> He really hasn't advocated for much

Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.

WordPress is still GPL licensed.

I don't know... WordPress is a pretty huge open source project and community. He also opened Pocket Casts.

Relevant: Kumail Nanjiani learns about Automattic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcrispG_rc

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

Someone made the same comment in the thread from a few days back. Yeah, it was the first time I realized it as well.

At least his egotrips make a bit more sense after you realise it.

It feels like I see this comment in every single Automattic thread on HN. :)

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.

From yesterday (or two days ago?):

> 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.”

True to form, he has already been on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt) and Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=photomatt) to engage in comment wars.

Ironic how hard he tries to seem like a man of a people and then posts about his million-dollar toys he buys from celebrities like John Mayer. Dude is the definition of out of touch.

It's easily the quote of the month. And we are only halfway into the month.

Not a good investment.

Anyone who wanted to get on with their jobs would have taken one of the buyouts. Everyone who still works there has to be committed to Matt.

Time for alternatives?

Makes me wonder if he really is back or the board just "forgot" to take his account offline

It left a temporary spot in my vision after I scrolled it away.

I remember seeing that on his avatar since the early days of the WP Engine drama.

What does that mean? Why is it a surprise?

The ability to appoint a board member doesn't mean you get to control their every decision. Nor is their fiduciary duty just one shareholder.

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.

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.

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. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.

He controls roughly 84% of the share-stakeholder votes.

Shares. Boards have a lot of power but end of the day the shareholders can remove the board so have the ultimate veto

you'd think that but at least one CEO has turned being an annoying diva into being the richest man in the world

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.

It's all the same situation. https://mullenweg.wtf/

Day One was acquired by Automattic in 2021 [1]. The move to a subscription model happened in 2017 [2].

[1]https://dayoneapp.com/blog/the-next-chapter-of-day-one-at-au...

[2] https://medium.com/day-one/day-one-goes-premium-424492fd0a5b

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.

WP is GPL, just fork it.

No different than how the Cabinet of the United States operates.

Probably has an HDR layer, kind of surprised social networks let that happen since it's really annoying imo. There was a discussion about it here a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402521.