WordPress retaliation impacts community

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.

"Capturing value" I suppose.

> even that response to DHH

Can you link to what you're referring?

He appears to have replaced the original post, which was a lot more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/UZZit

i think the original got taken down but you can find it on archive or just searching around

> 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.

Just taking a page out of the app store playbooks. I guess Matt hasn't been keeping up with courts starting to rule against those stores.

Funnily enough, your archive is already a friendlier version, there is one with even more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/7ZRbY

> "Capturing value".

Matt behaving like a PE fund, or any standard Big Tech company. In other words, enshittification as usual.

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."

but content is sacred right? /s

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.

> 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.

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.

"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)

They only contribute the most because they reject anyone else's contributions.

For real this hits home!

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.