Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

“WordPress is in trouble” depends on what “WordPress” is.

WordPress the supply chain is currently dependent on wordpress.org. The community is working to route around this by decentralising distribution - see efforts such as AspirePress.

WordPress the software development project is dependent on wordpress.org, and there is no way to route around this unless Matt agrees to give up his DFL position or a fork is created.

WordPress the brand is being tarnished, mostly by Matt’s actions. wpdrama creates a riskier environment when assessing whether to use it as a CMS.

WordPress the community is being denigrated and diminished. Again, I think only a change in governance can resolve that.

Embarrassing behavior for someone that became wealthy off other peoples' open-source contributions.

Mullenweg has decided to pretty much shutdown development efforts for 6 months on WordPres? Why? Legal actions, he forced upon himself!

I cannot understand how he is the guy in charge of all of this.

Dude has gone full Elon at this point. Why hasn’t WP 86’d this guy?

That’s standard authoritarian gaslighting.

“Why did you do this thing?”

“Sir, you told us to.”

“Don’t argue with me. You’re fired”

> Hey - if this is important to you, by all means pursue this direction, but I would cut this sort of initiative too.

This was costing Matt nothing. Zero.

The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

I found it kinda silly at first, like how would WP actually contribute to a reduction in climate change. But I think at the scale that WP is deployed at (millions upon millions of sites), changing something like static output by default could contribute to a non-negligable reduction in electricity spent on hosting.

I agree in principle. It's the childish way in which it was done that's the issue for me.

LLMs use about 1000X the resources of the most poorly designed WP site. The best thing that the WP Sustainability Team can do is retask itself to higher impact problems.

"Sustainability" is a garbage buzzword that at best means money being wasted on people writing pointless reports and usually means pushing a far left agenda.

> I didn't really understand what a "WP Sustainability Team"

You still don't.

A "journalist" who won't talk to the principal of the story. Now that's bizarre behavior.

Kara Swisher is an emotional activist type of journalist and not to be taken seriously. It’s not surprising to see manufactured outrage here.

It sounds like you actually work for a living and aim to conduct your business professionally, which is probably why you don't understand all these people who aren't doing either of those things.

I don't know man, I feel like the entire planet has gone mad over the course of about 15 years. Who am I supposed to root for? The executives who throw public tantrums and behave like children? Or the activists who try to turn the company into a vehicle for whatever the latest left wing cause is?

How about someone in that organization gets back to actually building some good fucking software? Is there a connection between all the horsing around these people do and the fact that after 5+ years of development Gutenberg is still kind of a pile of crap? I feel like not so long ago in history it would have been obvious to everyone that the answer is yes, work is about actually working and producing things. But now everybody's primary job is apparently to wail on Twitter instead of putting butt in seat for 8 hours a day, writing code, and on a good day, maybe figuring out how to get a little better at it. Idk man. Whatever this world is I don't really want any part of it anymore, I want to switch to the sane timeline.

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I was more struck by the fact that the author thinks anyone would or should care what some random tech journalist thinks about something. Person has opinions, news at eleven.

> …Mullenweg threatening to physically dismantle their booth in the middle of the show

This is crazy if true.

> The website Plugin Vulnerabilities catches an interesting detail: the language related to hosting forked premium plugins on wordpress.org has been modified, starting on the same day that the ACF takeover happened.

I wonder if Matty boy saw my comment, on the post here about the ACF takeover, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, lol.

In all seriousness, I wonder if Matt has a brain tumor. His behavior has gone from merely sociopathic to outright despotic, appearing both irrational and self-destructive.

Certainly, he has single-handedly turned the entire WP ecosystem into a toxic cesspool. I feel sorry for everyone that he seems to have threatened, bullied, or outright extorted. Anyone aware of these shenanigans would be wise to steer clear of the entire mess until he is out of the picture.

I think it started with Tumblr, perhaps behind the scenes. He then did some stupid things under pressure and said some highly inappropriate things in response to criticism.

Like others who faced pushback from certain communities, he decided to double down on the arrogance and insensitivity. Unlike others, he doesn't have the charisma, goodwill, or video podcast to pull it off.

