I don't know why i keep popping into these WP related threads, gotta take a break... Apparently also just read that he used the .org to push a post promoting alternative WPEngine hosting to his affiliates. I have no clue what is going on anymore.
They are not even WP Engine alternatives. He listed 4 other hosts, of which 3 are owned by Automattic and the other is paying Automattic licensing rights.
I mean that problem does exist as a whole, but in this specific case this has nothing to do with some scrappy open source project not being able fund itself. Automattic is a 7.5 billion dollar company with ~800 million in rev lol.
The "giving back" angle is just smokescreen for wanting to charge more rent IMO.
Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes.
If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that.
So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player.
"WordPress hosting" is an accurate description of what the product does and uses the term nominatively, which is legal. You couldn't call your company that, but within the company, you could call the product that hosts WordPress "WordPress hosting". (IANAL;TINLA)
> I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling.
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale ...
Yep, real respectful.
I don't even understand the point of the post, other than to shit on the other guy. It doesn't advance any debate or raise any questions.
The post as it is now sounds really decent and a step in the right direction. Let's not air all the dirty laundry happening here, it looks like Matt is trying to do the "right" thing here.
Here is the current iteration of that post from Matt:
"I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake."
he can link to his original post and put the clarification alongside if that's the case. i can change my mind if his actions show he's trying to do "right", but that takes time. for me, it's very important to know that he was even capable of writing the original post.
Yeah the DHH post is an example or projection… Automattic is hosting a lot of WordPress sites but not making anywhere near as much money as the WP Engines and Go Daddy’s of the ecosystem. (And yet automattic contributes the most to the project.) So it’s definitely a point of frustration to the business.
I worked in the WP space for many years and in that time have participated maybe twice in the actual WordPress OSS project: once to submit a patch to remove the “final” keyword from the Post class (lots of support from others that wanted this, and ultimately DoA because no one at the core level supported this) and once for some small thing that was relevant to my work at the time.
The hostility and difficulty in having a reasonable discussion, along with using SVN fwiw, made contributing feel like a chore. I had hopes of being a regular contributor and helping to enhance and extend a project I genuinely enjoyed working with, and nothing about how the core team operated made me feel welcomed.
he must be having a legit mental breakdown. i do not understand any of these decisions done so haphazardly with no regard to users or their current situation, even if that was the direction they were moving. basically, telegraphing that he will personally go out and fuck up your day if you cross him. pettiness to the nth degree right here.
At first we were saying it as a joke, but I am increasingly seriously wondering just how many famous people in the Valley are in various stages of stimulant psychosis, considering how widespread the joking-not-joking talk is about liberally using Adderall etc. to maximize "the grind".
Well, an essential part of psychiatric diagnosis is often to notice the presence of a noticeable before/after change. Psychosis, mania, are valid hypothesis that would make a CEO take surprising decision.
I don't see how that belittles the struggle of patients. Having and company and being bipolar is far from life on easy mode.
Greed and incompetence are also valid hypothesis, although don't necessarily need an abrupt change in behavior.
I am not. I am saying this is a hypothesis to consider. This is not at all the same thing and I would agree with you that diagnosing bipolar on a few press articles makes no sense. The goldwater rule is a good rule imo.
he could be all of them? i'm basing this off the fact that he was able to run and build it up to what it is today, then suddenly going off the rails. more of me grasping at an explanation than a declaration of truth heh.
Matt said in his keynote that he had a kidney stone a few weeks ago, which is evidently extremely painful. Perhaps that physical trauma triggered something.
I am not in the mood to do the proper base rate computations but I think it's considerably less likely that this would be indirectly due to a kidney stone rather than simply any of the well known psychiatric and neurologic condition you can have at the age of ~50.
isn't firm growth just a symptom of the issue? which i guess the article is describing.
sometimes i feel like the best short-term path forward for a poor country is just to have some kind of heavy handed gov't (like a "benevolent" dictator, hear me out lol) dictate policy and brutally subsidize and consolidate industries. of course you have to magically do this this with minimal fallout from corruption and then somehow make the transition to more of a democratic model.
debatable if this nets out positive in the long run for the average citizen, but it will make your country "rich" (looking at you south korea). US is unique in this regard in that we have these huge firms and can also foster an environment for small/med to make that transition, although it's changing as well.
