This is currently flagged, but I don't think it should be.
Yes, it's unlikely to result in any constructive discussion here. At best we could remark that the author appears to be unwell and that taking this down could save him some face.
However, the author is also an adult who is capable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In addition they are presenting themselves genuinely and sincerely here, which IMO is an important consideration for anyone who uses or is thinking about using WordPress.
So yes, it's drama, but it's highly relevant drama to people who are making decisions of what stacks to build on. This is information that people to deserve to have, even if, perhaps, it's not the interpretation that the author intended to evoke.
This seems to have been edited already, it's missing some ad hominem attacks and the recommendation to see a therapist which were definitely present when this article was linked.
> Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?
Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
> Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
Not only that, he also compared php code to ruby code. Totally different languages.
I'm not even arguing which one is better or worse (i dislike them both) but for example ruby is way more expressive than php... You (usually) need less lines of ruby code than php code to do most things.
It's not really meaningful either way. I could write a script to append "print('Hello, world!')" to the main function 6 million times, and I would have contributed 6 million lines but nothing of value. Actually, it's probably negative value now that someone else has to go clean that up.
It may also have to do with the brevity of the respective languages; I'm not a Ruby or PHP expert, but I do Go and Python and I would not be surprised if the Go version required an order of magnitude more lines because of how verbose it is and how terse Python can be.
Comparing lines of code in different languages, doing different things, with differing levels of complexity, is an exercise in futility.
WordPress is the biggest bowl of spaghetti code in existence! I can't believe it powers 40% of the web! PHP could do tons better - Laravel is a proof that PHP projects could be beautifully coded, readable, and extensible!
I've dealt with WordPress for so many years! It's sickening! Even the overglorified WooCommerce - I won't trust a business with it. I've done only a few sails and I had data loss, and so many issues.
Also, WooCommerce and other popular plugins such as GiveWP abuse the posts system. I've had so many issues causes by patch upgrades, because migrations went bonkers!
Honestly, WP had to be rewritten from scratch 10 years ago. There were some attempts, but they were not supported by Matt. With a rewrite, most plugins and "themes" would have stopped working, but if they are not maintained, they shouldn't be used anyway. I put "themes" in quotes as executable code is not a theme - it's a plugin installed in a different directory!
In general, WordPress is a patch over patches of patches! From mu-plugins (i.e., "must-use") to filters that could hijack the data read from the database - it's nearly impossible to trace which plugins screw up which plugins - even with the help of the overly glorified debugging plugins!
I've participated in a project where the management has decided to migrate a commercial online newspaper from a commercial Python CMS to WordPress - they hired me as I had PHP on my resume and it was hard to find PHP developers in SoCal. Anyway, for over a year, I had to completely remove WordPress from serving customers! Yes, everything was proxied, cached with nginx and optimized ngx_pagespeed (now abandoned). At the time, no commercial WP plugin could keep our website up! For example, an earthquake would take our website down, too, because people would go on our website to check for information and guess what happens if tens of thousands of people want to see the same page when according to the cache it's expired - there was no queue and it would generate 10,000 requests trying to regenerate the same homepage, which was making well over 500 DB calls to render!!!
WordPress hasn't changed much since! Yeah, PHP 7+ is much better, but it is still multi-process. The number of processors is determined by your available memory, and WordPress sometimes uses a lot of memory. That's why the only solution is heavy caching on all tiers!
Been watching this episode unfold on Twitter and has read about Matt’s domain hijacking of thesis, etc.
It seems to me like Matt is the type of person who likes to hide behind character and other ad hominem attacks rather than addressing actual issues at hand. Perhaps this is because of a psychological issue but I can’t really know. Normally I would think the community would be repulsed by this and would find an alternative.
What is remarkable is that there has not been enough community animus to fork relative to Terraform and OpenTofu. It shows the power of the underlying GPL license and “plugin” approach. Something to think about for other companies that may be thinking about relicensing versus just building a durable ecosystem around their proprietary brand and assets.
> Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?
Whaaat! Since when is LoC metric of “dirtiness”? Your hostility towards community Matt is what makes you and Automattic “dirty”, your toxic leadership.
Matt is clearly having a mental breakdown. I hope investors force him out.
It's also obvious from this post that Matt didn't actually bother to read the blogs closely. Most of the points Matt makes about Ruby on Rails or trademarks in his "response" were already addressed by DHH himself.
>David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
I'm just going to tell a little story here.
