My experiences with Automattic: Part 3 • Hacker News Board

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#41

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #21

> I can’t see how Matt’s recent ideas on the rights to use the WordPress logo, the name or the wordmark requiring companies that he doesn’t like to pay up are in compliance with the GPL license. Trademarks and logos are not attached to the software license. The Linux kernel has a trademark page ( https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark ) which is separated from the gplv2 license. Python has their own tra…

Author here. To clarify, the trademark rights were transferred to the WordPress Foundation 14 years ago and then licenced to Automattic to use for WordPress.com. (The internal verbal story was that it even involved a separate shade of blue to identify .com from .org.)

The foundation was open about the use of the WordPress logo, wordmark and the WP acronym until a couple of weeks ago. (Here's the previous version of the trademark policy (https://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpress...) and here is the current one for comparison (https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/))

Just like with attaching a permissive license to your code means that you can't just yank it back when you feel like it, there's a long history of case law proofing that you can't do the same with trademarks, especially when there's a whole economy that has built up around your FOSS project.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#42

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

MobileVet wrote: post #5

> What not everyone knows is that those sites are mirrored over to the WordPress.com infrastructure, including WooCommerce customer data and purchase histories — and that infrastructure is as far as I understand the GDPR — not compatible with European privacy regulations Yikes. Not surprising in this age of data hoovering, but definitely sketchy and likely illegal in the EU. I guess it follows the other point about A…

I still find it confusing that you can both claim to be GDPR compliant and also that only US law apply to your operations. Automattic was also claiming compliance via the EU-US Privacy Shield which had already been made invalid by the European Court of Justice for a while.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#43

Post by g-b-r » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #37

g-b-r wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't take Mozilla's handling of trademarks as an example to follow. They were the first to be so drastic in the open source world, and they were and probably still are despised for that

I would not claim which project has the best trademark policy to emulate. My comment is mostly to illustrate how a software license is handled separated from trademark agreements and that practically every major free software project and non-profit foundation has a trademark policy. The FSF/OSI guides are also very illustrative in how those communities view trademark law compared to copyright law. The Mozilla tradema…

Well, yes to the first paragraph.

For the second, using variations of a product name was common and not equivocal, their new policy was a major hassle; it also made it harder for forks of Mozilla to be discovered, and placed a serious burden on making them.

It was just not in the spirit of open source software.

But this is fairly off-topic

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#44

Post by steve_adams_86 » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:04 PM UTC

brtkdotse wrote: post #31

egeozcan wrote: post #2

> ...how it (the Wordpress community) has been made to depend on Matt’s leadership at Automattic’s infrastructure. And how that is a very bad thing. > This post is best read while listening to Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine. (There’s a jazzy cover if you are so inclined.) Well, I hope nobody needs to listen to "(This is what you asked for,) Heavy Is the Crown" when listening to the future developments :)…

Is WordPress even used for blogging anymore? In my view it’s more akin to Emacs or Jira - a platform to build whatever you want that out of the box just happens to be configured as a blog/text editor/bug tracker. I’d say this is the golden moment for Ghost to shine.

I would love to see ghost rise higher in all of this, but my experience is that it’s very, very hard to sell most clients on it. They have all heard from someone that Wordpress does everything, it’s the standard, it’ll give them more options down the line, etc.

Ghost is more than enough quite often, but I wonder if a few more key features could convince a large amount of people to convert.

Their editor is great, but making it more extendable would be a huge deal. I’ve dug into it several times now, but I don’t see a clear path to a maintainable plugin API for the editor that would allow you to add more cards at will by just throwing them into a directory for example. It’s possible, but how would you version plugins? Would the editor need to be decoupled from ghost well enough that you can install the version that supports your plugins best? How do you handle broken plugin content? What if someone stops maintaining a plugin; do all the users of it eternally stay on the last version of the editor that supports it?

If that problem was solved I think a lot more people might come over to ghost as things like recipe cards, ad server integrations, form builders, and other popular tools made it into the editor.

Yet, would that actually make ghost better? I think there’s a version of this that would be objectively better, but you’d have to be careful not to allow for all kinds of potential breakage and friction. Right now everything is fully integrated so there are no regressions caused by upgrades. It would be a shame to lose that.

