Comment by echelon
3 hours ago
He's indignant that WP Engine is eating his market share and not giving anything back in terms of OSS contributions.
It's not at the same scale that AWS and GCP suffocate database vendors, but it rhymes. And it's easy to see why he's mad.
If a very vocal part of the OSS community wasn't so averse to letting small amounts of monopolization happen, we might see open source products that reach significant commercial scale. Where a single vendor or entity can profit and grow big without irrelevant competitors abusing the license to latch onto the product. An open source monopoly could collect good margin and build ambitiously.
It's hard to build a defensible open source business without using fair source licenses, having source available enterprise offerings, or even using an open core design that keeps important parts hidden and out of the commons. That's the only way to defend the magic bits and grow big.
If OSS folks were more tolerant of this, we'd probably see more funding for OSS and extremely viable and defensible open source businesses.
I highly doubt that version is true, though he likes to repeat it. If he doesn't like WP Engine eating his market share while giving little back (they did give back, just apparently not enough, whatever that even means in a volunteer ran open source project) then he would've not responded by pulling his own contributions off of WP.org as well, stealing their plugins, banning their developers, and so forth. Like, what even is that? You don't want to play in my sandbox according the rules that I set so I won't play in my own sandbox either? Not to mention that if there's anyone doing monopolization in the WP world, it's Matt himself, by buying up basically every WP company there is.
His so-called "democratize publishing" persona is just a complete facade.
Nope. WPE gave hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the Foundation and community. Hell they put $70K to the PDX event that he got in stage and shit talk them, after banning them from attending and sponsoring the event. They give to the OSS community in plenty of resources.
Guess who owns an irrevocable, free, exclusive and universal commercial license for WP? Automattic. They got it the same day the project was gifted to the Foundation. Matt’s claims pushed for WPE to give damages to Automattic, not the community or foundation.
WP is OSS because it is as built on other projects and had to be.
Matt is not the victim here.