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by gabaix 617 days ago
He has maintained iron clad control over Automattic, WordPress, and WordPress.org. How? By insisting on securing the proxy votes from investors. Investors — what on earth were you thinking?

There is something to say about corporate governance. When a CEO can actively harm the company without risking being fired, the role of the board has failed.

This will help the case of VCs to get board seats.
1 comments
teruakohatu 616 days ago
The board represents the share holders and if the shareholders support Matt, good for them.

According to the company “5% of our company time to WordPress core”, in a for profit company where none of the investors have any vision, you get a WP Engine scenario where (according to Matt) they contribute about 40 hours per week, or about 0.1% of the company time to Wordpress (they have 1000 employees)

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ffsm8 616 days ago
That's just the reality of creating open source software.

Anyone (including companies) using it are free to do whatever they want with it (including reselling) and they aren't obligated to contribute in any way.

While this is a particularly dumb case, it's not the first time we've had this situation. Usually the company just relicensed the software going forward, forcing users to either start paying or forking/switching products.

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