Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

But moreover: I guess there's a presumption, whether fair or not, that well-paid executives overseen by wealthy boards of directors are pre-vetted and act in good faith, whether or not those actions pan out and make money; versus robbery or violent crime that people recoil from, that assumption of good faith isn't there, because it's self-evident to ordinary people that there is no justification for such actions.

I think if we are just looking at the media:

Most journalists wouldn't consider some nobody stealing $20 to be newsworthy in itself.

Most corporate scandals receive extensive media coverage. Even a CEO who was merely incompetent instead of corrupt, is still likely to get some bad press.

Now, you are completely right that the non-media consequences are very different – significant chance of criminal record (although in many jurisdictions, there are mechanisms which first-time offenders on minor charges can use to escape getting one) vs a multi-million dollar severance payment.

The issue with "golden parachutes" – if someone's employment contract creates an entitlement to a severance payment (and in some jurisdictions employment law creates one even if the contract itself doesn't) – then you generally have to pay them unless you terminate for "misconduct" (often even "serious misconduct"). The problem with terminating for "misconduct", is it creates a big incentive for the terminated employee to sue to try to get the severance payment they'd otherwise receive, and the larger the payment, the bigger the motivation – which creates an expensive legal and PR headache. The PR issue is especially acute for senior executives–a junior employee suing over a severance dispute will get a lot less media coverage than a former CEO doing it. So, unless the conduct was extremely egregious, there is a strong incentive for the employer/board to just pay the severance out and make the legal and PR headache go away.

Getting pushed out of a position is very career damaging at the executive level. Those golden parachutes are pretty rare, too. Most of the executives I know from companies you haven't heard of (and some that you maybe have) who were pushed out took a huge hit to their careers after that. The best play is to start calling up executive recruiters and try to get any job as soon as possible once the writing is on the wall that you're being fired.

And come on, stealing $20 doesn't register these days.

There are, to me, abundant signs that he is severely burned out, dysregulated and irrational.

(In this statement, in other statements, in his actions that wilfully worsened his own case against WP Engine, in his blog posts etc.)

These are mental health issues. I have experienced many of them myself (I am indeed recovering from them now) and do not know what else you could possibly call them.

He is very evidently experiencing continuing poor mental health. I don't know why the board would say "leave of absence" if they were not themselves alluding to his health. He clearly needs a break from the thing he does for his own benefit.

I absolutely wish him well and hope he steps back and takes care of himself for a while; none of this is worth worse health.

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

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

What do you call it when tamer words are more impactful? Example: I've found "Dum-dums" > "stupid idiots". Is it because they're less triggering for emotional responses to the words themselves?

It is super-HN to inflate something and then object to the inflated fabrication, and to throw stones while living in a glass house.

He is making severely self-sabotaging actions that appear to be designed to force clarity through extreme choices, he now writes emotionally in a way that seems desperate and polarising. These are the signs of a man in crisis.

No doubt he has always been a bit of an arrogant arsehole (nothing unusual in that) but mental illness is not just big splashy stuff like psychosis or full on breakdowns.

Burnout at this point is not just some occupational health thing, it’s more like a chronic disorder.

I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue).

I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.

"His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.

This is a reasonable hair to split, I agree with you and I think it might have gone differently (though "mentally" itself will trigger people, and there is a lot of certainty that he must be a particular arsehole simply because of the history of WordPress, or Gutenberg, or whatever it was that coloured their judgement).

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.

Unfortunately.

Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?

Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.

Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.

But, to be honest, I am not too well versed in the drama. IIRC it started because someone was building something on top of WP but was basically reselling something that was already free without contributing back? Maybe I'm mixing things up and I should really hit the sack.

Nevertheless, my concern lies mostly with the overall security of the platform, as I can imagine serious financial interests (and geological ones, too) might take the time to push out someone that knows the platform inside out.

> He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.

It was actually a pretty nice offer. iirc it was a pretty decent severance, no questions asked.

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.

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.)

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.

Since when was Automatic a public listed company?

https://www.dandodiary.com/2023/10/articles/securities-enfor...

If you've ever used Woocommerce, the one thing you want to do is stop using Woocommerce.

It's a reasonable hypothesis. Saying it's "probable" is nuts.

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.