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Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?

67 points by decrypt 5y ago

a5aAqU 5y ago
Start by denouncing AMP.[1] WordPress has been a major supporter. [1] https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-trust-in-google-led-initiatives https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-...
yepthatsreality 5y ago
> Since WordPress is open-source software, no company technically owns it Uh what? This seems like a gross misunderstanding of FOSS licensing.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  GPL3
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    How does GPL3 answer under which organization that Wordpress lives and in which it is maintained? Edit: the Wordpress GitHub also states GPL2
    - the-dude 5y ago
      I can take the Wordpress source and start a company where my copy lives and is maintained. Do I own it now?
      - tyingq 5y ago
        The copyright owner would always have more rights than someone using a GPL licensed copy of the source. Automattic itself doesn't have to abide by GPL terms for whatever use they want to make of Wordpress, WooCommerce, etc. Edit: Seems there's no contributor licensing agreement for Wordpress, so complicated here. Though the general point of copyright holders having specific rights beyond licenses they release under is still relevant, IMO.
        mirashii 5y ago
        > Automattic itself doesn't have to abide by GPL terms for whatever use they want to make of Wordpress Yes they do. Automatic doesn’t own the copyright to all the code. Individual contributions are still copyrighted and licensed under the GPL. They would need permission from all previous contributors to relicense it to avoid having to comply with the GPL.
        tyingq 5y ago
        Sure, barring contributions made without contributor agreements in place. They seem to track "copyright holders" for wordpress core and it's not a huge list: https://codex.wordpress.org/Copyright_Holders https://codex.wordpress.org/Copyright_Holders
        rmccue 5y ago
        This list is super out-of-date and in no way canonical; you’d need to check svn to see the real list of contributors. (The Codex is, to some degree, abandoned given the existence of the new developer documentation.) e.g: I’ve been a contributor to WordPress for about 17 years, I personally own the copyright to a huge chunk of WordPress’ source, and I am not on that list. :)
        mirashii 5y ago
        I was going to point out a similar thing. I was a contributor for a few years in the mid-2000s
        rmccue 5y ago
        WordPress doesn’t have a CLA, so contributors retain rights to their contributions. Automattic is a major contributor to WordPress, and has an agreement with the Foundation to use the trademark, but otherwise has no special permissions†. Also, the Foundation owns the trademark, domains, and is the legal entity for events, but also does not own the copyright on the source code. († nb: some asterisks that only matter to WP insiders) (I’m a long-term contributor to WordPress.)
      - yepthatsreality 5y ago
        No, Wordpress Foundation does. Wordpress might be very openly developed but that does negate legal ownership and responsibility.
        rmccue 5y ago
        The WordPress Foundation owns the trademark, but not the copyright associated with the code, which remains the IP of the contributors (see my answer above).
        yepthatsreality 5y ago
        Which would make Automattic the majority owner no? Or has there been enough significant changes that has diluted the majority ownership? I remember a push to integrate with JS technologies several years back where I could see that happening.
        rmccue 5y ago
        Automattic is the largest contributor by far, yes, but a majority doesn’t really matter for things like relicensing which require unanimous consent. “Owner” isn’t really an applicable term here; legally, each contributor (corporate or personal) retains the ownership of their own IP. (The WordPress Foundation is effectively controlled by Matt, and is the entity that actually owns the things that have ownership like trademarks.) In the broader context of control as we’re discussing here, Automattic couldn’t eg unilaterally switch to closed source, or misuse the trademarks, or etc. The ownership of their contributions gives them the ability to veto relicensing (which is something many contributors can do anyway), or to assert their own rights if the GPL is violated (as Wix did, and which any contributor can do). By pure size of their contributions, they can steer the project as well, but that’s not unilateral (and is a nebulous issue across the roles of Automattic vs the Foundation vs Matt). Now we’re getting very insider though.
        yepthatsreality 5y ago
        > Now we’re getting very insider though. This is exactly where a legal process would start.
- rmccue 5y ago
  This is effectively true; as noted in my other comments, WordPress doesn’t have a CLA, so contributors retain rights to their contributions. The trademark, domains, and some other legal parts are owned by the WordPress Foundation. For example, the team working on the React-based rich editor (Gutenberg) wanted to relicense it under dual MPL and GPL in order to encourage adoption within mobile apps (it supports React Native). To do so, they had to get agreement from over 700 contributors to relicense it: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/21/proposal-dual-licensing-gutenberg-under-gpl-v2-0-and-mpl-v2-0/ https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/21/proposal-dual-lic...
- coldtea 5y ago
  It's still entirely true, in the sense that any release that came out with a FOSS license will perpetually be free to use, extend, do whatever under that license.
deleted 5y ago
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jkhdigital 5y ago
This might be the tl;dr quote: > And then he offered the closest thing you’ll find to a Unified Theory of Matt Mullenweg. “As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.” Contrast with this link also (currently) on the HN front page: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/12/is-it-even-worth-working-on-foss-anymore/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/12/is-it-even-worth-working-on-...
- tyingq 5y ago
  That does seem laudable, but Automattic isn't open sourcing all the things they are buying either.
- ssl232 5y ago
  I'd rather say the tl;dr quote is: > He plans to spend the rest of his career building the web’s one true platform, the open system the internet deserves. and his Camus quote later on: > "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
ssl232 5y ago
> “I would be very, very interested in Mozilla,” Mullenweg said. Nice. I hope if Mozilla is ever in jeopardy of losing its independence, Mullenweg can scrap together whatever it will cost to buy and fix them. Seems like the right person to look after them.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Perhaps it's overly paranoid of me, but I'm not sure that Mozilla being purchased by a firm with significant VC investment is a good thing for its independence.
kingcharles 5y ago
I wish he would fix Tumblr first. They just permabanned my gf's account for no reason at all. Another victim of AI-banning.
isehfb6372 5y ago
The marketing machine around Matt, WP.com, and OSS is just incredible. Automattic has taken nearly a BILLION dollars in VC money (including 300m most recently from Salesforce) to essentially execute a hostile takeover of open of source WordPress. Automattic forced their rewrite of WordPress (a Squarespace clone written in React) on the community and it has been a disaster, leading to many resignations of long-time contributors and their replacement with paid Automattic employees: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/ https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/ Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic
- greggh 5y ago
  Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad. With great examples of page editors like Elementor, Beaver, Divi and others, I just don't understand how something as badly engineered as Gutenberg came to be. There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad. Not in my experience. I prefer them to the messy and hacky third party alternatives.. >There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing. As a user, I had absolutely no problem with Gutenberg regarding intuitiveness...
    - greggh 5y ago
      Your experience and mine (plus thousands of others in the reviews) are vastly different. One thing that interests me is how much someone has to actually care about a problem before they are willing to take the time to go post a review. I think its an interesting metric to use when looking at stuff like this. Thousands of bad reviews is a pretty large number when you take into account just how many people won't go and post a review.
deleted 5y ago
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ykevinator2 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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hammyhavoc 5y ago
If it involves blockchains, the answer is that he is dooming it.

