WordPress as Greek Tragedy
What do you think of when you imagine a leader abusing power? If you are like many, you are thinking of a power hungry villain who goes out into the world hurting people and societies for fun and profit, caring nothing for anyone or anything but themselves.
Are there people who abuse power in such a clear, one-sided way? Probably. But I don’t think everyone, or even most people, who abuse power do it like that, or for purely selfish reasons.
Most people who abuse their power do so attempting to preserve something they value or to fix something they love.
I'm not proud of how I behaved early in my leadership career, and the damage I did was real. It was also repairable for two reasons. First, the amount of power I had was modest, so the depth and breadth of the damage was contained. Second, I was able to see and take responsibility for the damage I’d done. From there, I adjusted my leadership style to one that allowed me to fulfill my responsibilities while also using my power appropriately.
The WordPress community is currently experiencing a similar abuse of power on a much larger scale. A very passionate and engaged leader believes the only way to ensure that WordPress is safe for generations to come is for him to maintain enough control over the project to personally defend it from harm.
Unfortunately, he too is abusing his power, and the potential damage is devastating– because he wields orders of magnitude more power than most of us will ever be able to access and because he doesn’t seem to be able to see, much less take personal responsibility for, the damage he’s causing.
It’s right out of Greek tragedy: A hero with a tragic flaw destroys the thing he loves most in an effort to save it.
If you are into Greek drama, you know it’s going to end bad. And yet, I like to play what-if. What if at one critical point the hero got good advice from someone he could listen to, took a deep breath and made a different choice?
Could the inevitable ending be avoided?
There is a character in Greek Mythology famous for trying to help: Cassandra. She has the gift of prophecy and attempts to share the future with the powerful men in her life, hoping they will change course.
They do not listen to her, and eventually she’s killed. Generally the lesson of Cassandra is STAY OUT OF IT.
But sometimes a girl can’t help herself.
An open letter to Matt Mullenweg
Dear Matt.
I know you love WordPress and that you genuinely believe you are doing what you have to do to ensure the project outlives us all. I know giving up any bit of control over the project feels like abandoning your baby to the wolves. And yet, it’s time. Your baby grew up. You’ll always be a founder of WordPress, but just like children grow up and become their own people separate from their parents, so do our very best ideas. You played a key role in making WordPress what it is, but it’s grown beyond you. WordPress belongs to the community, and it’s time for the community to play a larger role in charting its path.
I suspect that you are feeling some resentment right now. You have done SO MUCH for WordPress and the community that grew up around it. It is absolutely fair to say none of us would be where we are with this software without your passion and commitment. And so I can imagine it feels like a betrayal to have all these people who have benefited from your work and financial support of WordPress all these years question your character and your motives.
I am not a member of your inner circle, so I don’t know your true motives at this moment. I suspect they are a lot purer than people give you credit for, and also less pure than you personally believe. Not because you are a terrible person, but because you are still just a human like all of us, and humans have adapted to get through the day by hiding the things we don’t like about ourselves where we can’t see them, thinking we’ve suppressed them for good. Unfortunately, those traits are only hiding from us. Everyone else can see them just fine.
Beyond that resentment and whatever economic pressure that people and organizations working at your level have to deal with, I still believe you want what is best for WordPress. If that’s true, I hope you will do the one thing you can still do to save it: release the stranglehold you’ve wrapped around the project’s neck.
Turn the WordPress Foundation into a true home for the WordPress project. Stay on the board, but not as its only invested member. Add board members from the community and allow your voice to be one of many instead of the final say. Look for ways to make it clearer who is working for the foundation and who is working for Automattic. Make sure that when the interests of Automattic and the interests of the WordPress project conflict, the people who work for the Foundation have the freedom they need to support the project’s interests.
Fully transfer the WordPress licensing rights (commercial and non-commercial) to the WordPress Foundation. Clean up the guidelines around who can use them for what purposes and at what cost. Then let the foundation enforce those requirements in an even-handed, public way.
Use the funds raised by the licensing fees to fund the Foundation and the future of WordPress. Do it in a way that it’s clear to everyone that the funds are truly going to fund the Foundation and the WordPress Project, not Automattic or you personally.
WordPress isn’t dead, but it’s struggling. If you love it like you say, it’s time to let go.
