I mean, I have a lot sharper words for him than that, but it gets the point across. I want to share two links:

The Verge — Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’

Matt himself — Automattic Alignment

Honestly I have kind of thought he sucked ever since I saw the company name “Automattic,” years ago. But so much of what I’ve seen from him since then just reinforces it. He tries to act magnanimous, but he’s just like every other tech billionaire. You don’t get into that kind of position without having a grotesquely distorted sense of self-importance.

I get that what he intended by the statement “WordPress.org just belongs to me” is that he literally just owns the domain name. But it’s hard not to believe that the way that statement is easily misinterpreted is really what he feels. Yeah, he co-founded the WordPress open source project, as a fork of earlier blogging software called b2. But even if he were single-handedly responsible for the origins of WordPress — which he decidedly is not — it would still be a very tin-earred statement that an open source project “belongs” to an individual. (Honestly, the way he’s framing the battle against WP Engine these days makes it really seem like he wishes WordPress wasn’t GPL, so he didn’t legally have to allow it to remain open source forever.)

I don’t think Matt is as bad of a human being as Elon Musk, but there are similarities in their origins as guys who were part of something as it got off the ground and became huge, and were the ones who managed to take control and credit for everything. Then, perceived as unassailable technology and business geniuses, they were able to leverage their right-place-right-time moments to launch themselves to a level of status and wealth that is disproportionate to their actual contributions.

Anyway, suffice to say, as much as I live and breathe WordPress, I’ve been strongly critical of the direction Matt has insisted on taking the software for several years. It’s clear he has extreme conflicts of interest between his role as the leader of the open source project, and his multiple for-profit businesses that wouldn’t exist without it.

The worst part, to someone like me — a relatively small potatoes indie plugin developer/freelance web designer — is that he really does not seem to understand how WordPress is used in the real world. And it’s a worse product as a result.

If I had been an employee at Automattic this week, I absolutely would’ve taken the buy-out.

I don’t have much to say about all of this, other than that I would probably, yes, be posting this on Facebook if it were affecting literally anything else in my known realm of existence.

Today Facebook killed itself. But its undead corpse will surely rise again.

The problem is some kind of colossal DNS snafu, which has, for all intents and purposes, temporarily caused facebook.com to cease to exist.

Ah… the air somehow smells fresher today. The water tastes better. The sun shines brighter.

But I know it won’t last.

Anyway… today’s the day it happened. Here’s some more in-depth information from Ars Technica which hopefully will not disappear down the Memory Hole anytime soon.

Update: This Cloudflare blog post probably provides the definitive explanation of what happened.

If anyone has been bothering to read my rants for the past five-plus years, you may recall that one of my earliest blog posts was a tirade against the evils of cords.

Finally, while it may not be much solace, science as at least touched upon an explanation for why cords suck.

It’s kind of funny now, looking back at what I wrote in 2002. I was speaking in awed and reverent tones of the mystical wonders that awaited us in the future, these things called “AirPort” (I’m not even sure the term “Wi-Fi” was in use yet back then), and “Bluetooth” — things so new and wondrous that I put them in quotes when I referred to them, without a trace of irony.

Now I am pretty much taking for granted the fact that I’m sitting on my bed typing this on my laptop, connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi link to the router downstairs, and I’m controlling the cursor with a Bluetooth wireless mouse. Frankly, I’m more surprised by the fact that as of last Sunday my Mac is now set up in a triple boot configuration, with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Linux.

I know I’ve already ranted about Katherine Kersten in the past. I’m still not sure what masochistic compulsion drives me to read her column. I guess as much as I don’t want aggravation, I just can’t turn away when it’s staring me down, even when it comes in the form of a right-wing shill, a shameful hack of a “journalist.”

And so, today she’s at it again, this time railing against the “serial law-breaking mob” known as Critical Mass. I knew someone back in Atlanta who participated in Critical Mass, and even though I’m not a regular bike rider, I do choose public transportation for my daily commute, and I commend their efforts to wake up their fellow citizens to the multitude of ways that our gas-guzzling lifestyle is damaging the planet and, well, our lifestyle (if you need to put it in selfish terms to be motivated to care).

The real crime here is that a supposedly respected publication like the Minneapolis StarTribune continues to devote ink and paper, and even worse, money, to such predictably offensive drivel.