The main issue at play is that Matt used the blog of a GPLv2 project to attack a competitor of his own for-profit venture for playing by the rules — disabling revision posts is an official and documented WP feature. The point is: if Satan themselves decides to use and make a profit off based on WordPress, he is allowed as long as they follow GPLv2, which is the case with WP Engine. (Satan as an alternative example for a PE equity is not by coincidence, btw.)
This is unacceptable behavior for a FOSS project leader, not to mention his explicit conflict of interest by running a for-profit company rival to the one he tossed under the bus exploiting his power and position in the community.
If you can't see what's wrong here, I'm sorry, I can't make this clearer.
Unless I missed something, no one claimed it's not legal.
There are lots of things that are legal but nonetheless not nice.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean you can't say "that's not nice" or "you shouldn't be doing that".
"It's legal" is not an argument here. It's completely besides the point.
That his own product ALSO gates access to, unless you pay the top tier for?
I don't think it's fair to criticize the competition for that, and not acknowledge that you do the same, no.
To use your own logic, if the founder of a FOSS project leader wants to have a conflict of interest (which is a negatively biased framing of them earning a living off their two decades of hard work), they’re allowed to. If they want to criticize someone else making money off that project, they’re allowed to. It is downright bizarre that you think it is acceptable that “Satan” can profit off Wordpress but with the creator of Wordpress you suddenly take issue with a “conflict of interest”.
To further use your own logic: Is Matt violating the GPLv2? No. OK, then why are you whining about him? He has the same freedoms that you ascribe to WP Engine or others. It just looks like you’re carrying water for an evil private equity firm with a long track record of being evil. All to attack someone who actually created a massive positive impact on the world. Yea no thanks - no one is convinced by this weird demand that Matt needs to step down.
You may not care about the history of your website, many people do.
No he didn't. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked Michel Valdrighi's b2 cafeblog in 2003 to add new features and an admin panel. Wordpress is GPL because b2 was GPL. Matt built most of the early XHTML while Mike integrated patches and worked on the backend. Mike and Ryan Boren wrote large parts of the code early on. Christine Tremoulet came up with the name. Without them b2evolution or one of the other forks would've most likely raced ahead.
Towards the end it says:
> I really like WordPress, as I’ve stated many times, but Matt has become an irresponsible and damaging actor. He urgently needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership, or he risks undermining WordPress’ popularity and driving the community away.
But it makes at best, a really weak case for how he is “irresponsible” or a “damaging actor”. Sure there may be some minor controversies like this redirection thing it mentions, but that really doesn’t seem like a big deal or anywhere close to requiring anyone to step down. I find the accusation that Matt Mullenweg is doing something wrong by mixing in commercial interests to be ridiculous - he CREATED Wordpress. That was 20 years ago. Given its success and adoption, I think he deserves the commercial spoils of it.
> WP Engine was acquired by a private equity firm, Silver Lake.
It is hilarious that this blog post does not actually talk about Silver Lake or private equity at all. PE is a cancer on society - all they do is acquire assets and financially optimize them to squeeze money out at the expense of everyone else - employees, customers, society. They don’t actually add value to the product or affected people around the product. Silver Lake is one of the worst of them. This is a firm that was literally called evil by Wired magazine (https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/), for firing employees right before the Skype sale in a purposeful scheme to rob hard working people who built the company of their equity. Why should anyone trust WP Engine or its leadership? Let’s start there, because it sounds a lot like Matt Mullenweg is right.