Recently the head of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was complaining about the time and energy he was having to expend on the project. If this wasn’t performative, you would reasonably expect that he would hand off work to others. One place that could happen is with the Release Lead role for next release of WordPress. That role is supposed to be the “community member ultimately responsible for” a release of WordPress. But in reality, going back through the last 15 releases, he had that role 12 times. Two employees of his company, Automattic, handled the other two. On Friday afternoon, though, it was announced that he again would be taking on that role.

From a security perspective, having a new release lead would be an opportunity for someone who might allow known security issues with WordPress and fairly easy to implement security improvements to finally be implemented. That unfortunately hasn’t been of interest to Matt Mullenweg and those other Automattic employees. Hopefully, not because of the business interest in Automattic selling security solutions. [Read more]

In a post yesterday, we covered that those in charge of WordPress didn’t know how people could appeal being banned from WordPress. That came during a question and answer stream with the new Executive Director of WordPress.org, who wasn’t selected by the community, but is instead was hired by Matt Mullenweg’s company Automattic to have that role. Similarly, the previous person in that role (under the title Executive Director of WordPress) was an Automattic employee in charge of their team that was involved in WordPress. The new Executive Director had so little involvement with WordPress before being named to the role that her account on the website was created the same day she was announced for the role.  Matt Mullenweg didn’t acknowledge their employment with Automattic when announcing them in that role. WordPress is far from a meritocracy.

In a recent article on the “culture of fear” inside WordPress, the banning of community members was mentioned several times, including in this paragraph: [Read more]

Recently the new Executive of WordPress.org Mary Hubbard did a question and answer Zoom stream with Matt Mullenweg. WordPress focused news outlets covered this in a rather unquestioning way (no surprise, considering the general lack of journalism from them). Watching it, a question and the lack of an answer stood out that wasn’t covered by those news outlets. Mary Hubbard read this question (at the 30 minute mark of the stream):

I would love to see WordPress and A8C [Automattic] make a move towards more professional communication. Those are rough edges, like Otto and Felipe that sometimes come off as too aggressive of community members. Do you plan on recruiting volunteers with communication experience? [Read more]

As time has gone on, a central element of Matt Mullenweg’s story of how he got to publicly attacking WP Engine has continued to crumble. That is the timeline of meetings between the two sides over a deal to address what he now claims is trademark abuse. In a post dated October 14, on his own website, he claimed, as he has elsewhere, this was going on for 18+ months, ‘Automattic did not work on a deal with WP Engine for 18+ months because of the GPL, or them using “WP” in their name, it was because of their abuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.’ But looking at another of his statements and something from the company he runs, Automattic, suggests there would have to be a much shorter timeline.

On October 1, Automattic put forward a 20 month timeline of meetings between the two sides. Here the first three items on that: [Read more]