A long time ago, I worked on a recolorable Drupal theme, which was to be the new default look (Garland). It was completed and awaiting the next major release. Before that happened though, Matt Mullenweg grabbed the theme and the assets from our repo, ported it to Wordpress, and offered it as a theme on wp dot com to his customers.
When this was pointed out as being in extremely poor taste, he hid behind the GPL as the justification. WP was large enough already at the time that they could get away with stuff like this without suffering too much PR damage.
In short, if he's bragging about how much money he's making, it's because he has few scruples and doesn't actually care about credit and respect.
I just read the links you gave about the port and I wanted to say I'm just sorry for both you and Stefan Nagtegaal. What a gut punch to not even get to release your work in the way you intended before it was taken. Ugh.
I was pretty neutral,but man this guy just can't stop. It's not gonna end nicely for you bro, just enjoy your wealth instead of destroying your health and reputation by literally annoying the entire world
I feel sad saying this, but at this point I hope Matt falls hard over this whole episode. He's wilfully oblivious to how wrong he is - I find it hard to believe he can come back from this.
Replying to myself to note that Matt deleted the blog post. Not sure if that's because he's gaining some self-awareness or if he's finally taking some outside advice?
Isn't the nuance / difference that wordpress hosting between wp engine and wordpress.org are competitors v. creating a platform/environment like rails that is by default meant to be used to create other things?
It would be more like if rails had an arm that made money and someone cloned it and also tried to make money? I.e., the whole company was about rails and rails hosting and not about creating things with rails (basecamp) and worrying about other people who create things with rails (shopify, etc.) - that's a very different thing. I can see how then there'd be more pressure to look at trademark differences when the service provided is more similar? Or am I missing something?
"David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers."
"I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate. Matt, its probably way past time to put down the crackpipe and open the windows."
He also links to the DHH post where DHH very specifically address the thing he claims to be confused about:
>I don't even have a dog in this fight, only a set of principles. If anything, I'd be naturally inclined to be on Team WordPress. Between creating one of the most widely used open-source programs and powering half the internet, there's every tribal reason to side with Automattic over WP Engine's private-equity owners at Silver Lake.
>But whatever my feelings about private equity in general or Silver Lake's management of WP Engine in particular, I care far more about the integrity of open source licenses, and that integrity is under direct assault by Automattic's grotesque claim for WP Engine's revenues.
I love that people can say anything they want online. “It is unethical to publicly speculate on my mental health” is a sentence that sounds like it could be true, but it certainly is not. That’s not true! People are very much allowed to wonder out loud about extremely public behavior that has real impacts on real people.
That argument sounds more like “it is unethical to treat me as anything but God’s Special Fancy Boy, as my crusade is righteous and my foes ontologically evil”, which has the opposite effect when you’re trying to discourage people from asking “What the fuck is going on with this guy?”
Given how he is now accused of creating a toxic work environment for household staff and defending his mother when she sexually harassed the staff it does indeed seem like he is not a good person at all.
At this point I wonder when will Matt Mullenweg will start closing wordpress.com account owned by people that don't align with his opinions.
There already is a checkbox to check for people affiliated in any way with wpengine, i wouldn't be surprised to see a checkbox for a field like "i agree with our lord an savior Matt Mullenweg in the WordPress vs WPEngine case".
Saying nothing is always an option. It’s too bad that Automattic won’t consider that option because over the last 24 hours this has gone from embarrassing to nasty.
I didn’t expect a supply chain attack yesterday. And sure didn’t expect Mullenweg’s reply to DHH to be so childish.
Seriously he needs to really weigh shutting the fuck up instead of doing this pointless arguing. WPEngine haven't said a thing and have gotten all the support because he keeps digging this hole. Hopefully the consequences of his actions will bring him back to reality, but the longer it goes unchecked the more damaging it gets
Matt cannot help but just continuing to attempt to post through it. I'm seeing him all over the place in HN or even random Youtube video comments. Honestly feels like he's pretty... unwell or otherwise distracted/trying to distract.
Childish? Really? I read Matt's post as modern incivility, very grown-up nasty, one thin layer of fainted respectable sounding wordage wrapping extremely rude barbs.
Lol, what a bunch of garbage talk.
He just attacks dhh on random things like why he bought a car, not talking about any of dhh's points in his article.
Matt trying hard to kill WordPress
By my estimation, about 45% of the article is about DHH's revenue which is irrelevant to the discussion about Matt's behavior. Links on HN about Matt and WordPress keep getting downranked, and that'll continue to happen as long as Matt is not interested in seriously discussing it.
