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Matt got upset because they forked his open source project and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top of it without contributing anything back t
by echelon 7mo ago
Matt got upset because they forked his open source project and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top of it without contributing anything back to WordPress.
He'd have more of a leg to stand on if WordPress wasn't itself a fork of an open source project.
Matt should have built something open core or fair source licensed - free for customers, but stops competitors from stealing your lunch. He has no legal ground to argue his case now.
It's a much bigger deal with hyperscalers poaching and stealing, like AWS and GCP ripping off and stealing most of the revenue from Redis and Elasticsearch. That's dishonest and evil in my mind.
Totally orthogonal to this issue of marketing comparisons.
- chuckadams 7mo agoWPE never forked a thing. They were a successful company after he backed out of an investment with them, he resented the success, blackmailed them for 8% of their top-line revenue, then threw a tantrum when they told him to pound sand.
- halapro 7mo agoHave you looked at the screenshots? The admin literally looks like WordPress. You don't have to steal code to become liable. EmDash is an explicit direct competitor to WordPress and it copied the whole interface. It's like Pepsi suddenly shipping red bottles with the (I can't believe it's not) Coca Cola branding. If I did this and not CloudFlare, I would have gotten a cease and desist yesterday.