@@JamesWelbes DHH is the guy who created Rudy-on-Rails, a very influential web framework. Theo is a Twitter/RU-vid influencer who used to work at twitch and has a couple of startups
I just love that you're not one of those usual guys who'll have a guy on for an interview and then afterwards everything they do is 100% amazing. You were willing to call him out to his face, on your mentioned call prior to the checkbox and also in your own content. Bravo, sir. I hope he ends this tirade soon.
I’m ready to jump ship. Been developing in WP for the last 10 years, involved in the community, planned a WordCamp, but now I’m just done. Was personally berated by Matt over accessibility of Gutenberg, but I stuck around then… but this is the last straw.
Yeah. It sucks too, with all that time and history. It’s hard to see yourself pouring your heart into something like that anymore knowing how the project is being led. 😓
The funniest part about the 'affiliated with WP Engine' checkbox is that the text is *not localized*. So if English is not your native language you literally don't even know what you're agreeing to.
It is shitty how he is going about it but do you think a simple plugin made in a weekend (using NONE of their own code) should charge $40 a month to customers, making 10s of millions a year and give ZERO back to the community? There are plenty of cases of this in the wordpress ecosystem and I can understand him being pissed off about that.
@@excitedbox5705I think most people understand why he is pissed. WP Engine is a parasite. It is the biggest issue with OS since forever. But the dude is burning down the village to hurt his shitty neighbor and now he is the shittiest neighbor of them all.
I am getting strong reminders of when my (former) Boss went off the rails due to a psychotic break due to constant drug use. Not to say that matt's on drugs, But the behaviour rings similar
He's an adult with an opinion, and is willing to stand on business and stick to it. Nothing but respect for him. He's gone on several interviews and was completely calm and collected. I disagree, and honestly think what he is doing is the right thing, even if his methods aren't great.
@@poopman8837 I mean this in the nicest way possible - did you miss when Theo asked him the same question 5 times in a row, and he gave a different non-answer every time? He was also grinning and giggling while being asked serious questions. Especially when the questions lead right into one of his talking points, he seemed a bit too excited about it. I know that can just be nerves, but it still doesn’t strike me as someone collected or appropriately treating this as a pivotal moment of his professional career, or more importantly, of many thousands of other people’s careers.
Seriously Matt. We all appreciate your work and sacrifice over the years. You’ve built something that is used and loved by millions of people. Please don’t ruin it in the sake of dragging down some hosting company nobody even cares about with you. It is simply not worth it.
Not a lawyer, but it is hilarious that supposedly this started over a trademark violation given that depending on the open source license, I would argue taking over the ACF page and putting your own fork would violate the ACF trademark. Be one thing if they took the ACF link and 404 errored it, but to have it redirect to the fork? Yeah, sure sounds like "impersonating" another group for financial benefit. By the way, would love to see Matt try to sue someone who checked that box in deceit. Not sure the non-profit would gave the legal justification to demand that, even if the fir-profit could. Oh, and pretty sure conflating the non-profit and the for-profit business would be of interest to folks at the IRS!
Matt didn't "become" anything, he was always like this and simply kept pushing harder and harder because he didn't get any consequences for his previous public meltdowns
Having had someone close to me go through a manic episode of BPD, this seems *exactly* like one. Feelings of grandeur, rash actions, not listening to people around them. It's really hard to see. I hope Matt gets the help he needs. If he does apologize for all this and try to right these wrongs, it's on us as a community to accept it and him.
there was a recent interview where matt developed a spontaneous nosebleed partway through and just didn't acknowledge it at all and kept talking, so I'm thinking less bpd manic episode and more coke binge
Matt is going to get utterly destroyed in civil court. Tortious interference in a contract. He won't shut up and has given loads of ammo to opposing counsel. Although it's permissible to fork a GPL repo all you want, the context matters here. If you do it out of malice or spite with the intention of "going nuclear" and burning everything to the ground, you better hope your lawyer is smarter than you are because you're going to get taken to the cleaners. He could even face a class action from the community because he's harmed them now. This will make a great HBS case study for marketing students one day (for what not to do)
An analogy would be to compare this to a property-line dispute with a neighbor. Rather than let the legal system resolve the dispute, Matt has chosen to set his neighbor's house on fire.
No idea about his mental health history but automattic also runs tumblr and earlier this year Matt had a similar breakdown over a edgy tumblr post and somehow managed to turn it into a massive site wide controversy. It ended with him having to take a sabbatical from being involved in tumblr. Unfortunately it does not look like a wordpress sabbatical is in the cards :|
Yes. This isn’t the first time, but it is the first time it’s against a company strong and rich enough to fight back, and he cannot handle the backlash.
I've been seeing some of the stuff from the slack on X and it's wild. I appreciate you trying to talk him down, but it's clear he's going off the deep end.
Well done calling this behavior out so publicly; it's insane that it just keeps going. He really seems like he is going to destroy WordPress before admitting he was in the wrong.
At the very least Matt is cooking up some great content. I never found WordPress to be so entertaining until now. Perhaps he's gonna pull a 4D move and eliminate the competition, generate tons of marketing, and cement himself as the WP-Godfather.
Matt cannot apologize now. IMO. He went too far before, there were real extortion, real tortious interference, caused real financial damages to another company and lots of end users. There had been real consequences. For him to apologize now would be terrible for the lawsuits coming his way as a result of his previous actions. He cannot admit to any fault on his part now, I imagine.