Not that my opinion matters, but my preference would be that Matt stops with the pithy comments like "this is a respectful debate" or "I'll try to do better" and is instead just honest that he doesn't care what others think.
> Links on HN about Matt and WordPress keep getting downranked, and that'll continue to happen as long as Matt is not interested in seriously discussing it.
Or until they stop using company employees as flag-and-downvote farms.
In 1, the WordPress Foundation who owns the Wordpress trademark says:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
2 changed that to say, presumably by Matt (or under Matt's instruction) ignoring or failing to get any legal advice, to:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
"Please don't use the abbreviation 'WP' which is not a trademark we own, and that we've been telling everybody for years that they are free to use in any way, under these new conditions we made up today" - is not a legally binding requirement. It's "becoming problematic" only as evidence of the deranged behaviour of "the mad king".
WPEngine, quite reasonably, for more than a decade have been running/building a business using a name based on what the WordPress Foundation said in 1. I find it extremely hard to believe that a court/judge could possibly find that "problematic" or rude that WordPress (.com, .org, or foundations) or Matt or Automattic - have any rights that prevent WPEngine (or any other company) from using "WP" in their name, even if it is widely understood to be an abbreviation of WordPress.
The code is GPL ("GPL2 or newer"). That gives WPEngine (and you and me) a clear license to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code, with some very well understood restrictions (which do require you to share your modifications under the same GPL, but absolutely do not require "contributing back to the community" or paying a competitor 8% of your gross revenue).
For about 2 decades up until last week the WordPress trademark page explicitly told everyone that the use of "WP" was not covered by any of their trademarks.
US law has a concept of "Nominative Use" of trademarks: "Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit, by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
I guess a lot of lawyers are about to get richer determining whether or not WPEngine's use of the "WordPress" trademark was "as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." To me (remember, not a lawyer) it seems quite obvious that "We sell WordPress hosting" is a reference to the trademarked Wordpress product, and is exactly what is allowed by Nominative use.
> Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
I doubt they need or want to. They can fork Wordpress core itself under their rights granted by the GPL and they could name that something like WPEnginePress, or choose to use any other fork like ClassicPress or AspirePress. The Nominative Use "or to compare it to their own" clause allows them to say "We sell WPEnginePress Hosting, which is 100% compatible with WordPress and has an identical admin interface for users."
The wordpress.org theme/plugin repo is a bigger problem, but most (all?) of that is under the same GPL2.0 or newer licence, so WPEngine or any other fork can copy/modify/redistribute those as well (and WPE are already mirroring it), and at least AspirePress has said they've planning on getting plugin/theme authors to use their repo as well as the wordpress.org one.
David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that following this paragraph with links to DHH's $2MM sports cars and his home office that costs an integer multiple of what my entire house costs sort of undercuts his argument.
> I was surprised someone as smart as DHH would fall for WP Engine’s lame deferral to make this about “GPL code” or forking, rather than trademarks. We have no problem with their use of GPL code, our beef is with their trademark abuse.
Ah yes, defending trademarks. Really the rallying cry of the people. That's what everyone cares about here. Nice motte and bailey you have there.
Also, Matt is not even reading Ruby on Rail's trademark clause that he posted: "You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association."
Also, also Matt: If you are going to throw down over people about not donating enough to charity, you should really tell people what charities you are donating to. It better not turn out your charitable donations are to your own Wordpress org which we now know is little more than a marketing/PR department for Automattic.
Matt made a post a few weeks ago about his charitable donations.[0] It's really just a "I'm better than them" post. And it doesn't say where any of it was donated.
The Foundation's public filings are online, and I think they only had $22k in donations last year. Doesn't mean his contributions were all charitable, but they don't appear to have gone to the Foundation at least.
How much would you bet against most (or all?) of Matt's "donations" being money he spent to keep wordpress.org running? (which he explicitly admits is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is owned by Matt personally)
This article tries to provide cover for slamming DHH by opening with "this is a respectful debate".
DHH, like anybody else, is imperfect. But the author acts like he is superior. He isn't.
But I will say there is not much worse than a person who feigns respect and then goes on to say things like:
"toxic personality and inability to scale teams"
"it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach" (therapist really being the dig, here)
"Why are you still so small?"
"Instead of bragging about your beautiful office in the clouds, you should question why you can’t scale teams."
If your respect for DHH was real, you would have given your feedback in a respectful way instead of writing some blog post with such incendiary comments.
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.
