aldavigdis

I'm sorry. I will never get married with this demeanour.

I love it when a non-lawyer mansplains contract law to me. Do you want my number too?

Do you think I'm fucking stupid?

Matt didn't "make" WordPress. He started the project, which was based on another piece of software, with his friend Mike and now thousands of people have contributed to it in one way or another.

I actually doubt there's much left of Matt's own code besides some of the crap that should be removed, such as hello.php.

Author here. The US/CA statues of limitations are also extremely short compared to what I am used to, so I was too late for to perform any legal action over this stateside after I recovered somewhat from all of this. (There may be a way to go against the EU subsidiaries, but I'm not doing it alone.)

(Anyway. Matt. If you're reading this, then I've seen you've been very generous with your checkbook for the past couple of weeks. I am open to burying the axe to a certain extent but that would require paying for estimated unpaid overtime and on-call hours, providing proper compensation for keeping me for almost a year on a trialmattician contract and destroying my mental and financial well-being among other things. You know how to find me. If not, I'll see you in Brussels.)

I think you still need the sync to happen to use any of the modular plugins.

100%! I made the journey myself after finally getting an honest feedback of a coding challenge I did for a job application, but I do think that my own background in other languages and frameworks helped.

I do worry about the thousands of people out there that have no other marketable skill than WordPress and are not going to climb out.

I would argue that his recent behaviour warrants Automattic (and WordPress, as its dependence) being classed as a Designated Gatekeeper by the EU Commission under the Digital Markets Act.

Yeah. The Irish one is called Aut O'Mattic from the top of my head. Very Professional.

I would go as far as saying that PHP has developed into a very good OOP programming language in the past years (from C with dollar signs to something more Java like). Frameworks like Laravel and their ecosystems are actively using modern PHP and utilising the newest PSR standards.

The issue is how WordPress seems to be stuck in the ways of the mid-2000's. You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

Then there's Audrey Capital LLC, WordPress Community Services (which is a B corp owned by the foundation), an array of Automattic subsidiaries around the world.

His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount.

I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.

Hi Bullenweg. If you reach out, then I'll tell you one or two things on how the sausage is made.

I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.)

In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it.

WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.

I still find it confusing that you can both claim to be GDPR compliant and also that only US law apply to your operations. Automattic was also claiming compliance via the EU-US Privacy Shield which had already been made invalid by the European Court of Justice for a while.

Author here. To clarify, the trademark rights were transferred to the WordPress Foundation 14 years ago and then licenced to Automattic to use for WordPress.com. (The internal verbal story was that it even involved a separate shade of blue to identify .com from .org.)

The foundation was open about the use of the WordPress logo, wordmark and the WP acronym until a couple of weeks ago. (Here's the previous version of the trademark policy (https://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpress...) and here is the current one for comparison (https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/))

Just like with attaching a permissive license to your code means that you can't just yank it back when you feel like it, there's a long history of case law proofing that you can't do the same with trademarks, especially when there's a whole economy that has built up around your FOSS project.

Author here. I know how the sausage is made.

The thing is that when you set up Jetpack and authenticate, you sync your self-hosted site with a clone that resides on the WordPress.com infrastructure. This is to facilitate the backend services that Jetpack provides.

This is needed for things like the Elasticsearch index and all sorts of things.

So, say you do your best to make your site compatible with your local privacy regs because you may be taking medical appointments or if you are selling adult toys on your WooCommerce site and some genius installs Jetpack, personally identifiable information makes to non-EU controlled and hosted infrastructure.

We may go as far as saying that Automattic is pushing the liability from themselves to you as a site owner. (In other words, you are responsible for your own customers' data but not them.)

There are certain requirements for GDPR compliance that I still have a hard time seeing as being fulfilled. (And I did work in GDPR compliance projects before moving over to Automattic and have discussed this with people in the data privacy and security scene that have raised their eyebrows over the whole thing.)

It is very strange to go from being proud of working on this and then not being able to recommend using it for much other than the CDN that doesn't require the sync process.