Abandon WordPress now. Fork it or switch technologies.
The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
61–70 of 236 posts
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#62It's very funny that Matt's original complaint was that WPEngine didn't contribute enough, and he has now banned them from contributing and stolen what they had previously provided
Do you think they were all of the sudden going to dramatically start contributing? I see this more as symbolically shutting them out. Nothing in this ongoing situation is about more than optics now
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#63Calling it right now: If WP Engine is reading, fork WordPress now. Call it FreshPress. Put $25M into it, team up with other hosts, abandon the editor everyone hates, and relicense it to GPLv3 so Matt can’t have any of it. (Note that WordPress’s license specifically says GPLv2 or later.) Maybe support Composer like sane modern PHP projects. Maybe put the most important plugins like Woo into core and make it an all-in-…
Agree, except for ditching Gutenberg, unless they replace it with something better, like... no idea, Lexical based?
But I'm sure they're already debating internally how feasible a fork is and if it makes sense for their business.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The inclusion of the nosebleed is not to make fun of Matt, it is to highlight something relevant to the medical issues that people have speculated about. The motivation is to bring to light Matt's wide-ranging exploits in one place, given it is abnormal for someone involved in high-profile litigation to spend their time arguing on Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and live streams.
People are signaling to you that this particular thing crosses a line. You'd do well to heed that and take that part out. Speculating on his health / insinuating things undermines the points you're trying to make.
Matt doesn't appear to have a problem with the website ("It actually is an excellent website"[1]). Please create a Pull Request with any changes you think necessary.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#65Does anyone want to play armchair internet psychologist with me to speculate as to Matt's thinking here?
My guess is that he was focused on these facts:
1) I own Wordpress
2) WPEngine is profiting from Wordpress and I'm not benefiting
3) This is unfair
And it was stuck in his mind like a thorn, irritating him whenever the thought arose, and never went away. Commercializing open source is hard for myriad reasons, but wordpress.com is actually rather profitable, and yet it still bothered him that he wasn't getting a cut.
Eventually, after many grumpy ruminations on it, the answer was obvious: "I deserve a cut of WPEngine's income, since they're using my software." No, this isn't how the license works, and there's no legal basis for it, but it felt right and fair.
This thought, irrational and deluded as it was, wedged in his psyche and fed into his deep loathing for WPEngine. All the subsequent actions follow from it, from the initial ultimatum to the various actions he's taking to fight his enemy.
This is an intensely personal and emotional fight for him, and everyone that disagrees is an enemy too. He's just asking for what's fair, and yet all these ignorant commenters on the internet can't see it.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt being a poor steward of gpl is by definition not a systemic issue … unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors? The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss. I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/…
> unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors? I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage. > this global issue of companies b…
As for the trend of the bait and switch. That’s a fair point. But u can always fork and move on. And even then would you say that’s more of an issue or occurs more frequently then corps not contributing back at all?
Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?
As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.
We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.
The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#67It's very funny that Matt's original complaint was that WPEngine didn't contribute enough, and he has now banned them from contributing and stolen what they had previously provided
> [...] and stolen [...]
I'm not happy with the mess and Matt's behaviour, but you can't steal free code.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#68A lot of the comments seem to call out Matt (right or wrong). But that’s the easy thing to do. No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software. There is a social contract that people should contribute back, and while it’s largely unenforceable, as it should be, when it’s happening on a systemic level something has to be done. And we are all complicit if…
> There is a social contract that people should contribute back
No there isn't. The author gets to decide the contract, not you or anyone else.
I am the one who decides how to license my software. If I don't want to require my users to contribute, I don't have to. If I wanted to include such an obligation, I would have.
You don't get to hold users of my projects to unwritten, made-up obligations. You don't get to bully people online who aren't following your imaginary rules. My users and I have a contract. We both agreed to it. You don't get to step in between us and alter the agreement we made. How dare you.
The assertion that users must contribute to open source projects despite the license, is an attack on users, developers, and a just and free society. Developers must be able to license their software how they see fit. You want to take that freedom away from me, in the pursuit of hurting people you don't like.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors? I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage. > this global issue of companies b…
As for the trend of the bait and switch. That’s a fair point. But u can always fork and move on. And even then would you say that’s more of an issue or occurs more frequently then corps not contributing back at all? Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse? As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about. We have foss absolutists, but there’s these e…
> so much bad faith
This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.
Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.
If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.
The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.
Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org
#70Matt you've lost the plot, time to step down or put independent governance in-place.
How can you expect any developer to devote time to writing a plugin if the dictatorship of Matt can rug pull it at any time.