> It's even more outrageous that Automattic has chosen trademarks as their method to get their "Al Capone" ... I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations...
Except there is a second set of obligations, specifically designed to help avoid business confusion: trademarks. It's not clear why trademarks are considered outrageous. Rails™ matters to DHH, WordPress™ matters to Matt.
Counterpoint, nearly half of the internet uses WordPress. Learning that it's fully under the control of a vindictive techbro who is showing an ability and willingness to damage large swaths of the internet at a time is kinda a big deal.
The recent forking of Advanced Custom Fields is just a smoking gun for where his priorities actually lie. Matt is part of a small group of people who have made a significant amount of wealth from an open source project. The project itself, however, has stagnated over the past 10 years. The community's reliance on plugins like ACF is a complete failure of the development of core more than it is the tyranny of private investment.
It's clear to me now that the reason WordPress development has been stalled for so long is because Matt has been in charge this whole time and he has no idea what the development community actually wants/needs. So instead of in-housing a really basic tool like ACF he forces through garbage like Gutenberg.
Matt has unfortunately been very unresponsive to any feedback about what should or should not go into core. Despite claiming WordPress core is open-source and open to almost everyone, the team leaders responsible for what goes into each release have been all Automattic employees since 2019.
Which adds to the disingenuousness of all of this. Matt thinks WP Engine should have contributed more to the core... but only on features that Automattic decides? Clearly madness.
Slightly off topic, but does “techbro” mean anything other than “male that I don’t like who works with computers”? I feel like it initially had a real meaning, but now it’s kind of a catch all term.
I had the same thought yesterday reading through some of these threads. Its great that things are part of the public record as a snapshot in time. But now these employees have all sorts of awkward google-able conversation starters for future interviews etc. I'm happy for them if they are standing up for what they believe, but also how can you be so naive?
This is currently flagged, but I don't think it should be.
Yes, it's unlikely to result in any constructive discussion here. At best we could remark that the author appears to be unwell and that taking this down could save him some face.
However, the author is also an adult who is capable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In addition they are presenting themselves genuinely and sincerely here, which IMO is an important consideration for anyone who uses or is thinking about using WordPress.
So yes, it's drama, but it's highly relevant drama to people who are making decisions of what stacks to build on. This is information that people to deserve to have, even if, perhaps, it's not the interpretation that the author intended to evoke.
The linked blog post seems to have been deleted
https://archive.is/2024.10.15-041615/https://ma.tt/2024/10/o...
Wow, no kidding he deleted it. By far the most childish Matt has looked this whole saga. Growing up, I really admired this guy...
This seems to have been edited already, it's missing some ad hominem attacks and the recommendation to see a therapist which were definitely present when this article was linked.
Here's a previous edit: https://archive.ph/7ZRbY
None of the archive links are loading for me, but maybe that's for the best.
If you're using Cloudflare DNS, they used to have some conflict with Archive.Today:
https://gist.github.com/ardislu/b2f2b4b439c5da2f7ccb6bb42e7a...
> Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?
Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
> Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
Not only that, he also compared php code to ruby code. Totally different languages.
I'm not even arguing which one is better or worse (i dislike them both) but for example ruby is way more expressive than php... You (usually) need less lines of ruby code than php code to do most things.
Clownish, clownish.
I'm pretty sure it's not being used as a success metric there, but as a contribution metric.
It's not really meaningful either way. I could write a script to append "print('Hello, world!')" to the main function 6 million times, and I would have contributed 6 million lines but nothing of value. Actually, it's probably negative value now that someone else has to go clean that up.
It may also have to do with the brevity of the respective languages; I'm not a Ruby or PHP expert, but I do Go and Python and I would not be surprised if the Go version required an order of magnitude more lines because of how verbose it is and how terse Python can be.
Comparing lines of code in different languages, doing different things, with differing levels of complexity, is an exercise in futility.
Keep in mind that PHP is way more verbose and LOC-hungry than Ruby! So, to compare apples to apples, you need to device the PHP LOCs by at least 2!
WordPress coding standards is also full of padding. Spaces `like_this( foo, bar )`, curly braces on new lines, etc.
Plus, WordPress bundles all JS and PHP dependencies, including a whole userland PHP polyfill for libsodium.
WordPress is the biggest bowl of spaghetti code in existence! I can't believe it powers 40% of the web! PHP could do tons better - Laravel is a proof that PHP projects could be beautifully coded, readable, and extensible!
