> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 wrongly over a long period of time.
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.
But I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he 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 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 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.
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".
Well then I wasn't mentally ill, I guess, when I did stupid stuff not unlike this in the middle of extreme burnout.
I have spent my life being kind, a good friend with good friends, being professional, trying to be diligent, not billing too much, trying to deliver on promises, offering help at no cost, taking part in people's passion projects, doing the best work I can, not letting other people make mistakes that will cost them, even at a cost to myself.
At the depths of my burnout I was so "unglued" that I was rude to people in ways I don't recognise, shouty, quick-tempered, unreliable, unpredictable and self-sabotaging, determined to get people to hate me and make choices about me just so I had something to react to because otherwise I wanted everything to stop.
After a period of rest I have regained enough perspective to start rebuilding my life and I am back to who I was in some ways, different in others.
If you'd only had to deal with me in the middle of that, "unprofessional douchebag" is what you'd have thought of me. I wouldn't have cared. (I know several people do think this of me, because that's the only version of me that they know)
His behaviour reads a lot like mine, just in a much more public way.
It doesn't make any of it appropriate, of course. But try not to fall victim to fundamental attribution error.
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.
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 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.
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...
>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.
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.
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.
FWIW there’s actually proper scientific research that indicates that depressed people are better at correctly identifying sadness in people’s faces in photos.
Depressed people also make more correct predictions of negative outcomes.
The rest is less clear (there’s not strong evidence that experience of depression makes it easier to assess in others).
Depression can either heighten or weaken empathy, and depressed people project their own feelings at least as easily as the non-depressed.
But IMO the sad faces research alone should be enough to dislodge your “absolutely”. It is at least complicated.
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
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.
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 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.
WP Engine didn't make ACF, they acquired the company who 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The cottage industry that's sprung up around pathologizing ordinary human behavior as 'mental illness' might be endangered if you started querying statements like "Over 50% of adults have ADHD". While it may seem insane to call a majority of the human race mentally ill, that's because you're not trained, and do not understand, and may in fact be some kind of dangerous white supremacist far right conspiracy insurrectionist. Take your conspiracies elsewhere. Take your Ambien.
Let the grown ups worry about who is and is not mentally ill. If this concerns you, talk to your doctor about getting started on oxycontin.
Matt is clearly unwell. But this wider socio-economic context is why you're not allowed to observe this.
> Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill?
Because it's financially beneficial for most of the medical industry to get to define mental health in a way that maximizes drug sales. It would be highly inconvenient if you noticed that all the mental health resources are devoted to suburban moms with <strike>money</strike> ADHD and anxiety disorders, and literally none to helping the psychotic people living on inner city sidewalks. Ergo, the priesthood gets to define what mental health looks like, and not you. And as always, money shapes popular opinion ('what kind of ADHD do you have? A New York Times special series').
Foucault called this all in the 1970s, but he was too gay, so no one listened.
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.
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.
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're seeing in an individual who has not disclosed any diagnosis and then associating it with 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 regularly 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 he is so clearly dysregulated now.
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.
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 health.
I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance".
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.
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.
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’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 would have gone differently.
Like I say and I am gratified you've observed me saying: I think Matt did really big things and I think in the wider WP community we all benefitted enormously from him as a sort of avatar — someone who was prepared to be unabashedly proud of WP and everything around it, someone who had the absolute right to be proud of his achievements and to defend them, someone who the world could take seriously, someone who balanced GPL and product finely and fairly for the longest time and guided others to do so.
It is difficult to do that over such a long period of time without the incoming slings and arrows becoming personalised.
I think things have so gone badly wrong for him and what I wish for him is that he sees it and takes some time. I hope he understands it is OK to step back, to stop over-supplying energy, etc., and that there is a future where all of this shit will be water under the bridge. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to see.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 unsuitable 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
" 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’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 a little.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Anyone mind recapping the events that led to this? I only know vague things, like "Matt has been making Wordpress look very bad." I also heard of a subreddit that was created to highlight it, though I forget the name. This was a year or two ago.
I recognized the name but don't know much about the personality. Evidently, judging from many comments here, there is one. I was frankly struck by the depth of the corduroy on that jacket. At first glance I thought it was pinstripes but in profile it is obviously corduroy. Almost security blanket depth. It takes a different personality to don those duds.
299 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
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, 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 wrongly over a long period of time.
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.
But I do think this was overdue, for everyone including Matt, even though he 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 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.
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 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 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.
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".
I have spent my life being kind, a good friend with good friends, being professional, trying to be diligent, not billing too much, trying to deliver on promises, offering help at no cost, taking part in people's passion projects, doing the best work I can, not letting other people make mistakes that will cost them, even at a cost to myself.
At the depths of my burnout I was so "unglued" that I was rude to people in ways I don't recognise, shouty, quick-tempered, unreliable, unpredictable and self-sabotaging, determined to get people to hate me and make choices about me just so I had something to react to because otherwise I wanted everything to stop.
After a period of rest I have regained enough perspective to start rebuilding my life and I am back to who I was in some ways, different in others.
