Matt is causing damage to the OSS ecosystem far beyond WordPress.
No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software.
There is a social contract that people should contribute back, and while it’s largely unenforceable, as it should be, when it’s happening on a systemic level something has to be done. And we are all complicit if we don’t at least say that much and spare some good will towards the guy actively in that fight at least superficially
Calling out Matt and Automattic for their abusive behavior is addressing the systemic issue of for-profit corporations exploitatively abusing open source software.
We're talking about a company that released GPL software, waited a decade for another company to build their entire business around said GPL software, and then came at them with threats of going to "nuclear war" (their words) with them if they didn't agree to extremely exploitative terms on top of the GPL licensing under which the software was released.
That is the affront to Free Software that's happening here. WP Engine may or may not be a good company, but it is Matt who has given up on freedom. If you lure people in with a promise of Free Software and then hold a gun to their head when they take you up on it, you are the bad guy.
The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss.
I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/wp and then there’s this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
No there isn't. The author gets to decide the contract, not you or anyone else.
I am the one who decides how to license my software. If I don't want to require my users to contribute, I don't have to. If I wanted to include such an obligation, I would have.
You don't get to hold users of my projects to unwritten, made-up obligations. You don't get to bully people online who aren't following your imaginary rules. My users and I have a contract. We both agreed to it. You don't get to step in between us and alter the agreement we made. How dare you.
The assertion that users must contribute to open source projects despite the license, is an attack on users, developers, and a just and free society. Developers must be able to license their software how they see fit. You want to take that freedom away from me, in the pursuit of hurting people you don't like.
I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage.
> this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
I'll never understand this complaint about not giving back. I can understand if they're asking for free support and coercing you into saying yes, but that's rarely the concern, the concern is always "giving back".
If you release it under GPL, then companies are obliged to abide by the GPL and release their modifications, nothing more or less. If you release it under a less restrictive license then they have no obligations at all, and you presumably chose that license specifically because it made the software easier to use in enterprises.
If giving back matters so very much then you're not really interested in Free Software and you should put those requirements in the license. But you don't get to piggyback on the FOSS movement and then complain when people use your software freely to compete with your for profit.
Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?
As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.
We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.
The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.
This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.
Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.
If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.
The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.
The only damage being done when someone makes money using open source software, is to the ambitions and ego of a developer who imagined that "open source" meant "give me your contributions so I can build an empire." Fortunately, open source is for the benefit of all of us. Nobody owes them fiefs.
What absolute leeches they are.
(And I'm saying this as someone who dislikes WordPress in general, in the sense that I'm not a super invested Automattic user or something. It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim)
WPEngine are adults, they can (and are) taking care of themselves.
But sorry, if you start using your position as CEO of Automattic, and President of WPF to:
- push rants forcibly into the dashboards of your for-profit offering's commercial competitors
- lock users of a competitor out of a whole raft of functionality because of your beef with their provider
- break users sites in the name of effectively hostage-taking a plugin
Then what else are you but a "bad maintainer"?
> as a leach [sic]
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor. That's easily described as leeching.
> is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events)
Well, given that at these recent events they've given money, been banned from attending and had all references to their name removed, I think their contributions are valid.
Also "that doesn't count, it's just marketing", yes, marketing dollars that they are contributing to the community to make the cost to the rest of the community in hosting events less. You sound like Matt here, "Well, yes, they contribute, but not in the way I tell them to, and in the amount I tell them to, so it's not reallllly a contribution."
He's a guy running a multi-billion USD company annoyed at a ~bn USD company for capturing some of the profits from "his" "open" source software.
It's corporate warfare given the thinnest possible moral veneer. He was an investor in WP Engine.
I'm not happy with the mess and Matt's behaviour, but you can't steal free code.
Sure, the code is free, but that's still a lot of theft.
Even when you are banned from the event you are sponsoring.
Or something.
It's possible if they had been approached in a calm, polite and constructive way, they might have.
After Matt stormed in, set the bridges on fire and started pissing on everything?
lol. lmao even
> Nothing in this ongoing situation is about more than optics now
You're not wrong there! And since you apparently created this account purely to respond to my post, what do you think these optics make you look like, Matt? Do you think they make you look good?