I've dealt with WordPress for so many years! It's sickening! Even the overglorified WooCommerce - I won't trust a business with it. I've done only a few sails and I had data loss, and so many issues.
Also, WooCommerce and other popular plugins such as GiveWP abuse the posts system. I've had so many issues causes by patch upgrades, because migrations went bonkers!
Honestly, WP had to be rewritten from scratch 10 years ago. There were some attempts, but they were not supported by Matt. With a rewrite, most plugins and "themes" would have stopped working, but if they are not maintained, they shouldn't be used anyway. I put "themes" in quotes as executable code is not a theme - it's a plugin installed in a different directory!
In general, WordPress is a patch over patches of patches! From mu-plugins (i.e., "must-use") to filters that could hijack the data read from the database - it's nearly impossible to trace which plugins screw up which plugins - even with the help of the overly glorified debugging plugins!
I've participated in a project where the management has decided to migrate a commercial online newspaper from a commercial Python CMS to WordPress - they hired me as I had PHP on my resume and it was hard to find PHP developers in SoCal. Anyway, for over a year, I had to completely remove WordPress from serving customers! Yes, everything was proxied, cached with nginx and optimized ngx_pagespeed (now abandoned). At the time, no commercial WP plugin could keep our website up! For example, an earthquake would take our website down, too, because people would go on our website to check for information and guess what happens if tens of thousands of people want to see the same page when according to the cache it's expired - there was no queue and it would generate 10,000 requests trying to regenerate the same homepage, which was making well over 500 DB calls to render!!!
WordPress hasn't changed much since! Yeah, PHP 7+ is much better, but it is still multi-process. The number of processors is determined by your available memory, and WordPress sometimes uses a lot of memory. That's why the only solution is heavy caching on all tiers!
Been watching this episode unfold on Twitter and has read about Matt’s domain hijacking of thesis, etc.
It seems to me like Matt is the type of person who likes to hide behind character and other ad hominem attacks rather than addressing actual issues at hand. Perhaps this is because of a psychological issue but I can’t really know. Normally I would think the community would be repulsed by this and would find an alternative.
What is remarkable is that there has not been enough community animus to fork relative to Terraform and OpenTofu. It shows the power of the underlying GPL license and “plugin” approach. Something to think about for other companies that may be thinking about relicensing versus just building a durable ecosystem around their proprietary brand and assets.
"I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate", proceeds to insult the guy in every paragraph
I have no idea what is the point of this article.
> Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?
Whaaat! Since when is LoC metric of “dirtiness”? Your hostility towards community Matt is what makes you and Automattic “dirty”, your toxic leadership.
Matt is clearly having a mental breakdown. I hope investors force him out.
In this particular case, it's helpful to remember that two people can be wrong.
I don't know if DHH is wrong at all in this case.
All he did was write two blog posts, which were rather fair to Matt all things considered:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-di... https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-...
It's also obvious from this post that Matt didn't actually bother to read the blogs closely. Most of the points Matt makes about Ruby on Rails or trademarks in his "response" were already addressed by DHH himself.
While helpful in general, on this topic DHH seems to be right about basically everything. Is there any specific point he makes that you disagree with?
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
However, we're all winners when the two worst people you know fight each other.
>> "And you can arbitrarily cut off anyone publishing with Hey, they have no open source rights."
This is not a serious person. This is not a self-aware person.
Yeah, no idea why he'd make this statement. It's not relevant, not important, not tied to reality.
>David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
I'm just going to tell a little story here.
A long time ago, I worked on a recolorable Drupal theme, which was to be the new default look (Garland). It was completed and awaiting the next major release. Before that happened though, Matt Mullenweg grabbed the theme and the assets from our repo, ported it to Wordpress, and offered it as a theme on wp dot com to his customers.
When this was pointed out as being in extremely poor taste, he hid behind the GPL as the justification. WP was large enough already at the time that they could get away with stuff like this without suffering too much PR damage.
In short, if he's bragging about how much money he's making, it's because he has few scruples and doesn't actually care about credit and respect.
Ah man, that’s brutal. For what it’s worth, it’s a gorgeous theme and it made me excited to learn Drupal when I was 14!
I just read the links you gave about the port and I wanted to say I'm just sorry for both you and Stefan Nagtegaal. What a gut punch to not even get to release your work in the way you intended before it was taken. Ugh.
If this happened in public, links?
here you go! https://acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-copies-drupal-theme/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2006/12/12/new-theme-garland-and-...
