Matt has handled this whole thing so poorly. I wanted to be on his side but everything that has come out is just not a great look.
He could have had basically the entire internet on his side just by laying out the facts: "They use our product for free, generate hundreds of millions in revenue, and don't contribute back. It's just not fair. Please contribute more."
Instead this tantrum has turned a bunch of people that would be in his camp against him and he's dragged Wordpress.org into the mud.
Single handedly destroying a legacy.
Do they use a product? WordPress’ license is GPL. However unfair it might feel they can use it under the terms of the license. Matt has chose the license and has to live with that choice. He’s doing basically the same thing Redis/Elastic Search/Mongo did but worse. He wants the money without getting the relicensing backlash. Which, I’d argue, is even worse than those other instances.
He can't relicense as WordPress is a fork of B2 which is GPL. That's one reason why he's trying to extort instead.
I don’t think the fact that it’s a B2 fork is relevant. He wouldn’t be able to relicense even if it wasn’t a fork but initially chosen GPL.
Based on my understanding, this is not how it works.
IP issues withstanding, the owner of a software can relicense any time they want.
Any software released in the past would still be subject to the GPL.
So, if Matt decided to make WordPress closed source, previous versions would still be licensed under the terms of the GPL.
According to `git blame`, Matt isn't the sole, or even majority, owner of the WordPress codebase.
I understand your point, but that wasn’t my point. And in terms of reality, it’s easy to argue that Matt is the effective owner of the codebase.
The reality is that copyright law treats the author, not maintainer, as owner. Matt is the author of less than 1% of the codebase by line. To relicense, he would need consent from the remaining 99%. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.
Framing it as a David vs. Goliath fight was also a huge mistake. Considering the might of Automattic it looks like he's completely out of touch with reality.
What I see is a incredibly wealthy person displaying self pity because he can't have more.
This sums up the situation nicely. Though the part where Matt tried to extort wp engine into paying him personally an absurd sum didn't help put him on the right foot.
It seems like every step Matt makes just makes the whole situation worse.
Yup...that and (allegedly) trying to extort the rival CEO with a job offer/threat.
Plus I don't know how you give that threat before the speech with a straight face.
> He could have had basically the entire internet on his side just by laying out the facts: "They use our product for free, generate hundreds of millions in revenue, and don't contribute back. It's just not fair. Please contribute more."
I remember reading exactly this statement about corps generating profits on a open source thousand of times. Usually with zero effect.
Zero effect would have been strictly better than what we're seeing here.
At this point if Matt insists on his corporate orobouros of fiefdoms all controlled by him, the only solution to the problem is forking Wordpress, to rid him of any control.
Wordpress.org Login: "I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41791369 - Oct 2024 (240 comments)
WordPress contributor banned for asking about new checkbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788704 - Oct 2024 (8 comments)
Expect to see this kind of drama happening regularly and frequently as the gazillion dollar commercial industry continues to subvert every ideal of the original open source ethos.
Some of the best and now most commercially critical open source software started a long time ago, by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Turns out, we did not arrive in that future.
We arrived in the one where both $xxxB companies and their countless cargo cultists explot every means possible to profit from open source software, making angry demands on volunteers and small teams, while giving back as little as possible.
It's essentially a test to find every open source developer's breaking point. Recently, we found Matt's. Next month, it'll be someone else's.
Agreed, but Matt is not the innocent and distressed open source maintainer who hit a breaking point, he's the extremely wealthy CEO of a company that brings in hundreds of millions a year in revenue. The CEO who recently tried to extort another large company for tens of millions of dollars per year to be directed to his personal for-profit company.
The problem with Open Source as a movement isn't just the megacorps using it, it's also that paying for the project's ongoing development stopped being the goal for many monetization efforts—making the shareholders or the maintainers themselves (or in this case both) wealthy (or in this case even more wealthy) has become the new goal.
That is why it's such a problem that these companies don't "give back". Having the software in the world doing its job is no longer the primary goal of starting an open source project, and the "takers" are encroaching on the founders' market cap.
RMS was and still is right.
If you care what someone else does with free software beyond making the source available, that is a you problem.
Then why is GPL-3 encroaching on what I can do with open source software?