How can you expect any developer to devote time to writing a plugin if the dictatorship of Matt can rug pull it at any time.
I sympathized with Wordpress a lot in the initial drama, but this is going downhill fast.
Blocking somebody's access to the plugin repository, not accepting their patches, and then 'releasing' your own 'secure' version is just abuse, period.
But I can't shake the feeling that to a lot of observers, this latest thing is going to look rather like a kidnapping. It's not right.
Who should provide security updates to an open source package when author no longer has access to the repository - voluntarily or otherwise?
You say this like there's not much difference between the two, but there's a world of difference.
One is someone yanking a repo and breaking millions of builds across the world and the maintainers of npm stepping in to fix things (in a move that is still controversial, mind you).
The other is the maintainers of the WordPress plugin repository starting a self-described "nuclear war" with the plugin maintainers, banning them from the repo, publicly disclosing a security vulnerability in the plugin, then hijacking it to save the day.
One is a potentially misguided step to solve a real problem. What Matt is doing here is just cosplaying Syndrome from The Incredibles.
Give them the access. It's not like they forgot the password or are AWOL.
Guess who owns the trademark for both those things? WPEngine, that's who.
This guy is so bad at this that it's not even funny anymore.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=98321164&caseSearchType=U...
Good catch. Looks like it was filed just under a year ago, and hasn't been finalized yet. If it is approved, I think the original filing date is considered the registration date, so Matt's usage would (at that point) qualify as infringement. However, I am NAL.
These are good times for Wordpress alternatives to shine.
[1]: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/future-updates-for-acf-a...
My guess is that he was focused on these facts:
1) I own Wordpress
2) WPEngine is profiting from Wordpress and I'm not benefiting
3) This is unfair
And it was stuck in his mind like a thorn, irritating him whenever the thought arose, and never went away. Commercializing open source is hard for myriad reasons, but wordpress.com is actually rather profitable, and yet it still bothered him that he wasn't getting a cut.
Eventually, after many grumpy ruminations on it, the answer was obvious: "I deserve a cut of WPEngine's income, since they're using my software." No, this isn't how the license works, and there's no legal basis for it, but it felt right and fair.
This thought, irrational and deluded as it was, wedged in his psyche and fed into his deep loathing for WPEngine. All the subsequent actions follow from it, from the initial ultimatum to the various actions he's taking to fight his enemy.
This is an intensely personal and emotional fight for him, and everyone that disagrees is an enemy too. He's just asking for what's fair, and yet all these ignorant commenters on the internet can't see it.
I must say, “the Wordpress guy has a public nervous breakdown” wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024, but…
If WP Engine is reading, fork WordPress now. Call it FreshPress. Put $25M into it, team up with other hosts, abandon the editor everyone hates, and relicense it to GPLv3 so Matt can’t have any of it. (Note that WordPress’s license specifically says GPLv2 or later.) Maybe support Composer like sane modern PHP projects. Maybe put the most important plugins like Woo into core and make it an all-in-one Squarespace competitor.
Once it’s ahead, legal, and Matt can’t borrow; then he’ll realize his bluff has been called. Make WordPress the new B2.
The people that stayed are probably the ones that feel "married to the job" (pro-tip: you aren't your job)
I feel like it's time to move off Wordpress. I don't feel comfortable about its future for my clients.
What suggestions do you all have for alternatives?
WordPress is kinda awful in a lot of ways.
BUT
You can hand a thoughtfully build WP site over to a non technical client, and they can work out or learn how to do 90% of the publishing and updating they need to do, or easily find staff or contractors with lots of WordPress experience to do it for them.
The "43% of the entire web" statistic is a really really good reason to recommend WP for that reason.
There is obviously not a single competing CMS/blog-platform that has anything like as many experiences users. Where by "users" I mean people who are familiar with or even experts on publishing content using it.
That's the real "WordPress Community", the people using it on a day to day basis to get their jobs/hobbies/responsibilities done. That's the "WordPress Community" that makes it "the right thing" for agencies and contractors and IT departments to recommend WordPress.
