When Benevolence Fades

It looked like the WordPress mess had a period of relative calm for a few days, but now it’s stormy once again.

And honestly, I can’t help but feel like it’s only gotten uglier and harder to defend. WordPress and its parent company, Automattic, are still fighting with WP Engine, and it hasn’t gotten any nicer.

The story can best be observed around the arc of Theo Browne, perhaps the most prominent developer voice in the YouTube ecosystem. (Apologies to ThePrimeagen, who is also quite good.) Primarily a TypeScript coder, Browne doesn’t usually delve in the realm of PHP, but he felt the need to report on the conflict this past week in a video titled “This might be the end of WordPress.” The video drew a bunch of attention, and leaned pretty strongly against Matt Mullenweg for many of the reasons we covered previously.

But Mullenweg, looking to gain a firm grasp on a narrative he was very publicly losing, decided to reach out to Browne in response to the incident, which led to a nearly two-hour in-person interview in which Browne showed serious chops as a journalist, asking tough questions and holding his source’s feet to the fire—while allowing Mullenweg the opportunity to humanize himself to an audience of devs. (Plus, there was a cat in the room, which seemed to defuse any bad vibes.) Browne did a great job, but it seemed like both of them made some concessions.

But those concessions ran into the reality of the lawsuit that WP Engine filed against Automattic and Mullenweg on Tuesday. It’s a doozy of a document, one that suggested, among other things:

• Mullenweg misled the public on who actually owned WordPress.org. For years, the belief was that it was owned by the WordPress Foundation, but in recent comments, he made it clear that he, personally owned the domain and its services and was making it available to users.
• Mullenweg made a wide variety of false claims about WP Engine in public settings, including to both Theo and ThePrimeagen.
• Mullenweg attempted to pressure the CEO of WP Engine to jump ship to Automattic, and threatened to make it publicly known that she had interviewed with Automattic.
• Mullenweg’s ultimate goal was to get WP Engine customers to jump ship, so he could acquire the business at a discount.

It’s … a lot. And Mullenweg is straight-up posting through it on Hacker News and other platforms, which, hilariously, led to an actual lawyer telling him, in the comments, to shut up for his own good. We’re well past that point. He’s airing this out in public, whether we like it or not.

In FOSS circles, There’s this concept of the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), a.k.a. the lead of an open-source project. Basically, the person who came up with or built out the idea ultimately had final say over how the project goes, but they’re not being a jerk about it. People accept what they do with it. After all, they’re often working on it for free or getting paid indirectly.

For years, Mullenweg fit this mold, and his community blossomed, becoming one of the most dominant forces in publishing—in any medium. To highlight this point: Vox Media gave up on using its proprietary Chorus CMS, which was long seen as a strategic advantage over other publishing companies, in favor of using WordPress on sites like The Verge and Vox.

The second the veneer of benevolence dropped, though, the whole thing started falling apart. In his most recent video, recorded in the middle of the night out of necessity, Browne basically set aside any warm vibes their weekend interview exposed and laid it out straight to his interview subject:

I know you’re watching this, Matt. I know I’m going to wake up to a barrage of texts, and I’m sorry, but you fucked up here, man. Like, this is really bad, and this is going to have consequences, and I don’t know how you dig your way out of this one.

(Seriously, Theo is so good at this. You should follow him.)

There are rumblings happening behind the scenes, too. Whispers of a mass-buyout at Automattic have been floating around some corners of the internet in recent days. (I’m not trying to get folks fired, so I’ll skip linking, but making it clear I have heard it from multiple sources.) There are suggestions that dozens of employees, a larger number than you might expect, are voluntarily leaving, taking a generous severance, in protest of Mullenweg’s actions over the past two weeks.

When a dictator stops being benevolent, people start looking for the exits.

And not just employees, either. I am honestly worried that the WordPress drama is going to seriously harm open source, overall, in the enterprise. Like, a $2 billion company does not want to find out that their most important communications medium is suddenly in danger of going offline because someone deep in the ecosystem couldn’t work out his differences with a competitor.

If I was a BDFL running a prominent FOSS project, I would take steps right now to structurally protect the organization from my own decision-making.