If the WordPress Foundation is controlled by Matt, Automattic is controlled by Matt and WordPress.org is controlled by Matt, how can there be independent decision making? As Matt has demonstrated by blurring the lines between WordPress.org and Automattic by introducing the ban on WP Engine "affiliates" accessing WordPress.org because of the lawsuit against Automattic, there's no distinction.
Matt has tweeted about his final approval over WordCamp events despite members of the volunteer groups operating under the belief they had the final say, which undermines any attempt to claim these volunteer groups have any control (only the illusion of control): https://x.com/ryancduff/status/1841834672059199590
Automattic just poached Jason Bahl from WPEngine to bring WPGraphQL into core WordPress, demonstrating very clearly that Automattic have control over WordPress core: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wpgraphql/
Matt has shared that he owns WordPress.org personally but that Automattic employs hundreds of people to work on it and spends millions of dollars financing it.
Ultimately, you work for Automattic and report to Matt so you're obligated to share his version of the world, but the version of the world you're describing only exists in Matt's head. There's no way to frame what is happening as independent of Automattic. I know that it doesn't matter to you personally, this is just a job, and once you leave Automattic you'll look back and laugh at the absurdity of this situation. I guess the point of my comment is to say: we all know that you know this is nonsense, you're convincing nobody. If you actually believe this nonsense (which I doubt, you're not an idiot) then you need to do a much better job of convincing people.
Matt seems to have missed that dhh called out his use of the WordPress trademark as the strategy to "get Al Capone" which Matt has admitted to multiple times.
"“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.” WP Engine competes directly with the hosting services offered by Automattic and WordPress.com, and Mullenweg argues one of the reasons for its success is the use of “WordPress” across its site. “That’s why we’re using that legal avenue to really, yeah, pressure them. That’s true: we are pressuring them.”"
The point missed here is that you didn’t need to write any code at all, with or without ChatGPT. ChatGPT helped you with busy work: you reinvented something that already exists, instead of using a mature and established membership platform, you built your own. The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
You did learn something, by the way: you learned how to use modern tools. You didn’t do things most efficiently but it was more efficient than writing code without the help of ChatGPT.
>The reason this has parallels to education is because that’s what education traditionally is: busy work.
Busy work is work that is assigned merely for the purpose of occupying one's time.
That's not the same thing as practice. We drill children in arithmetic not to keep them busy but because it turns out repeatedly solving multiplication problems is an effective way to teach children their times tables.
Exactly right. In terms of education, there generally seems to be a blurry line between was is considered learning and what is considered memorization. If you memorize your times tables, it doesn't mean you've learned multiplication for example... oftentimes the ability to memorize and recall things is opposed to learning, which means leveraging previous knowledge to solve something new.
In the case of AI, it usually presents facts and opinions simultaneously (something a calculator famously does not do, for example). Facts are memorized, opinions are learned. In all core studies it's always been more important to understand what you're solving for, and why, rather than "how" to solve it. The continued dissolution of the "how" barrier is a net benefit for all of civilization, and when experts of "why" are valued more than experts of "how" the world will be a much better place.
This is one reason why many educators are phasing out homework. It's great practice but can easily lead students to regurgitating information instead of understanding and retaining knowledge. This is also why quizzes and tests are vital in a well-designed curriculum: they test understanding (or at least are supposed to).
When you are learning something, that busy work helps. What you think of as busy work when you are a professional is actually often sort of novel to learners and is a simple example of how to do stuff.
Since AI can’t invent new stuff, who will do that? Juniors who haven’t learned anything because of those tools? Or seniors who will disappear one day because they are retiring or are being replaced by AIs?
I already work with juniors who use ChatGPT and cannot explain what they wrote. They have a fucking engineers degree and don’t know anything. It’s catastrophic and may increase in the future. What will happen if it continues like this?
I feel in some regards this worry is akin to not knowing assembly. When/if it becomes good enough that the entirety of coding is abstracted away we won't care that new entrants don't understand it.
Let's just not lose the documentation on how to modify/improve the AI when needed...
Maybe that can be the job of a very select few. Fixing AI the way we fix robots for manufacturing.
code is an input not an output. People don’t care about code, they care about products. You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before.
My point wasn’t that writing code with AI is bad, my point was that writing code for the sake of writing code is bad. If something already exists, use it. If something doesn’t exist, build it, bring something new to the world — whether that’s with hand-typed code or ChatGPT assisted code, I don’t care.
