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Comment by delhanty | Hacker News Reader

Apologies HN, off-topic.

Matt, while you're here can you comment on John O'Nolan's tweet [0] from July accusing Automattic of anti-competitive behavior w.r.t. Ghost [1]?

>Can never decide if I’m flattered or horrified that a $1.1billion, 1,000 person company w/ a 83% share of CMS market seriously employs a full-time team dedicated to attacking a 12 person bootstrapped non-profit org with an open source product

[0] https://twitter.com/johnonolan/status/1146075173134618625

[1] https://twitter.com/Ghost

Edit: Matt's not taken the opportunity to rebut John's claim after 50 mins, even though he's replied to a couple of other comments in this thread. I guess that's his prerogative, but ...

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John is a pompous jerk who likes to misinterpret half-truths, scream persecution, and then block people when called out rather than admit fault. And if ever called on it he silently deletes his tweets instead of acknowledging his actions or faults.

source: he blocked me years ago for precisely this. also, coincidentally, when he was screaming persecution once prior.

https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/605728714840797184 https://twitter.com/daljo628/status/606057031288647680 https://twitter.com/jcasabona/status/605946936659558402

Further examples of another tweet thread of his that he silently deleted after getting called out:

https://twitter.com/helenhousandi/status/286930024232267777 https://twitter.com/helenhousandi/status/286929096846499840 https://twitter.com/helenhousandi/status/286862020412858369

In short, pretty much anything that comes out of John's mouth is trolling, and should be given about as much credence.

OK, fair enough.

I notice that you were working for Wordpress.com in May 2018 and had a run in with John O'Nolan on HN then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17086661

Just disclosing that for you to put your comment in context.

Oh hey I guess I did. Totally forgot about that.

You'll note:

* He says something factually wrong (`It does not run the open source codebase at all.`)

* I point out that he's factually wrong, and back it up.

* He dodges and insists he's right regardless.

Yup. True to form.

How is that anti-competitive behavior?

That looks like a textbook definition of competitive behavior.

I'm not advocating either way - just curious to hear Matt's take on it.

I'd imagine it'll be something along the lines of "of course we market to potential customers".

Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows:

>"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]"

[0] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1146446632017203200

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#European_Uni...

That's an insane statute to apply here.

It's a sales person offering to answer questions and (maybe? it's a bit unclear what the scope of "our services" is here) offer onboarding advice/assistance. Considering that to be "predatory pricing" would ban the sales and technical support processes of virtually any company.

Well it's not my claim, but I think it must be what John means.

Otherwise, as you correctly point out, it's clearly just plain old competitive behavior.

Edit: thinking this through, the Automattic sales people aren't stupid, so they're not going to hand over a smoking gun by making an explicit offer that would be provable predatory pricing. But there's a hint there that might be the intention. In the original tweet, John has underlined in red the following phrase:

>To be clear, we don't charge anything for our services.

What is meant by "services"? I think Automattic would claim it's just the Special Projects services

On the other hand, it's maybe deliberately ambiguous: Possibly once contact is made more is on offer.

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