Response to DHH
ma.tt
ma.tt
Yes, it's unlikely to result in any constructive discussion here. At best we could remark that the author appears to be unwell and that taking this down could save him some face.
However, the author is also an adult who is capable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In addition they are presenting themselves genuinely and sincerely here, which IMO is an important consideration for anyone who uses or is thinking about using WordPress.
So yes, it's drama, but it's highly relevant drama to people who are making decisions of what stacks to build on. This is information that people to deserve to have, even if, perhaps, it's not the interpretation that the author intended to evoke.
https://gist.github.com/ardislu/b2f2b4b439c5da2f7ccb6bb42e7a...
Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
It may also have to do with the brevity of the respective languages; I'm not a Ruby or PHP expert, but I do Go and Python and I would not be surprised if the Go version required an order of magnitude more lines because of how verbose it is and how terse Python can be.
Comparing lines of code in different languages, doing different things, with differing levels of complexity, is an exercise in futility.
Plus, WordPress bundles all JS and PHP dependencies, including a whole userland PHP polyfill for libsodium.
I've dealt with WordPress for so many years! It's sickening! Even the overglorified WooCommerce - I won't trust a business with it. I've done only a few sails and I had data loss, and so many issues.
Also, WooCommerce and other popular plugins such as GiveWP abuse the posts system. I've had so many issues causes by patch upgrades, because migrations went bonkers!
Honestly, WP had to be rewritten from scratch 10 years ago. There were some attempts, but they were not supported by Matt. With a rewrite, most plugins and "themes" would have stopped working, but if they are not maintained, they shouldn't be used anyway. I put "themes" in quotes as executable code is not a theme - it's a plugin installed in a different directory!
In general, WordPress is a patch over patches of patches! From mu-plugins (i.e., "must-use") to filters that could hijack the data read from the database - it's nearly impossible to trace which plugins screw up which plugins - even with the help of the overly glorified debugging plugins!
I've participated in a project where the management has decided to migrate a commercial online newspaper from a commercial Python CMS to WordPress - they hired me as I had PHP on my resume and it was hard to find PHP developers in SoCal. Anyway, for over a year, I had to completely remove WordPress from serving customers! Yes, everything was proxied, cached with nginx and optimized ngx_pagespeed (now abandoned). At the time, no commercial WP plugin could keep our website up! For example, an earthquake would take our website down, too, because people would go on our website to check for information and guess what happens if tens of thousands of people want to see the same page when according to the cache it's expired - there was no queue and it would generate 10,000 requests trying to regenerate the same homepage, which was making well over 500 DB calls to render!!!
WordPress hasn't changed much since! Yeah, PHP 7+ is much better, but it is still multi-process. The number of processors is determined by your available memory, and WordPress sometimes uses a lot of memory. That's why the only solution is heavy caching on all tiers!
That's not a real statistic. It powers 40% of the long tail of web but not 40% of the access. With Google + Meta included I would guess wordpress doesn't serve even 10% of web.
Not only that, he also compared php code to ruby code. Totally different languages.
I'm not even arguing which one is better or worse (i dislike them both) but for example ruby is way more expressive than php... You (usually) need less lines of ruby code than php code to do most things.
Clownish, clownish.
It seems to me like Matt is the type of person who likes to hide behind character and other ad hominem attacks rather than addressing actual issues at hand. Perhaps this is because of a psychological issue but I can’t really know. Normally I would think the community would be repulsed by this and would find an alternative.
What is remarkable is that there has not been enough community animus to fork relative to Terraform and OpenTofu. It shows the power of the underlying GPL license and “plugin” approach. Something to think about for other companies that may be thinking about relicensing versus just building a durable ecosystem around their proprietary brand and assets.
> Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?
Whaaat! Since when is LoC metric of “dirtiness”? Your hostility towards community Matt is what makes you and Automattic “dirty”, your toxic leadership.
Matt is clearly having a mental breakdown. I hope investors force him out.
This is not a serious person. This is not a self-aware person.
All he did was write two blog posts, which were rather fair to Matt all things considered:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-di... https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-...
It's also obvious from this post that Matt didn't actually bother to read the blogs closely. Most of the points Matt makes about Ruby on Rails or trademarks in his "response" were already addressed by DHH himself.
I'm just going to tell a little story here.
A long time ago, I worked on a recolorable Drupal theme, which was to be the new default look (Garland). It was completed and awaiting the next major release. Before that happened though, Matt Mullenweg grabbed the theme and the assets from our repo, ported it to Wordpress, and offered it as a theme on wp dot com to his customers.
When this was pointed out as being in extremely poor taste, he hid behind the GPL as the justification. WP was large enough already at the time that they could get away with stuff like this without suffering too much PR damage.
In short, if he's bragging about how much money he's making, it's because he has few scruples and doesn't actually care about credit and respect.
I think this outrage against Matt is terrible in many ways but people are getting away with accusing him of anything they felt wronged. We are talking about a guy that created something in the level of Linux and Wikipedia. Give him some credit and respect ffs.
So it’s a “you’re not wrong you’re just an asshole” situation.
At this point I wonder when will Matt Mullenweg will start closing wordpress.com account owned by people that don't align with his opinions.
There already is a checkbox to check for people affiliated in any way with wpengine, i wouldn't be surprised to see a checkbox for a field like "i agree with our lord an savior Matt Mullenweg in the WordPress vs WPEngine case".
