391–400 of 416 posts
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I support your approach here Matt. I have used WordPress forever and greatly appreciate the software.
I guess you don't host it or program for it...
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> (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like) You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved li…
The Open Source Definition is only about copyright licensing, but it does mention "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups". https://opensource.org/osd/ Technically you can of course discriminate in other ways and remain Open Source, like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective, for eg when there are multiple download mirrors that don't have t…
You miss the point. I'm not sure if this will help, but I'll see if I can expand and reiterate. Seeing this whole reply now, I apologize for the length. You might go back up to the parent comment and re-read what I was addressing: the claim that one's ability to "ban" is "not even OSS". Regarding ban evasion through Tor or similar, that plays into whether a ban is technologically feasible -- rather than about ability and freedom to make your choice in the first place -- and I won't address it further here.
If I don't want to interact with someone, I make that choice for myself. No open source license prevents me from making and implementing my choice for myself. If I previously chose to interact with someone and am now no longer willing to do so, then open source licenses have either no continuing obligations (eg BSD) or extremely low continuing obligations (eg GPL).
(If someone knows of a license that meets the Open Source Definition, to use a handy threshold, which does in fact require me to interact when I would prefer not to, then I would appreciate the counter-example. In fact, when I wrote "low" in my parent comment, I was thinking specifically and only about the GPL's requirement to provide source code for 3 years after interacting with a party, so I'd appreciate any counter-example that requires more than that.)
If others choose to interact with that same someone, then that is their choice, not mine. I am not a party to their interaction with that same someone. I may even choose to now include them in the list of people with whom I will no longer interact -- but that only goes forwards and does not change prior interactions -- and whether I even desire to make that choice is now getting far away from the topic of ability to make that choice.
My choices not affecting other people is very much in the spirit of open source and FLOSS, as I understand them.
The part that you quoted from the Open Source Definition is that the license cannot have discrimination terms. That has nothing to do with whether I choose to interact with anyone else on any basis that I choose, regardless of whether that basis is socially acceptable or not.
What that OSD requirement does do, however, is prevent my interaction choices from affecting others when I use an open source license. You might imagine a hypothetical license that discriminates against particular nationalities or industries, and contrast that with someone who uses open source licenses while still refusing to interact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or North Korea, to use two current, real-world examples.
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Getting remote jobs in general is tricky if you're not from certain countries. I'm from Algeria, Automattic was one of the few companies that hired there. Every other country would ask you to be in the US, or US timezone, or in a certain European country. Not all remote is built equal.
This actually makes me really suspicious about Automattic. Companies generally don't refuse to hire outside of certain countries just to be jerks, they do it because complying with international tax obligations while paying employees in dozens of countries is complex and expensive. Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really gr…
Things like payroll, insurance, health benefits, retirement benefits, equity, unions, etc. all need to be done differently for different countries. This means that there's a lot of "extra stuff" that's specific to each country. For example, US employees expect a 401(k) plan and health insurance. For a US company, that's par for the course, but for a French company (for example), you need local expertise to navigate all the laws and protocols.
There are middlemen like Rippling that help centralize some of those things, and paper over the differences. But it's still a lot of added complexity. Not insurmountable, but smaller companies may decide to not burden themselves with it.
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Did WPE fork WordPress though? They clearly claim in their legal filing that the WordPress installs they use come directly from the official sources. I don't use WordPress or WPE, but I would (perhaps naively) assume that if they are making a clear statement of fact in a court filing that they are not lying about that fact.
They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting. In the complaint they brag about how they haven't changed a single line of code in WordPress itself. That's way more adversarial than forking the codebase, since the GPL ensures people still give back when they go their own way.
... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies?
> GPL
The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license.
More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their court filing claims. Is it all self serving? Of course it is! A for-profit corporate entity rarely (never?) does things not in it's self interest.
I will freely admin I'm not a part of the WP community and have zero investment on either side of this fight. I will also say that just from reading what has been posted by all parties, I feel really strongly that Matt needs to stop talking/acting and let the lawyers sort things out at this point.
As an aside, as I was thinking about it this morning, Matt claims that WPE is causing him personally due to excessive usage of wordpress.org, right? But, if WPE goes away today, all those sites they were hosting are suddenly going to other hosting companies and the SAME amount of traffic will still hit the wordpress.org site. Trying to claim that WPE is causing undue traffic is just saying the WP as a whole causes too much traffic. So, are ANY hosting companies beyond Matt/Automattic funding the wordpress.org website? It's clear from the WPF financial filings that they don't contribute to funding that critical resource. And it's clear from Matt's posts that he prefer that every WP install uses those resources as he's expressly questioned why he would make it easy to point to another resource.
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If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo? (asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
I would point you at headless cms software like ContentStack or Payload which are easy as pie to use and integrate with a react frontend.
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They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting. In the complaint they brag about how they haven't changed a single line of code in WordPress itself. That's way more adversarial than forking the codebase, since the GPL ensures people still give back when they go their own way.
> forked their business ... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies? > GPL The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license. More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their…
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That's definitely true, but MW shouldn't mistake inertia for immortality. WP doesn't really do anything novel. I disagree about Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately; it's been in all the papers.
> Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately I know, but it has taken more than two years to take serious wounds and it's still very far from being dead.
As of now, it’s 80%.
Are you saying that your threshold for “serious” is more than a 71% loss of value?
These losses are squarely in the territory of those who are commonly labeled as “worst ceo’s of all time”.
I'm surprised more didn't take the offer. Maybe they have a better package of shares in the company that's worth the wait? Otherwise it seems like a great offer to take even if you've enjoyed working there and support Matt and his public meltdowns.
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It is actually quite remarkable that Twitter has kept functioning at a technical level. A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't. However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code…
When SWEs in tech want to flex, they code Twitter on a whiteboard as an interview question. Major respect for the the work they're doing at xAI, but the hardest challenges building Twitter itself are social.
create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);
but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.
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This isn't like a football match where the variables are well-known. Lawsuits are decided on facts if they end up going to court, and every case is unique even if they follow similar fact patterns.
If you are saying it’s essentially random, why would you go with an expensive lawyer when you can hire basically anyone (competent). Is it just virtue signalling?
2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.