Automattic Minus Matt

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let's hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.What’s the bigger tragedy? That a creator gets separated from their life’s work, or that the effort to assert control over that work just alienates the creator from the community they built?In the past two years, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has let both situations play out in his name. The first, which kicked off two years ago with a fiery speech at WordCamp, put the open-source project at odds with some of its largest supporters, while forever tarnishing Mullenweg’s good-guy reputation. The target of Mullenweg’s ire was WP Engine, a company that had built successful brand in the WordPress ecosystem, arguably upstaging Automattic, the company that has traditionally led the WordPress project.Mullenweg believed WP Engine didn’t do enough to support the open-source project. WP Engine disagreed. Everyone sued one another, and it became…