HN truly is a wild place in that I don't know other forums where psychopaths are celebrated.
It's not at the same scale that AWS and GCP suffocate database vendors, but it rhymes. And it's easy to see why he's mad.
If a very vocal part of the OSS community wasn't so averse to letting small amounts of monopolization happen, we might see open source products that reach significant commercial scale. Where a single vendor or entity can profit and grow big without irrelevant competitors abusing the license to latch onto the product. An open source monopoly could collect good margin and build ambitiously.
It's hard to build a defensible open source business without using fair source licenses, having source available enterprise offerings, or even using an open core design that keeps important parts hidden and out of the commons. That's the only way to defend the magic bits and grow big.
If OSS folks were more tolerant of this, we'd probably see more funding for OSS and extremely viable and defensible open source businesses.
His so-called "democratize publishing" persona is just a complete facade.
Guess who owns an irrevocable, free, exclusive and universal commercial license for WP? Automattic. They got it the same day the project was gifted to the Foundation. Matt’s claims pushed for WPE to give damages to Automattic, not the community or foundation.
WP is OSS because it is as built on other projects and had to be.
Matt is not the victim here.
Like many sociopaths, he prefers not to draw a clear distinction between actions he's performing for his own benefit and those he's performing on behalf of others, so he often tells a very different story about this. He claims to think, and may actually think, that there's nothing strange or alarming about the open source WordPress project taking sides in a commercial dispute between two vendors.
Indeed, I suspect if you sat down with him in private he'd explain to you that things like the Wordpress Foundation or fiduciary responsibility to Automattic shareholders are legal fictions. In his reality, he's the WordPress guy, and anything which seems to limit or constrain his control of WordPress is just some nonsense he signed off on to keep the suits happy.
Would that be wrong? What makes him not "the WordPress guy"?
Legal stuff aside I mean. Are there other people that put in significant amounts of work that he is not giving credit to/downplaying their contributions or similar?
Sooo.. no?
This, genuinely, is incredible to me. Does really no one on this godforsaken platform have a single name they can drop?
Always this meta diversion.
If Matt is truly the bad guy here, then the good guys absolutely suck at making a convincing argument. Which would not be impossible, but dumb nonetheless.
> Are there other people that put in significant amounts of work that he is not giving credit to/downplaying their contributions or similar?
If you're looking for an answer to this question as stated, then I agree with you the answer is no. It's unrelated to what I'm talking about, which is why I didn't answer it the first time.