Yes, but there's a balance. The HN purists who are wedded to their knowledge struggle with this, but then someone does need debugging skills to go in and fix things when some of the stupid things AI does makes things break.
Also I've found telling it specifically where it's messed up is way more effective than just shouting at it to fix it after it's failed a second time. And sometimes you just need to manually fix it.
I wrote an entire library last weekend, then rewrote it on Monday when I realised I'd messed up. Two things I wouldn't have bothered to do without AI doing the coding.
I know how the important stuff works and I could pick my way through the JS, but glad I didn't have to write it. I mean, I just wouldn't have.
> You can build something new using code that already exists: every product we use today is built on a lot of what came before.
I don't disagree with this from a business perspective but for an engineers perspective I find it severely limiting.
Even very very basic things should probably stay fresh foe you. If you cannot implement a basic parser ( recursive dexent / pratt etc) you will very likely reach for regex when there is likely a better solution that isn't a lot of code.
You should probably know how to write leftpad... Or how to strip ascii whitespace using an ArrayBuffer and a for loop in JS. These are things that is extremely easy but a little tedius to do but are fundamental skill to building up more complex solutions later.
You should probably know how to build and reason about some more advanced datastructures in your language. Basic trees, directed graphs, trie. These are things that if they are second nature for you to implement you can come up with novel solutions to actually novel problems when they come up.
You also get an innate understanding of where the performance characteristics of certian algorithms and datastructures actually lay. Because big O doesn't always tell the full story...
As the parent comment said. Even if you never need to do it. Being quire familiar with these topics can help you select the correct solution.
Sometimes you don't need a binary tree, you just need a O(n) linear search but someone who has never played with the actual low level datastructures has no idea when that matters, so in their mind a hashmap makes a ton of sense because searching is between O(1) and O(log n) depending on implementation. But in many cases a flat array will be significantly more performant and is a simpler implementation but in their mind a hashmap is the better solution.
Now it probably doesn't matter, but when it matters it's better to know the the answer.
That for me is the big distinction between software engineering and software development.
Plumbers don't need to be engineers, but there are times when you really need an engineer to design the plumbing system.
Strive to be the engineer, purely because you will enjoy the craft a lot more, and people recognise drive and ambition.
It doesn't matter if you are in the right place at the right time if you don't have the skills to back it up.
Granted if all you want to be is a plumber that pipes APIs together and lives a different life, by all means I encourage you to enjoy life. But don't make students believe thats all their is to the industry.
It's not about implementing a graph or a trie. It's about knowing when and why these data structures matter.
Sure, you (or an LLM) can probably find a package that can quickly search for a file in an extremely large filesystem.
I'm guessing that the authors of S3 didn't have that luxury when they were building out this service years ago, though. There are very few people on Earth that deal with exabytes of data, and prior art only gets you so far in this scenario.
The only way something like that can be built is by truly understanding CS fundamentals. Most people study CS to become a SWE. If programming gets reduced to maintaining prompts and optimizing here and there, then there is a real risk of this discipline eroding over time.
That’s not my point. I’m not disparaging AI. I described AI as modern tooling that is beneficial to learn. I’m sure there are many professional developers saving time using AI to generate code they would have otherwise written. My point is that in this specific case, AI didn’t enable anything useful. I would have said exactly the same if the OP had written the code without AI. If a problem is long solved, reinventing it is busy work. Busy work can be fun, I reinvent things all the time, but that doesn’t change the nature of it. If the project they had built had been something novel (that does not exist) then it would have not been busy work.
You "realized"? He built WordPress from the first day. That's why he runs both its non-profit and Automattic, which is named after him.
It sounds like you haven't been aware at all about WordPress and suddenly looked up some numbers and imposed traditional company expectations on an open source project with a commercial arm.
Fair enough! Me, neither. I just had a WordPress blog for several years and the back story came up in various announcements in the dashboard news feed.
2018 would tie in with about when I first got the impression he was not a fan of WP Engine. I'm sure there was fuss once before (about them not being on the "recommended hosting" page?)
That's the amount of hours they contribute to the "Five for the Future" program which specifically refers to work on a subset of the WordPress project managed by Automattic. For example, WPEngine own and develop Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin used by hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites. The work they do on that isn't covered in the 40 hours. Likewise, WPEngine run the DE{CODE} conference but that isn't included in the 40 hours either.