Up until 2 weeks ago, I regularly recommended WordPress. In spite of it's flaws.
I feel for everyone that uses Wordpress.
> Around 20 minutes in, my nose started bleeding, which sometimes happens when I travel too much. Prior to this interview, I was on 30+ hour flights returning from Durban, where I was on safari, to Houston. I'm sorry for not noticing it happening; it's very embarrassing.
How that relates to an executive engaged in sudden extremely aggressive and over the top and highly personal scorched earth attack campaign over what appear to be fairly routine open source community squabbles is left as an exercise for the reader.
The "traveling too much" is exactly the same kind of BS I would have said in my addiction. Is he referring to air pressure? Because that would happen on the plane, not hours later.
After reading it, the first thing I did was to make sure that I and all WP sites I have access to had automatic updates disabled. This always seemed like a good policy to me, as it is such a massive attack vector. After all, some popular plugin developed by someone in Nebraska (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/) might be hijacked at some point. WP did the stupidest thing ever by hijacking ACF.
WP is the villain now because they can inject unknown, unvetted code into my site (if I had enabled automatic updates). While I find ACF's code abhorrent, at least it has a proven track record of working and not crashing my site. Someone who just took over the plugin does not enjoy the same trust from me.
Because looking at it that way, might open different analysis than most of what I’ve seen so far.
It’s MIT licensed so anybody can use it, including people affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.
12 years building sites on WP... not anymore.
But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone.
Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.
You should be more specific about what you're trying to achieve.
But no, Drupal is not an alternative to Wordpress. Perhaps ten years ago but even then barely. Now? That's like saying a Kenworth semi is an alternative to a motorcycle. Sure, you can get from A to B on either but beyond that, they are really different tools for different jobs.
Maybe the new "Drupal CMS" (nee Starshot) initiative will bring them into direct competition again. We will see.
- Why now? What snapped? Clearly WPE didn't go to "billions" over night. So why go nuclear now?
- Doesn't he have a close and immediate circle of advisors and confidants? Are they speaking to him and he's not listen? Or has he locked himself in a room so to speak and is completely unapproachable? Either way, not good.
- Is he trying to force WPE to fork WP and then maintain their own version? Does he believe they can't do it? What if WPE's hosting peers unite and abandon what is effectively Automattic's version?
Am I the only one who can't imagine a good outcome from all this?
Here's a possible good outcome.
1. The board fires Matt, stops chasing windmills, and settles with WP Engine. I'm kind of surprised they haven't done so already - it's all downhill from here. He's either lying to them, not listening, or they're drinking the Kool Aid.
2. Matt steps down from the WordPress Foundation and transfers ownership of wordpress.org to them. He takes his hundreds of millions of dollars and does something else.
3. The new CEO apologizes to the community and establishes public processes for removing extensions and such. Checks and balances are added.
4. The WordPress Foundation's new director orders a house clearing. Many hosting providers and developers are invited to join the board. It's no longer an instrument of Matt's will, but represents the community.
The first step will probably happen at some point.
The second step could happen, but seems unlikely. I think there's a significant chance Matt would go on a rampage if he was fired. He clearly thinks of WordPress as his personal property. If he retains control of the foundation, there's nothing to stop him from continuing his crusade there. He's certainly got the funds to do so.
The third step is effectively required if he's fired. It's even mentioned in the 48 Laws of Power.
I don't think this outcome is particularly likely, but it could happen. People do sometimes win the lottery.
I imagine a near future result will be WPE maintaining a fork of WordPress and the plugin repo, with WP demanding plugin authors disclaim any association with WPE.
WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part.
Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that route then also Automattic doesn't have to put up with funding WPE operation anymore.
I'm tired of people justifying WPE attitude and behavior by saying "legally, they don't have to contribute", well let's talk legal, everything happening to them is within those same lines too. Why are you complaining if it's legal?
This is one of those "fuck around and find out" situation. Matt just run out of fucks to give, and decided it's better to teach the bully a lesson even if it comes at a cost.
Guess: Matt is not well. You can find others making more specific guesses, but we don't need to make that public.
