If you followed his months of mad ravings, he made it clear that Wordpress is not a true open source project. He has direct control over the project via Automattic appointments in the community, everything is designed to route through his circuitous network of shell corporations and trademarks (wordpress.org is fully under his control and he personally owns the Wordpress trademark - which the "project" licenses from him).
The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
Has very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.
That’s fast! It usually takes me decades, if ever, to figure out this stuff. One of the downsides being slightly autistic and taking everything too literal
Not sure if it makes me autistic though, I mean, companies use wrong spellings all the time to differentiate, so often that I don't give much thought to it any more.
It has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.
Y combinator helped people notice it when they invested in a company called Automatic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/automatic However now that it's been acquired that reminder of Automattic not being named Automatic is gone.
Just when we (the WP community) thought things were settling down and cooler heads might be prevailing... this happens. Uhg, not great for someone who has invested over 15 years into building with WP and does (paid) business with an Automattic company.
Changing jobs can be rough or maybe even impossible in this job market. I'm sure there are many there that are not aligned with Matt, but just need the steady paycheck. Same was true after Elon took over twitter.
> Also, if you're just there for a paycheck, you're probably not that upset at distractions.
Not true, I've worked jobs where I was there for the paycheck, I'd still prefer that it be a stable working and environment and still wanted to do good work.
I'm happier when work doesn't expect me to be "part of the vision" or "part of the family", treat me with respect, I'll treat you with respect and do good work - that's all it needs to be.
Applying the word "impossible" to leaving a white collar job seems like a stretch. Also the buyout was almost 2 years ago now, anyone still there must be either in dire financial straits or quite commited.
That's until you find yourself in this job market and you realize now how stupid the digital creation job market and overall jobs are. Once you get laid you are now you're in a pile of 100(edit 1000s) other applicants equally qualified vying for the same job and then hundreds of thousands who can all type to Ai to do a job that once required knowledge & skill.
Or they need the pay. It's all well and good to go "they could just leave" but then what? Spend 6 months looking for a new job only for everyone to go "sorry, the hundreds of thousands of layoffs from every other highly skilled tech workforce beat you to it"?
What is it about Automattic's structure that lets Matt stay in control? Even Travis got ousted at Uber, and he was the primary founder. Is the company set up in a way that makes removing Matt very difficult?
Don’t underestimate Matt’s disregard for corporate theatre. A board voting to remove a CEO isn’t like firing an employee, there’s an assumption that obviously the founder would not use their elevated access to retaliate. As noted, Matt controls the majority of the voting stock, but he also controls WordPress as a whole. Removing the founder who controls everything against their wishes is basically impossible. Even if removing his access to Automattic’s corporate systems was possible, it takes one “I’ll revoke Automattic’s license to use the WordPress.com domain” to convince the board to blink and Matt is back. Mutually assured destruction. The board probably underestimated just how petty Matt is.
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care.
I really hate this company and how they operate. Key example, they sold a «lifetime» plan for Day One that was quite expensive. I used it a lot and went for it.
After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying.
Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying.
Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating.
Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
Depends on the rules of the company. Just because he can elect the board doesn't mean he gets to direct their every decision. They are supposed to have their own independent judgement.
Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
What relevance will WP have now that AI can build websites?
I see more and more vertical SaaS vendors bundling website migration/building/hosting in their offering. I suspect they may steel away many customers from WP, Wix and competitors.
What do you think?
Wordpress' security track record isn't great, but I'm worried whether it would be safer if everybody builds their own CMS using AI. Yes, as a general-purpose CMS it has more attack surface, but there are more people working to harden and fix it than for all the little diverse AI-generated sites.
I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
One challenge is that if everyone uses AI to build their own websites, the security vulnerabilities will be different per site, which is very inconvenient if you want to compromise a huge number of sites simultaneously. It's possible that AI tools for exploiting websites scale to overcome this challenge, but it's going to be hard for AI to compete with Wordpress for security vulnerability density, uniformity, and cost.
Sure but a SaaS vendor already handle security for their own products which are typically dynamic website apps. I agree security is a concern for clients doing it themselves.
Davies was supposedly the one who originally cooked up the whole extortion scheme against major players in the WP space. WPE was just the first target of many that were planned. Not that Matt is absolved in any way, but it'll be interesting to see what falls out if and when he throws Davies under the bus.
That'd be the first time I hear about that angle. Mullenweg was pretty public about why he was doing it and it never felt like it was someone else's idea, given his level of commitment. It would be smart to find a scapegoat if you want to stretch your tenure a few years though.
Directus is great. And free for small organizations and non-profits.
Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.
WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.
It would have been just a matter of time before he displayed his power with the nonprofit and wordpress.com which he controls personally, independently of the Automattic board. Maybe that is part of why the board gave him his control of Automattic back so quickly.
This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.
The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
Either that or he somehow has control over IT and is just shit posting and controlling Slack.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
Not sure if it makes me autistic though, I mean, companies use wrong spellings all the time to differentiate, so often that I don't give much thought to it any more.
I'm sure there are people who are stuck and have a house payment, but it was pretty obvious the shenanigans were only going to get worse.
Also, if you're just there for a paycheck, you're probably not that upset at distractions.
Not true, I've worked jobs where I was there for the paycheck, I'd still prefer that it be a stable working and environment and still wanted to do good work.
I'm happier when work doesn't expect me to be "part of the vision" or "part of the family", treat me with respect, I'll treat you with respect and do good work - that's all it needs to be.
My feelings are not "boy I wish I could get back at that grindstone". It's "this is the ride I signed up for"
I'm assuming there should be an "off" after "laid"...
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care.
After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying.
Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying.
Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating.
Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
Of course usually hand-picked boards don't go against their benefactor, and they're not keeping their seats.
That they did in this case says something about just how bad the situation must be.
Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
> As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said.
mhm, ok.
Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.
WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.