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Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

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Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#31

Post by xiaoma »

Thank you WP and thank you Automattic. I find all the negative comments directed at Matt here both surprising and deeply disappointing.

Wordpress powers about 20% of all the sites on the web. It's been a boon to humanity and much of the reason it has flourished as it has is its open sourced nature. Automattic has made profit, but only a tiny sliver of what it could have if concern for the rest of the world weren't an issue.

The Thesis guy, on the other hand, grossly violated copyrights while trying to play the victim (literally had copied WP code in his project) and is now applying for patents that would pretty much wreak blogging and with it the web if granted. Personally, I'm very happy to have people like Matt putting their efforts and money where their principles are. I'm all for building a business, but not that entails stealing from the open source community or breaking the web.

Automattic paid for thisis.com and I'm glad Chris wasn't able to take it by force.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#34

Post by avinassh »

> Automattic filed cancellation requests for all three trademarks

umm... why Automattic is after DIYTHEMES trademark?

> There is a tendency to think that there are two things: WordPress, and the active theme. But they do not run separately. They run as one cohesive unit. They don’t even run in a sequential order.

So, by this analogy, every app/piece of code you write for a GPL licensed OS, then the people who hold the copyright, can claim over your code?

> The answer given in the GPL FAQ is short and to the point: “Subclassing is creating a derivative work.”

So, if tomorrow Apple releases Swift with GPL or Microsoft releases C# with GPL, then everything that is written using those languages has to be GPL?

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#35

Post by girvo »

xiaoma wrote: post #31

Thank you WP and thank you Automattic. I find all the negative comments directed at Matt here both surprising and deeply disappointing. Wordpress powers about 20% of all the sites on the web. It's been a boon to humanity and much of the reason it has flourished as it has is its open sourced nature. Automattic has made profit, but only a tiny sliver of what it could have if concern for the rest of the world weren't an…

They're both being childish, but frankly I have little sympathy for Matt or Automattic here; this kind of corporate "warfare" is abhorrent in all cases in my opinion. I don't know how you can defend Matt's behaviour here. And I say that as someone who has worked with WordPress professionally since 2006.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#36

Post by bootload »

"During that debate, I got defensive and acted like an asshole. At the time, I was woefully ignorant about software licensing, and I felt as though I was being backed into a corner and asked to accept something I didn’t fully understand. Instead of handling it in a measured, polite manner, I was a jerk. I made a mistake, and I paid dearly for it."

This something to keep in mind, stay calm. When you are agitated you don't think straight. What I don't understand is why Mullenweg and Pearson don't work together and increase the size of the market?

Having read this article, http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p... now I see why.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#37

Post by pavlov »

avinassh wrote: post #34

> Automattic filed cancellation requests for all three trademarks umm... why Automattic is after DIYTHEMES trademark? > There is a tendency to think that there are two things: WordPress, and the active theme. But they do not run separately. They run as one cohesive unit. They don’t even run in a sequential order. So, by this analogy, every app/piece of code you write for a GPL licensed OS, then the people who hold th…

Yes, if the language's class libraries are GPL and you're linking them into your binary, then your app has to be GPL too. That is the most common interpretation at least.

This is exactly why LGPL exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_Lice...

For open source class libraries, LGPL makes the most sense and is used by the vast majority of libraries in the Linux world.

Also, some libraries are GPL-licensed specifically to protect commercial interests. Under such a dual licensing scheme, you can use the free GPL version, but then your app has to be GPL as well... Or you can pay for a commercial license that lets you build closed-source apps using the library.

Qt used to have that kind of dual license, but they switched to LGPL after Nokia acquired Qt sometime around 2008.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#38

Post by mtbcoder »

kijin wrote: post #22
michaelpinto wrote: post #16

You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed: - Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site). - That said the quality of…

I couldn't care less about whether WordPress is a mobile-first platform or how easy it should be to wrap a WordPress site in an app. Most of that is presentation layer problem, which can and should be handled by individual themes and plugins. WordPress themes are incredibly powerful; they can do that and much more. The only part of the presentation layer that WordPress needs to concern itself with is the admin interf…

> The only part of the presentation layer that WordPress needs to concern itself with is the admin interface.

If only this were the case. WP's underlying processes and database structure are so unbelievably stunted and entirely coupled to the core WP application, that to do something as simple as pull rendered posts from the database generally involves performing a series of SQL gymnastics just to retrieve the relevant data. Not to mention all of the convoluted WP functions that are needed to render the final content snippet.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#40

Post by puranjay »

michaelpinto wrote: post #16

You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed: - Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site). - That said the quality of…

If you wanted to know how big of a mess WordPress is, just take a look at all the successful businesses that have been built just to explain how to use WordPress.

The WordPress UI hasn't changed in the 6 years that I've been using it. Everything about it feels "heavy".

Not a good experience, honestly.

Just that the free alternatives (Ghost, for example) are even more technically challenging.

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