It would be more like if rails had an arm that made money and someone cloned it and also tried to make money? I.e., the whole company was about rails and rails hosting and not about creating things with rails (basecamp) and worrying about other people who create things with rails (shopify, etc.) - that's a very different thing. I can see how then there'd be more pressure to look at trademark differences when the service provided is more similar? Or am I missing something?
This is kind of intriguing to me too...
> I’m unsure why you felt you had to insert yourself into this fight with Silver Lake / WP Engine and take their side, but here we are.
It seems that the fight has been made public with photomatt's constant commentary, at least on HN.
Unconvincing.
Matt already knows this.[0]
photomatt: "It is also unethical to publicly speculate on my medication, medical state, or mental health."
That argument sounds more like “it is unethical to treat me as anything but God’s Special Fancy Boy, as my crusade is righteous and my foes ontologically evil”, which has the opposite effect when you’re trying to discourage people from asking “What the fuck is going on with this guy?”
I’ll refer to my previous comment on this ordeal as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41822606
>I don't even have a dog in this fight, only a set of principles. If anything, I'd be naturally inclined to be on Team WordPress. Between creating one of the most widely used open-source programs and powering half the internet, there's every tribal reason to side with Automattic over WP Engine's private-equity owners at Silver Lake.
>But whatever my feelings about private equity in general or Silver Lake's management of WP Engine in particular, I care far more about the integrity of open source licenses, and that integrity is under direct assault by Automattic's grotesque claim for WP Engine's revenues.
I didn’t expect a supply chain attack yesterday. And sure didn’t expect Mullenweg’s reply to DHH to be so childish.
They can afford not to.
Not that my opinion matters, but my preference would be that Matt stops with the pithy comments like "this is a respectful debate" or "I'll try to do better" and is instead just honest that he doesn't care what others think.
Or until they stop using company employees as flag-and-downvote farms.
I guess it's a good thing I moved to Hugo a year ago.
1.Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)
2.Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress...
In 1, the WordPress Foundation who owns the Wordpress trademark says:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
WPEngine, quite reasonably, for more than a decade have been running/building a business using a name based on what the WordPress Foundation said in 1. I find it extremely hard to believe that a court/judge could possibly find that "problematic" or rude that WordPress (.com, .org, or foundations) or Matt or Automattic - have any rights that prevent WPEngine (or any other company) from using "WP" in their name, even if it is widely understood to be an abbreviation of WordPress.
Not paying $30mil a year in extortion?
> Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)
IANAL, but:
The code is GPL ("GPL2 or newer"). That gives WPEngine (and you and me) a clear license to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code, with some very well understood restrictions (which do require you to share your modifications under the same GPL, but absolutely do not require "contributing back to the community" or paying a competitor 8% of your gross revenue).
For about 2 decades up until last week the WordPress trademark page explicitly told everyone that the use of "WP" was not covered by any of their trademarks.
US law has a concept of "Nominative Use" of trademarks: "Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit, by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
I guess a lot of lawyers are about to get richer determining whether or not WPEngine's use of the "WordPress" trademark was "as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." To me (remember, not a lawyer) it seems quite obvious that "We sell WordPress hosting" is a reference to the trademarked Wordpress product, and is exactly what is allowed by Nominative use.
> Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
I doubt they need or want to. They can fork Wordpress core itself under their rights granted by the GPL and they could name that something like WPEnginePress, or choose to use any other fork like ClassicPress or AspirePress. The Nominative Use "or to compare it to their own" clause allows them to say "We sell WPEnginePress Hosting, which is 100% compatible with WordPress and has an identical admin interface for users."
The wordpress.org theme/plugin repo is a bigger problem, but most (all?) of that is under the same GPL2.0 or newer licence, so WPEngine or any other fork can copy/modify/redistribute those as well (and WPE are already mirroring it), and at least AspirePress has said they've planning on getting plugin/theme authors to use their repo as well as the wordpress.org one.
I never took much issue with DHH and now I feel I just side with him. Talk about being out of touch with everything Matt.
Ah yes, defending trademarks. Really the rallying cry of the people. That's what everyone cares about here. Nice motte and bailey you have there.
Also, Matt is not even reading Ruby on Rail's trademark clause that he posted: "You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association."
Also, also Matt: If you are going to throw down over people about not donating enough to charity, you should really tell people what charities you are donating to. It better not turn out your charitable donations are to your own Wordpress org which we now know is little more than a marketing/PR department for Automattic.
For all we know these are self-dealing tax write-offs to his own foundation. The one that is currently doing dirty work for his private business.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that following this paragraph with links to DHH's $2MM sports cars and his home office that costs an integer multiple of what my entire house costs sort of undercuts his argument.
Except there is a second set of obligations, specifically designed to help avoid business confusion: trademarks. It's not clear why trademarks are considered outrageous. Rails™ matters to DHH, WordPress™ matters to Matt.
DHH, like anybody else, is imperfect. But the author acts like he is superior. He isn't.
But I will say there is not much worse than a person who feigns respect and then goes on to say things like:
"toxic personality and inability to scale teams"
"it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach" (therapist really being the dig, here)
"Why are you still so small?"
"Instead of bragging about your beautiful office in the clouds, you should question why you can’t scale teams."
If your respect for DHH was real, you would have given your feedback in a respectful way instead of writing some blog post with such incendiary comments.
“DHH has a toxic personality” in paragraph three. Uh oh.
Just wondering about ruby, linux, etc.
Poor Linus.
What's really embarrassing is the same few Automattic employees arguing for Matt online.
DHH doesn't make kilo-millions so his ideas suck.