He's a guy running a multi-billion USD company annoyed at a ~bn USD company for capturing some of the profits from "his" "open" source software.
It's corporate warfare given the thinnest possible moral veneer. He was an investor in WP Engine.
I'm not happy with the mess and Matt's behaviour, but you can't steal free code.
Sure, the code is free, but that's still a lot of theft.
Even when you are banned from the event you are sponsoring.
Or something.
It's possible if they had been approached in a calm, polite and constructive way, they might have.
After Matt stormed in, set the bridges on fire and started pissing on everything?
lol. lmao even
> Nothing in this ongoing situation is about more than optics now
You're not wrong there! And since you apparently created this account purely to respond to my post, what do you think these optics make you look like, Matt? Do you think they make you look good?
How can you expect any developer to devote time to writing a plugin if the dictatorship of Matt can rug pull it at any time.
I sympathized with Wordpress a lot in the initial drama, but this is going downhill fast.
Blocking somebody's access to the plugin repository, not accepting their patches, and then 'releasing' your own 'secure' version is just abuse, period.
But I can't shake the feeling that to a lot of observers, this latest thing is going to look rather like a kidnapping. It's not right.
Who should provide security updates to an open source package when author no longer has access to the repository - voluntarily or otherwise?
You say this like there's not much difference between the two, but there's a world of difference.
One is someone yanking a repo and breaking millions of builds across the world and the maintainers of npm stepping in to fix things (in a move that is still controversial, mind you).
The other is the maintainers of the WordPress plugin repository starting a self-described "nuclear war" with the plugin maintainers, banning them from the repo, publicly disclosing a security vulnerability in the plugin, then hijacking it to save the day.
One is a potentially misguided step to solve a real problem. What Matt is doing here is just cosplaying Syndrome from The Incredibles.
Give them the access. It's not like they forgot the password or are AWOL.
Guess who owns the trademark for both those things? WPEngine, that's who.
This guy is so bad at this that it's not even funny anymore.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=98321164&caseSearchType=U...
Good catch. Looks like it was filed just under a year ago, and hasn't been finalized yet. If it is approved, I think the original filing date is considered the registration date, so Matt's usage would (at that point) qualify as infringement. However, I am NAL.
These are good times for Wordpress alternatives to shine.
It’s MIT licensed so anybody can use it, including people affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.
12 years building sites on WP... not anymore.
But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone.
Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.
You should be more specific about what you're trying to achieve.
But no, Drupal is not an alternative to Wordpress. Perhaps ten years ago but even then barely. Now? That's like saying a Kenworth semi is an alternative to a motorcycle. Sure, you can get from A to B on either but beyond that, they are really different tools for different jobs.
Maybe the new "Drupal CMS" (nee Starshot) initiative will bring them into direct competition again. We will see.
[1]: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/future-updates-for-acf-a...
My guess is that he was focused on these facts:
1) I own Wordpress
2) WPEngine is profiting from Wordpress and I'm not benefiting
3) This is unfair
And it was stuck in his mind like a thorn, irritating him whenever the thought arose, and never went away. Commercializing open source is hard for myriad reasons, but wordpress.com is actually rather profitable, and yet it still bothered him that he wasn't getting a cut.
Eventually, after many grumpy ruminations on it, the answer was obvious: "I deserve a cut of WPEngine's income, since they're using my software." No, this isn't how the license works, and there's no legal basis for it, but it felt right and fair.
This thought, irrational and deluded as it was, wedged in his psyche and fed into his deep loathing for WPEngine. All the subsequent actions follow from it, from the initial ultimatum to the various actions he's taking to fight his enemy.
This is an intensely personal and emotional fight for him, and everyone that disagrees is an enemy too. He's just asking for what's fair, and yet all these ignorant commenters on the internet can't see it.
- Why now? What snapped? Clearly WPE didn't go to "billions" over night. So why go nuclear now?
