In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

Kids - when the website demands your real identification, it’s not anonymous, ok. Pick a lane - do you want to be anonymous or do you want to post on this “Blind” site.

Here’s an example of my suggestion:

Blind: sign up with your genuine work email so you can talk shit about your company, bosses, and co-workers!

Me: closes window

Out in the cloud world, several companies changed their FOSS license to prevent large cloud providers from making money off their work (eg, Terraform, Redis, Mongo, and ElasticSearch).

Their reasoning was sound, on paper. They were spending a ton of time and money supporting a popular product and the only way to make money on it was by selling hosted services to enterprise. Then these other cloud providers would take their work for free, compete with them for the same customers, and often win.

In almost all these cases, the FOSS developers were pilloried for changing the terms of their original license, leading to immediate forks and fragmentation of the community.

The only outfit that I know of that survived the transition was Thingsboard. They still offer an open-source service, but they take a lot of their enterprise-only adapters and do not offer it as FOSS. Only way to get these is to sign up with their service.

Wordpress could have taken a survey of their highest paying customers, then created features they needed behind a private hosting service. Yes, people would have been unhappy, but the core service would remain FOSS and the company would still make a lot of money.

This whole thing has been done in the worse possible, public, mud-slinging manner. I don't understand who benefits from the scorched-earth approach.

Meanwhile, everyone on tumblr is relieved that Matt has something to distract him from harassing trans women for existing

Imagine being so rich that you can afford to burn down one of your companies and destroy large swathes of the internet in the process over a beef with someone using your FOSS you didn't even create.

What started all of this? I was hoping for some background in the article

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months).

Upping the offer may get more people to take it, but now he's going to get people sticking around to see if he'll go higher later.

If you’re using any work-related anything to post “anonymously” or talk to journalists, don’t. That Blind redirection is chilling yet it’s well within the capabilities of employers. The right way to talk to journalists like 404 is to find their anonymous contact details eg Signal using your own internet connection and your own device. Work computers can be monitored. Traffic on work computers or work VPNs can be monitored. Company email usage can be monitored. Company phone usage can be monitored. You don’t need to be incredibly private with a VPN over tor and anonymous services; you just need to not use company resources. Whether or not this should be legal is a different story; you just gotta know you have fuck all for privacy on company resources.

I’ve only heard of Blind in passing; that corp email makes it too close to Glassdoor for comfort and it’s very clearly not private with that requirement.

He's unhinged.