Back in 2019, Matt Mullenweg announced a new role, the Executive Director of WordPress, without disclosing the role was being filled by someone working for his for-profit company Automattic. When that person was brought up after that, it was rarely mentioned that they worked for Automattic, despite the obvious conflict of interest inherent in the situation. That conflict of interest might explain why the WordPress never got its conflict of interest policy, which that person said was coming.
That lack of disclosure continued when Matt Mullenweg announced that person’s replacement, under the slightly changed title, Executive Director of WordPress.org, in October. Considering how clear it has become recently that Matt Mullenweg has been intentionally obscuring the control of WordPress and intermixing of different entities, you might reasonably expect that journalists would be careful about accuracy on things like this. That continues to not be the case. [Read more]