Why should anyone care if you find the single stipulation of gpl(any version) to share with the next guy that which was given to you for free, to be intolerable?
Even gpl3 isn't "encroaching" on anything.
It's terms are no different than any other terms, in that you can either accept or not. No different than if the terms are for money.
If you don't agree to them, then luckily you don't have to use the software. You can write your own software that you don't have to share with anyone. Or you can pay for software that has other terms which are surely much more generous and empowering than gpl3.
The only reason the software exists and is good enough to be valuable in the first place, is because it had those terms. If it had other terms, it wouldn't exist in the first place or be worth stealing for you complain that it doesn't let you steal it. If it had other terms, then most of the people who gave their time to work on it, would not have done so, because it would be a bad investment of their time.
I guess the actual complaint here is "why can't you just give me software like MIT?" Why should anyone care about that complaint? It's like trying to use a freedom argument to criticize the limitation on your freedom to keep slaves.
Matt is worth $400 million off the backs of open source developers. He is the big bad in this scenario.
He's just mad someone else is also making money.
I do see OSS as free labour for Bezos, Altman et. al. and act accoringly.
Closed source (but open data formats) may be the new open source.
What?
WordPress was a fork of B2 and quickly intended to make money.
Matt and Automattic bought into WPE. They were the ones who sold their shares to the Private Equity firm that now owns it!
The only other board member of the Foundation is ... drum roll ... the Managing Partner of another Private Equity firm, that Matt himself appointed.
All his hand wringing about PE is to distract from the simple fact that he has repeatedly been an asshole through this process, and it's not because he "reached his breaking point" as an open source developer. This is so apologistic it's not funny.
He reached a breaking point as a CEO, because he made a horrible business decision to buy Tumblr, which has been nothing but a money pit, ever since.
Since then, MATT's for profit business has had this boat anchor around it, so he's looking for extra cash.
That's why he demanded their royalties be paid to Automattic, his for profit company, not the open source project.
> by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Horseshit. People with RMS-like visions for the future don't see the commercial potential for an open source project, immediately spin up a Foundation with themselves as President, and immediately grant their own for-profit company a perpetual, exclusive and irrevocable commercial use license for said open source project. (They may however release self-congratulatory press releases talking about how they are champions of open source for assigning ownership of the project to their Foundation while neglecting to mention the licensing that they[1] signed off on, that very same day.)
You have apparently fully bought into the narrative.
> making angry demands on volunteers and small teams
What "angry demands" has WPEngine made of the project? I'd love to hear of at least one.
[1] I say 'they' but really, the licensing was signed for the Foundation by "Matt Mullenweg, President", and for Automattic by "Matt Mullenweg, President and CEO".
We can only blame ourselves here. We knew that the companies would exploit it all along. Since before Free Software became a thing. Actually, this knowledge is the very ting that started Free Software. And we watched how Open Source came along to cozy up to businesses and bolster adoption. All this time we knew very well that no one’s going to pay for what’s available for free.
And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.
We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.
Can someone remind me why large businesses using Free Software is a problem? If they respect the terms of the license and release their changes as Free Software, why do I, as the maintainer, care who uses it? Isn't the entire point of releasing Free Software to maximize user freedom?
The only problem that I've been able to see isn't a problem with Free Software as a concept, it's a problem with VC-funded companies that think "Open Source" is a business model that will somehow get their investors an ROI, but that's a problem with the motivations of VC-funded companies, not with Free Software.
You’re not wrong but only partially right.
Most FLOSS starts as a weekend project. Most end there, too. But some get big. Those big projects demand a lot of time and effort to deal with all the issues, PRs, mailing list/forum/IRC channel/whathave you moderation. So much effort that it in fact becomes another full-time job. Most people don’t know how to deal with that. They probably like what they’ve built, like all the attention, they try to be helpful. The obvious idea is to turn it somehow into a source of income so that they could continue doing what they like and what is obviously in demand.
I’m not talking about Reacts, coporate internal projects that get open-sourced. I’m talking about your Linuxes, curls, and WordPresses, for that matter. WP didn’t start as a business. The business part of it came a little later. And now that Matt saw the business is lucrative he does what any business does. And what is incompatible with FLOSS.
