My WordPress Slack Ban
linuxjedi.co.uk
linuxjedi.co.uk
He could have had basically the entire internet on his side just by laying out the facts: "They use our product for free, generate hundreds of millions in revenue, and don't contribute back. It's just not fair. Please contribute more."
Instead this tantrum has turned a bunch of people that would be in his camp against him and he's dragged Wordpress.org into the mud.
Single handedly destroying a legacy.
It seems like every step Matt makes just makes the whole situation worse.
What I see is a incredibly wealthy person displaying self pity because he can't have more.
IP issues withstanding, the owner of a software can relicense any time they want.
Any software released in the past would still be subject to the GPL.
So, if Matt decided to make WordPress closed source, previous versions would still be licensed under the terms of the GPL.
I remember reading exactly this statement about corps generating profits on a open source thousand of times. Usually with zero effect.
WordPress contributor banned for asking about new checkbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788704 - Oct 2024 (8 comments)
It continues to reinforce that the entire WordPress.org / Foundation / Automattic cluster has turned out to just be Matt's personal fiefdom... which worked out okay when he was pretty chill, but is terrible when he decides to burn it all down.
Some of the best and now most commercially critical open source software started a long time ago, by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Turns out, we did not arrive in that future.
We arrived in the one where both $xxxB companies and their countless cargo cultists explot every means possible to profit from open source software, making angry demands on volunteers and small teams, while giving back as little as possible.
It's essentially a test to find every open source developer's breaking point. Recently, we found Matt's. Next month, it'll be someone else's.
Closed source (but open data formats) may be the new open source.
The problem with Open Source as a movement isn't just the megacorps using it, it's also that paying for the project's ongoing development stopped being the goal for many monetization efforts—making the shareholders or the maintainers themselves (or in this case both) wealthy (or in this case even more wealthy) has become the new goal.
That is why it's such a problem that these companies don't "give back". Having the software in the world doing its job is no longer the primary goal of starting an open source project, and the "takers" are encroaching on the founders' market cap.
WordPress was a fork of B2 and quickly intended to make money.
Matt and Automattic bought into WPE. They were the ones who sold their shares to the Private Equity firm that now owns it!
The only other board member of the Foundation is ... drum roll ... the Managing Partner of another Private Equity firm, that Matt himself appointed.
All his hand wringing about PE is to distract from the simple fact that he has repeatedly been an asshole through this process, and it's not because he "reached his breaking point" as an open source developer. This is so apologistic it's not funny.
He reached a breaking point as a CEO, because he made a horrible business decision to buy Tumblr, which has been nothing but a money pit, ever since.
Since then, MATT's for profit business has had this boat anchor around it, so he's looking for extra cash.
That's why he demanded their royalties be paid to Automattic, his for profit company, not the open source project.
> by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Horseshit. People with RMS-like visions for the future don't see the commercial potential for an open source project, immediately spin up a Foundation with themselves as President, and immediately grant their own for-profit company a perpetual, exclusive and irrevocable commercial use license for said open source project. (They may however release self-congratulatory press releases talking about how they are champions of open source for assigning ownership of the project to their Foundation while neglecting to mention the licensing that they[1] signed off on, that very same day.)
You have apparently fully bought into the narrative.
> making angry demands on volunteers and small teams
What "angry demands" has WPEngine made of the project? I'd love to hear of at least one.
[1] I say 'they' but really, the licensing was signed for the Foundation by "Matt Mullenweg, President", and for Automattic by "Matt Mullenweg, President and CEO".
If you care what someone else does with free software beyond making the source available, that is a you problem.
Even gpl3 isn't "encroaching" on anything.
It's terms are no different than any other terms, in that you can either accept or not. No different than if the terms are for money.
If you don't agree to them, then luckily you don't have to use the software. You can write your own software that you don't have to share with anyone. Or you can pay for software that has other terms which are surely much more generous and empowering than gpl3.
