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

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

#311
post #35
post #2

> “And the biggest news: I won't be able to make the ELT tomorrow,” Matt wrote in an Announcement Slack. He continued, writing that Mark Davies, current Automattic Chief Financial Officer, has “conspired” with Automattic Board of Directors members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker “behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that.” If you’re doing this type of accusa…

He is surely very evidently mentally ill. This is a man who, to be fair to him, has been beneficially bullish and iconoclastic in the WP community's favour for decades, as well as writing a big chunk of what was "early modern" WP. Before he came unglued. The fact that he looked, sounded, talked the way he did, was involved, put his own money where his mouth is, and was press-available to the extent he was is a lot of…

I’ve upvoted your comments in this thread because what you’re saying seems obvious to me. You’re also being empathetic and respectful to the man while crediting his legacy and all the work he has done in his past.

I wonder if the people objecting to your statement would object as strenuously had you had phrased it as “evidently mentally unwell”. The word “ill” seems to have triggered people into reading more into it than what was actually said. If a stranger sees me violently coughing and sneezing in public, they would be correct to say that I’m evidently physically ill. They’re not trying to diagnose whether the illness is a common cold, Influenza A, Covid-19 or any other respiratory disease.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CMS that can only run on one hosting provider?

It can be deployed to a node.js server with sqlite https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/nodejs/ Not as simple as wp, but not tied to one hosting provider.

The whole USP for emdash is sandboxed plugins. Sandboxed plugins only work in Cloudflare.

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

#313
post #271
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He is surely very evidently mentally ill. I agree and upvoted your post. But can I just say that it is super-reddit to diagnose someone based on your B- undergrad psych classes. We should go back to the classics like "he went off his rocker!", or "he's totally unhinged!" or "completely delulu!" (of course the people who know, know, and they shouldn't tell you.)

They did not in fact diagnose anything, "mental illness" is not a specific condition in the DSM. You'd have a valid point if they confidently stated he had bipolar disorder or something.

Yes, buy NPD *is* in the DSM. While I'm not a mental health professional (read: I can't diagnose with any authority), I would still say that Mullenweg consistenly exhubits many / most of the symptoms of classic NPD.

NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's different types of mental illness. For example, don't you think a person with depression would be better at diagnosing depression in others, than someone who has never experienced it?

No, absolutely not.

An experienced runner can almost always tell if another person is an experienced runner by watching them run or hearing them talk about the activity. Same for a mathematician, or a car mechanic, or a software engineer. I don't see why the experience of mental illness would be different from every other kind of experience.

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

#316
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?

Open to correction here, but I understand it to be like this: the kernel of the contention is about the use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, not the software itself. Essentially, WP Engine is a commercial entity profiting from the use of the trademark. Regardless of how it has been handled, it does not seem to be a frivolous claim.

They were using the trademark on the website to describe WordPress the software project under nomitative fair use in the same way many, many hosting providers have been doing for decades. He openly admitted in online comments to trying (and failing) to extort their CEO in private to give Automattic huge payments, and if they declined that he'd destroy their valuation by cutting off their access and buy them for pennies on the dollar. Among other threats leading up to the lawsuit, which taken together made it look like a blatantly selective punitive measure for cynical reasons.

It doesn't help that the word "Wordpress" is used for all sorts of different, but overlapping things: wordpress.com for his private WordPress commercial host competing with WPEngine, wordpress.org for the WordPress Foundation he also controls, WordPress describing the open source GPL licensed project.

Google makes things much simpler to avoid misusing their trademarks by splitting Chrome for their commercial product and Chromium for the open source project.

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

#317
post #314

He's really tweeting through it today: https://xcancel.com/photomatt/with_replies From a quick scan of his recent tweets, https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenwegs-messages-wen... might answer the "why now?" of this.

Thanks for this.

I try not to waste my time on WordPress drama anymore, but it's sad reading his tweets from today and thinking how someone I used to respect for supposedly being kind and generous (or just good at writing well to get what he wants) has fallen so far.

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

#318
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then, the founding fathers of the United States were all mentally ill. All of the greatest scientific minds that made breakthroughs in their field are mentally ill.

> the greatest scientific minds if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest. > founding fathers of the United States that may in fact, be the case, but chances are someone today of similar disposition would not be able to do the same.

> if one has a scientific mind, they will accept evidence which may be contrary to their personal views. If you dont, you cannot be said to have a scientific mind, let alone greatest.

Then no one has a scientific mind.

It's a spectrum, not a binary. Newton was into alchemy. Watson got into race pseudoscience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease has a nice long list.

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

#319
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness. You don't know anything about this person, and your case seems to rest on "I know because I've been through it" which assumes your experience is the same as a total stranger'…

> I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness. Goodness me. Sit and think about that for a while.

> Goodness me. Sit and think about that for a while.

You're quite right, let's think further about this.

- A person racing to meet their deadlines.

- Another sweating through a difficult meeting.

- A third using some terrible company software for the first time and feeling his blood temperature rise.

- A fourth softsoaping an angry customer over the phone when all he wants to do is tell him where to do.

By your definition, each of these types are undergoing a spasm of mental illness, since work stress is mental illness.

But then your definition is total bollocks.

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

#320
I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story.

In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.

And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.

No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.

Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!

[1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305

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