You’re right pointing out that the entire point of releasing Free Software is to maximize user freedom. But you also have to accept that user freedom is completely incompatible with any sort of sutainable development at scale. It can sort of work for small project that get a bug report every other week but it becomes untenable at a steady rate of half a dozen issues/PRs a day. Basically, unless every FLOSS user is a maintainer of their fork the whole thing falls apart.
And let me tell you, ain’t no one got time for that. Most people do not maintain their forks. Some just don’t want to, some don’t have time, but most just don’t have the skill. They either don’t know 120 languages to support every piece of software they use, or don’t have the domain knowledge that spans kernles, file formats, graphics subsystems, web dev, and a billion other things. There’s simply no way to support all the software without maintainers who specialize in that particular language/domain. So we lock in people in those positions, exercise peer pressure/guilt to keep them working and then turn away and say “they just don’t know how to FLOSS”.
The checkbox on WordPress.org is such a bad look, and is dragging the theoretically non-commercial parts of WordPress into this big (stupid) licensing fight.
It continues to reinforce that the entire WordPress.org / Foundation / Automattic cluster has turned out to just be Matt's personal fiefdom... which worked out okay when he was pretty chill, but is terrible when he decides to burn it all down.
In psychiatry, the concept of insight is used to describe an individual's ability to view their actions, beliefs and overall situation with what would be considered a normal perspective. It's probably best exemplified in popular culture by the movie "A Beautiful Mind". In the movie, a loss of insight is shown as one characteristic of schizophrenia, but it is by no means limited to that disorder.
I'm just a rando on the internet, and this isn't a diagnosis, and you shouldn't diagnose either, kids; but given the relatively sudden onset of Mr. Mullenweg's public situations, and the associated seeming complete loss of insight, I can't help but wonder if there is a known or unknown mental health challenge in the background underlying all of his actions. Such things are invariably complicated by a person being "post-economic", with the lack of the usual checks and balances that come with that state of privilege.
Agreed. It is frowned upon in public discourse to be an armchair psychiatrist, but I am seeing this implosion as the second-order effect of some condition afflicting Matt's mind. This situation can be seen in mechanical terms, the end-user effects like vendor-lock in, legal conflicts, profit and loss... or maybe Matt just woke up one day and, for some reason, felt like he's had it with everything. For some reason nobody knows. And also happened to be a few clicks away from the WordPress.org admin console.
I am reminded of Kayne West. I think some people latched on to what he said in a literal sense instead of just ignoring it outright as the rants of a diagnosed bipolar person. To be sure what he said was deplorable at face value in a public space. But behind all the dialogue, the entire event might have been nothing more significant than the inevitable progression of a disease, one which leaves consciousness just intact enough to keep one recognizable, yet also compels one to say the most polarizing things.
Also related, an article about one of Cloudflare's founders who was afflicted with a neurodegenerative disease that largely destroyed his personality. It went unnoticed for so long because his actions were taken at face value - he was just tired and disengaged from daily life - instead of as originating from a disease of the brain.
For me, the fact he tried to compel the WPE CEO to work for him or else he would expose that she was in negotiations with him is the most unhinged thing I’ve ever heard in a hiring process. Quite literally an affront to freedom.
My most charitable guess at what is going on is severe mental illness.
It did all seem to blow up around when he came back from a sabbatical, presumably taken because he really needed a break. Though I guess that he also had a bit of a PR disaster with Tumblr during that sabbatical, so...
"Quite literally an affront to freedom"? Really? Say more.
Work for me or I will publicly shame you, try to damage your reputation, and make your employees potentially question your loyalty.
Threatening people if they don’t take a job with you is in the most literal way a challenge to your autonomy as a human being.
I think a lot of this whole saga is easier to understand if you just remember that WordPress is a major open source project and a company, so you get to see a lot of the stuff every company --- almost none of whom run major open source projects --- does in the ordinary course of business.
Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.
> Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.
Ahh, "everyone else does it" - no, have never been threatened that if I refuse a job offer, or otherwise decline, that my current employer will be told all about how disloyal I was to them.
Hey, to be clear, I'm not sticking up for it, I'm just saying: commentary about this whole saga sometimes feels like people have lost some perspective, and are holding WordPress to a standard that pure commercial companies aren't held to. Hiring is ruthless! Executive hiring in particular!
