9mo ago

“Nice Guy” Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress.com Cries Foul and Threatens Me With Legal Action

medium.com

34 comments

So the guy running WordPress.com (business model: Uber for LAMP stack, not to be confused with WordPress.org, winner of Drupal's Drag Race) is angry that WP Engine (business model: Lyft for LAMP stack, not to be confused with MediaWiki, the engine of WP) offers hosting for the same GPL licensed CMS as they do, am I understanding this correctly?
- Also, I just now realized that Automattic (business model: Uber for not posting female-presenting nipples) is a pun on this guy's name.
  
  and perhaps a little bow to lem's “cyberiad” (automateusz, translated as automatthew, from the story automatthew's friend)
  
  my brain keeps telling me his social media username photomatt must be a pun for matte photo paper or matting your photos for an exhibit, but something tells me Matt thinks matting your own photos is for poor people (because it’s a lot of frustrating labor) and I doubt anyone’s demanding prints of his “rich boy with an expensive Nikon” photos
- I recognize this style. Shame they stopped posting their weekly hackernews sneer.
I really don't like what Matt is doing. Many developers are considering leaving the community.
- Masterclass in foot shooting on display, really.
- yep. Even if WP Engine disintegrated into dust tomorrow, Mullenweg would still be the guy that fucked with the open source alleged charity that everyone relied on for a business grudge. Undoing that requires getting rid of the dependency on wordpress.org or getting rid of Matt.
As someone who is running a simple WordPress portfolio / brochure style site, what are some alternatives?
- there's a ton of 'em
  the sticking point will be a plugin or theme you depend on
  third-party WP dev is extremely widely available, but not so much for other CMSes
  
  Some kind of a community fork might happen, but I wouldn't count on it.
- Depends on what you're doing with it. You could get away with a SSG for some use cases, but Wordpress with plugins can get pretty crazy and out of scope for simple SSGs.
  
  or if you want comments edit: self-hosted, not third-party
- I saw someone suggest Publii today, but I've never used it
- If it's a sinple site https://gohugo.io/ might be an option.
- Hugo
  It doesn't make sense for a site that gets new content 3-4 times a year to get generated from scratch to each single visitor
He's now forking the ACF plugin https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/
- More like took control and rebranded the ACF plugin
  That's ridiculous
  
  here's the statement from ACF
  https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-longer-available-on-wordpress-org/
I read the whole thing.
Enh.
Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.
- the what now?
  
  Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted
  I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
  and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.
Fields API lead stepping down
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/13/fields-api-team-seeking-new-leadership/
ACF already had so many problems incorporating into Gutenberg. I can’t see SCF having any sort of future when the team maintaining it is actively developing a fundamentally different editor experience.

34 comments