I was pretty neutral,but man this guy just can't stop. It's not gonna end nicely for you bro, just enjoy your wealth instead of destroying your health and reputation by literally annoying the entire world
I feel sad saying this, but at this point I hope Matt falls hard over this whole episode. He's wilfully oblivious to how wrong he is - I find it hard to believe he can come back from this.
Replying to myself to note that Matt deleted the blog post. Not sure if that's because he's gaining some self-awareness or if he's finally taking some outside advice?
I don't even know how to describe this: https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1845851330063028718
This is not related to the WP drama tho.
https://casetext.com/case/attayeb-v-mullenweg
The actual lawsuits are available here to download, https://freewp.com/2024/10/14/matthew-charles-mullenweg-defe...
What did it say?
This is just sad to watch
Isn't the nuance / difference that wordpress hosting between wp engine and wordpress.org are competitors v. creating a platform/environment like rails that is by default meant to be used to create other things?
It would be more like if rails had an arm that made money and someone cloned it and also tried to make money? I.e., the whole company was about rails and rails hosting and not about creating things with rails (basecamp) and worrying about other people who create things with rails (shopify, etc.) - that's a very different thing. I can see how then there'd be more pressure to look at trademark differences when the service provided is more similar? Or am I missing something?
"David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers."
This is kind of intriguing to me too...
"I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate. Matt, its probably way past time to put down the crackpipe and open the windows."
Suggesting that DHH should seek therapy is way out of line.
> I’m unsure why you felt you had to insert yourself into this fight with Silver Lake / WP Engine and take their side, but here we are.
It seems that the fight has been made public with photomatt's constant commentary, at least on HN.
Unconvincing.
He also links to the DHH post where DHH very specifically address the thing he claims to be confused about:
>I don't even have a dog in this fight, only a set of principles. If anything, I'd be naturally inclined to be on Team WordPress. Between creating one of the most widely used open-source programs and powering half the internet, there's every tribal reason to side with Automattic over WP Engine's private-equity owners at Silver Lake.
>But whatever my feelings about private equity in general or Silver Lake's management of WP Engine in particular, I care far more about the integrity of open source licenses, and that integrity is under direct assault by Automattic's grotesque claim for WP Engine's revenues.
> Suggesting that DHH should seek therapy is way out of line.
Matt already knows this.[0]
photomatt: "It is also unethical to publicly speculate on my medication, medical state, or mental health."
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB1ZXFiEgJY
I love that people can say anything they want online. “It is unethical to publicly speculate on my mental health” is a sentence that sounds like it could be true, but it certainly is not. That’s not true! People are very much allowed to wonder out loud about extremely public behavior that has real impacts on real people.
That argument sounds more like “it is unethical to treat me as anything but God’s Special Fancy Boy, as my crusade is righteous and my foes ontologically evil”, which has the opposite effect when you’re trying to discourage people from asking “What the fuck is going on with this guy?”
I’ll refer to my previous comment on this ordeal as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41822606
The instant I saw that I stopped reading. Matt does not seem like a great person.
Given how he is now accused of creating a toxic work environment for household staff and defending his mother when she sexually harassed the staff it does indeed seem like he is not a good person at all.
This is starting to get clownish.
At this point I wonder when will Matt Mullenweg will start closing wordpress.com account owned by people that don't align with his opinions.
There already is a checkbox to check for people affiliated in any way with wpengine, i wouldn't be surprised to see a checkbox for a field like "i agree with our lord an savior Matt Mullenweg in the WordPress vs WPEngine case".
DHH has replied in his blog (14 Oct): https://world.hey.com/dhh/capture-less-than-you-create-c30e4...
Saying nothing is always an option. It’s too bad that Automattic won’t consider that option because over the last 24 hours this has gone from embarrassing to nasty.
I didn’t expect a supply chain attack yesterday. And sure didn’t expect Mullenweg’s reply to DHH to be so childish.
Seriously he needs to really weigh shutting the fuck up instead of doing this pointless arguing. WPEngine haven't said a thing and have gotten all the support because he keeps digging this hole. Hopefully the consequences of his actions will bring him back to reality, but the longer it goes unchecked the more damaging it gets
Matt cannot help but just continuing to attempt to post through it. I'm seeing him all over the place in HN or even random Youtube video comments. Honestly feels like he's pretty... unwell or otherwise distracted/trying to distract.
Childish? Really? I read Matt's post as modern incivility, very grown-up nasty, one thin layer of fainted respectable sounding wordage wrapping extremely rude barbs.
I think that most of us are more interested in value created than value personally captured.
