That crosses unduly into personal attack, even by the monumentally low standard of this topic. Please don't break HN's guidelines like this. You may not owe CEO egos better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> It is about time for an Ayahuasca retreat or two to beat down some of that monumental ego.
I mean, one of all of my ex's attempts to get people's validation was doing Ayahuasca (by drinking Yagé). It did nothing for her huge ego - not even throwing up like crazy did anything for her.
It's not the first time Mullenweg shows his megalomaniac side and attempt to manipulate the community for his own benefit. I still recall pretty clearly all the Gutenberg drama. Some people will never change.
Sample size of 1. Don't discount the benefits of psychedelics. You must be willing to open yourself up to change and it's not an overnight thing. Takes time, many doses, many experiences, lots of introspection and meditation to wake up.
> second, the entirety of WP was produced from "free labor" by people all over the world. matt is just the beneficiary. grow up dude. it is about time for an Ayahuasca retreat or two to beat down some of that monumental ego.
Open Source does not mean free labour. WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities. WordPress would not exist as it is without Matt. To the point, if Matt didn't like you, you would find it hard to contribute.
He may be a dickhead and in the wrong. But acting like he's benefiting from other people's free labour just shows you've never paid attention to the development of WordPress.
It turns out that Matt personally owns Wordpress.org. I think that would surprise many people who contributed to Wordpress. It certainly surprised me. And likewise the Wordpress foundation has only three board members and only Matt is active.
A massive reason WP became the de facto web CMS was the community, including volunteers supporting plugins they wrote and published for free.
For example, in the early 2010s I manned a help booth at wordcamp. I frequented the forums and gave folk advice on issues they had with free plugins.
This is entirely distinct from Wordpress core and I would say that the ecosystem of plugins was the driving force behind WP’s rise to dominance. I neither wanted or needed Matt Mulenwegs blessing to participate, but he seems to have forgotten that lately.
> But acting like he's benefiting from other people's free labour just shows you've never paid attention to the development of WordPress.
Is Matt responsible, financially, for a large portion of WP development? Yes. Is he benefitting from free labor from OS contributors? Yes. Is the WP ecosystem enriched as a whole by commercial and OS contributors? Yes.
There is this whole issue - which plays into the dispute in multiple ways - that treats Matt, Automattic, WordPress, wordpress.org, wordpress.com, WordPress Foundation, as essentially interchangeable and synonymous. That's part of the problem.
This lawsuit is between two for-profit companies, Automattic and WPE. Automattic has investors and revenue streams. As does WPE. This isn't "Matt is financially responsible for WP development".
Your statement further highlights the issues actually. Matt owns, outright, wordpress.org and uses resources from Automattic to manage wordpress.org. One avenue this slap fight has taken is via Matt blocking WPEngine from wordpress.org. Matt, not Automattic. The WP Foundation is a thin veneer around Matt as well. There are a bunch more oddities in this whole thing if you care to look into it.
IMHO, Matt needs to step back from this whole thing and let the lawyers work out the dispute without his emotions clouding things. He also needs to clear up ownership of wordpress.org, ideally by transferring it to the WPF. And finally, he should step down from his role at the WPF to help it become a foundation independent of control from Automattic. He's proven to be an unstable steward of the WP ecosystem at this point and lost trust is hard to regain.
I make all of these statement as someone not connected to the WP ecosystem beyond sometimes helping a friend who leverages WP for his clients.
Sure... That's why nearly all the top contributors through out time have been paid to full-time work on WordPress by an entity related to Matt... Because free labour...
Using WordPress and paying attention to Trac are two different things.
But that time is long gone and WordPress being what is it today fundamentally depends on paid labour and not free labour. It would have withered to the side like other CMSes that depended on free labour. Nearly every top contributor that we can see in the WordPress commit history was paid.
You’re mistaken friend. Just because that time is “long gone” doesn’t mean it wasn’t paramount to the success of this platform. A disproportionate amount of work towards the WP ecosystem has been unpaid.
You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".
I disagree. They're fundamentally the same at the core. The argument at hand is whether or not Matt is where he is because of free labour. And the answer to that is a clear no. Automattic would not be a multi-billion dollar company because WordPress powers so much of the internet that Automattic gets lots of hosting customers. WordPress has such a big market share because Matt has invested heavily in the open-source version of WordPress.
And since the argument is based on wether of not Matt is where he is because of free labour the other person needs to prove that he is. I can't prove a negative. I can prove that nearly all the top contributors to the project have been paid by an entity related to Matt.
While you've attempted to frame the argument as something else, I believe that would be considered a strawman fallacy.
