Maybe he might be winning in courts, but I will never depend on any WordPress.com service again. Don't play with your users and developers that have supported you for more than a decade this childishly. Your public image will not recover from this.
The effort at https://fair.pm is well underway to cut out Matt and wordpress.org as a single point of failure and control in the community. It's a Linux Foundation project, being run by former WordPress community leaders (people who provided years of volunteer labor that directly benefited Automattic), and there's been interest from several large hosting providers, including some that are even larger than WPE. Matt is likely to find that by the time the trial actually starts, that he's already lost.
Thanks to Matt's shenanigans I discovered ClassicPress a few months ago https://www.classicpress.net/ - I had such a good experience that I ended up migrating all of my self hosted blogs to it, as a form of insurance against further madness with the WP Foundation. Note that depending on what plugins or themes you are using, ClassicPress might not work as well for you. You can consider setting up a monthly donation to support development.
Oh man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone lose an internet drama, only to revive it a few months later when everyone had forgotten about it.
Happy to answer any questions from HN folks, to the extent I can. I love this community and have been here since 2007.
I recently worked on a few client projects that used WP/Gutternberg. I was pleasenetly surprised by how good the dev/editing experience has been compared to when I tried using Gutternberg a few years ago, some amazing work has gone into it. Sadly I still have a lot of uneasiness around what has happened over the past year. For most greenfield projects we have been using Statamic CMS
For those who still need word press, I recommend checking out the roots.io open source collective, they have done great work bringing modern PHP development practices into WP projects. Bedrock and Sage are a great starting point to any project.
This dude has to be one of the biggest losers in the modern tech space.
Matt had a golden goose and he decided it wasn't golden enough.
I removed/converted my last Wordpress site (commercial and otherwise) last month.
Just ditched my last WordPress installation in July. Good for you Matt.
Hans… are we the baddies!?
thats great matt. i still wont ever use wordpress because of your choices
Legal to have police harassing you none stop until you become a terrorist?
No thanks every person involved with the harassment should be tried for murder
Perhaps it’s a legal win but the PR disaster remains.
As our company thinks about a new website vendor, WordPress is off the table because of the nonsense.
The controversial topics around wordpress are surreal.
Matt’s behavior was atrocious. I’m with WP Engine on this, and I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic. I don’t pretend to know the law better than they do, but still.
Can someone provide some context for those of us who are utterly out of the loop?
matt relies on the passage of time and the fact that nobody really cares too much about wordpress drama. it's best that people do not forget what type of person he actually is behind the public facade when he inevitably pulls this kind of shit again later.
from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117192124/http://wpblogger....
one of his responses to DHH when the WPE thing went down:
Not for a paywall, of course: personal blog he hosts. Due to editing in the past.
"Win" or, said another way, "The bullshit I started is seeing an end". Whatever works for you, buddy.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
Matt is in large part mischaracterizing, although not outright lying about, the court's ruling. If you follow the link he provided to the ruling itself, many of the dismissed claims were dismissed "with leave to amend" (basically WPEngine has to fix their allegations), and one was dismissed for the reason that it should instead be asserted "as an affirmative defense if appropriate later in this litigation." There were some claims dismissed in a way WPEngine can't fix, but not many, and others were upheld.
I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
In case Matt removes the link to the actual ruling from his post, and also simply for HN readers' convenience, here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/169/wpengine-i...