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Comment by genmon | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago

https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/

and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.

Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.

All seems so sudden and disproportionate.

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> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project?

WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?

Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.

I’d go with the most obvious explanation: Matt found out their biggest competitor makes more money than WP.com and does’t give back (money or development time), got rughtfully pissed, but started doing ridiculous things instead of just calling them out.

If WP Engine wanted to dedicate resources to build on the code they are using, they would've contributed more to the core itself.

Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this.

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.

You might want to add a disclaimer that you work at Automattic.

Most of my other comments I was speaking in first person, in others I did not initially realize it wasn't as clear in some of them.

I also updated my bio here to reflect the product I am working for belongs to Automattic. Previously, it only mentioned the product which not everyone has to know belongs to Automattic.

Your employer has been served a cease and desist. Does your legal counsel know you are commenting on the legal matters on social media as an employee? This doesn’t seem like a wise position to put yourself or your employer in.

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