Seeing his posts here, it would appear that his behavior is indeed "as bad as it seems". A serial poster who cannot seem to disengage, took everything personally, and refused to try to understand other perspectives.

> Did Mullenweg always behave like this?

Matt, literally (he turned 21 then), came of age in the 2004-2006 Silicon Valley climate of the post-Bubble "Trümmerfrauen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%BCmmerfrau) movements that brought us things such as DHH and Rails, Matt and WordPress, Andreessen being himself, and others, all of which are now considered "problematic."

I don't think Matt has changed. The climate these projects operate in, has. To some it's an eggshell walk, to others a game of signaling the right virtues while acting against them in secret, and to some a chance to achieve relevancy or dominance. And for all of them, there's a day of reckoning. 2005s proclivities have no similarities to 2025 dogma, and why should they. Neither did 2005 have any with 1985. Feel old, yet?

Matt's Matt. That Matt was what was needed to kick a floundering piece of software (P2) into the kind of trajectory that helped transform it into the absolute unit of a social and communications portfolio, Automattic is today.

That kind of Matt is a dinosaur in 2025. As were 1985 coders and founders in 2005. Heck, 2005 didn't look too kindly upon 1999 Silicon Valley mindsets.

I guess Matt's "problem" is not, that he has changed. Matt's difficulty is, that he hasn't, and that 2025 is nothing like 2005. And, like DHH or Andreessen or Brendan Eich back in 2014, that can ... hurt. I'm too old to care, but I'd presume today's "golden child" will be a very problematic person in 2045, unless they learn to change or hide behind signals.

It saves a ton of time creating. It wastes a lot of time maintaining and cleaning up infections and debugging poor performance.

Is like Dreamweaver but you have to run Dreamweaver all the time your site has visitors and an instance of Dreamweaver for each visitor.

Why did you start using it again?

One could argue the sustainability team was disbanded in the name of sustainability.

> spend all their working lives

These were volunteers.

> Seeing how they spent 1,5 years

They didn't.

> he was right to shut this down.

Ignorance is a choice.

It looks like it was originally just a channel on Slack, that eventually evolved into a “team” without Mullenweg paying much attention to it.

The Sustainability agenda , quoted by the article, appears excessive to me as well - and it resonates with me why Mullenweg is asking for a different approach.

With the dramas going on, shutting down the channel was a dick move , though.

He himself clearly showed it's a lie as he admitted on Threads that he started said team. Utterly bizarre.

> If this is true

It's not true. It's a blatant lie, as the embedded video in the article proves.

I've been building websites on WordPress for 15+ years, run a WordPress agency and have many clients who come to us specifically asking for us to use WordPress. I'm seriously considering moving to something else because we use the WP Engine plugin Advanced Custom Fields (pro version) and him pulling the free version from the plugin repo in a hissy fit has made me seriously concerned about the stability of the ecosystem if one guy can do something like that in a fit of pique.

I'm not as sure about that; products like Wordpress have an amplification effect with their users. The average person who uses Wordpress doesn't just have one Wordpress site; they have dozens to thousands, because they're actually an agency/contracting firm/whatever. Its the same, but opposite, reason why Microsoft can build products that piss off literally every corporate end-user they've got on the whole planet; they aren't selling to corporate end-users, they're selling to people with higher leverage, and they haven't pissed those people off.

He's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a lot of businesses that depend on that stability.

The "average person" using this is not some average citizen - they're developers or business folks, and such nonsense as has been going on will not go unnoticed by them. People don't want to build a product on this system and have to wonder whether the plugin they're using will be removed by Automattic or whatnot.

Probably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the company to continue operating profitability.

Having only been exposed to Mullenweg on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I perceived him as the benevolent, zen-like steward of one of the biggest open source projects ever. Watching this drama over the past few months has been... interesting. It's like the dude on the podcast hit his head badly and had his whole personality replaced.

I haven't learned much in my career, (cue "burn after reading" clip [0]), but I do know that CEOs hate it when changes in governance are discussed by underlings, it's way more of a threat to power than any fork.

[0] https://youtu.be/J6VjPM5CeWs