throw646577

All of this I agree with.

Oh fuck off, I am not Matt and it should be obvious.

> so why is it so unlikely that he could have potentially hired people to write code that he claimed under his moniker?

Sure and he could have bought loads and loads of monkeys and given them typewriters.

Why are you fantasising?

It's a pretty straightforward story here.

???

This is a fair bit of silliness now I'm afraid. Like him or loathe him (and he's making it so very easy to do the latter), Mullenweg was one of the only developers of WP for years back when it was starting. He wrote it part time, he actually quit his job to work on it full time, and he was still a teenager. His energies are why it exists.

Has it all gone horribly wrong in the last couple of years? Yes. Has the money situation complicated things? Yes. But we can state these things without constructing an alternate, incorrect timeline.

He's surely acting like this in part because he does so closely identify with something he risked his livelihood to build as a pretty prolific young developer.

There are plenty of things he's done recently that are ridiculous and bogus enough that they can be criticised without imagining stuff.

Focus on the actual issues.

IIRC yes.

Whatever the latest move is, it's clearly a dick move. He is in a bad place, if he wins anything it is going to be a pyrrhic victory, and he needs to stop.

If he really does still have Neal Katyal working on whatever the merits of his actual case are, I am gobsmacked that he is being allowed to behave this way. Katyal is not an idiot or a troll, and this picture does not make sense to me.

Some of his bullshit has already been smacked down by the court: I don't get why he is still doing this.

Matt: stop.

> Mullenweg is a cuckoo. He did not create Wordpress and yet has managed to closely associate the product with his own persona and ever since has spent most of his life wringing money out of Wordpress.

This is quite inaccurate. Sure, WP started as a fork of b2, but it's not true to say Mullenweg is a cuckoo. WordPress is something he personally did extensive development work on to evolve it to where it is today, and he hired many of the people who did most of the rest of it as it became commercially viable. Even early on it was a quite different product to b2, which was at best fledgling, and it is fully fair to say that he is one of its creators. He wrote loads of it at the beginning; it's his thing as much as it is any other developer's, if not more. We should not diminish that achievement by pretending he is just leeching off something that in fact he substantially built.

Now, whether he is cuckoo is another matter; as you say, he appears unhinged. Something has happened to him such that the more self-absorbed tendencies that used to work quite well in a BFDL context have gone very wrong. He always used to be able to come across as the guy who could help sell this so it will all work for everyone in the ecosystem commercially, and could be likeable and encouraging as a community figure, but something has broken.

I am sad for him because this kind of loss of control is ultimately humiliating him. It's time to take off all (or all but one) of the hats, and find something else in life.

You are right about WP Engine: I am no fan having had considerably less than optimal customer service experiences with them.

But this is fucked up.

Like clockwork.

The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi is the most sustained example of tech industry gift-horse-examination I can think of.

Here they are with a wide range of SBCs and microcontrollers at a wide range of price points, with a level of industrial support, OS support, community support and documentation that none of their competitors match, committing to (and displaying the fruits of that commitment to) support each piece of hardware for over a decade, and HN is like:

"Who cares I got this N100 on Aliexpress from a company with a procedurally generated brand name who don't respond to support requests, will never issue a firmware or driver update, and will be impossible to find before my next birthday, if I can figure out who actually manufactures this at all"

Dudes. It's not the same picture.

And sure, secondhand PCs. Good. But that is a completely different, entirely subjective comparison.