One-twelfth of Automattic staff leave over WordPress-WP Engine spat

WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg offered staff at his company, Automattic, $30,000 or six months’ salary to leave if they didn’t like the way he was handling a dispute with rival WordPress service provider WP Engine.

In September, unhappy that WP Engine was not committing as much staff time to maintaining and improving the WordPress open source project as Automattic was, Mullenweg asked WP Engine to pay 8% of its revenue to Automattic as a license fee for the use of the WordPress trademark, or to commit staff time worth 8% of its revenue to working on WordPress core features and functionality.

On Thursday, Oct. 3, WP Engine responded with a lawsuit accusing Automattic of attempted extortion, as CIO.com reported last week.

The dispute led to considerable debate within Automattic. As Mullenweg blogged with a certain amount of understatement, “It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.”

To resolve the dispute internally, Mullenweg decided to pay dissenters to go away, with what he described as “the most generous buy-out package possible”: $30,000 or six months’ salary, whichever was higher. There were two catches: staff had to decide by 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Oct. 3, and there would be no possibility of getting hired back by Automattic.

By the deadline, 159 staff — 8.4% of the company’s workforce — had accepted the offer to leave, including one person who had started just two days earlier, Mullenweg wrote.

The company’s official statement the next morning described the move as “a strategic realignment to better pursue our core values and operational goals” and focused instead on the “91.6% of employees [who] chose to stay.”

Mullenweg, for his part, wrote, “Every resignation stings a bit. However, now I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.”