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Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

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401–410 of 717 posts

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt - i'm not your lawyer, but you should shut up. Employers generally have an obligation to keep personal data confidential, especially sensitive information like a job application. Whether that applies in this particular case or not, i'm not going to offer an opinion, but you really should shut up. I get that it's particularly frustrating and hard to feel like you are being unfairly treated or whatever, but shut u…

Just let the man speak, he probably didn’t listen to his own lawyers why you think he will listen to you? As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.

> As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.

You really shouldn't, IMO.

For one thing, what parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy. I get that that's fun from the sidelines, but I certainly don't think we should encourage employers to violate other people's privacy.

For another, we have a court system with lots of rules around it for a reason. These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here. He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying here and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it. He could be bringing up totally irrelevant facts while not talking about the actual important things, with his counterparty correctly not talking about it, but leaving the impression that there is nothing there. Etc.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#402
post #257
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my opponent was weak Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless

At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I think about it the more I think that's exactly what someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might do.

I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#403
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the executive drama (on both sides) it is in bad taste to build WPEngine off an Open Source project and barely contribute back to it. It's probably a case where their version is so heavily customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals. But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well. Relationships are important in business.

[flagged]

HN isn't one person. There was always a lot of criticism of those closed source licenses. See for example the thread when Redis fell, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#404
This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome, whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it.

It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few extra dollars. He knew going in that this would cost him a lot. He'll spend a ton on lawyers and courts, but he'll do it for reasons that some people cannot comprehend. I would fight to the death if someone threatened my child. Some may not even agree with on that.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#405
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an arm length removed from all this drama having not used Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I’d use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that happens between corporations all the time My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with…

You’re welcome to your opinion, but my company is in the market for a large enterprise CMS management contract, and this situation has taken every WordPress option off the table due to uncertainty about the business and technical stability of the ecosystem. I highly doubt we’re the only ones feeling that way.

If you were considering Wordpress for a "large enterprise CMS", you shouldn't be making those kinds of decisions.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi language plugin on top and your site will be eating memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue at all

I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our open source project, and when you had problems with the revision system, instead of contributing improvements, you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?" Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that t…

To recap, every post is stored in the wp_posts table and revisions have a post_type of 'revision' and a post_status 'inherit' (attachments also inherit). There's no gradual improvement you can do to this. More, their codex does not discourage accessing the database directly at all rather points out there's a class to make it easy https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description so moving revisions to a separate table will break every plugin which wants to access revisions and uses the wpdb class to do so which is just not acceptable: "WordPress strives to never break backward compatibility. It’s one of our most important philosophies, and makes updates much easier on users and developers alike".

We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#407
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't lawyers usually advise their clients to stop talking about it when they're sued? Or is that one of those cliches that isn't true

Definitely true and all of his communication - this thread, he’s given some interviews, etc. is very odd for a legal strategy.

It's probably not a legal strategy. Everything becomes evidence that your opponent can use. You don't want them to have more of that.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers. This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions: > What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for i…

I don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a fork

Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-)

Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#409

The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint, the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track, but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they f…

They didn't need to fund it, either fastly or cloudflare would've taken it on long ago if they needed to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726759

In 2015 a similar project: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/drupal.org-migrates-co...

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#410
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $1000+/hr apparently does not guarantee great proofreading. Already found two typos and am not even a quarter of the way through: - Page 12: "wordrpess.org" - Page 17: "fundamental principal"

I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my opponent was weak Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless

Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away to draw their attention to something irrelevant?
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