The only reason the software exists and is good enough to be valuable in the first place, is because it had those terms. If it had other terms, it wouldn't exist in the first place or be worth stealing for you complain that it doesn't let you steal it. If it had other terms, then most of the people who gave their time to work on it, would not have done so, because it would be a bad investment of their time.
I guess the actual complaint here is "why can't you just give me software like MIT?" Why should anyone care about that complaint? It's like trying to use a freedom argument to criticize the limitation on your freedom to keep slaves.
He's just mad someone else is also making money.
And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.
We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.
The only problem that I've been able to see isn't a problem with Free Software as a concept, it's a problem with VC-funded companies that think "Open Source" is a business model that will somehow get their investors an ROI, but that's a problem with the motivations of VC-funded companies, not with Free Software.
Most FLOSS starts as a weekend project. Most end there, too. But some get big. Those big projects demand a lot of time and effort to deal with all the issues, PRs, mailing list/forum/IRC channel/whathave you moderation. So much effort that it in fact becomes another full-time job. Most people don’t know how to deal with that. They probably like what they’ve built, like all the attention, they try to be helpful. The obvious idea is to turn it somehow into a source of income so that they could continue doing what they like and what is obviously in demand.
I’m not talking about Reacts, coporate internal projects that get open-sourced. I’m talking about your Linuxes, curls, and WordPresses, for that matter. WP didn’t start as a business. The business part of it came a little later. And now that Matt saw the business is lucrative he does what any business does. And what is incompatible with FLOSS.
You’re right pointing out that the entire point of releasing Free Software is to maximize user freedom. But you also have to accept that user freedom is completely incompatible with any sort of sutainable development at scale. It can sort of work for small project that get a bug report every other week but it becomes untenable at a steady rate of half a dozen issues/PRs a day. Basically, unless every FLOSS user is a maintainer of their fork the whole thing falls apart.
And let me tell you, ain’t no one got time for that. Most people do not maintain their forks. Some just don’t want to, some don’t have time, but most just don’t have the skill. They either don’t know 120 languages to support every piece of software they use, or don’t have the domain knowledge that spans kernles, file formats, graphics subsystems, web dev, and a billion other things. There’s simply no way to support all the software without maintainers who specialize in that particular language/domain. So we lock in people in those positions, exercise peer pressure/guilt to keep them working and then turn away and say “they just don’t know how to FLOSS”.
My most charitable guess at what is going on is severe mental illness.
Threatening people if they don’t take a job with you is in the most literal way a challenge to your autonomy as a human being.
Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.
Ahh, "everyone else does it" - no, have never been threatened that if I refuse a job offer, or otherwise decline, that my current employer will be told all about how disloyal I was to them.
> We’re still getting lots of questions about this [checkbox]. What if an agency is part of your affiliate program[…]?
…addressing the WP Engine firm whose users he’s been weirdly bullying with all this?
He attempted to frame his own ambiguously menacing checkbox-cum-loyalty-oath as somehow being of its target’s making? What?
Is that type of… duplicitous? dissociative? schizophrenic?… tactic common these days in twitter kinds of spheres?
I'm just a rando on the internet, and this isn't a diagnosis, and you shouldn't diagnose either, kids; but given the relatively sudden onset of Mr. Mullenweg's public situations, and the associated seeming complete loss of insight, I can't help but wonder if there is a known or unknown mental health challenge in the background underlying all of his actions. Such things are invariably complicated by a person being "post-economic", with the lack of the usual checks and balances that come with that state of privilege.
I am reminded of Kayne West. I think some people latched on to what he said in a literal sense instead of just ignoring it outright as the rants of a diagnosed bipolar person. To be sure what he said was deplorable at face value in a public space. But behind all the dialogue, the entire event might have been nothing more significant than the inevitable progression of a disease, one which leaves consciousness just intact enough to keep one recognizable, yet also compels one to say the most polarizing things.
