I gave the domain Wordpress.com to Matt 20 years ago. This domain is worth millions according to some estimators online, but I gave it to him for Free to support open source.
He then sued me and I lost my job, my house, and almost my marriage.
I do not think anyone could hate Matt more than I did. I went to therapy for years, but eventually learned forgiveness.
I am confused about what is going on with Wordpress. It does look like Matt is acting like a dick.
But I am not sure he is wrong.
Matt may have a right to protect Wordpress - FOR THE COMMUNITY.
It looks like Matt’s post is about being betrayed. I know how that feels.
I love open source. I am confident that we will learn from this, and hopefully Wordpress community will be able to move on.
Who attacked WordPress, exactly? Nobody. That's right. Nobody attacked Open Source. The only one who is doing wrong to the community and attacking OSS and Wordpress is Matt. He is mad that other people are using OSS and profiting from it more than he does. That's the real reason why Matt is so angry.
I'm sick of arguments, "Company X profits from OSS project Y and not making contribution to it". They ARE NOT required to contribute back. There's no such conditioning in OSS licenses. Deal with it when you are open-sourcing something. Make peace with the fact that somebody will probably make more money from that piece of code than you do. If you're not OK with that, don't open source it.
No OSS license has an issue with people making money from it. Only small greedy men who took 100s of millions from VCs have an issue with it.
I disagree with your insinuation that OSS projects have to be happy about big tech deciding to offer their product as a managed service. I think that's ridiculous; OSS isn't an ideology, it's a type of license.
I do agree that OSS licenses do and should allow for big companies to do this, and that Matt is doing the business version of a football flop by complaining someone other than him is making money from an open source project.
The point of open source is to be useful for each other, not to collect free labor for your own projects.
He then sued me and I lost my job, my house, and almost my marriage.
I do not think anyone could hate Matt more than I did. I went to therapy for years, but eventually learned forgiveness.
I am confused about what is going on with Wordpress. It does look like Matt is acting like a dick.
But I am not sure he is wrong.
Matt may have a right to protect Wordpress - FOR THE COMMUNITY. It looks like Matt’s post is about being betrayed. I know how that feels.
I love open source. I am confident that we will learn from this, and hopefully Wordpress community will be able to move on.