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Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO, Seems Bound and Determined to Wreck WordPress
- linotype 2y agoWhen you’re as rich as he is what difference does it make?
- choult 2y agoHis sense of self importance and relevance seems to be especially crucial to him. He is losing both.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI'm trying to figure out what's the most loving thing to do for a person in his situation.
- KerrAvon 2y agoIf you’re a relative or friend, take them aside and have a frank conversation. If not, nothing you can do!
- spokaneplumb 2y agoAnd accept that there’s a good chance this will accomplish nothing but getting you on their naysayers list. People can continue behavior where all they really need to do is stop actively harming themselves for no gain at all for years. It’s bizarre to watch from the outside. In the best cases they haven’t roped anyone else into their delusion-bubble.
- airstrike 2y agoI think it's to try to help them by offering compassion, understanding, and trying to create harmony. Try to look at it from an outside perspective instead of through the lens of our own preconception. Humans are subject to making terrible mistakes and lapses of judgment. Sometimes things spiral out of control. We all have our demons, so to speak. It's very easy to judge a tech multimillionaire bro and saying he should know better, he deserves this, etc. And I mean easy as in cheap. It's the prevailing view and it feels "fair" to a lot of people who didn't get so lucky or so far ahead in life, so they don't feel the need to be sympathetic. But it adds no value to the situation, so it's a pretty useless take. And it's not like the world has a limited supply of sympathy, so it's OK to offer it even in these situations. At this point I think the guy just needs help.
- choult 2y agoI've done my best not to pathologize him here, but... Suggest therapy.
- dylan604 2y agoSometimes, rock bottom is the only way to stop
- bravetraveler 2y ago+1, unfortunately counter-intuitive. A bit of a song comes to mind: "A junkie won't bounce until he hits the ground" - Say Hey There, Atmosphere My family and I all tried to help a sibling for something like 20 years. Nothing stuck [from us], they had to choose it. The ground helped. Trying to minimize harm just created more :/
- thatguy0900 2y agoFunctionally infinite money seems to just not be enough in life for a lot of people. I honestly think if they weren't powerful it would be considered a serious mental illness.
- linotype 2y agoCouldn’t have said it any better, thank you.
- paxys 2y agoFunny thing is his net worth is almost entirely tied in Automattic, and he is doing his very best to crater the company's value.
- bawolff 2y agoEgo doesn't go away just because you made a bunch of money.
- duskwuff 2y agoIf anything, experience suggests it's the opposite.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoThere's usually a crowd of hangers-on who are feeding the ego and enjoying the perks. They need someone to whisper in their ear "remember you are mortal" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
- snihalani 2y agois there an opportunity to make a vendor neutral Wordpress here?
- dboreham 2y agoJust can't call it Wordpress. So Locutionprinter or something.
- albert_e 2y agoVerbalCompressor? EDIT to add: SentencePublisher TokenStream IdeaRadio
- dboreham 2y agoWell I didn't just register that domain, but sure..
- bugglebeetle 2y agoTermjuicer
- Brian-Puccio 2y agoWP is a fork of b2/cafelog. So b3/bistrolist? (There’s also b2evolution.)
- sadeshmukh 2y ago...and someone bought it!
- generj 2y agoIt’s amazing nobody has sat him down and told him to stop throwing temper tantrums yet.
- xupybd 2y agoI've heard speculation that he as VCs driving him to make money and this is causing all the crazy behaviour.
- dboreham 2y agoThat could also lead someone to blow the hatch.
- xt00 2y agoWreck wordpress? doesn't seem like it -- seems like a classic "somebody pseudo forked my open-source-ish product / project and they became too popular".. so I'm going to try to prevent fragmentation / somebody else "making money off of all my hard work" kind of thing.
- zdragnar 2y agoThe takeover and renaming of a third party extension and subsequent updates which released previously paid features was a huge shock. Add on top of that Matt claimed that WordPress.org is his personal website, so neither it nor the official plug-in repository are under the control of the foundation (unless he's walked back that claim since I last paid attention). There's still going to be plenty of users, but a lot of trust has been lost, and a lot of users are now looking for alternatives.
- adamhartenz 2y agoYes, and they way they are going about it is wrecking wordpress
- iambateman 2y agoIf you’ve followed closely, this article is a retread of the last four months. Also will someone please fork WordPress.
- neom 2y agoReminds me of this: https://medium.com/node-js-javascript/growing-up-27d6cc8b7c53 https://medium.com/node-js-javascript/growing-up-27d6cc8b7c5...
- thisislife2 2y agoThere's ClassicPress. But a better alternative than sticking with WP is https://textpattern.com/ https://textpattern.com/ (which has better and more stable codebase that is as old as WordPress).
- chipotle_coyote 2y agoTextPattern needs more attention and love in general! (Although to be fair, it also needs to be developed a wee bit faster.)
- iambateman 2y agoI’ve been a PHP dev for a long time and never seen Text Pattern. Thanks for sharing!
- dhotson 2y agoI'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable? - WordPress code is open-source. - WP Engine is entitled to use the source code. I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free? If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?
- dylan604 2y agoBecause that's how open source works. If you don't want for profit companies using code for free, then offer it under a license that states that.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoParent is asking about infra not copyright. This is interesting in terms of Github. They could pull the same thing and say only the porceline git client and MS approved clients can pull. After all it is their servers. The open source licenses are orthogonal to this and are between authors and users.
- ceejayoz 2y agoGithub isn't leveraging a (theoretically) separate 501(c)(3) non-profit to attack a specific competitor.
- likeabatterycar 2y agoOpen source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose? Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.
- cmeacham98 2y ago
- dcchambers 2y agoIt's really sad seeing this whole saga play out.
- padiyar83 2y ago> How would you react if someone demanded you pay them 8% of your annual revenue? Yeah. Like that. If I built my product on the labour of that "someone", I would pay it. Seems these days, doing what's honourable is not that simple.
- theamk 2y agoYou are making it sound like it was a single person who could not pay their bills. It was not. That's a $7.5 billon company threatening $1 billion company over totally frivolous reasons.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> If I built my product on the labour of that "someone", I would pay it. Automattic is not contributing 8% of their revenue to PHP. (Nor MySQL, Apache, or all the other bits of free labor they're similarly built off.)
- jitl 2y agoWho flagged this? Matt?