I wish I had more time to work on this. It’s a really fun, properly challenging problem.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#45

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:15 PM UTC

brtkdotse wrote: post #31

egeozcan wrote: post #2

> ...how it (the Wordpress community) has been made to depend on Matt’s leadership at Automattic’s infrastructure. And how that is a very bad thing. > This post is best read while listening to Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine. (There’s a jazzy cover if you are so inclined.) Well, I hope nobody needs to listen to "(This is what you asked for,) Heavy Is the Crown" when listening to the future developments :)…

Is WordPress even used for blogging anymore? In my view it’s more akin to Emacs or Jira - a platform to build whatever you want that out of the box just happens to be configured as a blog/text editor/bug tracker. I’d say this is the golden moment for Ghost to shine.

I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.)

In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it.

WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#46

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

bullenweg wrote: post #11

> WordPress and Automattic as Subject to EU Legislation I'm loath to defend Mullenweg but WordPress.com is not 43% of the internet. WordPress (the software) is used by 43% of websites, WordPress.com is used by a few million, making it smaller than Wix, Squarespace and even other WordPress hosts like WPEngine.com. Automattic has no relationship with a meaningful amount of end-user data.

Hi Bullenweg. If you reach out, then I'll tell you one or two things on how the sausage is made.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#47

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

prettyStandard wrote: post #20

briandear wrote: post #16

Can someone explain the whole drama of all of this? I have heard of “Wordpress” and I have heard of “WP Engine” and I have heard that .com and .org are apparently not the same thing. But other than that this feels like walking into someone else’s family argument halfway through it. I don’t know what “side” to be on, nor what those “sides” even are.

Basically WPEngine vs AutoMATTic (emphasis mine) WPEngine is private equity(I personally like their founder, find his talks) Matt seems to be a founder gone crazy(I don't know much about him) .com and .org are both controlled by Matt. .com is Matts business side .org is Matts non-profit side WPEngine is another company All of this seems to be very unfortunate. Even if Matt has valid claims, he seems to have shot hims…

His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount.

I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#48

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

Raed667 wrote: post #19

Havoc wrote: post #12

> Matt seems to treat what happens on WordPress.org to be within his personal domain, while those who contribute generally assume that their contributions are within the WordPress Foundation’s scope That seems to be the crux of the issue. At least with respect to the now what question. Thinking more and more this is going to require a substantial rethink of the entire thing well beyond a fork. Especially if Matt stic…

We thought there were 2 entities: WordPress.com & WordPress.org , but turns out those 2 are basically the same, but there is still a 3rd one WordPress Foundation (that is not WordPress.org apparently)

Then there's Audrey Capital LLC, WordPress Community Services (which is a B corp owned by the foundation), an array of Automattic subsidiaries around the world.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#49

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote: post #22

pell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use. There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and the…

Right. WordPress is Windows for the Web, basically. More enjoyable to develop for, IMO, but otherwise the comparison holds. I would add that other PHP-based projects have had severe maintainability crises, poorer clarity of design, even worse code quality crises (Joomla, for example), major fallings-out and multiple forks (Joomla again). WordPress got this far in part because it managed inevitable community fallings-…

I would go as far as saying that PHP has developed into a very good OOP programming language in the past years (from C with dollar signs to something more Java like). Frameworks like Laravel and their ecosystems are actively using modern PHP and utilising the newest PSR standards.

The issue is how WordPress seems to be stuck in the ways of the mid-2000's. You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

Re: My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

#50

Post by aldavigdis » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

nikdoof wrote: post #32

LordAtlas wrote: post #6

Judging from this post, it seems there are lots of regulatory holes in the way Automattic operates in the EU. Mullenweg needs to be careful that the eye of the EU doesn't turn its gaze towards him and his company, or he could be in some trouble. But I can't say I'm surprised by his belief that he only answers to US laws and jurisdiction.

The mention of the self-employed employees could be interesting to HRMC in the UK, if they are skirting around IR35 it could end up with them being handed a large tax bill. Also their UK branch is called "MINISTRY OF AUTOMATTIC"... really.

Yeah. The Irish one is called Aut O'Mattic from the top of my head. Very Professional.