Americans relating everything back to “freedom” is so jarring for literally everyone else.
Can't wait for Matt to show up in the comments here saying how he isn't a bad guy and banning people who ask questions is actually for the benefit of WordPress.
God why are you taking the petty checkbox I unilaterally added seriously, you're just supposed to check the box unless you're someone I think is a doo doo head /s.
Hey Matt, I sent you an email. I know you probably are getting a lot of emails right now, so I just wanted to let you know here. Whenever you get a chance, I have some additional questions about this. Thanks!
That’s…not Matt.
I know.
Wait. From TFA I’m to understand that this Matt person, posting as Wordpress.org, tweeted:
> We’re still getting lots of questions about this [checkbox]. What if an agency is part of your affiliate program[…]?
…addressing the WP Engine firm whose users he’s been weirdly bullying with all this?
He attempted to frame his own ambiguously menacing checkbox-cum-loyalty-oath as somehow being of its target’s making? What?
Is that type of… duplicitous? dissociative? schizophrenic?… tactic common these days in twitter kinds of spheres?
Glad I am not the only confused person. I marked it down in my "ah well i dont understand 10-20% of social media inside baseball" category.
He's been in ego preservation mode since at least February and he really, really needs to get the hell off the internet for six months and possibly heal. It's a spiral and it's painful to watch.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
This is stunning.
Once a dedicated user of WordPress, I never thought I would ever say this, but here it is -- I hope WordPress dies as soon as possible and gets replaced by something else. Well, a better outcome would be Matt goes away, but I don't see that happening.
This checkbox will absolutely not look good in front of a jury. It's petty at best.
Small discussion (27 points, 2 days ago, 8 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788704
It's not enough for some people to be rich beyond all needs and comfort, they also want to be richer than their peers and be influential and be well liked.
The word affiliate is so loose that it could mean anything. IANAL but I recommend everyone read that word with the tightest of definitions. That means you are not an affiliate if: you are not wpengine, you are not their employee, you are not doing work for wp engine, you are not owned by wpengine, nor do you work for any wpengine companies, and you don't have any ownership in organizations or companies that wpengine also has ownership or control in. And none of wpengine's board of directors or any of the board of directors of any companies wpengine has ownership or control in are your employees or managers.
Effectively, they want to ensure wpengine is not interfacing with wordpress.org through undisclosed ways like shady shell companies. That is the reason for the checkbox.
If you are selling stuff on wpengine or being paid by wpengine for selling stuff on there, you are not an affiliate. you are a seller. if you are selling wpengine subscriptions, you are not an affiliate; just a seller. if you are advertising wpengine services, you are not an affiliate. you are an advertiser.
> IANAL but I recommend everyone read that word with the tightest of definitions.
Why would you recommend that when Matt/WordPress is on record questioning WP Engine's common sense interpretation?
In a Twitter thread linked in TFA WP Engine put forward an interpretation like yours in an attempt to make their customers less nervous and WordPress (probably Matt) replied with a "what if..." casting doubt on that interpretation.
We're talking about a guy who is currently following through on a threat to wage "nuclear war" (his words) and has very clearly shown that he does not care how much collateral damage he causes. It's totally reasonable to take the broadest interpretation of the checkbox possible.
The challenge is this is a commonsense interpretation of the checkbox. The legal interpretation could be much broader. If you have something to lose (ie you are a money making entity), you are much less willing to take the risk that someone someday will decide to interpret the checkbox in a manner that you did not expect.
photomatt, if you’re reading this, you need to step away from all things WordPress and let someone else lead it. Focus on the lawsuit at hand and spend time away from the internet as much as possible. These kind of knee jerk and extremely petty actions don’t add any value to whatever you think your moral or legal position is. On the contrary, you (and you alone) are making things far worse for yourself.
The checkbox is so outrageous I thought it was just a meme the first time I saw a screenshot of it. This will result in WordPress being forked.
Someone on r/Wordpress pointed out that Matt suffered a nosebleed during a podcast:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g1omxy/matt_for...
It's very possible that he's ill.
