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No reason given?

• chris_wot 7d ago
  Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
  • bigiain 7d ago
    I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
    • ChallengeEup237 7d ago
      There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.
• downrightmike 7d ago
  He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
  • nijave 7d ago
    He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back" Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
    • rossriley 7d ago
      Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
      • ChallengeEup237 7d ago
        I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
  • wpm 7d ago
    Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
    • pathartl 7d ago
      They do not. It's GPL
    • Arnt 7d ago
      Only to the extent the company pledged to do so. It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
      • ceejayoz 6d ago
        > Only to the extent the company pledged to do so. Is this not the standard expectation? Does one typically add a gratuity when contributing to OSS? > It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal. So they kept the promise?
        • Arnt 6d ago
          I don't know about standard behaviour, some people consider behaviour normal that I consider slimy. I heard at the time that a WP Engine employee had told someone that his/her pledged "full time assignment" had shrunk to a small number of hours per week after a while. That's hearsay, I heard it from someone who doesn't work at either of the two companies and it must be third-hand. But if that were the case, and if the pledge didn't say how long the full-time assignment would be kept up, some people would say that the promise was kept. Those people probably also would say that you shouldn't trust a handshake agreement, and please have a lawyer check the written agreement, and if you run an open source project, copy the policies Oracle has for JDK. What I say is that there's a conflict waiting to happen, if one of the parties expects the pledge to be kept up for a significant period of time and the other expects to tiptoe away shortly later.
    • ibejoeb 6d ago
      Open to correction here, but I understand it to be like this: the kernel of the contention is about the use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, not the software itself. Essentially, WP Engine is a commercial entity profiting from the use of the trademark. Regardless of how it has been handled, it does not seem to be a frivolous claim.
  • duskwuff 7d ago
    WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
  • jemmyw 7d ago
    Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine? I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
  • ksenzee 7d ago
    He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
  • pocksuppet 7d ago
    That's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.