Sounds like Singapore.. without the transition to a more democratic model. Living standards there indicate it's been net positive for quite a long time.
Singapore got rich because so many foreign firms moved there to use it as their base of operations. That isn't a scalable approach for a larger countries (Singapore's population is only around 5 million) that can't rely on foreign firms to supply all their jobs. In terms of producing successful local firms Singapore has actually been quite unsuccessful.
What type of industries were consolidated/subsidized in singapore? My impression is that they had the advantage of being a liberal financial center, whereas all their neighbors were not.
I am an armchair economist regarding SG, but I would that say semiconductor manuf has been heavily subsidised by the gov't. As I understand, the "one trick" is to "get the plant built". They do whatever it takes to get the next plant built. Once built, it is very hard (economically) to stop running a semiconductor plant. This creates long-lasting, genuine economic growth for SG.
Also, their petro-chemical industry is surprisingly large for a tiny country. I'm not talking about the simple trading of crude oil and gas; I'm talking about real value add by refineries and chemical plants. Again, I am not an expert here, but I assume that the SG gov't provided handsome benefits to the global supermajors to build huge refineries and chemical plants.
Yeah the government does not disturb businesses here much. But they do heavily subsidize corporate costs. Theres a economic development board that provides lot of grants for companies. Most mncs use edb grants for setting up their initial business.
Early on in Singapores history, the government did seize a lot of land from farmers though. I believe they were compensated for it.
We also have these weird things called GLCs. China sort of copied this with their telecom industry. GLCs are corporations created by the government to handle certain things. They kind of have government level powers but corporate governances (worst of both worlds imo).
Im not sure about how much the dictator part is nessecarily true. For one when singapore was independent it was already wealthier than its neighbours. PAP loves telling us how theyre the best thing on earth, but Im not convinced. LKY did a lot of reforms but where practical he left colonial infrastructure as is. FDI and luck are also a big part of Singapores growth story.
Singapores success was mirrored by china in the 2000s. The trick was free market capitalism with socialist political policies (in both cases). Also singapore has mastered the art of Government linked corporations - something that china copied. From 2000-2012 China probably had one of the least dictatorial governments in its history. Adding a dictator back in the mix has slowed growth although i wonder if thats a symptom of slower growth.
> without the transition to a more democratic model
Are you saying that SK has not transitioned to a more democratic model since their colonial independence in 1945? I beg to differ. SK is not SG. Yes, I know they have chaebols. Since their transition in ~1988 to a full democracy, the President and parliament (whatever they call it) have certainly shifted between multiple parties -- peacefully. If you study the development of democracies, this is an important step to a long-lasting, mature democracy.
currently AI focus is very narrow. I treat it like a junior dev where it can repeat structure it's given and then I basically "approve" it or I use it like a super robust autocomplete where it knows what I'm writing next like 80% of the time. also good for bouncing ideas to see if there's something someone else had done similarly.
there is no way in hell I would tell it to "generate X feature" or "fix X bug" wholesale. half the time it is just dead wrong in it's approach and it's more time consuming to grok what it did exactly and then either 1) suggest an alternate approach and 2) fix what it did wrong.
like i get it, in the end if it generates the right code and it works then most people will call it a day. but longevity is in being able to understand and maintain your codebase and at this point i can't trust it to do that. it some sense it reminds me of (and still reminds me of) those wysiwyg site builders where sure, your output might be fine for 90% of those cases like a simple landing page but the code underneath is a big pile of shit. good luck if you need to break out of that box at any point.
i guess all to say AI will start replacing low level static site facing stuff. for instance if you're selling cookie cutter WP themes i'd be worried at some point. for everything else it's a non-factor right now.
honestly, just read this and his initial post about the whole issue (content is "sacred" or whatever) and it's clear he's semi-deluded himself into thinking he has massive support and/or more important in the grand scheme of things than he actually is. burned so many bridges and still won't concede anything.
