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Comment by kedean | Hacker News Reader

He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab partner, not of an establish business that helped build the internet as we know it.

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Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though, it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're necessarily having a breakdown at all.

What you've observed, quite accurately, is that our bar for emotional intelligence when it comes to corporate executives is the same that we expect from ten-year olds.

Respectfully, it's not. Serious businesses take EQ seriously.

This feels very "no true scotsman" to me. It's accurate if none of the large places I've worked are "serious".

At best, "serious" businesses (which I take to mean large, successful ones) pretend to take EQ seriously.

Engaging with reality as directly as possible is important in business. Emotions are a part of reality, usually a signal about social dynamics.

At the higher levels of serious companies — by which I mean ones trying to win in the market, regardless of size - managers and executives regularly receive training about this.

I can’t say more because this is my alt, but: “executives are childish”, “executives are psychopaths”, etc. are very common, often incorrect narratives. If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.

To return to topic: something is going seriously sideways with Matt, and I wish him the best.

> If anything executives should be straightforward and simple.

Except they almost NEVER are, in fact, the most common trait shown by executives is dishonesty.

Really? That does not sound like an opinion derived from real data.

But there is every possibility that they were always going to do this.

Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial side.

it's somewhat valid though, why continue providing free code for wp engine to resell when wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves?

wp engine has also bought out multiple competing hosts, so they're a direct competitor with deep pockets

> wp engine doesn't contribute to open source themselves

At minimum they contribute Advanced Custom Fields, one of the most heavily used plugins. I make no judgement on if they contribute enough, but it's not like they give zero back to the ecosystem.

it's not for you to decide, but for Automattic to decide how much contribution is needed for them to allow you to use their services.

the code of WP is free software. free-as-in-freedom.

the services are not, and never were... they were free-as-in-beer.

RMS taught us about this, and it comes in handy again.

I don't recall voicing an opinion either way. In fact I specifically said I don't know if it's enough, but saying they contribute nothing is factually incorrect. And no lack of contribution would justify taking over ACF in what is essentially a supply chain attack like they did.

The contribute to the ecosystem, a little to the WP code, but use for free the services that Automattic provides.

It's the services that they got cut-off from. They are separate things that to the layman are seen as "wordpress".

> I don't recall voicing an opinion

Well, you mention they contribute to the ecosystem. If it is not your supply chain, you cannot dictate how it is run. You call it an attach, they call it a commercial endeavour.

If "free code" being resold is the issue, then Matt's eve worse of a freeloader, since most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt.

> most of the code in WordPress was provided for free by people not employed by Matt

Automattic previously spent ~4k hours a week maintaining wordpress, so I'm not sure what you're on about

Matt's a known liar, and that 4000/hours a week includes a lot of stuff that doesn't involve working on code. (For example, Matt is including time spent censoring the WP forums, and harassing event sponsors in that time.) Given that the bulk of the WordPress team quit last year, I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now on anything related to code right now.

But if we're going by hours...the WP Community as a whole probably spent several hundred thousand hours on maintaining or improving WP last week.

> I'd be surprised if they're even spending a 100 hours/week as a company right now.

Even if half the staff quit (they didn't) they'd still have hundreds of employees...

You seriously don't think they had 4 people working on Wordpress full-time?

The staff that quit was the staff that worked on WP. Almost none of the remaining employees worked on it, so yeah I would not be surprised if only 4 people are working on it now and that's the real cause of Matt pulling back on their WP work.

sure it’s petty but i still feel that wp engine kinda sucks here

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