67 points by decrypt 5y ago

Start by denouncing AMP.[1] WordPress has been a major supporter. [1] https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-trust-in-google-led-initiatives https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-...

yepthatsreality 5y ago

> Since WordPress is open-source software, no company technically owns it Uh what? This seems like a gross misunderstanding of FOSS licensing.

pmlnr 5y ago
GPL3
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  How does GPL3 answer under which organization that Wordpress lives and in which it is maintained? Edit: the Wordpress GitHub also states GPL2
  - the-dude 5y ago
    I can take the Wordpress source and start a company where my copy lives and is maintained. Do I own it now?
    - tyingq 5y ago
      The copyright owner would always have more rights than someone using a GPL licensed copy of the source. Automattic itself doesn't have to abide by GPL terms for whatever use they want to make of Wordpress, WooCommerce, etc. Edit: Seems there's no contributor licensing agreement for Wordpress, so complicated here. Though the general point of copyright holders having specific rights beyond licenses they release under is still relevant, IMO.
      - mirashii 5y ago
        > Automattic itself doesn't have to abide by GPL terms for whatever use they want to make of Wordpress Yes they do. Automatic doesn’t own the copyright to all the code. Individual contributions are still copyrighted and licensed under the GPL. They would need permission from all previous contributors to relicense it to avoid having to comply with the GPL.
        tyingq 5y ago
        Sure, barring contributions made without contributor agreements in place. They seem to track "copyright holders" for wordpress core and it's not a huge list: https://codex.wordpress.org/Copyright_Holders https://codex.wordpress.org/Copyright_Holders
        rmccue 5y ago
        This list is super out-of-date and in no way canonical; you’d need to check svn to see the real list of contributors. (The Codex is, to some degree, abandoned given the existence of the new developer documentation.) e.g: I’ve been a contributor to WordPress for about 17 years, I personally own the copyright to a huge chunk of WordPress’ source, and I am not on that list. :)
        mirashii 5y ago
        I was going to point out a similar thing. I was a contributor for a few years in the mid-2000s
      - rmccue 5y ago
        WordPress doesn’t have a CLA, so contributors retain rights to their contributions. Automattic is a major contributor to WordPress, and has an agreement with the Foundation to use the trademark, but otherwise has no special permissions†. Also, the Foundation owns the trademark, domains, and is the legal entity for events, but also does not own the copyright on the source code. († nb: some asterisks that only matter to WP insiders) (I’m a long-term contributor to WordPress.)
    - yepthatsreality 5y ago
      No, Wordpress Foundation does. Wordpress might be very openly developed but that does negate legal ownership and responsibility.
      - rmccue 5y ago
        The WordPress Foundation owns the trademark, but not the copyright associated with the code, which remains the IP of the contributors (see my answer above).
        yepthatsreality 5y ago
        Which would make Automattic the majority owner no? Or has there been enough significant changes that has diluted the majority ownership? I remember a push to integrate with JS technologies several years back where I could see that happening.
        rmccue 5y ago
        Automattic is the largest contributor by far, yes, but a majority doesn’t really matter for things like relicensing which require unanimous consent. “Owner” isn’t really an applicable term here; legally, each contributor (corporate or personal) retains the ownership of their own IP. (The WordPress Foundation is effectively controlled by Matt, and is the entity that actually owns the things that have ownership like trademarks.) In the broader context of control as we’re discussing here, Automattic couldn’t eg unilaterally switch to closed source, or misuse the trademarks, or etc. The ownership of their contributions gives them the ability to veto relicensing (which is something many contributors can do anyway), or to assert their own rights if the GPL is violated (as Wix did, and which any contributor can do). By pure size of their contributions, they can steer the project as well, but that’s not unilateral (and is a nebulous issue across the roles of Automattic vs the Foundation vs Matt). Now we’re getting very insider though.
