Yes, they did use Matt's Hacker News comments against him. (p24)
The more relevant outcome of WPEngine getting the injuction is in Section F (p40), which includes removing that WordPress login checkbox.
The more relevant outcome of WPEngine getting the injuction is in Section F (p40), which includes removing that WordPress login checkbox.
The lawyer thing was hilarious. Someone actually claiming to be his lawyer was on the HN threads and anytime he was asked a question the response was a version of "Oh, I hadn't heard about this. I can't answer that."
Well, a judge did indeed rule on the injuction.
He just retweeted this tweet about the case: https://x.com/brian_essig/status/1866640985842692452
> This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What’s next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?
Even though you don't have a contract, you make a promise (Matt: wp.org is free forever to anyone), someone (WP Engine) relies on that promise to their detriment, and the plaintiff's reliance on that promise was reasonable. Discussion of promissory estoppel at 44:17 (over the next 3 minutes or so) in [1].
And note that singling out WP Engine for very explicitly a payment is part of the rationale.
Shortly after Mike also discusses the same point made by /u/DannyBee [2], ie that the attorneys seem to be considering this case not in the context of the wordpress business, in which Matt being allowed to say you all have access to the code / updates / plugins at my whim is not great for wordpress the company outside of this narrow cirumstance.
[1] A discussion by attorney Mike Dunford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdwiZEhRS3o
Like, come up with some new material.
I've heard about corporations being persons too but a person claiming to be a corporation is a new one. Has that regal "L'État, c'est moi" ring to it.
What he says is that, because wordpress[dot]org is his personal site, telling him what to do with it would violate his First Amendment rights.
Matt is pretty clearly a terrible client from a client control perspective. He's simply not good at doing anything but exactly what he wants to do.
As I have said elsewhere, he is now in this situation solely due to his own actions, having gained almost nothing and lost a lot. He'll lose more if this goes to trial.
And maybe give the wp.org domain ownership to the Foundation, making WP a bit more reliable and resilient to one's actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Also worth reading the poster's follow-up years later and the ensuing discussion. Graeme's observation about the significance of the comment is super important:
That comment has gotten a bum rap over the years. The commenter was trying to be helpful with Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant on HN in 2007). Back then, file synchronization was widely thought to be a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. I've been trying for years to get people to understand this (starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275, then https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), even though I know you can't argue with the internet.
The comment only became infamous years later [1, 2], after Dropbox was clearly a success—so this is a case of hindsight. If people would only read all three comments, instead of stopping at the first, they'd see that the exchange was pleasant and successful [3]. But a meme is more fun. It didn't exist, so it had to be invented! [4]
Compare that with the other infamous-HN-comment-from-2007, "did you win the Putnam" [5], which got pilloried in real time. No hindsight fallacy there!
If the hivemind had empathy (which alas it does not), people would stop to consider how they'd feel about getting publicly mocked over decades for something they posted with good intentions at age 22 [6]. Alas, this is how the internet works—not much we can do about it. It's amazing, though, what a good sport BrandonM has been about it all this time. That part of the story is actually real, so we should celebrate that too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138488 (August 2013, i.e. 6 years later) seems to be the earliest reference on HN itself.
[2] April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 (Oct 2013)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272 from Drew, and then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9479
[4] https://www.whitman.edu/VSA/trois.imposteurs.html
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079, but don't miss the witty and graceful concession (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35350)
I don’t think the point is that the people saying it at the time were stupid, it’s just interesting that people can come to completely wrong conclusions which seem reasonable at the time.
There was a time on HN where it actually made sense to bat a YC application back and forth, and to talk about what might make a more or less compelling one. It's long gone, and the people dunking on this comment have completely lost touch with what the original community was. I'm not saying that community was better (it was much more insular), but it was certainly more collegial.
† In fact, I think we now know it was literally correct, and YC had the same qualms, accepting Drew Houston just to get access to him and apparently hoping he'd find something better to work on.
As you can see by the success of Dropbox, point 1 wasn’t a real issue. That’s also the funniest point, because „why would anyone pay for XYZ, as a software engineer I can just do A, B, C, and D myself“ is such a common counterpoint which completely neglects that most customers aren’t going to do ABCD themselves because they don’t want to deal with it and don’t have the know how.
And point 3 probably can also be classified as wrong, at least Dropbox seems to make some amount of money.
Because to me it seems like he’s criticizing the product itself, not just the presentation.
Please don't, just let them.
Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
I think Matt needs to be replaced, and while the “what” may be arguable, he loses hard on the “how”.