If WP Engine has to create a fork and dump millions, they would basically lose. As they have built a business model around not contributing even to the already well developed WordPress codebase. So I can't imagine how going beyond that and forking the entire thing would work, unless they just mirror upstream.
I don't think Matt would mind if WP Engine did just that because he's arguing that they are using WordPress without giving back anything in return, so if they just did their thing outside of WordPress that would be exactly what he wants.
But I'm sure they're already debating internally how feasible a fork is and if it makes sense for their business.
I don't think Matt will be too displeased with WPEngine investing $25 million into a fork. He may even feel vindicated.
Matt's extortion attempt is because WPEngine is generating a lot of revenue and is valuable enough for PE to notice. He figured he had a decent chance of blackmailing them out of 8% of their revenue to the tune of around 10mil a year. Matt's a deluded and entitled tech nerd cosplaying a mafia mobster. And WPEngine did not blink.
The main reason is that Matt wouldn’t be able to freeload without relicensing WordPress - which would be a massive headache for him and his partners to go through; and the reason would be patently and embarrassingly obvious.
The goal I described earlier is not to make a WordPress clone that just happens to be free of Matt. There’s plenty of low hanging, long ignored gripes and opportunities for improvement. Offer a better, Matt-free product, and you’ll win.
WordPress is a fork that basically killed the original project. No reason that history can’t repeat itself.
You're right about the reviews, users, url, etc, but what was "previously provided" was code with a GPL license. You can't "steal" that.
The list of things to criticise Matt for is long, but you can't accuse him of stealing open source code.
Thank you for stating the move is still controversial. The root issue people always forget was NOT left pad. It was kik. It was not npm’s to take away from the package maintainer and give to someone else. That was the abuse of trust that caused the maintainer to also yank left pad. I am not this maintainer. I don’t know this maintainer. However, if someone went to my email provider for example Gmail and said I can’t use kik at Gmail dot com anymore and this email address would be given to kik now, I would be furious.
Imagine if Toyota came to New York Times and said the New York Times can’t have a page like nytimes.com/toyota The lawyers at the times would tell them to pound sand and or see you in court.
NPM has never acknowledged its grave error of judgment. In fact, its website doubles down saying it stands by its decision.
If you told me Wordpress dot org would manage to outclown the clowns at npm, I would not believe you and yet here we are.
That _might_ not be what's doing on. But it's entirely plausible given <waves hands around at everything>
It was first brought up in r/Wordpress 17 hours ago.
I'm running dozens of WP sites on a single $3/mo Hetzner box without trouble.
Way to speed run wiping out trust in your product.
Any Wordpress plugin developer who relies on it for their livelihood should be EXTREMELY worried.
Maybe it's a technicality, but the code is open source and you can do whatever you want it it, provided that you respect the GPL license.
There's a lot to criticise Matt for here, but you can't accuse him of stealing GPL code. Like, that's one of the points of that license.
And that freedom is also its weakness. "When all you have is a hammer, ..." comes to mind.
I've had to rescue enough booking systems, LMS's, and SaaS platforms built on WordPress with terrible performance or 20% of features not working to think this is a terrible approach.
> Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.
That's no bad thing. More specialised tools help with performance and UX for those tasks.
For "ACF" however, the examiner didn't see a problem and it has been published in the Federal Register. It will be registered if no one files an opposition during the publication period.
You don't need to have a registered trademark to sue for trademark infringement; registration does make it easier to assert your trademark and can increase damage in a court case.
Whether or not that means it will be granted I have no idea. On one hand it's only known in WordPress circles. On the other hand, WordPress is said to account for over 40% of the web.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1cc0aor/what_are...
Frankly, it would explain a lot. Cause as it is, it's baffling.
It's a contagious theme.
Any alternative must have a hosted option, I'm not playing admin for something that already takes up a lot of my time, as I said out of the goodness of my heart and wallet.
The best I can say for wordpress is that myself, other contributors and our commenters tolerate it, though quite often it leans towards hate it. I've yet to hear anyone say they love it hence the ask.
