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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#81
post #28

My mother has a WordPress site talking about hedgehogs and at this point it seems like it's only a matter of time before Matt's vendetta shows up in her site footer.

curious, whats that hedgehog website?

There’s a ‘sport’ where contestants see who can kick a rolled up hedgehog over the most garden fences. Maybe that one? Or it was a Sean Lock joke. I forget.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#82
post #32
post #4

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one m…

> Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.

> changing the license in a next version

Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#83
post #4

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one m…

Wordpress has always been a personal fiefdom.

This is quite reminiscent of the Great GPL Themes Kerfuffle of 2009 [0], actually. Stakes are a lot higher now, of course.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/wordpress-and-thesis-go-to-battl...

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#84
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.

OK, replace "WPEngine" with AWS/GCE/Azure/every-other-server-host. Thery all sell customer's services that rely on linux kernel (and gnu utilities). I don't see Torvalds or Stallman getting high and trying to extort them...

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#85
post #4

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one m…

I'm probably wrong here, but my tinfoil hat take is that Matt has seen how well Taylor Otwell is doing with Laravel and he wants a piece of that cake. Granted they're doing pretty good with wordpress.com hosting, but they'd have so much more money if they licenced plugins and features the way Laravel does.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#86

@WPEngine - fork Wordpress, rebrand yourself and the code. Setup a plugin / update hub like Wordpress.org and provide a pathway for your customers and devs to migrate. I recognize this is non-trivial. Ending an abusive relationship usually is.

They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.

Just so you know, the phrase is "bury the hatchet" which comes from the Native American practice of burying weapons in times of peace.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#87
post #72

I’m trying to get a better picture of this. Can someone tell me what percentage of code contributions are paid for by Matt/automattic? If it’s like 99% then I’m a little more sympathetic, I’m reminded of the centos/redhat thing. Either way, peace :)

In WordPress core? I dunno, but I doubt it's as high as 99%, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was way below 50%, most likely way way below.

In the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo that Matt's weaponised in his tantrum? I'd be surprised if it's as high as 1%

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#88
post #46
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a PHP developer with expertise in WordPress Automattic is pretty much your version of FAANG - I can totally understand why people wouldn't want to trade even six months salary for never being able to work there again.

The 8% of the company left. IMHO it's not uncommon than the 8% of any company is willing to leave at any time because of any reason. They got a payoff so they anticipated their move. Some of them could have been even on Matt's side, some not.

Matt even dunked on DHH that only 8% left automattic, while 30% left badecamp back when they banned politics. Nevermind the fact that DHHs offer was without a timelimit, allowing people to figure out their options. Also the job markets couldn't be more different.

However, I do think a fair amount of automattic employees do not want to leave since their benefits seem actually really nice. Not many companies provide constant pay regardless of your cost of living, so I commend them for that. It could be impossible to find an equivalent job for non US employees, so 6 months pay for leaving in this market is hardly worth it, unless like you said you had plans to do it anyway.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#89

Perhaps I missed something, but I wonder why WP didn't just include ACF functionality in WP Core from the very beginning? Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?

WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality.

It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.

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