npub16l…jvcy8 on Nostr: So, why anyone is doing something to stop Matt Mullenweg to keep pulling crazy stunts ...
So, why anyone is doing something to stop Matt Mullenweg to keep pulling crazy stunts in his conflict with WP-Engine, you may ask?
Let me lay the players out to you. Matt leads two different organizations:
The WordPress foundation: A non-profit in charge of fostering all the assets of WordPress, the GPL open source project, receiving donations to maintain everything, organizing events, etc. It owns the WordPress trademark.
Automattic: his for-profit business, with several business lines, but the most important of them all being WordPress.com, a for-profit web host, the only one in the world that gets to use "wordpress" in its domain name, because the foundation has ceded the trademark use to this company.
Both organizations have a board who is supposed to watch over the CEO. But.
In the case of automattic, Matt controls 84% of the shares with voting rights. That means that even if the entire board is against him, he could just vote them out and put someone else in their place. Their only real power would be to complain loudly, or to walk out publicly. But they have no way to actually check his behavior out.
In the case of the WordPress foundation, the board is composed by three members:
Matt himself
Mark Ghosh, who used to have a news site focused on WordPress abandoned a decade ago and that, according to linked in, hasn't been involved in WordPress at all since then. Actually, the only mention of WordPress in his linkedin is being a "member" of the WordPress foundation with no mention of having one of the three board chairs.
Chele Farley, a republican party politician, who doesn't have any kind of connection with WordPress (or even the tech industry) and that she even mention the WordPress foundation in her linkedin.
All the work in the foundation is handled by Automattic employees, the only people with signing power over the bank accounts of the foundation are automattic employees (or Matt himself of course), etc.
So, as you can figure, Matt control over the WordPress project is absolute and unchecked. No one could force him out, neither from his unicorn SV company, nor from the foundation that controls the software powering 43% of the web.
Nice uh?
Let me lay the players out to you. Matt leads two different organizations:
The WordPress foundation: A non-profit in charge of fostering all the assets of WordPress, the GPL open source project, receiving donations to maintain everything, organizing events, etc. It owns the WordPress trademark.
Automattic: his for-profit business, with several business lines, but the most important of them all being WordPress.com, a for-profit web host, the only one in the world that gets to use "wordpress" in its domain name, because the foundation has ceded the trademark use to this company.
Both organizations have a board who is supposed to watch over the CEO. But.
In the case of automattic, Matt controls 84% of the shares with voting rights. That means that even if the entire board is against him, he could just vote them out and put someone else in their place. Their only real power would be to complain loudly, or to walk out publicly. But they have no way to actually check his behavior out.
In the case of the WordPress foundation, the board is composed by three members:
Matt himself
Mark Ghosh, who used to have a news site focused on WordPress abandoned a decade ago and that, according to linked in, hasn't been involved in WordPress at all since then. Actually, the only mention of WordPress in his linkedin is being a "member" of the WordPress foundation with no mention of having one of the three board chairs.
Chele Farley, a republican party politician, who doesn't have any kind of connection with WordPress (or even the tech industry) and that she even mention the WordPress foundation in her linkedin.
All the work in the foundation is handled by Automattic employees, the only people with signing power over the bank accounts of the foundation are automattic employees (or Matt himself of course), etc.
So, as you can figure, Matt control over the WordPress project is absolute and unchecked. No one could force him out, neither from his unicorn SV company, nor from the foundation that controls the software powering 43% of the web.
Nice uh?