Take your pick of commenting platforms from this 2021 thread:
Obviously there's more to it here as they've also taken over the plugin's reviews, users, etc, but the code is GPL.
It's not only stealing, it's an even worse, exceptionally low form of stealing when something is already free and yet you still choose to steal it.
But if you willingly able to contribute back to the community with between 20 - 40% of profit generated from the open source used, is and will be considered fair play.
In the case of gpl software, copying, and posessing a copy, and redistributing a copy of the code itself is not theft. The license grants those actions explicitly.
But the fact that the license grants those particular rights does not mean there is no license, and violating that license is exactly theft, which is what Mullenweg has done.
For someone persuing this whole pogrom under the banner of championing open source and being a good community member and challenging others integrity, this is about as hipocrytical and low as you can go. It would be a joke if it wasn't a fact.
I would not admit in public that you think that since a license does not require money, that means it has no owner or copyright and that it's impossible to steal it. Or that laws are the only thing that defines right and wrong and stealing. Money is just one of many terms in any agreement or contract or license.
What is your personal definition of "free code" and "stealing free code"? From your post, either you got one of them profoundly wrong, or both.
https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-acquires-delicious-brain...
They were, until the CEO started burning decades of goodwill. At this point I'm looking at what I should do to get off Automattic for my website, I'm legit scared plugin developers are going to get spooked.
That’s probably mostly because the private equity folks are just better at extracting money without causing an international scene. Matt’s ineptitude doesn’t make it categorically different, though.
Has this been proven in court, not implying the legality would be respected in this case though.
The question isn’t whether the GPL can restrict you from doing something. It’s just that in the absence of the GPL, you fall back to the default legal rights where you’re not allowed to make copies of that code.
Multilingual is built into Drupal and as far as I am aware, it's a plugin for Wordpress.
Complex permissions/access control is another area where Drupal is much stronger.
And overall, the more complex the requirements are , the more likely Drupal will be the answer. Wordpress leans very heavily towards "here, install this, it'll work, you can tweak it and that's about it". Drupal gives you a gigantic bucket of LEGO. In other words, although it's a bit of an exaggeration but not badly, with Wordpress you start from a working website and there's only so far you can walk from that point. With Drupal, you need to walk quite a bit in the first place to get a good website but there's just no end how far you can walk.
I'm not sure if it's true, but there were talks about WPEngine devs basically not being allocated any dev time on WordPress anymore (whereas Automattic devs spend tens of hours a week on the actual OSS project). That was one of the catalyst behind the whole drama where Matt called them out basically on stage during a conference talk. Which was just before (or at the same time) as he started talking about the royalty.
Now, again Matt's behavior has been super weird since he basically failed at articulating his position well, and his PR has been catastrophic.
But the fact is WPEngine still does not contribue to WordPress. That is their right, but everything matt has been doing is also "legal" and within his (and his company's) rights.
I think it's the other way around: the (false) claims about WPEngine not contributing became a thing because they refused his demands to direct 8% of their revenue into matt's private-equity-backed pockets.
It would make no sense otherwise: "you aren't contributing to the community, so contribute to my for-profit corporation instead"? If matt really cared about the community*, wouldn't the appropriate demand be for WPEngine to contribute 8% to the community, instead of to matt?
*: yes, I recognize that, in reality, matt's repeated actions harming the community in service of himself have made clear that he cares more about himself than the community.
Also, the community (in terms of development) is basically automattic and... that's it. That's the whole problem! But again, I completely agree that the royalty request was extremely weird especially considering the supposed separation between WordPress.org & Automattic
In my mind, shortly after the WordCamp US things should have leveled out. Someone should have pulled Matt aside and said, "OK, you vented. Pissed all over The Community who showed up, but you vented. Let's get this back on the rails..."
It's possible that was said. But Matt's listening skills aren't good and lately have gotten worse. To me, the long this stays off the rails the less likely it is to get back on the rails.
Someday this is going to be an HBR case study on how not to ensure your legacy. There should also be an HBR case study for Gutenberg, "How not to roll out a product."
Also their employee "shares" dont have any voting rights:
In the context OSS Matt's behaviour is deplorable. His insistence on digging a deeper and deeper hole is freightening.
