally speaking I have no opinion here, but I don't think it's as out-of-pocket as it sounds.
The article linked ( https://www.404media.co/automattic-automatic-trademark-matt-... ) is behind a paywall. But reading https://www.searchenginejournal.com/automattic-disputes-use-... it sounds like the claim 'Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic"' might not be accurate.
Yeah, regardless of other aspects of Automattic's behaviour, flagging that an identically-pronounced single letter variation of their registered company name might be a confusingly similar brand for a third party commercial service specifically designed to customise Automattic's product to adopt seems to be at the reasonable end of trademark disputes...
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Hard disagree. 404 has been awesome since being founded.
FUD. Don’t spread nonsense. They’re as rigorous as any other tech journo, you just have an axe to grind.
I don't see how this is FUD. Both a sibling comment and my parent pointed out that there's more to the story than simply "claiming the word automatic." They provided extra context (which the article didn't).
I am merely relating my experience that stuff like this is common with 404 Media. They'll omit nuances - whether intentionally or just being shoddy.
The article links to an entire separate article about automatic.css.
That's how you can tell the article isn't giving you the full picture.
"Windows", "Word" and "Excel" are just plain English words, but it appears you can trademark them for specific industry. Maybe you have to make it more specific. Like "Microsoft Windows"?
I run payments engineering at Automattic, on the WooCommerce side. Speaking for myself.
The company statement is on TechCrunch. Mark Davies, the CFO, is interim CEO, and Mary Hubbard told TechCrunch that WordPress.org is unaffected. I won't guess at the board's reasons.
Nothing about how my teams ship has changed since the news broke. The repos are public if you want to watch.
I've worked under Matt for years and I'm grateful for the company he built. People can argue about the rest.
The best line was buried at the bottom. Did Automattic really attempt to claim it owns the word “automatic?
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
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> The situation is obviously more complex than any of us know, and I'd encourage everyone to be a bit more positive and supportive of a fellow founder and builder.
What is your basis for this claim? His actions and behavior are publicly visible, and I can't even imagine a hidden context that would justify how he has acted.
It's so weird how all your posts show absolutely no consideration or praise for anyone except Matt.
Like everyone else in the world is an NPC whose perspective can be ignored or overruled by this one dude.
Give the guy a break. So much jealousy waiting to be poured out into word of hate. Says far more about you than it does about him.
Towards the end it says "Mullenweng"
> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”
Real austin powers vibes
> He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.
It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.
Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.
Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.
they own automatic.com right?
If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?
Anyone could have forked WordPress at any time or spun up their own multi tenant instances if they were truly concerned, this just seems personal. It’s a bad day for founders IMO.
it's personal only in the sense that Matt had been doing an absolutely awful job leading the company for several years, and the board had fiduciary obligations to intervene
this is not a bad day for founders; it's Matt having gotten to the end point of his value as a leader
Don't get me wrong: getting to a point where you have 2,000 employees and a 7 billion dollar valuation is a massive accomplishment. He was clearly very effective at various parts of the company's history. But it scaled beyond the point where his skillset and personality could continue to credibly steer the ship
The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
So problem solved? My only criticism is that 1) Mr. Mullenweg should have held tighter controls over the IP and 2) the direction to the community that they are encouraged to use "WP" as a prefix for their business names and products was ultimately a bad one leading to this mess..
Matt, you shouldn't have picked a FLOSS license if you didn't intend for the software to be FLOSS in the first place.
Matt, ... just log out and take a break.
If they'd done those two things Wordpress would probably have been far less successful. Which certainly is a way of making WP Engine not even want to do what they did. Heck, they would probably not even exist.
WP Engine's "forking" consisted of disabling the revisions feature by default.
As someone who's personally been bitten by this particular WP Engine misfeature, describing this as a "fork" is disingenuous at best. The average Linux distro ships way more out-of-tree changes than WP Engine ever did.
Look, a brand new account taking photomatt's side. Neat.
tbh I don't think it's a Matt sockpuppet; Matt would definitely comment himself.
Hilariously, he already has -- but was downvoted to oblivion.