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Posted by LeoPanthera 12 hours ago

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence(techcrunch.com)
328 points | 216 commentspage 5
0xDEADBEEFCAFE 14 hours ago|
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.
mission_dolores 13 hours ago||
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

minimaxir 14 hours ago||
The entire saga started due to WP Engine "forking" WordPress.
0xDEADBEEFCAFE 14 hours ago|||
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..
garbagepatch 8 hours ago|||
Matt, you shouldn't have picked a FLOSS license if you didn't intend for the software to be FLOSS in the first place.
nixosbestos 14 hours ago|||
Matt, ... just log out and take a break.
kmeisthax 13 hours ago|||
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.

qarl 13 hours ago||
If the board is going behind his back... then how does he know he was put on leave?
echoangle 14 hours ago|
> Most recently, Automattic attempted to claim it owns the word “automatic.”

Real austin powers vibes

> He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark.

variaga 14 hours ago||
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.

ifahimreza 14 hours ago||
they own automatic.com right?