“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers…
Matt Mullenweg, “Downtime“, WordPress.com Blog, June 14th, 2010

Doesn’t mean that our Systems Lead Barry Abrahamson isn’t going to do everything he can to make sure a similar event never happens again.

Barry is solid, and makes every link around him stronger.

I love working with that guy!

The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

We hope to gather broad community support to make sure we can continue to serve the public good through freely accessible software.

About Web page, WordPress Foundation

There are already a lot of great comments on the welcome post “Getting off the ground“. Here is a one of the many juicy comments made by Matt in response to a question posted there:

Sure, as a quick summary: [Wordpress.com and the WordPress Foundation] completely separate, but share a similar name and my involvement. One is for-profit, the other non-profit. They both have similar goals in terms, but the Foundation can take a long-term multi-decade approach to solving these problems without regard for short term profit, market conditions, or shareholders. I’ve always had a vision for two simultaneous approaches to the WordPress way, the heart and the mind, but it’s just now coming together.

“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!

Taking a Matt Nap

In “The Way I Work, annotated” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares additional insights and linkifies his Inc. Magazine’s “The Way I Work” column (July issue). Both versions are excellent reads, but the post at ma.tt benefits from Matt answering a lot of additional questions in the comments.

Here is an excerpt from the article that inspired me to share this photo (emphasis mine):

“I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.”