WordPress, drama, leadership, and the web

October 18, 2024

The WordPress saga continues. Theo Browne has a great video overview of things up to October 14. Since I last wrote about this there was more back-and-forth between David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Matt Mullenweg. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan of DHH, but I agree with his takes on this situation. On October 13, DHH commented on the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) hijacking. Mullenweg then responded but deleted the post. Mullenweg put a new post up at the same URL which offered a modicum of contrition, but was still doubling down on his actions. DHH then responded with a thoughtful rebuke that didn’t mention Mullenweg at all.

This all felt like messy drama that didn’t deserve much attention. I was busy, and the whole thing felt so draining. Mullenweg was still on the same path, so I tried to ignore it… but then a bunch of stuff happened yesterday.

First off, I saw 404 Media reporting on two main items: that Mullenweg was offering a second “alignment offer”, and that he was personally redirecting registration emails for the anonymous chat app, Blind, to his personal email address. The alignment offer is rather generous, but employees had until the end of the day to accept it. The email redirections for signups to Blind apparently started in July.

The first alignment offer happened on October 4, and 159 are reported to have taken the deal. Based on 404 Media’s reporting, the second offer is provides 9 months of severance — up from 6 in the previous offer. Mullenweg reportedly offered the second round because people “have been leaking to the press and ex-employees”. 404 reports that that there’s a “culture of paranoia and fear” among some who remained at Automattic but who still disagreed with Mullenweg. The whole piece is really worth a read, and you can sign up for free to do so. As an aside, I’m consistently impressed with the reporting from 404.

The second thing I saw yesterday was this Mastodon post from Scott Kingsley Clark. Clark is the lead developer of the Pods Framework — a WordPress plugin similar to ACF. He mentioned that his access to WordPress.org was revoked without warning, and that he is no longer able to access the WordPress Slack instance. Clark had been critical of Mullenweg’s actions. He had mentioned that he was stopping his contributions to WordPress Core, but that he still believed in the community and wanted to continue working on Pods. Clark joins many others who have complained about losing access to WordPress.org and Slack after criticizing Mullenweg.

All of this is rotten. I swear to you, I’m not some drama llama. I find this situation draining and depressing. I’m not a huge fan of WordPress, but that’s mostly because I disagree with some technical and architectural decisions the platform makes. WordPress powers a large chunk of the web, and I desperately want the open web to thrive.

I think Open Source, as a concept, is a wonderful thing. It’s also made up of people, and people are messy. Mullenweg has made many choices over the past month that I strongly disagree with. He’s also perfectly within his right to do them all based on his position as leader of WordPress.org and Automattic. But that’s not the point. The point is: the community disagrees with his actions as a leader. Instead of taking that into account and reviewing his actions, he’s doubled down again and again.

I feel like Mullenweg let the mask drop a bit in his now-deleted response to DHH:

DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.

Aside from being some grade-A dick-measuring, he’s shown that he thinks less of people who’ve let others profit too much from “their” value. I can’t think of a sleazier thing for the leader of prominent open source software to believe. You can say it’s about trademarks or about “not giving back” — though I’ve written about why I don’t think either excuse makes sense to me — but this isn’t Mullenweg’s “value” to protect. It belongs to a community now, and that community is largely showing that it thinks Mullenweg is on the wrong path. That he doesn’t realize it is terrible leadership.

To combat this, Mullenweg has decided to surround himself solely with yes-people. If you work for him and disagree with his actions, he offers a severance package. If you’re contributing to WordPress.org and criticize him, you may have your access revoked. If you’re talking about him behind his back on Blind, he’ll know about it. These actions look petty and thin-skinned.

WordPress powers a massive amount of the web. W3Techs estimates it as over 43%. When you’re leading something this big, your weird drama is more than a cue to grab the popcorn. It’s making people doubt the stability of something that previously looked like the obvious answer. Maybe WP Engine should be giving more back, I don’t know. But there’s nothing in the WordPress license to that effect. Similarly — as I’ve written before — the trademark complaint seems to be a sudden change in policy as well. Demanding 8% of someone’s revenue is an insane remedy for these grievances. Also, that 8% isn’t going to the community, it’s going to Mullenweg.

And if this can happen to WP Engine, who will it happen to next? I assume it will be whoever else Mullenweg thinks is capturing too much of “his” value. But even if it never happens again, the damage has been done. Mullenweg has shown the world the sort of leader he is. When this sort of leadership is in charge of something this important to the web, it’s not just drama. It affects people and it makes the web worse.