        yepthatsreality 5y ago
        > Now we’re getting very insider though. This is exactly where a legal process would start.
rmccue 5y ago
This is effectively true; as noted in my other comments, WordPress doesn’t have a CLA, so contributors retain rights to their contributions. The trademark, domains, and some other legal parts are owned by the WordPress Foundation. For example, the team working on the React-based rich editor (Gutenberg) wanted to relicense it under dual MPL and GPL in order to encourage adoption within mobile apps (it supports React Native). To do so, they had to get agreement from over 700 contributors to relicense it: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/21/proposal-dual-licensing-gutenberg-under-gpl-v2-0-and-mpl-v2-0/ https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/21/proposal-dual-lic...
coldtea 5y ago
It's still entirely true, in the sense that any release that came out with a FOSS license will perpetually be free to use, extend, do whatever under that license.

deleted 5y ago

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jkhdigital 5y ago

This might be the tl;dr quote: > And then he offered the closest thing you’ll find to a Unified Theory of Matt Mullenweg. “As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.” Contrast with this link also (currently) on the HN front page: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/12/is-it-even-worth-working-on-foss-anymore/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/12/is-it-even-worth-working-on-...

tyingq 5y ago
That does seem laudable, but Automattic isn't open sourcing all the things they are buying either.
ssl232 5y ago
I'd rather say the tl;dr quote is: > He plans to spend the rest of his career building the web’s one true platform, the open system the internet deserves. and his Camus quote later on: > "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

ssl232 5y ago

> “I would be very, very interested in Mozilla,” Mullenweg said. Nice. I hope if Mozilla is ever in jeopardy of losing its independence, Mullenweg can scrap together whatever it will cost to buy and fix them. Seems like the right person to look after them.

woodruffw 5y ago
Perhaps it's overly paranoid of me, but I'm not sure that Mozilla being purchased by a firm with significant VC investment is a good thing for its independence.

kingcharles 5y ago

I wish he would fix Tumblr first. They just permabanned my gf's account for no reason at all. Another victim of AI-banning.

isehfb6372 5y ago

The marketing machine around Matt, WP.com, and OSS is just incredible. Automattic has taken nearly a BILLION dollars in VC money (including 300m most recently from Salesforce) to essentially execute a hostile takeover of open of source WordPress. Automattic forced their rewrite of WordPress (a Squarespace clone written in React) on the community and it has been a disaster, leading to many resignations of long-time contributors and their replacement with paid Automattic employees: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/ https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/ Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic

greggh 5y ago
Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad. With great examples of page editors like Elementor, Beaver, Divi and others, I just don't understand how something as badly engineered as Gutenberg came to be. There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Gutenberg, and the Full Site Editing features that are built in now, are unbelievably bad. Not in my experience. I prefer them to the messy and hacky third party alternatives.. >There is literally nothing intuitive about Gutenberg, not one thing. As a user, I had absolutely no problem with Gutenberg regarding intuitiveness...
  - greggh 5y ago
    Your experience and mine (plus thousands of others in the reviews) are vastly different. One thing that interests me is how much someone has to actually care about a problem before they are willing to take the time to go post a review. I think its an interesting metric to use when looking at stuff like this. Thousands of bad reviews is a pretty large number when you take into account just how many people won't go and post a review.

deleted 5y ago

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ykevinator2 5y ago

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hammyhavoc 5y ago

If it involves blockchains, the answer is that he is dooming it.