WP23

“This is all because I gave a speech [and also committed a string of sneaky acts that wouldn’t rouse as much sympathy if I fessed up to them here]!”

> But trust in the project is more fragile than ever.

yeah and it's one guy doing that

> I believe Matt is right about the core issue in this fight. WordPress cannot become a place where large companies extract massive value from the ecosystem while ignoring the responsibilities that come with that position.

I don't think Matt was acting for that, though. I was only interested in money that ended directly in his pocket. Both WPEngine and Automattic are extracting value from an existing ecosystem. But does Automattic give 8% of their revenue to PHP? It doesn't seem so. And would Matt still have acted the way he did if WPEngine was giving money to PHP, Nginx, Debian and MariaDB? I think so.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe you would have a moral obligation to help the projects on which you make money, but that obligation can't apply to everything (where would you put the limit? Technically, you depend on all packages installed on any OS you use to run any software. And you would depend on quite a bunch of specifications from W3C/IETF, don't they deserve money from companies that extract value from those standards?)

I would even argue that WPEngine financing libxml2 would have been even morally better than WordPress, if you look at open source as a whole. So I would happily argue that Matt wasn't right about the core issue, just being selfish. Being sometimes selfish is probably OK when you're an open source project leader, but don't make him a leader of rightful funding of open-source software because he's certainly not.

> WordPress cannot become a place where large companies extract massive value from the ecosystem while ignoring the responsibilities that come with that position.

Matt made it very clear in his months of rambling and attacks that Wordpress is "his". This isn't about ecosystem, it's about his own sense of personal entitlement.

Most of the open-source aspects of WP have been revealed to be a sham. Nearly all the community managers were Automattic employees - even if he asked for more contribution (he didn't he tried to shakedown for money) anything WP Engine would have contributed would have been for the personal benefit of Mullenweg.