Lol, what a bunch of garbage talk. He just attacks dhh on random things like why he bought a car, not talking about any of dhh's points in his article. Matt trying hard to kill WordPress
By my estimation, about 45% of the article is about DHH's revenue which is irrelevant to the discussion about Matt's behavior. Links on HN about Matt and WordPress keep getting downranked, and that'll continue to happen as long as Matt is not interested in seriously discussing it.
Not that my opinion matters, but my preference would be that Matt stops with the pithy comments like "this is a respectful debate" or "I'll try to do better" and is instead just honest that he doesn't care what others think.
> Links on HN about Matt and WordPress keep getting downranked, and that'll continue to happen as long as Matt is not interested in seriously discussing it.
Or until they stop using company employees as flag-and-downvote farms.
I never thought Matt's unhinged behavior would make DHH look sane, and private equity look reasonable, but here we are.
I guess it's a good thing I moved to Hugo a year ago.
What is the endgoal for WpEngine.I am not following the drama closely.
1.Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)
2.Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
the 'wp' word never been legally trademarked. The usage is okay until Sep 24th [1], but becoming problematic since the king mad [2]
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress...
2. https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
To save a few clicks and page scans,
In 1, the WordPress Foundation who owns the Wordpress trademark says:
2 changed that to say, presumably by Matt (or under Matt's instruction) ignoring or failing to get any legal advice, to: "Please don't use the abbreviation 'WP' which is not a trademark we own, and that we've been telling everybody for years that they are free to use in any way, under these new conditions we made up today" - is not a legally binding requirement. It's "becoming problematic" only as evidence of the deranged behaviour of "the mad king".WPEngine, quite reasonably, for more than a decade have been running/building a business using a name based on what the WordPress Foundation said in 1. I find it extremely hard to believe that a court/judge could possibly find that "problematic" or rude that WordPress (.com, .org, or foundations) or Matt or Automattic - have any rights that prevent WPEngine (or any other company) from using "WP" in their name, even if it is widely understood to be an abbreviation of WordPress.
Except you can't acknowledge that "WP" isn't a trademark, and then say "you can't use it".
> What is the endgoal for WpEngine.
Not paying $30mil a year in extortion?
> Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)
IANAL, but:
The code is GPL ("GPL2 or newer"). That gives WPEngine (and you and me) a clear license to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code, with some very well understood restrictions (which do require you to share your modifications under the same GPL, but absolutely do not require "contributing back to the community" or paying a competitor 8% of your gross revenue).
For about 2 decades up until last week the WordPress trademark page explicitly told everyone that the use of "WP" was not covered by any of their trademarks.
US law has a concept of "Nominative Use" of trademarks: "Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit, by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
I guess a lot of lawyers are about to get richer determining whether or not WPEngine's use of the "WordPress" trademark was "as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." To me (remember, not a lawyer) it seems quite obvious that "We sell WordPress hosting" is a reference to the trademarked Wordpress product, and is exactly what is allowed by Nominative use.
> Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
I doubt they need or want to. They can fork Wordpress core itself under their rights granted by the GPL and they could name that something like WPEnginePress, or choose to use any other fork like ClassicPress or AspirePress. The Nominative Use "or to compare it to their own" clause allows them to say "We sell WPEnginePress Hosting, which is 100% compatible with WordPress and has an identical admin interface for users."
The wordpress.org theme/plugin repo is a bigger problem, but most (all?) of that is under the same GPL2.0 or newer licence, so WPEngine or any other fork can copy/modify/redistribute those as well (and WPE are already mirroring it), and at least AspirePress has said they've planning on getting plugin/theme authors to use their repo as well as the wordpress.org one.
DHH has responded on Twitter: https://x.com/dhh/status/1845887043748221421
Thats right! 3.. 2.. 1.. FIGHT!!! JUGGERNAUT KICK!!!
Genuine question, is Matt ok? I hope nothing bad is happening in his personal life.
This is less a response to the points that DHH raised than a personal attack against him.
yeah total ad hominem
> you should question why you can’t scale teams.
They can afford not to.
I read half of the blog post and it's revolting. Wtf?
Missed out ", age 4" from the title.
David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that following this paragraph with links to DHH's $2MM sports cars and his home office that costs an integer multiple of what my entire house costs sort of undercuts his argument.
He's playing both sides so he always comes out on top.
> I was surprised someone as smart as DHH would fall for WP Engine’s lame deferral to make this about “GPL code” or forking, rather than trademarks. We have no problem with their use of GPL code, our beef is with their trademark abuse.
