Days after 159 people accepted Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s offer of a six-month severance package to employees who wanted to leave, the company floated a new offer late on October 16 of a nine-month severance package to anybody who quit immediately. Employees had four hours to decide whether they wanted to take the deal. In Slack message seen by TechCrunch, Mullenweg posted that people who accepted the offer would lose access not only to Automattic but also to WordPress.
org. This effectively means that people leaving wouldn’t be able to contribute to the open source project — at least under their existing ID. This would also mean they would be efficiently banned from the WordPress community.
News of the deal was earlier reported by 404 Media . Apart from being Automattic CEO, Mullenweg also owns and controls WordPress.org open source site.
Mullenweg gave just four hours’ notice (Until October 17, UTC 00:00) and said people who want to accept the offer should DM him, “I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer.” “You don’t have to say any reason or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.
’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep your office stuff and work laptop. You will lose access to Automattic and Worg,” Mullenweg said. He said, “I guess some people were sad they missed the last window,” and so presented this new short window.
Automattic didn’t comment on the story by the time of publication. It is not clear if an.