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My WordPress Slack Ban

linuxjedi.co.uk

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Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#51

Post by gamblor956 »

swatcoder wrote: post #26

Expect to see this kind of drama happening regularly and frequently as the gazillion dollar commercial industry continues to subvert every ideal of the original open source ethos. Some of the best and now most commercially critical open source software started a long time ago, by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future. Turns out, we did not arrive in that future. We arrived in the one where both $xxxB comp…

Matt is worth $400 million off the backs of open source developers. He is the big bad in this scenario.

He's just mad someone else is also making money.

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#52

Post by 8490109481 »

gwerbret wrote: post #39

In psychiatry, the concept of insight is used to describe an individual's ability to view their actions, beliefs and overall situation with what would be considered a normal perspective. It's probably best exemplified in popular culture by the movie "A Beautiful Mind". In the movie, a loss of insight is shown as one characteristic of schizophrenia, but it is by no means limited to that disorder. I'm just a rando on t…

Agreed. It is frowned upon in public discourse to be an armchair psychiatrist, but I am seeing this implosion as the second-order effect of some condition afflicting Matt's mind. This situation can be seen in mechanical terms, the end-user effects like vendor-lock in, legal conflicts, profit and loss... or maybe Matt just woke up one day and, for some reason, felt like he's had it with everything. For some reason nobody knows. And also happened to be a few clicks away from the WordPress.org admin console.

I am reminded of Kayne West. I think some people latched on to what he said in a literal sense instead of just ignoring it outright as the rants of a diagnosed bipolar person. To be sure what he said was deplorable at face value in a public space. But behind all the dialogue, the entire event might have been nothing more significant than the inevitable progression of a disease, one which leaves consciousness just intact enough to keep one recognizable, yet also compels one to say the most polarizing things.

Also related, an article about one of Cloudflare's founders who was afflicted with a neurodegenerative disease that largely destroyed his personality. It went unnoticed for so long because his actions were taken at face value - he was just tired and disengaged from daily life - instead of as originating from a disease of the brain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#53

Post by AnonHP »

photomatt, if you’re reading this, you need to step away from all things WordPress and let someone else lead it. Focus on the lawsuit at hand and spend time away from the internet as much as possible. These kind of knee jerk and extremely petty actions don’t add any value to whatever you think your moral or legal position is. On the contrary, you (and you alone) are making things far worse for yourself.

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#54

Post by tptacek »

FireBeyond wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of this whole saga is easier to understand if you just remember that WordPress is a major open source project and a company, so you get to see a lot of the stuff every company --- almost none of whom run major open source projects --- does in the ordinary course of business. Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.

> Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you. Ahh, "everyone else does it" - no, have never been threatened that if I refuse a job offer, or otherwise decline, that my current employer will be told all about how disloyal I was to them.

Hey, to be clear, I'm not sticking up for it, I'm just saying: commentary about this whole saga sometimes feels like people have lost some perspective, and are holding WordPress to a standard that pure commercial companies aren't held to. Hiring is ruthless! Executive hiring in particular!

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#56

Post by sionisrecur »

sergiotapia wrote: post #40
rty32 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to actually understand what's happening instead of simplifying the whole thing as tldr.

is this not true? Main Points of Contention Trademark and Branding Issues Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of misusing the WordPress trademark and causing confusion among users1. WP Engine has since changed some of its plan names to address these concerns1. Open Source Contributions Mullenweg criticizes WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project relative to their profits5 . Core Feature Mod…

To me it seems like he's using the trademark as a weapon to go after the competition, even through the Wordpress Foundation should be neutral. Many other companies, including his, also make money out of Wordpress.

And I think technically the owner of the trademark is Matt and not the Wordpress Foundation, but also technically, WP Engine isn't required by the license to give him money or contribute back, they are allowed to modify the code and required to share their modifications when they redistribute the software.

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#58

Post by mikae1 »

dcchambers wrote: post #4

Matt has handled this whole thing so poorly. I wanted to be on his side but everything that has come out is just not a great look. He could have had basically the entire internet on his side just by laying out the facts: "They use our product for free, generate hundreds of millions in revenue, and don't contribute back. It's just not fair. Please contribute more." Instead this tantrum has turned a bunch of people tha…

Framing it as a David vs. Goliath fight was also a huge mistake. Considering the might of Automattic it looks like he's completely out of touch with reality.

What I see is a incredibly wealthy person displaying self pity because he can't have more.

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#59

Post by pointlessone »

dcchambers wrote: post #4

Matt has handled this whole thing so poorly. I wanted to be on his side but everything that has come out is just not a great look. He could have had basically the entire internet on his side just by laying out the facts: "They use our product for free, generate hundreds of millions in revenue, and don't contribute back. It's just not fair. Please contribute more." Instead this tantrum has turned a bunch of people tha…

Do they use a product? WordPress’ license is GPL. However unfair it might feel they can use it under the terms of the license. Matt has chose the license and has to live with that choice. He’s doing basically the same thing Redis/Elastic Search/Mongo did but worse. He wants the money without getting the relicensing backlash. Which, I’d argue, is even worse than those other instances.

Re: My WordPress Slack Ban

#60

Post by pointlessone »

swatcoder wrote: post #26

Expect to see this kind of drama happening regularly and frequently as the gazillion dollar commercial industry continues to subvert every ideal of the original open source ethos. Some of the best and now most commercially critical open source software started a long time ago, by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future. Turns out, we did not arrive in that future. We arrived in the one where both $xxxB comp…

We can only blame ourselves here. We knew that the companies would exploit it all along. Since before Free Software became a thing. Actually, this knowledge is the very ting that started Free Software. And we watched how Open Source came along to cozy up to businesses and bolster adoption. All this time we knew very well that no one’s going to pay for what’s available for free.

And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.

We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.

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