It's digital self-emmolation. It's professional suicide.
The board is Matt and a PE firm Managing Partner, appointed by Matt. The third board member m (also appointed by Matt) doesn’t seem to have been active in any way shape or form in several years.
I don’t see this happening.
Current drama aside, good for him if that's the case. Very few founders maintain absolute control past a Series C.
It is so transparently apparent that these people are completely subservient to Matt.
Yes, WPEngine is contributing to the wordpress community, but that's beside the point, since WPEngine's contributions to the community only came up when WPEngine refused matt's shakedown demand to transfer money into matt's pockets. Weirder still, matt banned WPEngine from contributing to the community on wordpressdotorg, then took some of WPEngine's community contributions and claimed them as their own.
> Also, the community (in terms of development) is basically automattic and... that's it.
It's interesting that you felt the need to qualify "community", limiting it to "in terms of development". The community is the sum total of all users of, and contributors to, the wordpress ecosystem. Matt has harmed millions of community members with his actions, and the community is telling him to knock it off, for the good of the community.
Read the lawsuit filed by WP Engine. No such negotiations existed. Matt has been arguing with WP Engine in his head. You may believe WP Engine's contributions to WordPress are disproportionately small for their size but make that argument on the basis of accurate information, not the fiction from Matt.
Nobody likes WP Engine but Matt's lying has been so problematic that it is impossible to take his side unless you believe that integrity is optional.
Are you for real? Event sponsorship is part of the marketing budget. They're there to promote their company among competitors. It's a universal business expense.
> plugin development ACF
ACF is their own asset
I mentioned this in my comment, they don't contribute significantly beyond their mouth. What you came with are just the receipts for what I said.
We can't pick and choose which contributions are valid and which aren't. WP Engine spend money on the development of WPGraphQL a free plugin, WP Engine spend money on the development of Advanced Custom Fields which they release for free for millions of WordPress sites to use... of course they're not doing that out of some altruistic moral crusade, of course it's a clear calculus about the benefit to their bottom line, but that doesn't change that they're contributing.
The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg: you're playing into Matt's absurd narrative that the only valid contribution is one that is made to something under Matt's control.
I think WP Engine are Private Equity leeches, I have zero doubt about that, I wish that they were to contribute more but that's the deal with Open Source software, that's what we choose to allow by releasing Open Source software. The moral obligation we have when we use Open Source software is to respect the license, Matt had the choice about the license to release WordPress under, he made the choice for it to be GPL.
dhh is more eloquent and authoritative than I, read these if you need further convincing:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-di...
https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-...
WPE has other employees dedicated to WP and The Community. I'm not defending WPE but just because they don't contribute in a way MM wants doesn't mean they don't contribute. Suggesting they're not contributing is disingenuous.
Matt is not a dictator. Oh wait, scratch that.
p.s. Matt should be careful what he wishes for. If WPE or anyone contributes they're going to want a voice, a seat at the table. Is Matt willing to share control? If the answer is no, then that is the root problem here.
Exactly, if that was the only thing WPE has leeched we wouldn't be here. They were tolerated for years but they kept digging more and more.
This sounds like dictator speak. "Tolerated" by who? The community embraced them, it's matt and his private-equity-associated, for-profit corporation that didn't like their success.
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
It's about ego.
It's about money.
I don't care about specific individual or technology since I don't use WordPress and I'm not in that business to begin with but these discussions are spreading the wrong message and values.
Please make sure you're contributing to the discussion in the future, not just attacking people based on your limited view.
He's just ruined that possibility for just about anyone else going forward.
Praise him? No way.
Ironic isn't it? He cries about the scourge known as PE, and he's single handedly f*ked every investor-seeking founder everywhere going forward.
That's naive at best.
Plenty of investors are already asking "Can I get f*ked like this?" And going forward investors will be sure not to be exposed unnecessarily.
Zero impact? That's silly. Investors what high returns and lowest possible risk. Matt has made single founder with too much control high risk.
Yes, this has f*ked other investment-seeking founders. Full stop.
