Matt Talks About WordPress Situation

A couple of hours ago Matt dropped into a twitch stream and offered up an interview [VIDEO] > Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there" > Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"

Matt Mullenweg did a video segment with ThePrimeagen yesterday. I found Matt’s stance a bit confusing in areas but admit it may just be too early in the morning for me to process. [VIDEO]

I'm referring to this comment [LINK] >It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated. If you check Wordpress' Youtube channel, they uploaded the Q&A [LINK] There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine. I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it. >at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen. Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core. Matt gave an interview to about it [VIDEO] and although he sounded very unprepar

Another interview: [VIDEO] 27:00 "Matt Talks About WordPress Situation" by ThePrimeTime 2024-09-26

As I understand it, Mullenweg has explicitly said in his video interview [0] that no other company is currently paying an 8% license fee. The WordPress Foundation trademark policy page [1] states (since Sep. 24) that its only commercial sublicensee is Newfold Digital, and Mullenweg mentioned this in the same interview, but I don't think that the sum that Newfold pays has been disclosed anywhere. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]

It's not new, Matt has been trying to reach an agreement for years.[1] To be fair, he has done everything he can for the health of the ecosystem for all these years. WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part. Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that route then also Automattic doesn't have to put up with funding WPE operation anymore. I'm tired of people justifying WPE attitude and behavior by saying "legally, they don't have to contribute", well let's talk legal, everything happening to them is within those same lines too. Why are you complaining if it's legal? This is one of those "fuck around and find out" situation. Matt just run out of fucks to give, and decided it's better to teach the bully a lesson even if it comes at a cost. [1] [VIDEO]

> Is there a law that says you have to give back? No. There is a law that says you can’t violate the trademark, so that’s the law that we’re using to try to encourage them to give back. [VIDEO]