The comments on the original post [0] are telling. Flying monkies without substance. Matt himself calling the post borderline hate speech? It really waters down the meaning of hate speech and underlines the unchecked ego on Matt. The dark triad strikes again!
This was a fascinating read. I imagine Ben Cook feels pretty validated at the moment. What's most interesting to me is the thin-skinned response of Mullenweg even back then. Having read the blog post in question, the idea that Cook's "writing borders on hate speech" as Mullenweg claimed, is histrionic nonsense, and Cook goes out of his way to give praise where it's due, starting his blog with this line: "Neither WordPress nor Automattic would be where they are today without the tireless efforts of Matt Mullenweg. I have personally benefited from his work and for that I’m truly thankful."
I run a WordPress agency and although I think the current childish spat will take a very long time to cut through with our clients, if it ever does, I feel huge vicarious embarassment that it's come to this. The fact that Mullenweg doesn't see the conflict of interest, or does see it but is too comfy being in complete control, is a great shame.
To be clear, I think Mullenweg may have a point about WP Engine - I'm not close enough to it to know one way or the other - it's the way that he's chosen to handle it that's embarassing and concerning. As I've said before, adding the pineapple checkbox - in response to a court order - just makes WordPress look fucking ridiculous.
Edit: the other amusing thing was the fanboys commenting under the blog post about how there's no conflict of interest and how Matt would never do anything like this.
I agree that wp engine is taking advantage, but that's where negotiations would pay off instead of the bruhaha we're left with. It wouldn't be that hard to present WP engine with some stats "x resources used by WP engine clients" WP engine has the resources to either mirror the plugin/update resources and patch the server URLs in code, or support WordPress.org with donations to offset their resource usage. But I have no idea if anything like that happened before Matt went all 'guns blazing' and now we get to reflect on his past blunders in great detail.
The real problem with WP Engine is that they have been doing very well as a service. Many people believe them to be the most trusted hosting especially in the premium sector. This is earned reputation that Matt would much rather have for his companies.
All the stuff of them not contributing (while they maintain some of the most essential plugins) and them taking advantage… Is simply desperate search for arguments. Wordpress is open-source project licensed under GPLv2 you can use it however you want in limits of that license. And point of GPLv2 is that you can use it pretty much how you want - redistribute it, sell it, modify it. The main limit is that you have to publish the improvements you make to the software.
Its like if Linus Torwalds was suing Amazon AWS.
WP engine is simply not doing anything wrong otherwise Matt would sue them to the ground years ago. WP engine is just too successful for his tastes.
Sometimes a navel can be confused with an event horizon.
Always, always, all-ways wear thick cottony garments so that you remember to pick lint out of your personal "event horizon" - it's a navel! relax, a little - everyone's got one.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20101201093607/http://wpblogger....