- Doesn't he have a close and immediate circle of advisors and confidants? Are they speaking to him and he's not listen? Or has he locked himself in a room so to speak and is completely unapproachable? Either way, not good.
- Is he trying to force WPE to fork WP and then maintain their own version? Does he believe they can't do it? What if WPE's hosting peers unite and abandon what is effectively Automattic's version?
Am I the only one who can't imagine a good outcome from all this?
Here's a possible good outcome.
1. The board fires Matt, stops chasing windmills, and settles with WP Engine. I'm kind of surprised they haven't done so already - it's all downhill from here. He's either lying to them, not listening, or they're drinking the Kool Aid.
2. Matt steps down from the WordPress Foundation and transfers ownership of wordpress.org to them. He takes his hundreds of millions of dollars and does something else.
3. The new CEO apologizes to the community and establishes public processes for removing extensions and such. Checks and balances are added.
4. The WordPress Foundation's new director orders a house clearing. Many hosting providers and developers are invited to join the board. It's no longer an instrument of Matt's will, but represents the community.
The first step will probably happen at some point.
The second step could happen, but seems unlikely. I think there's a significant chance Matt would go on a rampage if he was fired. He clearly thinks of WordPress as his personal property. If he retains control of the foundation, there's nothing to stop him from continuing his crusade there. He's certainly got the funds to do so.
The third step is effectively required if he's fired. It's even mentioned in the 48 Laws of Power.
I don't think this outcome is particularly likely, but it could happen. People do sometimes win the lottery.
I imagine a near future result will be WPE maintaining a fork of WordPress and the plugin repo, with WP demanding plugin authors disclaim any association with WPE.
WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part.
Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that route then also Automattic doesn't have to put up with funding WPE operation anymore.
I'm tired of people justifying WPE attitude and behavior by saying "legally, they don't have to contribute", well let's talk legal, everything happening to them is within those same lines too. Why are you complaining if it's legal?
This is one of those "fuck around and find out" situation. Matt just run out of fucks to give, and decided it's better to teach the bully a lesson even if it comes at a cost.
Guess: Matt is not well. You can find others making more specific guesses, but we don't need to make that public.
I must say, “the Wordpress guy has a public nervous breakdown” wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024, but…
If WP Engine is reading, fork WordPress now. Call it FreshPress. Put $25M into it, team up with other hosts, abandon the editor everyone hates, and relicense it to GPLv3 so Matt can’t have any of it. (Note that WordPress’s license specifically says GPLv2 or later.) Maybe support Composer like sane modern PHP projects. Maybe put the most important plugins like Woo into core and make it an all-in-one Squarespace competitor.
Once it’s ahead, legal, and Matt can’t borrow; then he’ll realize his bluff has been called. Make WordPress the new B2.
If WP Engine has to create a fork and dump millions, they would basically lose. As they have built a business model around not contributing even to the already well developed WordPress codebase. So I can't imagine how going beyond that and forking the entire thing would work, unless they just mirror upstream.
I don't think Matt would mind if WP Engine did just that because he's arguing that they are using WordPress without giving back anything in return, so if they just did their thing outside of WordPress that would be exactly what he wants.
But I'm sure they're already debating internally how feasible a fork is and if it makes sense for their business.
I don't think Matt will be too displeased with WPEngine investing $25 million into a fork. He may even feel vindicated.
Matt's extortion attempt is because WPEngine is generating a lot of revenue and is valuable enough for PE to notice. He figured he had a decent chance of blackmailing them out of 8% of their revenue to the tune of around 10mil a year. Matt's a deluded and entitled tech nerd cosplaying a mafia mobster. And WPEngine did not blink.
The main reason is that Matt wouldn’t be able to freeload without relicensing WordPress - which would be a massive headache for him and his partners to go through; and the reason would be patently and embarrassingly obvious.
The goal I described earlier is not to make a WordPress clone that just happens to be free of Matt. There’s plenty of low hanging, long ignored gripes and opportunities for improvement. Offer a better, Matt-free product, and you’ll win.