The .io registry is operated by Identity Digital which is a consolidation of a bunch of different registries from the last decade[1]. Identity Digital own (and sometimes just operate) many different TLDs and ccTLDs: most likely, the registrar will retain the right to operate the ccTLD and start paying license fees for each .io to Mauritius. The .tv ccTLD is the most famous example of this, as something like 15% of Tuvalu's GDP is from licensing of the .tv ccTLD.
[1] ICB acquired by Afilias, Afilias acquired by Donuts, Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital.
The ccTLD for Mauritius is .mu. The e British Indian Ocean territories stop existing once the UK releases its claims to the territories so there goes the country code of "io"
The country codes used for ccTLDs are arbitrary, I thought: they're roughly consistent with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes but not exactly. Are there precedents to suggest a country can only have one ccTLD?
No, there's lots of counterexamples that are typically designed around subregions or territories (I understand there are nuances here, but this sets the general spirit of when this happens). The UK has .uk and .gb, US has .us and had .um , Austrailia has .au, .cx (Christmas Island), .cc (Cocos/Keeling Islands)
With the demise of X.400 e-mail and IANA's general aim of one TLD per country, use of .gb declined; the domain remains in existence, but it is not currently open to new domain registrations.
"she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic"
But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as you've revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few weeks. I don't follow, how can Heather apply for a job with Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you personally own?
Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.
> Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.
So are you now using company resources for personal projects (as they point out, you constantly have claimed that the .org domain is your personal domain) as well as for non profit org projects?
Doesn't exactly sound... beneficial to investors interests.
Why did you tell the community: "the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company"? That's objectively untrue. Period.
That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community for 14 years.
The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-license. The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood.
I understand the workings of the trademark. The question I asked of you (that you avoided) is why did you claim that the trademark was "fully independent from any company" and that Automattic had "give[n] up control". [0]
That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with the USPTO is clear:
>WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic Inc., an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in Exhibit A attached hereto...
I’m curious: what else is there to a trademark? Nominal ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they’ve granted “irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic” (as claimed in this lawsuit), what else is there? Maybe there is something, I’m no lawyer or particularly deeply familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like, for all practical purposes, ownership belonging to the Foundation is a furphy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy>.
> The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org.
The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?
Weird that you never mentioned that this license was granted on the same day it was transferred.
I love how he explains that “consideration” was conjured from thin air.
I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises to let me use it on weekdays?
Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this is a valid contract with “consideration” because I gave Jimmy my car and, “in return,” he gave me my car back Monday–Friday.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine that it is illegal to donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit organization, without contracts and considerations coming into play. But if I’m wrong, and “consideration” is a required element of a transaction like this, I don’t think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster anyway.
I also do not get it, I don't know why consideration is even relevant for a donation.
I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead, with them retaining commercial rights.
Why would either side want to minimize the donation size? It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-profit doesn't care about income tax.
I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
There are so many legal entities here that appear completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation, Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.
the statements about the non-profit situation seem especially bad. He'll obviously have his own side of the story, but I'm guessing they didn't misread the tax filings.
"May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email."
Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May. The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to them months ago.
Matt has tweeted about his final approval over WordCamp events despite members of the volunteer groups operating under the belief they had the final say, which undermines any attempt to claim these volunteer groups have any control (only the illusion of control): https://x.com/ryancduff/status/1841834672059199590
Automattic just poached Jason Bahl from WPEngine to bring WPGraphQL into core WordPress, demonstrating very clearly that Automattic have control over WordPress core: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wpgraphql/
Matt has shared that he owns WordPress.org personally but that Automattic employs hundreds of people to work on it and spends millions of dollars financing it.
Ultimately, you work for Automattic and report to Matt so you're obligated to share his version of the world, but the version of the world you're describing only exists in Matt's head. There's no way to frame what is happening as independent of Automattic. I know that it doesn't matter to you personally, this is just a job, and once you leave Automattic you'll look back and laugh at the absurdity of this situation. I guess the point of my comment is to say: we all know that you know this is nonsense, you're convincing nobody. If you actually believe this nonsense (which I doubt, you're not an idiot) then you need to do a much better job of convincing people.