Depends on how seriously he is about making right. His lawyer could send a letter to WP Engine tomorrow offering to make an apology, return all previous access, and pay for the loss of revenue incurred by WP Engine, in exchange for immunity from his actions and they might accept it. Lawsuits are expensive if you can get what you want without it. This is pretty much what has happened every time you hear "Settled out of court"
When the best becomes bad, everything else falls down and deteriorates. While I do believe that WordPress can survive this, the Internet will never be the same after this.
@@NithinJune There is no evidence, just some garbage attack someone is spreading around maliciously to discredit Matt by claiming he is mentally insane. What is sadder is the people who regurgitate that vomit far and wide because it supports their viewpoint.
If Matt says there are other at his team doing this - it just shows how bad of a CEO he is. This personal crusade.. mental! Matt really believes that his childish way will give himself credit. He is very very narrow minded
I was a WP developer for a long time, and jumped over to react and next about 2017, and did not look back. I feel sad about what is happening. I thinking of all the developer out there, who dont know what to say to there clients. And all the junior php developers that selected WP for there platform to get a good jobb from, who now dont know what to do. Im so sad about this.
This is really sad. And i think we have to go beyond as society to talk about his mental health. We may have oir Judgements, but i refuse to accept Matt being quiet all of a sudden flips to be this way is without a cause. Something might have been boiling in him for a while. And when he was suffering in silence no one knew. But when he decided to take action we are all judging. And Yes, i think Theo was harsh in the video. And i hope Matt gets the help he needs.
Undermining open source is right. It is absolutely highlighting the danger of one person projects. Benevolent dictators are widely appreciated but only because they are benevolent.
I feel kinda sad for Matt, this is clearly a mental breakdown, I think he started this for the right reasons but the outcome haven't been what he expected and now he doesn't know how to end this and it's too stubborn to back out.
"This is unprecedented", perhaps if you don't count Freenode's new (2021) overlord taking over registrations of active, maintained channels and then banning their former maintainers.
First I though he is just a petty little matt, then he made a bit sense in the interviews. Now he seems just insane. Its like I dont even say wtf u doing, its just like I feel sorry that he is going through a mental breakdown. Can’t judge further - he just lost his mind. Hope he gets help.
Honestly, ruthless plug-in takeover by the repository, isn’t & shouldn’t be illegal, what should be illegal is to force only one repository in your platform
Only if it is cheaper than actually giving their fair share back to the community. If 90% of the value of your product depends on open source, I think you should be giving a good amount back to those projects that you use. How much would it cost a company to build or pay for all the open source stuff the internet is built on from OS, to Networking, to DB, to Server down to the programming languages themselves. I can count the number of multi BILLION let alone $100s of million a year companies that actually give back a reasonable amount on 1 hand. Look at companies like CPanel who have raised prices over 180% in the last 2 years, rely on 99% open source and put little into development, because it is easier to buy up competitors instead of improving products. These are companies that SQUEEZE customers for features that took a few minutes to add to their product because SOMEONE ELSE did the work and released it for free. Companies like GTmetrix who charge for open source website scan and are so lazy they don't even change the style sheet of the scan report to match their website. Companies who's entire existence is adding a checkout process to FREE Software.
Anyone else hear "this is totally crazy" in DHH's accent crAAzzy. I feel like what is tragic is how many people are in the "he's right but I want him to be wrong because of how he is handling it" camp. All I see this doing now is breaking apart the giant WP glacier because of the trickle down of trust erosion.
The only ones who are saying he's right are the people who are automatically on the "VC Bad" bandwagon. Its open source, you can't just stop people making money off it. For better or for worse, that's not how OS works. Thats why Redis and co had to change the license. Even if you accept the Trade Mark infringement argument (which seems like it would be difficult since he's not going after anyone else using the trade mark), the things he has done are not the actions of a sane rational person trying to actually achieve a reasonable outcome.
even if it is a mad king crusade, this is a risk with open source providers or any centralize provider tbh ... morally dubious in the end ... however matt did say he was mad of WPE leeching bandwidth and free distribution. noone is bound to give away power, infrastructure, etc on opensource initiatives.
What is stopping the community from forking WordPress and starting a replacement run by the community? I can imagine great ideas for the potential names. After the printing press we had the dot matrix printer, then laser printer and now most people read on high quality displays. Lots of options in there. Leave this nonsense behind.
Isnt this kinda similar to the drama around facebook in the early stages but much wider in scale, we know they had a bunch of legal stuff happen after and i can definitely see a big lawyer play happening for one or many parties.
I’m new to programming, I was hoping to have less human interactions in the computer sciences. It seems here is also full of emotions!! I should probably move along and look for a physics degree!!
It’s alright, trust me. You can get along just fine and still avoid a lot of the drama. This is just a particularly exceptional (and attention grabbing) situation that’s getting a relatively disproportionate amount of attention.
If people move away from wordpress - the 43% of internet with jquery, they will probably use some modern tools that run on npm / react eco system. That means npm / react % on web will increase in next few months ?
At this point wp-engine could fork wordpress and spin up all of the support sites; they might actually get enough support from the community. I mean this as hyperbole but it doesn't feel far fetched.
To speculate further on your hyperbole, they want to make next to 0 contributions to WordPress directly and donate 0 to the foundation, you think they want to invest the time, people and money into maintaining WordPress on their own? It would be 20000x cheaper to give WordPress 8% or contribute the equivalent of dev hours needed. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily watch them fork it and fail miserably. Automattic does a great job of building and maintaining WordPress and that result is not so easily or cheaply reproduced. At the end of the day WP Engine only exists and is profitable because the entire enterprise is build on top of WordPress (free platform, free update servers, free bandwidth, free maintenance, free support, free security patches, free promotion) etc etc.