I saw an interesting tweet from DHH to Matt that seems relevant:
> I have nothing but the out-most respect for what you've built with WordPress. It's an incredible achievement, and you're been justly rewarded for that accomplishment. No need to squeeze the lemon that hard. It's undermining open source as a whole. [1]
A lot of folks had compared it to DHH/Basecamp because of the voluntary severance. But for the most part, those issues did not spill into Rails like this. I think if anyone can talk Matt down from the ledge, it would be another "Benevolent Dictator".
That said, I think DHH misses something: lots of people built Wordpress, not just Matt. And we are slowly seeing the most engaged people, some who do it for the love of Wordpress instead of the money, either back away or get forced out. THAT is what will kill the ecosystem that has been built. Any harm that WP Engine may have been doing cannot compare with the harm that's happening right now from their own spiteful actions.
Dear Matt,
Resign.
Threadreader of the linked twitter thread with all the Slack discussion (since X was completely not working for me): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1843963052183433331.html
...Matt doesn't come across well in it. Lots of refusing to state what he thinks the checkbox that he added means.
Why is Wordpress(TM) not open source ?
Like under Apache foundation or something
Because it is "perpetually, exclusively, and irrevocably" licensed to Automattic.
Irrevocably? Sure about that?
They are sure the license says that.
It only controls the trademark anyway no different from firefox or anything else with a trademarked name.
Anyone else can do anything else the gpl allows with the software, just under some other name.
Matt is just burning WordPress down with one dumb move after another.
From a PR and Marketing point of view certainly. I love WP but wary to use it now. This stuff make me nervous. WP is it's ecosystem, and these moves may slowly kill that. I see WP as the quiet never talked about on HN nocode superpower! Here is hoping for no more drama.
Is there a TL;DR on this story? I feel like I missed the start of it and am now hopelessly behind on the drama-du-jour.
so tl;dr this is like redis/amazon thing where $CONGLOMO takes open source and bleeds it dry and doesn't contribute enough back to the open source project? i'm so disappointed in open source. there has to be a better way for projects to get something out of the deal.
You might want to actually understand what's happening instead of simplifying the whole thing as tldr.
is this not true?
Main Points of Contention Trademark and Branding Issues Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of misusing the WordPress trademark and causing confusion among users1. WP Engine has since changed some of its plan names to address these concerns1. Open Source Contributions Mullenweg criticizes WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project relative to their profits5 . Core Feature Modifications WP Engine is accused of altering core WordPress features, particularly disabling post revisions by default2. Mullenweg argues this compromises the integrity of WordPress and its promise to users2.
To me it seems like he's using the trademark as a weapon to go after the competition, even through the Wordpress Foundation should be neutral. Many other companies, including his, also make money out of Wordpress.
And I think technically the owner of the trademark is Matt and not the Wordpress Foundation, but also technically, WP Engine isn't required by the license to give him money or contribute back, they are allowed to modify the code and required to share their modifications when they redistribute the software.
Would love to know which pages you used in the prompt for that shoddy summary job.
perplexity. https://files.catbox.moe/tqxnp8.png
i wonder if the summary is totally inaccurate or really just debated.
That summary is missing a lot of relevant nuance.
Like they said, go read up on it, since no this is not the story at all. By now there are many good write-ups.
No, it's not true.
WPEngine used "WP", which until a few weeks ago was explicitly stated as "feel free to use". Nominative usage also says factual statements are protected. If you offer WordPress hosting, you are allowed to say "We offer WordPress hosting". You might highlight (and WPE did) that "WordPress is a trademark of...".
Matt's claim, "My mom is confused and thinks that WPEngine is part of the open source project", is a deflection, and laughable coming from the man who runs wordpress.org as a "independent website" (running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.
> Open Source Contributions Mullenweg criticizes WP Engine for not contributing enough to the WordPress open-source project relative to their profits
WPE donated hundreds of thousands a year to events alone, maintains several of the most popular plugins (all of which are free to use, unlike several of Automattic's, which are commercial).
> Core Feature Modifications WP Engine is accused of altering core WordPress features, particularly disabling post revisions by default
This is laughable. It's literally a configuration option in the control panel. It just defaults to "disabled" on WPE.
> Mullenweg argues this compromises the integrity of WordPress and its promise to users
Why is it even a configuration option, then, Matt?
This is a plague on both houses. People want stability and reliability, not drama. And what they're getting feels and awful lot like drama.
