Anyone has Mathew's Mastodon link? I wanted to follow him but the link at the end of the post is broken.
Found the link https://mastodon.social/@mathewi@journa.host
Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
91–100 of 149 posts
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if they had literally disabled 80% of the functionality of wordpress, would that still be the concern of anyone other than WP Engine and their customers? Why would anyone using open source software be required to use 100% of the functionality that the software is capable of providing?
Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated. This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dum…
If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#93Mullenweg just keeps digging. He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim. If Trademark was the issue, why did it take him over a decade ? Why is he not going after all the other gazillion WP providers that use similar phrase on their website ? We all know the answer. The only company (WP Engine) that beat his for profit…
What you've said is completely true, but I still can't detect any bad behavior here. He stopped supporting a company that was threatening (not unfairly) his company with his software. Why would he be obligated to justify that? If you built your business next to mine, and I shared e.g. my water infrastructure with you for free or for a nominal fee, then one day your business got large enough to threaten my business, a…
That analogy doesn't fit. What actually happened is that someone shared with you how they do mining contingent on the fact that if you use that knowledge or add to it, that you have to share it as well (WordPress was a fork off of b2/cafelog)
You did so, but turns out that other people are way better at utilizing that knowledge than you are. You throw a hissy fit on the internet. Everybody turns against you, even people who think that in essence you're right.
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
My opinion is both parties are in the wrong, but everyone is piling on this guy and calling him mentally ill
My opinion is very similar: both parties are in the right, but one is calling up a mob to pile up on this guy and call him mentally ill. Automattic has the right to cut off use of its trademarks and infrastructure for any reason , and the hedge fund has the right to whine about it because they got used to the generosity.
Matt tried to call up a mob against WP Engine. For example with his talk but also the things he wrote in the admin panel of all WordPress users. It backfired and the mob turned on him.
As far as I know WP Engine has not tried to call up a mob. The mob was entierly Matt's own creation. So you agree that he is the one in the wrong?
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#95Mullenweg just keeps digging. He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim. If Trademark was the issue, why did it take him over a decade ? Why is he not going after all the other gazillion WP providers that use similar phrase on their website ? We all know the answer. The only company (WP Engine) that beat his for profit…
Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark. For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress.…
Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Maybe he's right about WP Engine, but the way he has and continues to handle everything has been disastrous." This is the best single line distillation of the current lunacy. I mean with every passing day, it all becomes more and more unhinged, and I see no good outcome in the long term. The overall damage to the ecosystem I think begins it's death spiral now. It's a boon for competitors I suppose, but that's about…
> It's a boon for competitors I suppose I would think so too, but it’s not guaranteed. Everyone thought for sure that Twitter would die with what Elon Musk has been doing to it, but somehow it seems to still be alive. Likewise, everyone thought there would be a total exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy or Kbin. And while those platforms did get a lot of new users, it feels like it didn’t reach the level of significa…
Reddit is much worse today than before the exodus, it is recovering and maybe it will eventually fully recover. The issue with the Reddit exodus is that people fled to various different platforms and not just one. Plus some people likely just stopped using social media. This shattering to various different platforms stopped the momentum from totally killing Reddit. And maybe the same will also project WordPress.
I am still at Reddit but many subreddits are just not the same.
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated. This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dum…
If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.
I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt has a history of doing this. There was a similar blowup at Tumblr (owned by Automattic) earlier this year [1] where Matt did the same thing, DM'ing users criticizing him and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
> and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with. While I think Matt's current behaviour is abhorrent, my understanding is the linked article buries the lede a bit. The user claimed they were banned due to bigotry and that Tumblr was lying about them having NSFW content. Things continued to escalate until Matt shared a list of their NSFW accounts. https://www.threads.net/@samhenrigold/post/…
Why does a CEO even get involved in something like that? No matter who is in the right?
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark. For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress.…
Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.
I don't know about you but I would be more frustrated not being able to revise posts? It's bad enough on twitter I can't update my posts, I have to delete and repost
Re: Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.
I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.
But until the last few weeks the Wordpress site enthusiastically endorsed its use by third parties.
It wasn’t “we really wish you wouldn’t”.