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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the whole drama of all of this? I have heard of “Wordpress” and I have heard of “WP Engine” and I have heard that .com and .org are apparently not the same thing. But other than that this feels like walking into someone else’s family argument halfway through it.

I don’t know what “side” to be on, nor what those “sides” even are.

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A really good primer on the whole background is LWN's recent "The WordPress mess"

https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/

They have a follow-up "WordPress retaliation impacts community". It's currently subscribers-only for another week, but they do allow subscribers to generate free links provided subscribers don't abuse that - which I don't think this should count as?

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/993895/8482b183b2dcb418/

Basically WPEngine vs AutoMATTic (emphasis mine)

WPEngine is private equity(I personally like their founder, find his talks)

Matt seems to be a founder gone crazy(I don't know much about him)

.com and .org are both controlled by Matt.

.com is Matts business side .org is Matts non-profit side

WPEngine is another company

All of this seems to be very unfortunate. Even if Matt has valid claims, he seems to have shot himself in the foot, and lost community support.

His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount.

I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.

I think this is the first instance of a big "open source company" where it's getting competed by another company using its very own product. That's essentially the gist of it. Matt/Automattic made WordPress and (ehm) using open source as a distribution strategy. WPEngine is trying to profit from the product (the license does permit it). As they got too big, Matt now wants to get them out of the market.

Matt didn't "make" WordPress. He started the project, which was based on another piece of software, with his friend Mike and now thousands of people have contributed to it in one way or another.

I actually doubt there's much left of Matt's own code besides some of the crap that should be removed, such as hello.php.

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