Ah yes, defending trademarks. Really the rallying cry of the people. That's what everyone cares about here. Nice motte and bailey you have there.
Also, Matt is not even reading Ruby on Rail's trademark clause that he posted: "You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association."
Also, also Matt: If you are going to throw down over people about not donating enough to charity, you should really tell people what charities you are donating to. It better not turn out your charitable donations are to your own Wordpress org which we now know is little more than a marketing/PR department for Automattic.
Matt made a post a few weeks ago about his charitable donations.[0] It's really just a "I'm better than them" post. And it doesn't say where any of it was donated.
0. https://ma.tt/2024/09/charitable-contributions/
That's exactly what I was referring to.
For all we know these are self-dealing tax write-offs to his own foundation. The one that is currently doing dirty work for his private business.
The Foundation's public filings are online, and I think they only had $22k in donations last year. Doesn't mean his contributions were all charitable, but they don't appear to have gone to the Foundation at least.
How much would you bet against most (or all?) of Matt's "donations" being money he spent to keep wordpress.org running? (which he explicitly admits is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is owned by Matt personally)
This article tries to provide cover for slamming DHH by opening with "this is a respectful debate".
DHH, like anybody else, is imperfect. But the author acts like he is superior. He isn't.
But I will say there is not much worse than a person who feigns respect and then goes on to say things like:
"toxic personality and inability to scale teams"
"it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach" (therapist really being the dig, here)
"Why are you still so small?"
"Instead of bragging about your beautiful office in the clouds, you should question why you can’t scale teams."
If your respect for DHH was real, you would have given your feedback in a respectful way instead of writing some blog post with such incendiary comments.
it reminds my that crypto "genius" who kept saying: "are you still poor?", then was taken to prison
This page in Matt blog is not exist anymore. (404)
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.
Just wondering about ruby, linux, etc.
Poor Linus.
This is one of those moments where you make your opponent look really good and you're too blind to see it.
I never took much issue with DHH and now I feel I just side with him. Talk about being out of touch with everything Matt.
> It's even more outrageous that Automattic has chosen trademarks as their method to get their "Al Capone" ... I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations...
Except there is a second set of obligations, specifically designed to help avoid business confusion: trademarks. It's not clear why trademarks are considered outrageous. Rails™ matters to DHH, WordPress™ matters to Matt.
he removed it - bing still has it in cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2fma.tt%2f2024...
“This is a respectful debate” in paragraph one. Okay that’s good.
“DHH has a toxic personality” in paragraph three. Uh oh.
This trolling is unworthy of Hackernews, IMHO. It is just mudslinging without content.
abolish copyright and move on
Rich people arguing on the internet. We've only got one life to live, it's just not worth the time to follow this soap opera.
Counterpoint, nearly half of the internet uses WordPress. Learning that it's fully under the control of a vindictive techbro who is showing an ability and willingness to damage large swaths of the internet at a time is kinda a big deal.
The recent forking of Advanced Custom Fields is just a smoking gun for where his priorities actually lie. Matt is part of a small group of people who have made a significant amount of wealth from an open source project. The project itself, however, has stagnated over the past 10 years. The community's reliance on plugins like ACF is a complete failure of the development of core more than it is the tyranny of private investment.
It's clear to me now that the reason WordPress development has been stalled for so long is because Matt has been in charge this whole time and he has no idea what the development community actually wants/needs. So instead of in-housing a really basic tool like ACF he forces through garbage like Gutenberg.
Matt has unfortunately been very unresponsive to any feedback about what should or should not go into core. Despite claiming WordPress core is open-source and open to almost everyone, the team leaders responsible for what goes into each release have been all Automattic employees since 2019.
Which adds to the disingenuousness of all of this. Matt thinks WP Engine should have contributed more to the core... but only on features that Automattic decides? Clearly madness.
Slightly off topic, but does “techbro” mean anything other than “male that I don’t like who works with computers”? I feel like it initially had a real meaning, but now it’s kind of a catch all term.
tldr: I make more money than you so your points don't matter
What's really embarrassing is the same few Automattic employees arguing for Matt online.
I had the same thought yesterday reading through some of these threads. Its great that things are part of the public record as a snapshot in time. But now these employees have all sorts of awkward google-able conversation starters for future interviews etc. I'm happy for them if they are standing up for what they believe, but also how can you be so naive?
TLDR:
DHH doesn't make kilo-millions so his ideas suck.
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