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Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

Matt has handled this whole thing so poorly. I wanted to be on his side but everything that has come out is just not a great look.

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.

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This sums up the situation nicely. Though the part where Matt tried to extort wp engine into paying him personally an absurd sum didn't help put him on the right foot.

It seems like every step Matt makes just makes the whole situation worse.

Plus I don't know how you give that threat before the speech with a straight face.

Yup...that and (allegedly) trying to extort the rival CEO with a job offer/threat.

Do they use a product? WordPress’ license is GPL. However unfair it might feel they can use it under the terms of the license. Matt has chose the license and has to live with that choice. He’s doing basically the same thing Redis/Elastic Search/Mongo did but worse. He wants the money without getting the relicensing backlash. Which, I’d argue, is even worse than those other instances.

He can't relicense as WordPress is a fork of B2 which is GPL. That's one reason why he's trying to extort instead.

I don’t think the fact that it’s a B2 fork is relevant. He wouldn’t be able to relicense even if it wasn’t a fork but initially chosen GPL.

Based on my understanding, this is not how it works.

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.

According to `git blame`, Matt isn't the sole, or even majority, owner of the WordPress codebase.

I understand your point, but that wasn’t my point. And in terms of reality, it’s easy to argue that Matt is the effective owner of the codebase.

The reality is that copyright law treats the author, not maintainer, as owner. Matt is the author of less than 1% of the codebase by line. To relicense, he would need consent from the remaining 99%. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.

Yes, if everyone signed a CLA with copyright assignment, as is common in some projects that are still nevertheless GPL, then he could relicense, but because he has not done that (and because it's actually a fork initially), he cannot relicense.

Framing it as a David vs. Goliath fight was also a huge mistake. Considering the might of Automattic it looks like he's completely out of touch with reality.

What I see is a incredibly wealthy person displaying self pity because he can't have more.

> 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."

I remember reading exactly this statement about corps generating profits on a open source thousand of times. Usually with zero effect.

Zero effect would have been strictly better than what we're seeing here.

At this point if Matt insists on his corporate orobouros of fiefdoms all controlled by him, the only solution to the problem is forking Wordpress, to rid him of any control.

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