On With Theo / T3.gg
ma.tt
ma.tt
Theo then reads out the specific terms that Matt says contain the warning, and there is in fact no warning about service disruption.
Somebody needs to start telling him "no." Ideally he'd step aside. I doubt either of those things will ever happen.
WP Engine is profiting off of wordpress, not their trademark, the same as countless other consultants and service providers, and perfectly allowed even if no other companies were doing the same thing.
They are controlled by vcs and don't give back much, if you don't count things that could be argued to be self-serving marketing, like hosting conventions. But so what?
If you require that someone give ypu something in return for your software, then it's not open source. Just charge for it honetsly.
He has no moral high ground by several different angles. Both because he has no right to get what he's complaining abput not getting, and he's wildly abusing his position in a public non-profit organization to extort a competitor to benefit his for-profit company.
No integrity at all.
Just like, if i want opinions and discussion of this quality i could go to 4chan and a good portion of the posters would be a lot more civil and rational.
Theo on the other hand is mostly an idiot and people think he’s an authoritative figure on everything. He will never admit he’s wrong, rather sweep it under the rug or pretend no one saw him be wrong.
Theo is too quick on the gun with breaking tech news and habitually does not come with the appropriate context or knowledge to sustain any insight. Though if I were in his shoes trying to cover every breaking development in tech (read: HN front page trending) I would be caught with my pants down 80% of the time.
Prime is really about the entertainment value from what I've seen, though to his credit is aware of his limits and knowledge. I have found his reaction videos tedious with the excessive commentary.
PirateSoftware, to his credit is quite an insightful person in my estimations and all of his advice is contextualised in his own experiences which is usually quite valuable but sometimes not given the highly individual nature of it. Some of his purported life hacks are flat out terrible, but for what he gets wrong, he does get a lot right, especially around indie game dev.
I don't follow any of the mentioned youtubers, but their stuff occasionally appears in my recommendations. I don't understand the point of videos where someone just scrolls through a blog post and reads it out loud. It comes across as narcissistic and an attempt to piggyback on anything to "create content". There's rarely any added value, and it also feels extremely inefficient to watch such "reaction videos" when I could just skim through the text myself. I guess I'm too old and not part of the target audience.
I just liked primeagen from the above. I like him cause he made no pretense to objectivity and he is also very exciteable, which is a valuable information in itself.
It’s difficult to take the interview seriously. Very disappointing and a waste of time in my opinion.
The other side is that... years later, Matt spent $100,000 just to spite the developer by buying the domain he wanted. Imagine spending six figures just to spite someone. That's a lot of meals for hungry school kids.
This is really scary behaviour for anyone. Let alone the leader of a community.
You're right, he answered later though with the example of reselling GPL licensed plugins. I guess I missed that at first.
I just stopped watching after an hour, after the arguments about who should actually pay the fee and who should not. No other companies seem to have to pay the 8% fee, but then he decides that WPE should do it and maybe because they hurt his feelings, they probably need to pay even more - his own words.
It also provides another example of Matt exploding with a personal vendetta (IMO). Which is highly relevant to what's happening now. It's a pattern.
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/thesis/
Pearson never made amends; he continued his bad actions long after being called out (and possibly still does).
The correct solution to bad actors is to raze them to the ground; Matt isn't wrong in this. He has the means and is doing something principled with them: Destroying a bad actor.
This should be encouraged; it is how capitalism is supposed to work.
(For clarity, I'm specifically talking about buying the thesis.com domain name, which he couldn't use because Pearson had the trademark).
It's vindictive and wasteful. Period. That's $100,000 ($132,000 in today's dollars) that could have gone to making the WordPress community better, some other charitable cause, or even a nice vacation for Matt and his family.
I'm sorry, but that is not normal or "principled" behaviour and it's not something that should be "encouraged".
I can't blame them if they don't want to talk to him, since he called WP Engine a cancer. I don't think he meant it to sound so dehumanizing, but it's a hell of an insult to throw around.
Plus, just knowing someone was willing to do a longform, non-screened, potentially hostile interview can be mollifying.
Corollary tip: the best messenger for this is frequently not you personally.
Every time Theo tried to talk about the negative community impact or the perceived stability of the platform as a whole, Matt forcefully steered the conversation back towards criticising WP Engine.
Matt seems more concerned with retribution towards WP Engine than doing what's right for the WHOLE userbase. It almost doesn't matter how right or wrong he is in his arguments against WP Engine, what worries me is that he is being vindictive in a way that undermines everything he's built.
But as Theo pointed out, the public was not privy to this long running dispute, and Automattic's drastic action came effectively out of nowhere.
Matt seems so preoccupied with this line of thinking (i.e. is WP Engine doing something wrong) and not nearly preoccupied enough with the impact on the Wordpress userbase, the long-term perceptions of the Wordpress brand, and the overall business confidence in Wordpress as a platform. There are ways to balance both, but Matt has chosen not to.
It is clear to me that Matt sees Wordpress as "the foundation" and "the trademark" and "Wordpress.com" and not the 25% of the public internet that uses it.
WPEngine may very well be doing something wrong, but WordPress needs a clearer license with which to attack them with
"on notice" for what? "on notice" for not doing something you're not obligated to do?
I never once washed your car, despite being on notice about it for 5 years...
I can understand why comments are mostly negative given recent events, but I don't think it's fair to cherry-pick bits and pieces from a 2-hour interview with the aim to portrait someone in a worse light than he had already done for himself.
I personally don't think what Matt did was fair and I still don't think that after watching the video, but the additional context he gave certainly makes me a lot more sympathetic towards the complexity behind the situation for what we only saw the outcomes for.
If you don't have time to watch the whole thing but going to do it anyway, I recommend starting from 1:51:51 to set the tone for yourself.
So is Matt lying here? Talking about someone else? What am I not getting?
Just a slight mischaracterization, it's just an interview / conversation between two technical software devs.
https://youtu.be/YkOSUVzOAA4?si=u6i8S7urXqDniooa&t=1277
I semi-liked him at some point, but his video on the T3 stack lost my support. In a few videos he completely ignored that Next.js and other stacks already had shipped the features T3 supposedly uniquely had. T3 is different to work with, in my opinion worse, and he completely ignores the innovation from Next.js that had already happened since the Next.js code he compares it to. It's like he launched a 1995 model car in 2000 and started comparing it to all the 1990s cars.
I know if Next.js hadn't innovated, his framework would have stood a chance at wider immediate adoption. It had some real, and unique pros. Unfortunately, by the time of his release, his ideas and knowledge were either already outdated, or he is hiding the truth from himself. A lot of the supposed benefit of T3 stack is now provided in Next.js by default.
The man should look at usage stats. He's getting more pithy and angry over time. I don't think it's wise.
I wouldn’t listen to him without a fist of salt.
"Matt Talks About WordPress Situation" by ThePrimeTime 2024-09-26