If you'd only had to deal with me in the middle of that, "unprofessional douchebag" is what you'd have thought of me. I wouldn't have cared. (I know several people do think this of me, because that's the only version of me that they know)
His behaviour reads a lot like mine, just in a much more public way.
It doesn't make any of it appropriate, of course. But try not to fall victim to fundamental attribution error.
(Parody of a famous quote about "unreasonable man".)
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists[1]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26107/pg26107-images.ht...
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.
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.
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...
Why is this necessary?!
Oh, I flagged his crap. I don't think Matt is worth engaging with–he has a rage audience for his meltdowns on X in any case.
I think your comment was stronger without the personal insult. So I engaged.
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.
It's rude but...the Steve Jobs self-insert stage entrance is straight out of The Onion.
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.
In my case, I'll take Woz over Jobs any day. Steve Jobs is not my hero.
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!
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.
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?
Depressed people also make more correct predictions of negative outcomes.
The rest is less clear (there’s not strong evidence that experience of depression makes it easier to assess in others).
Depression can either heighten or weaken empathy, and depressed people project their own feelings at least as easily as the non-depressed.
But IMO the sad faces research alone should be enough to dislodge your “absolutely”. It is at least complicated.
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.)
But thank you for your thoughtful input or whatever.
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
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.
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.
Now I have no idea which metaphorical box to sort him into because I am not sure why I should be shocked.
The speed with which Matt hijacked that plugin was one of the funniest parts of this saga. All while complaining they don’t contribute!
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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 lulu!"
(of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)
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.
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'
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.
The cottage industry that's sprung up around pathologizing ordinary human behavior as 'mental illness' might be endangered if you started querying statements like "Over 50% of adults have ADHD". While it may seem insane to call a majority of the human race mentally ill, that's because you're not trained, and do not understand, and may in fact be some kind of dangerous white supremacist far right conspiracy insurrectionist. Take your conspiracies elsewhere. Take your Ambien.
Let the grown ups worry about who is and is not mentally ill. If this concerns you, talk to your doctor about getting started on oxycontin.
Matt is clearly unwell. But this wider socio-economic context is why you're not allowed to observe this.
Because it's financially beneficial for most of the medical industry to get to define mental health in a way that maximizes drug sales. It would be highly inconvenient if you noticed that all the mental health resources are devoted to suburban moms with <strike>money</strike> ADHD and anxiety disorders, and literally none to helping the psychotic people living on inner city sidewalks. Ergo, the priesthood gets to define what mental health looks like, and not you. And as always, money shapes popular opinion ('what kind of ADHD do you have? A New York Times special series').
Foucault called this all in the 1970s, but he was too gay, so no one listened.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/07-08/upfront-destigmatizin...
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-disc...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6999022/
this bloviating about free speech when all anybody is asking you to do is to not be an asshole is so overwrought and childish
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.
"I don't really know if this person is mentally ill, I need an expert to come here and apply the DSM-V"?
Also, the DSM-V is not even used for those things ...
Our brain is designed through evolution to slap labels, aka engage in hasty generalisation. The world is much more complex than that.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41449521/
But nice try with the throwaway account and everything. 8/10, pal.
Nice try dismissing something someone said for invalid reasons, "pal".
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?
NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder
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.
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.
That's fair if the target is someone you know and interact with personally. Lazy armchair diagnoses from internet posts is something entirely different.
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?
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.
He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he regularly 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 he is so clearly dysregulated now.
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.
He is unwell, I think, and I hope he gets better.
Probably a good move to move on with someone else that doesn't need to get microdosis at burning man yearly to get ideas.
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 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 health.
I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance".
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it would have gone differently.
Like I say and I am gratified you've observed me saying: I think Matt did really big things and I think in the wider WP community we all benefitted enormously from him as a sort of avatar — someone who was prepared to be unabashedly proud of WP and everything around it, someone who had the absolute right to be proud of his achievements and to defend them, someone who the world could take seriously, someone who balanced GPL and product finely and fairly for the longest time and guided others to do so.
It is difficult to do that over such a long period of time without the incoming slings and arrows becoming personalised.
I think things have so gone badly wrong for him and what I wish for him is that he sees it and takes some time. I hope he understands it is OK to step back, to stop over-supplying energy, etc., and that there is a future where all of this shit will be water under the bridge. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to see.
> 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.
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.
[0] https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt#102-wp-engine-fi...
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.
You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
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 unsuitable 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.
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.
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.
That’s not to pass comment either way on Mullenweg
It’s just WordPress folk are nuts.
What is wrong with these people?
In the mean time, if you're unable to derisk Mullenweg out of your business stack, this is a good first step.
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.
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.
Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
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 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.
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.
https://www.classicpress.net/
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.
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 ;)
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.
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.
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.
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.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
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.
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?
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.
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 "
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?
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.
Since when was Automatic a public listed company?
https://www.dandodiary.com/2023/10/articles/securities-enfor...
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).
[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...
If you've ever used Woocommerce, the one thing you want to do is stop using Woocommerce.
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.
It's a reasonable hypothesis. Saying it's "probable" is nuts.
Here is Matt talking about his control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657150
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.
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.)
But seriously if I had to recommend something, not escalating seems best for everyone involved.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Real austin powers vibes
> He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.
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.
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).