In the discussion for this post alone, we have commenters with no idea that WordPress can be self-hosted, or that dot com has a free plan.
That's skimming the top for how confused a non-HN-reading layperson could be at the whole project.
And? It is the backbone that powers their entire business. You're acting like they're being asked to contribute to something they don't use. That should be the bare minimum. Even business wise it make sense to contribute to it and help make it better. It's absurd we're even having this discussion.
You're also inconsistent. You claim something is fine because it's legal (the license doesn't ask for more as a condition) but you condemn the other party reaction on a different grounds? I thought everything you can get away with, legally, is OK. Matt has barely scratched the surface of what's within his power to do in response.
I release Open Source software under a permissive license: if I leverage my control over that software to harm the consumers of my software that I believe are taking without giving, then I am far worse than a leech.
Regarding "WordPress Core": if WordPress Core is all that matters, why are plugins fundamental to WordPress? Why do millions of WordPress websites use Advanced Custom Fields?
You've repeated a bunch of Matt's lies, either you're uninformed or not impartial. The latter cannot be addressed, the former can. Read more, speak less.
I release software under a permissive license too. But I understand the only reason I'm able to do it, is because companies like Google and Mozilla believe in supporting people like me. There's this unwritten rule that the most successful people in our society should be philanthropic, because they're the only ones who can. However nothing formally requires this.
It's similar to how a company might officially give you unlimited vacation days. Imagine if one person tests that rule, and makes every day a vacation day. It would probably take years before someone tries that, but once someone actually does, the rules are going to quickly change for everyone and you might end up with a lot less freedom than before.
WPEngine has certainly tested the limits of the open source gift economy and the way Automattic is reacting isn't helping either. It's a sad thing to witness.
It's foolish to support a private equity against the guy because you hold him to a higher standards. It doesn't even make sense.
But this discussion is unlikely to lead anywhere.
Can you mention any specific events before the recent debacle that show Matt have been anything but supportive of them for all these years?
It's quite telling that we don't see matt attacking less successful companies which do the same thing as WPEngine, much less putting forth the same pretexts for it.
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
That's hilarious because Matt and Automattic actually invested in WP Engine, supported them in many ways ever since their inception and helped them be more successful and reach this level.
Your entire argument about "jealous of success" falls apart if you look only few months back. He wanted them to succeed for years and years, even after private equity, he still saw them as partners.
If he succeeds with WP Engine, then he'll probably shake down other companies in the future.
I won't say nobody is asking questions at all, because "investor" is a loosey-goosey term and there are plenty of people writing small checks who call themselves investors. But those people never had leverage anyway. Investors get preferred shares with no voting rights (or even information rights!). The only ones who have any power are round leads, whose board seats are enshrined in the company's articles of incorporation.
If -- and again, it's a big if -- Matt, after raising a billion dollars across many funding rounds, still controls a majority of the voting shares and board seats, it's because Automattic was already so successful that he's been able to dictate terms every step of the way. This is stupendously rare. It's not a situation that applies to other startups, or that investors are measurably worried about.
I can not imagine writing a cheque for anything above $999 and not ensuring I have some sort of protection against this type of sideways.
Frankly, if my investors weren't now concerned I'd be concerned about the quality of my investors. It's not a win to say they're not comcerned.
Where did I say they don't contribute? I said they don't contribute beyond their mouth
> You don't see the non-premium version of ACF as contributing?
It's a marketing strategy, first and foremost. If they didn't offer it, an alternative would come along and attract the crowd.
You know what's disingenuous? Claiming it's a contribution when you're doing it as marketing strategy or as part of sales funnel.
You can't cash a check twice.
In your example, you're contributing to other people projects so yes it would be contribution right of the bat. That's completely different than the case with ACF.
And what makes Automattic's contributions any different? They "steer" the product to their benefit and sell that as what's good for them is good for all.
That's rubbish.
It's not contributing to "the cause" when the features you add are solely for your own benefit. Not that self-serving is wrong. But to sell it as benevolent red lines any decent bullshit detector.
