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Discussion (100 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This should probably say self appointed advocate. He really hasn't advocated for much beyond collecting payments to Automattic.
Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate.
WordPress is still GPL licensed.
Only because it's forced to be because it in turn was a fork of a previous GPL license.
It should be noted that Mullenweg has regularly weaponized the GPL license in the past - using it to take out other companies in the ecosystem like in their fight against Thesis.
Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
The only reason Wordpress is open source in the first place is because it's a just a fork of b2/cafelog and the original GNU license means derivative works have to be open source as well. (Lost in his moral crusade against WP Engine is the fact that he never really contributed to b2 besides just taking their code).
When the rights were transferred to the WPF, Matt didn't disclose that the Foundation was essentially just him, and the two other nominal members were effectively absent.
When the rights were transferred, and a big deal was made of this, "It now belongs to the WPF, which ensures that no commercial entity or interest can affect what should be a community project", there was no mention of how, on that same day the WPF silently granted a "irrevocable, non-expiring, exclusive universal commercial licence" to Automattic.
Throughout all of this Matt has conflated Automattic, himself, WP.com, WP.org, the WPF to whatever is most convenient to himself.
Matt says himself "I am WordPress.org. It's not a part of the Foundation", but you'd be forgiven for thinking so, given that the website resides on the Foundations AS network...
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.
Matt's claim, "My mom is confused and thinks that WPEngine is part of the open source project", is a deflection, and laughable coming from the man who runs wordpress.org as a "independent website" (that just happens to be running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.
Not sure if it makes me autistic though, I mean, companies use wrong spellings all the time to differentiate, so often that I don't give much thought to it any more.
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
Wasn't there a 6 month severance on offer?
I'm sure there are people who are stuck and have a house payment, but it was pretty obvious the shenanigans were only going to get worse.
Also, if you're just there for a paycheck, you're probably not that upset at distractions.
Of course usually hand-picked boards don't go against their benefactor, and they're not keeping their seats.
That they did in this case says something about just how bad the situation must be.
Depending on the company rules it is possible they might not be easily replaced during their term in which case they could do a coup in the short term.
Travis, Altman, they’re egotistical but ultimately respect corporate theatre, they know that circumventing it is a bad idea, that one must participate in the grand performance, as Altman did. Matt doesn’t care, he’ll do as he pleases regardless of the consequences.
If Matt was a rationale shareholder he would know that what he has done here is a death sentence for Automattic but alas he does not care. Matt will watch Automattic burn before he lets anyone usurp him. The irony is that as a supposed open source advocate, he’s harming open source, he’s showing how dangerous it is for investors to invest in the corporate arm of an open source project when the founder has absolute control over the project.
Either that or he somehow has control over IT and is just shit posting and controlling Slack.
> As of yet, no one at Automattic has heard a confirmation from the board. Mark Davies’ Slack account was also deactivated, sources said.
mhm, ok.
Davies perhaps explained to Matt how financially precarious Automattic’s position is but it seems very unlikely for a CFO to advocate for a batshit extortion plot that had no hope of success. Where did you hear that Davies was responsible for the extortion scheme? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere.
I'd love the diversity of everybody being able to build the sites they want, though. Perhaps we'll see more static HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Update: I love the irony that I just saw the sibling post arguing in the exact opposite direction, that the diversity might make it harder to exploit web sites at scale. Which is also a good point.
After they saturated the market for lifetime buyers, they started launching new features not included for lifetime buyers. Annoying.
Then they started pushing advertising for upgrading. Very annoying.
Then they started taking away features lifetime plan users had already. Infuriating.
Then they made it so that support was only available for users on a subscription plan. My complaints weren’t even answered. Unforgivable.
Just saying, there are plenty of good CMSs out there now.
WordPress is junky AF, and the spat with WP Engine over... of all things... how they store backups... it was all so cringe. Felt like it boiled down to WP Engines saying, "We don't need to keep backups on the live server..." And WP saying, "Oh hell yeah you do, you can't have your own way to do rollbacks!" It was literally insane for them to fight about that.