Also related, an article about one of Cloudflare's founders who was afflicted with a neurodegenerative disease that largely destroyed his personality. It went unnoticed for so long because his actions were taken at face value - he was just tired and disengaged from daily life - instead of as originating from a disease of the brain.
Once a dedicated user of WordPress, I never thought I would ever say this, but here it is -- I hope WordPress dies as soon as possible and gets replaced by something else. Well, a better outcome would be Matt goes away, but I don't see that happening.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
> I have nothing but the out-most respect for what you've built with WordPress. It's an incredible achievement, and you're been justly rewarded for that accomplishment. No need to squeeze the lemon that hard. It's undermining open source as a whole. [1]
A lot of folks had compared it to DHH/Basecamp because of the voluntary severance. But for the most part, those issues did not spill into Rails like this. I think if anyone can talk Matt down from the ledge, it would be another "Benevolent Dictator".
That said, I think DHH misses something: lots of people built Wordpress, not just Matt. And we are slowly seeing the most engaged people, some who do it for the love of Wordpress instead of the money, either back away or get forced out. THAT is what will kill the ecosystem that has been built. Any harm that WP Engine may have been doing cannot compare with the harm that's happening right now from their own spiteful actions.
Effectively, they want to ensure wpengine is not interfacing with wordpress.org through undisclosed ways like shady shell companies. That is the reason for the checkbox.
If you are selling stuff on wpengine or being paid by wpengine for selling stuff on there, you are not an affiliate. you are a seller. if you are selling wpengine subscriptions, you are not an affiliate; just a seller. if you are advertising wpengine services, you are not an affiliate. you are an advertiser.
Why would you recommend that when Matt/WordPress is on record questioning WP Engine's common sense interpretation?
In a Twitter thread linked in TFA WP Engine put forward an interpretation like yours in an attempt to make their customers less nervous and WordPress (probably Matt) replied with a "what if..." casting doubt on that interpretation.
We're talking about a guy who is currently following through on a threat to wage "nuclear war" (his words) and has very clearly shown that he does not care how much collateral damage he causes. It's totally reasonable to take the broadest interpretation of the checkbox possible.
...Matt doesn't come across well in it. Lots of refusing to state what he thinks the checkbox that he added means.
Like under Apache foundation or something
https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/license.t...
Trademark != Copyright
It only controls the trademark anyway no different from firefox or anything else with a trademarked name.
Anyone else can do anything else the gpl allows with the software, just under some other name.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g1omxy/matt_for...
It's very possible that he's ill.
Resign.
Main Points of Contention Trademark and Branding Issues Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of misusing the WordPress trademark and causing confusion among users1. WP Engine has since changed some of its plan names to address these concerns1. Open Source Contributions Mullenweg criticizes WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project relative to their profits5 . Core Feature Modifications WP Engine is accused of altering core WordPress features, particularly disabling post revisions by default2. Mullenweg argues this compromises the integrity of WordPress and its promise to users2.
And I think technically the owner of the trademark is Matt and not the Wordpress Foundation, but also technically, WP Engine isn't required by the license to give him money or contribute back, they are allowed to modify the code and required to share their modifications when they redistribute the software.
i wonder if the summary is totally inaccurate or really just debated.
WPEngine used "WP", which until a few weeks ago was explicitly stated as "feel free to use". Nominative usage also says factual statements are protected. If you offer WordPress hosting, you are allowed to say "We offer WordPress hosting". You might highlight (and WPE did) that "WordPress is a trademark of...".
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" (running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.
> Open Source Contributions Mullenweg criticizes WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project relative to their profits
WPE donated hundreds of thousands a year to events alone, maintains several of the most popular plugins (all of which are free to use, unlike several of Automattic's, which are commercial).
> Core Feature Modifications WP Engine is accused of altering core WordPress features, particularly disabling post revisions by default
This is laughable. It's literally a configuration option in the control panel. It just defaults to "disabled" on WPE.
> Mullenweg argues this compromises the integrity of WordPress and its promise to users
Why is it even a configuration option, then, Matt?