FWIW Jeffrey Zeldman is a living legend. He was one of the first print designers to transition to the web, did it well, and wrote about it constantly. He designed the “Batman Forever” website in 1995; it was visited by something like one-third of all Internet users.

He created the Web Standards Project, hugely influential in getting browser manufacturers to support standards rather than pee in the pool. And if you think cross-browser support today is rough, at the time you could reliably crash production browsers with valid CSS.

Never mind A List Apart, one of the best early mailing lists on the web, a kind of transitionary form between Usenet and forums/Discord. And A Book Apart, which published lots of high-quality stuff.

If you develop for the web today, every time a browser behaves as the spec describes, thank Jeffrey Zeldman.

A Book Apart (the publishing company) closed?! When did this happen? The article linked doesn’t mention a date. So sad I had wanted to use them to publish a book eventually.

I wonder what happened

> I also know that the Maker-Taker problem is an issue in open source, just as I know that a friend you buy lunch for every day, and who earns as much money as you do, is supposed to return the favor now and then

Informal agreements like this work between people who know each other, not for agreements between strangers. The terms in an open source license are intended to be universally applicable, to make the obligations clear for anyone who reads them. This includes total strangers and companies that didn’t exist when you published the code.

Those strangers shouldn’t be expected to abide by anything not explicitly written down in the license. If the license doesn’t document the obligations you expect of anyone, you used the wrong license.

We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code. Open source licenses have very generous terms, maybe too generous. They allow takers. That’s how it works, you can take it.

I have a tough time relating to "[believing] in the work we do" at a for-profit company, especially one that just makes blogs. I work at a somewhat similar commercial open source company, I really enjoy my job, and I adore my direct collegues, but I've thought a lot over the past few years that if in a similar position I would almost definitely take the offer.

A job you like where ~10% of your colleges leave is a job I would probably enjoy a whole lot less.

It's a nice sentiment, but are you helping people by granting the wishes of an unshackled combative owner? Could you take the money and help people more by working for a company with more careful leadership? Wordpress isn't the only CMS out there...

His evocation of the assault on Rodney King and the L.A. Riots is perplexing.

I hope the decision works out for him. Six months salary is really only a big bag of cash if 1) you have a decent salary, and 2) you can be confident of landing a job of equal or better salary within the six-month window. Otherwise you're just going to burn through it. Given the way hiring has been in the tech world of late, it's easy to imagine it taking six months or more to get a decent job -- you can easily spend several months interviewing to have a role disappear.

FWIW I'd have to be pretty pissed and/or have no confidence in the direction of the company & its leadership and/or have another job/work lined up already to jump ship on a few days' notice like that.

Believing in the work the author was/is doing is one thing, but I can't help but wonder if/how they still believe in their boss.

The "We're hiring" link shows the first position offered is a "Happiness Engineer", https://i.imgur.com/zSVeuYq.png.

> Our software and services aim to provide a seamless experience, but when things don’t go as planned, our customers rely on us for help. Happiness Engineers are the frontline heroes ensuring we deliver the best experience for our users. Their role is crucial because they interact with our customers the most and make the biggest impression in their time of need.

I am just reading about this whole Automattic vs WP Engine fight today, and I'm a little surprised that most people seem to think Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy. Automattic has still given away a huge amount of open-source software away over the years. WP Engine seems like it is entirely a mercenary operation. (Which there's nothing wrong with, per se. But it doesn't exactly warm the cockles of my heart.)

And paying people to leave if they don't agree with what the company is doing seems like a win-win.

It will be hard to do that work from within an embattled organization that's only in that situation because of the CEO's behavior. Things don't get better from here. Any good-faith assumptions people made before are just gone. Every action has new layers of scrutiny, every move becomes suspect.

Why does someone who works at Automattic have meaningful medical debt? That's awful. I would expect Automattic to have both good insurance and sufficient pay such that no employee suffers from medical debt.

What's the background on doing a soft layoff (or w/e) and hiring at the same time? Many of us have seen one of these close-up, just wondering what the case is here.

Why? This is someone else’s fight. Do you have a high amount of equity in Automattic?

You have to look out for number one.

My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics.

What an immensely cowardly statement. Zeldman is not some naive worker elf and pretending to be such as an excuse to avoid saying anything is contemptible. If you don't want people to know what you think, just say that, or say nothing. Pretending you don't have an opinion because you don't understand is just...ick.

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> I already miss them, and most only quit yesterday. I feel their departure as a personal loss, and my grief is real. The sadness is like a cold fog on a dark, wet night.

I can't understand this. I do not view my coworkers as part of my personal life, so while I enjoy working with some, I wouldn't say I'm sad if they leave. This sounds unhealthy