Yes, it's unlikely to result in any constructive discussion here. At best we could remark that the author appears to be unwell and that taking this down could save him some face.

However, the author is also an adult who is capable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In addition they are presenting themselves genuinely and sincerely here, which IMO is an important consideration for anyone who uses or is thinking about using WordPress.

So yes, it's drama, but it's highly relevant drama to people who are making decisions of what stacks to build on. This is information that people to deserve to have, even if, perhaps, it's not the interpretation that the author intended to evoke.

Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?

It seems to me like Matt is the type of person who likes to hide behind character and other ad hominem attacks rather than addressing actual issues at hand. Perhaps this is because of a psychological issue but I can’t really know. Normally I would think the community would be repulsed by this and would find an alternative.

What is remarkable is that there has not been enough community animus to fork relative to Terraform and OpenTofu. It shows the power of the underlying GPL license and “plugin” approach. Something to think about for other companies that may be thinking about relicensing versus just building a durable ecosystem around their proprietary brand and assets.

> 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”?

Whaaat! Since when is LoC metric of “dirtiness”? Your hostility towards community Matt is what makes you and Automattic “dirty”, your toxic leadership.

Matt is clearly having a mental breakdown. I hope investors force him out.

This is not a serious person. This is not a self-aware person.

I'm just going to tell a little story here.

A long time ago, I worked on a recolorable Drupal theme, which was to be the new default look (Garland). It was completed and awaiting the next major release. Before that happened though, Matt Mullenweg grabbed the theme and the assets from our repo, ported it to Wordpress, and offered it as a theme on wp dot com to his customers.

When this was pointed out as being in extremely poor taste, he hid behind the GPL as the justification. WP was large enough already at the time that they could get away with stuff like this without suffering too much PR damage.

In short, if he's bragging about how much money he's making, it's because he has few scruples and doesn't actually care about credit and respect.

It would be more like if rails had an arm that made money and someone cloned it and also tried to make money? I.e., the whole company was about rails and rails hosting and not about creating things with rails (basecamp) and worrying about other people who create things with rails (shopify, etc.) - that's a very different thing. I can see how then there'd be more pressure to look at trademark differences when the service provided is more similar? Or am I missing something?

This is kind of intriguing to me too...

> I’m unsure why you felt you had to insert yourself into this fight with Silver Lake / WP Engine and take their side, but here we are.

It seems that the fight has been made public with photomatt's constant commentary, at least on HN.

Unconvincing.

At this point I wonder when will Matt Mullenweg will start closing wordpress.com account owned by people that don't align with his opinions.

There already is a checkbox to check for people affiliated in any way with wpengine, i wouldn't be surprised to see a checkbox for a field like "i agree with our lord an savior Matt Mullenweg in the WordPress vs WPEngine case".

I didn’t expect a supply chain attack yesterday. And sure didn’t expect Mullenweg’s reply to DHH to be so childish.

I guess it's a good thing I moved to Hugo a year ago.

1.Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)

2.Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?

They can afford not to.

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that following this paragraph with links to DHH's $2MM sports cars and his home office that costs an integer multiple of what my entire house costs sort of undercuts his argument.

Ah yes, defending trademarks. Really the rallying cry of the people. That's what everyone cares about here. Nice motte and bailey you have there.

Also, Matt is not even reading Ruby on Rail's trademark clause that he posted: "You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association."

Also, also Matt: If you are going to throw down over people about not donating enough to charity, you should really tell people what charities you are donating to. It better not turn out your charitable donations are to your own Wordpress org which we now know is little more than a marketing/PR department for Automattic.

DHH, like anybody else, is imperfect. But the author acts like he is superior. He isn't.

But I will say there is not much worse than a person who feigns respect and then goes on to say things like:

"toxic personality and inability to scale teams"

"it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach" (therapist really being the dig, here)

"Why are you still so small?"

"Instead of bragging about your beautiful office in the clouds, you should question why you can’t scale teams."

If your respect for DHH was real, you would have given your feedback in a respectful way instead of writing some blog post with such incendiary comments.

Just wondering about ruby, linux, etc.

Poor Linus.

I never took much issue with DHH and now I feel I just side with him. Talk about being out of touch with everything Matt.

Except there is a second set of obligations, specifically designed to help avoid business confusion: trademarks. It's not clear why trademarks are considered outrageous. Rails™ matters to DHH, WordPress™ matters to Matt.

“DHH has a toxic personality” in paragraph three. Uh oh.

What's really embarrassing is the same few Automattic employees arguing for Matt online.

DHH doesn't make kilo-millions so his ideas suck.