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"Unfortunately" for whom? I'm pretty ok, even happy, with him out.
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The unfortunate part is that he became someone you’re happy to see out. I think he’s absolutely become a net negative for Wordpress, but that wasn’t always the case.
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it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.
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Unfortunate this was the result of 23 years, not unfortunate it's happening.
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The entire internet is breathing a sigh of relief
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Can you provide some examples of these errors? Asking genuinely.
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The biggest one was probably 2 years back, the dispute with WP Engine, a hosting provider for WordPress. He used WordPress infrastructure to force all instances hosted there to break, then removed the extensions they built from the plugin store, and then replaced them under the exact same name and identifier with his own.

He then went on this site, and placed incriminating comments under posts discussing that, without discussing it with his lawyers. These comments were then of course used in subsequent lawsuits, which so far he's been losing.

He then also told his employees that if they didn't agree with his actions, they could leave with a severance package, which then had 10% of his employees quit.

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The whole WP engine thing. I think it’s private equity buying a wordpress thing, but things got weird and it starting getting bad press. There was the hijacking of a plugin from them if I recall among other things (checkbox in login saying you weren’t affiliated with Wpengine)

Talking to a few Wordpress consultants they were getting questions from their clients which isn’t good.

Matt has seemed erratic from a casual outside view. If he’s having issues hope he pulls it together. The WP community is pretty good.

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No reason given?
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Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
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I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
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There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.
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He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
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He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"

Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?

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Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
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I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
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That's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.
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He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
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WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
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Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
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Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.

It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.

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They do not. It's GPL
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Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine? I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
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"Unfortunately"??
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"Unfortunately", because Matt did a lot of good for the internet over the past two decades. WordCamp is (or was) really amazing, the community he built is really great, the Automattic Lounge was cool, he's donated millions of dollars to good causes, and WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.
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Automattic also bought Tumblr and Pocket Casts, publishing the code of the latter. I used to have a subscription just to support them.
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The purchase of Tumblr was basically Elon purchasing Twitter without the political gain. I'm amazed the purchase decision was ever made, and more amazed that it still exists after the hit to the user base.
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And Simplenote.
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Which is no longer in active development

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195093

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Huh. I still remember back in the Gutenberg launch era and all the drama around it (2018) the internet saying he was the devil for profiting from WP.
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> WordPress powers a large portion of the Internet.

Unfortunately.

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He read the commit logs and understood much of what he read. That's deep understanding of the product. That alone puts him in the top few percent of CEOs.

IMO.

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Yeah, it's unfortunate when anyone goes off the deep end.
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He still contributed a lot to the world during the good times.
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Wordpress enshittified in the mid-2010s. It wasn’t recent. So, I only agree off we resolve “past few years” to at least a decade.
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Classicpress may be worth checking out.

https://www.classicpress.net/

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em-dash by Cloudflare looks interesting in terms of replacing Wordpress.

by garnering enough of an ecosystem to cause a migration will be the bigger challenge.

of course some people will say in the age of agents will people need to visit websites ;)

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Am I looking at the right thing?

https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash

> EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts. Upgrade your account (starting at $5/mo) or comment out the worker_loaders block of your wrangler.jsonc configuration file to disable plugins.

Seems like a pretty poor replacement for WordPress, which will run on pretty much whatever random system happens to be within eyesight.

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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.

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A CMS that can only run on one hosting provider?
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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.

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> Doing the same thing for 23 years likely makes it difficult to have a proper perspective.

Preach.

Seems to twist perception that reality is a fractal when it's recursive and eventually exits (everything dies).

Explains religion, politics, and similar longtermism memes.

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