Matt defined the license. Now he regrets that and he wants a cut. Nuttin wrong with that. But to sell it otherwise is shite. We're not that stupid.
Well, unlike WPEngine, Automattic and Matt make significant contribution beyond their ecosystem, here are some:
- Let's encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/
- Matrix's open protocol: https://matrix.org/
- The PHP Foundation: https://thephp.foundation/
- Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/
- And the list goes on: contributing and sponsoring many projects and developers that everyone using the web benefited from, including you and billions of people (not counting wordpress's impact)
Please educate yourself before spreading FUD about people who made great contributions constantly to the open web, the entire industry, and promoted open source on every chance they got.
WP Engine is a company that chose to build a business around a piece of software released under a license that permits their commercialisation of the software.
Matt is an individual who chose to release software under a license that permits companies to build a business around the software and has then chosen to initiate a "nuclear war" against one of those companies who is complying with the license he chose to release the software under because they are not contributing to the software in a way that he deems acceptable.
They're fundamentally different actors in fundamentally different positions. WP Engine has behaved exactly as one would expect from the start. Matt has behaved in a way that suggests he has lost his damn mind, doing everything in his power to harm a business that is complying with the license he chose.
I don't disagree with the idea that WP Engine should contribute more, I don't disagree that Private Equity is harmful to Open Source, but I fundamentally disagree with Matt's weaponisation of Open Source to make a point. There is a lot of great prior thinking on this subject[1], Matt has many options, he is making the choice to behave in this way, it is not a foregone conclusion.
Our discussion isn't going to lead anywhere, but we can revisit it in a month when Matt's downward spiral has resulted in the inevitable. Perhaps, at that point, you'll reflect on whether Matt's behaviour was worth supporting.
Clearly, this isn't about OSS or PE, etc. It's about the depth of Matt's pockets. He might be drinking his own Kool Aid but few others are.
A fork of WP might not be as "productive" but at least it won't have to carry a wild monkey Matt on its back.
Matt championing himself as benevolent and using OSS as a shield is BS. No one is expecting him - or anyone - to be perfect. But he and his hypocrisy has jumped the shark.
The argument that matt is doing this for the community, though, totally falls apart when we see that he is actively harming community members, and the argument that he's doing it for open source totally falls apart when we see that he tried to extort WPEngine for money into his own pocket before contriving the aforementioned pretexts.
Why just WPEngine? It seems because they're successful and he's jealous of their money (hence demanding they give it to him, and not the community).
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
>shake down WPEngine for money into his own pocket
It's not going to Matt pocket, Matt pays that multiple folds and has done that for years. Stop making ignorant accusations.
Yes, it is. He demanded WPEngine pay 8% of revenues to Automattic. Not to the community. To Automattic: matt's private, for-profit corporation. The one matt runs along with a private equity friend of his. The one matt likely owns much of, too. The one matt named after himself.
Also, please stop ignoring the questions posed to you:
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
No, that's would be their value proposition or what every company on earth have been doing since inception, filling a gap in the market.
You seem to be claiming that their mere existence in the ecosystem would be a contribution, even if they were closed source. They would be providing value and attracting users in a butterfly effect style. Sure, that help and have a positive impact but is it a contribution to an open source project and the ecosystem?
My model is fairly simple, you can't claim credit for something if you did it involuntarily or with a different intention or it happened as n-level side effect of what you are trying to do.
> Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
Am I sitting on some regulatory board? What this got to do with me? if I had to propose anything it'd be form a board from all major contributors to solve this conflict and reach a resolution
> "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
No, Matt supported and invested in them for years, before you and "the community" even heard about them. He was the one there from the very beginning.
Well, I asked a simple question: Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? What do you think? Should he?
> if I had to propose anything it'd be form a board from all major contributors to solve this conflict
Ignoring for a moment that matt is banning contributors, rather than caring what they want: What about what the wordpress community wants? They are the most important and most numerous stakeholders here.
> No, Matt not only embraced them, he supported and invested in them for years, before you and "the community" even heard about them. He was the one there from the very beginning.
No, the community has embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community and to Automattic's success. So who specifically are you speaking of, who merely "tolerated" WPEngine?