Maybe its a newfound persona, maybe its a new marketing angle, or maybe its just someone going a little unhinged. But all isn’t right in the WordPress world
I think he's right about the movement, right about better monetization for open source, right about the trademark issues, and while rude, his comments are harsh truths about DHH and his work in OSS.
Obviously, they way he's handled everything has been bad - very valid to ask why he didn't act sooner about the trademark issue. And, snide comments about DHH not donating enough to charity are irrelevant. But he is right about a the core issues.
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.
And this?
> Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”? Shopify used Rails to build a $7B/revenue and growing business, why didn’t you?
And this?
> 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
Matt isn't talking about sustainability for open source—no one could accuse Rails of being unsustainable—he's talking about open source as a vehicle for developing personal wealth.
If at this point you think Matt is motivated by anything other than greed, you haven't been reading enough of what he's writing. The trademark thing and "sustainability" is a very thin veneer on top of a man who thinks $400 million net worth is still too little.
He made his point poorly, but ultimately it's about OSS projects making more money and not running on people's generosity until they get burnt out because they have to do the OSS work and their real job to pay the bills. That it's a single maintainer or a group of people that get rich is irrelevant, to the real issue and only got brough up because Matt was trying to be insulting, which as I said, was wrong.
> If at this point you think Matt is motivated by anything other than greed, you haven't been reading enough of what he's writing.
I think this is an instance of, in some aspects and theoretically, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
You can't tell me with a straight face that this line is talking about paying the bills? "Most of the value has been captured by others"?
The man thinks about open source in terms of value captured rather than value contributed. He seriously thinks that success in open source is measured by the market cap of the attached for profit.
This is as transparent a window into Matt's psyche as I hope we'll ever get, and if you're still buying his lies after reading this I don't know what else to tell you.