The guy has some kind of point (for which he was flamed in the comments, and respect for acknowledging his gratitude to the maintainer) but the maintainer did the work, and by dint of ignoring this guy, did another 15 years of work on WP which has been made available under the gpl for free... that's a win for everyone as far as it goes, right?
If he just gave up in 2010 so there was no "conflict of interest" to satisfy this guy, who is actually better off?
this is faulty logic. you are taking two overlapping issues and framing them as an either/or. matt could easily have removed the conflict interest while not "giving up" on wordpress and continuing to contribute. it's about anticipating any future issues that could arise through governance, not that matt should just stop working on wordpress altogether.
so yes, absolutely WP would be in a better place now had he just removed that aspect of his involvement. by 2010 WP was an ecosystem that was more than just the founder. and ben cook isn't just "some guy".
and more historical context if you want to see what happened to mr. cook and the pattern of retaliation by matt.
the funny thing is i didn't even really care about who ran WP since a few months ago, but due to all the drama u can easily dig this stuff up now and it's not pretty.
... "faulty logic"... the Maintainer runs a business and makes a lot of money and he should give that up, but is invited to keep working as before for nothing. It is left to others to make the money on his work, but he should keep striving away for other's benefit like a slave.
It's quite crazy to say if the last 15 years of work was not done by the paid devs and the maintainer, WP would be in a "better place". It just goes to show how partisan this topic is, trying to argue this seems rational to you at the moment.
None of your comments make any sense: "the Maintainer runs a business and makes a lot of money and he should give that up" - literally nobody is saying that. They author obviously knows he would stay as CEO of Automattic, so he is arguing to give up leadership of the foundation.
From the article: "it’s time for Matt to resign from either the WordPress Foundation or Automattic."
Can I gently suggest to you that posting under a throwaway leads you to post - and downvote - in a way you wouldn't normally, that is not helpful for the discussion?
i don't think you read the article or understand the current context.
he has two entities, a private business (Automattic) which is separate from the WP.org side which he has said since the beginning as being "community run", but is now apparently his personal property and we were all just playing his garden.
you keep talking as if WP in its current form is only because of paid devs and the maintainer. thousands of other contributors made it what it is today, all with the assumption that it was governed a certain way.
all OSS has this inherent issue. the for-profit gatekeeps what goes into core or can steer/block things to keep things advantageous only to them. it's why the questions around governance are even being asked. if you can't understand why this conflict could be a problem then i'm not sure what to say.
So it turned out, there was an option 3, where random internet guy was ignored and the maintainer both made money from his work, and continued with the public good of donating work to his GPL'd project.
WP Engine is truly upset with the money they were able to make from WP being in good shape for free the last 15 years? According to the maintainer it's hundreds of millions of dollars. Before Mullenweg complaining about their not chipping in, they seemed very happy to go on.
But if I posted the CNN bloat it would have been "here's the text-only version"
And it's close but I still prefer giving Russia my analytics than the bloat and ad tracking fluff that constitutes a CNN webpage "article" ; at least in fhe former, it all happens behind the scenes.
But it's a preference thing. Still maddening to me watching the car industry play out post pandemic.
I know this isn’t Stripe support, but I’m out of options. Stripe cuts off support access for closed accounts. I’ve emailed them multiple times, offering to provide additional documents and PayPal statements, but I haven’t received any response for over a month.
"No privacy concerns".... you're dreaming if you think you won't have "privacy concerns" in Russia or whatever. In fact being able to see the endpoint of the traffic you're trying to conceal while having your billing address will put a big target on your head.
Since a couple of years ago, I spent a year or so like this, with the TV resting on the desk directly.
It looked pretty nice, but it had some problems.
- The only actual 8K modes reported on the HDMI were some variant of YUV, it means you could not select what your OS considered an RGB mode
- Even using it at 4K, with the 55" TV a couple of feet from the back of the desk, my eyes could not keep all of it perfectly in focus.
- The power consumption was much higher than a typical ~30" monitor, and the amount of heat created was also significant. This became hard to deal with in summer.
Eventually I gave up on it and returned to a ~30" monitor.
You have been and continue to trust Automattic for the core code.
If for example, Automattic instead had said they will bundle the plugin functionality with the core, there are many historical cases of that, unpleasant as it is for the third party usually... results are identical, right?
This plugin can only operate on top of the core code, whoever distributes the plugin to you. It means you have to decide to either bin the whole ecosystem, or use the core and plugin from the same people.
It's also open to the plugin people to distribute the core themselves, but since they don't have a history of working on it, why would you imagine for core maintenance, you can trust a smaller private equity-funded group that historically leeches on the core project, more than the originating project for the core?
Sorry, this is a GPL plugin to stuff already maintained by Automattic?
It's not like users aren't already updating to whatever Automattic want to give them, in the core, if that's the case? Automattic producing the same plugin and delivering it the same as the core doesn't sound like much of change, since users already trusted Automattic for the core either way...
If the delivery service that transported my vendor's goods to me, suddenly started substituting their own product instead, I would sue them. I think my vendor would be pissed too, especially if the main difference is that their monetization was torn out.
This behavior would land people in jail in a more serious industry.
No... core volunteers who provide work to you for free, which you have been consuming successfully, have now extended the domain of their works to also encompass something on top you previously got from elsewhere.
The plugin you previously used was always completely dependent on the work of the core volunteers; you were always consuming their work and nothing changed about that. It just also already includes the optional plugin now.
Why would anyone end up in jail when everything is GPL2+?
Users of the plugin already have a trust and consumption relationship with Automattic for the core.
It's more like mcdonalds replacing Coke with McCola with your mcdonalds meal - you were already trusting mcdonalds for the food. But even that is a stretch since both are GPL2 and there's no current sign the plugin Automattic provide differs from the WP Engine one.
GPL is on both sides, nothing stops WP Engine doing the same and providing their own flavour of core with their plugin, if that's what people want. Of course that costs more than private equity just using Automattic's core for free.
I feel like the dodgy part isn’t the forking. Any open source project can be forked at any time by anyone. The dodgy part is them automatically switching existing users to their fork.
To use your McDonald’s analogy, it’s like specifically ordering a Coke and McD’s secretly switching it to a McCoke without you noticing.
As I wrote elsewhere, this is no different from a project deciding to incorporate a third party's functionality into the core. Either way whoever provides the plugin, you trust the provider to provide the core, if you now think they are going to do bad things, there is nothing they can do in the plugin that they couldn't do in the core without all this drama.
It seems the "perceptual framing" that is being engineered about this, that Automattic and its leader should be cancelled, is not about technical issues.
> In one instance, the lawyers set about trying to disprove the legitimacy of handwritten notes. ... Sherrell’s team tracked down the printer of the notepad in China, proving that the exact version of that notebook had not been released until years after Wright’s claims.
If he just gave up in 2010 so there was no "conflict of interest" to satisfy this guy, who is actually better off?