WordPress is a fork that basically killed the original project. No reason that history can’t repeat itself.
The people that stayed are probably the ones that feel "married to the job" (pro-tip: you aren't your job)
I feel like it's time to move off Wordpress. I don't feel comfortable about its future for my clients.
What suggestions do you all have for alternatives?
WordPress is kinda awful in a lot of ways.
BUT
You can hand a thoughtfully build WP site over to a non technical client, and they can work out or learn how to do 90% of the publishing and updating they need to do, or easily find staff or contractors with lots of WordPress experience to do it for them.
The "43% of the entire web" statistic is a really really good reason to recommend WP for that reason.
There is obviously not a single competing CMS/blog-platform that has anything like as many experiences users. Where by "users" I mean people who are familiar with or even experts on publishing content using it.
That's the real "WordPress Community", the people using it on a day to day basis to get their jobs/hobbies/responsibilities done. That's the "WordPress Community" that makes it "the right thing" for agencies and contractors and IT departments to recommend WordPress.
Up until 2 weeks ago, I regularly recommended WordPress. In spite of it's flaws.
I feel for everyone that uses Wordpress.
> Around 20 minutes in, my nose started bleeding, which sometimes happens when I travel too much. Prior to this interview, I was on 30+ hour flights returning from Durban, where I was on safari, to Houston. I'm sorry for not noticing it happening; it's very embarrassing.
How that relates to an executive engaged in sudden extremely aggressive and over the top and highly personal scorched earth attack campaign over what appear to be fairly routine open source community squabbles is left as an exercise for the reader.
The "traveling too much" is exactly the same kind of BS I would have said in my addiction. Is he referring to air pressure? Because that would happen on the plane, not hours later.
After reading it, the first thing I did was to make sure that I and all WP sites I have access to had automatic updates disabled. This always seemed like a good policy to me, as it is such a massive attack vector. After all, some popular plugin developed by someone in Nebraska (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/) might be hijacked at some point. WP did the stupidest thing ever by hijacking ACF.
WP is the villain now because they can inject unknown, unvetted code into my site (if I had enabled automatic updates). While I find ACF's code abhorrent, at least it has a proven track record of working and not crashing my site. Someone who just took over the plugin does not enjoy the same trust from me.
Because looking at it that way, might open different analysis than most of what I’ve seen so far.
Matt is causing damage to the OSS ecosystem far beyond WordPress.
No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software.
There is a social contract that people should contribute back, and while it’s largely unenforceable, as it should be, when it’s happening on a systemic level something has to be done. And we are all complicit if we don’t at least say that much and spare some good will towards the guy actively in that fight at least superficially
Calling out Matt and Automattic for their abusive behavior is addressing the systemic issue of for-profit corporations exploitatively abusing open source software.
We're talking about a company that released GPL software, waited a decade for another company to build their entire business around said GPL software, and then came at them with threats of going to "nuclear war" (their words) with them if they didn't agree to extremely exploitative terms on top of the GPL licensing under which the software was released.
That is the affront to Free Software that's happening here. WP Engine may or may not be a good company, but it is Matt who has given up on freedom. If you lure people in with a promise of Free Software and then hold a gun to their head when they take you up on it, you are the bad guy.
The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss.
I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/wp and then there’s this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
No there isn't. The author gets to decide the contract, not you or anyone else.
I am the one who decides how to license my software. If I don't want to require my users to contribute, I don't have to. If I wanted to include such an obligation, I would have.
You don't get to hold users of my projects to unwritten, made-up obligations. You don't get to bully people online who aren't following your imaginary rules. My users and I have a contract. We both agreed to it. You don't get to step in between us and alter the agreement we made. How dare you.
The assertion that users must contribute to open source projects despite the license, is an attack on users, developers, and a just and free society. Developers must be able to license their software how they see fit. You want to take that freedom away from me, in the pursuit of hurting people you don't like.
