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.
He's not scared of forks. He's kinda trying to force fork.
He wants WP Engine to either fund a fork which means they would have trademark issues since their fork won't be WordPress, or for them to partly fund the development of WordPress, which is what this entire battle was kinda about.
That would be beautiful next level to his insane public breakdown.
Honestly though, I feel very genuinely sorry for him, and very sad for him.
Clearly something has cracked and it’s unimaginable being on the pedestal he’s been on for as long as he’s been on it. His friends are not looking out for him, which makes me wonder if he has any friends capable of telling him “stop”.
Matt, if you’re reading (which, c’mon, we all know you anlmost certainly are!) please stop.
It’s not too late to save yourself, to save your mental health, and to save your reputation.
Don’t dig your heels in, and don’t play chicken on the railroad tracks the lawyers are laying out for you.
Stop, and focus on the next stage of your journey, your legacy, and let the great work you did speak for itself, rather than be tainted.
You are not Wordpress, and your identify should not be so tied to Wordpress to the degree that is suggested by the way you are conducting yourself in recent times.
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.
I guess everything itt should be taken with a grain of “personally” salt, because that clearly is an accusing statement not tagged as a personal opinion. I wasn’t following this topic at all, but what gp is saying contradicts your hypothesis at least, so there’s no “personally I” escape route.
More meta, it feels like all this civilized discussion on HN et al is just a facade, because in rare situations like this people suddenly start theorizing, rationalizing their position, jumping gray-voting wagons and so on. I mean, it’s their right, but it looks like a booing mob rule rather than a society of standards that everyone relates themselves to here.
I stand by my statement that you have quoted. The “personally” bit was that I, personally, can no longer have full faith that his Wordpress commits are his work, given his recent conduct.
There is nothing accusatory about my statement that he has managed to closely associate Wordpress the product with Mullenweg the man. And it’s an undeniable fact that he’s managed to wring an enormous amount of profit from that relationship, and, indeed, boasts about it himself in the blogpost linked from this post!
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.
I was pretty much blissfully unaware of Matt Mullenweg before this recent nonsense. I knew him as “the Wordpress guy” but beyond that I didn’t really care much.
I now know far more than I would ever have liked to know about him, including his apparent sexual proclivities, how his mother allegedly talks to the staff, and goodness knows what else as his reputation is dragged through the courts.
Did I prefer Wordpress before I became intimately acquainted - albeit secondhand - with Mullenweg’s reputation. Absolutely.
Did I trust Wordpress more when I thought it was a community of developers rather than something dictated by the apparently unstable whims of a vain 40-something year old manchild? You bet I did.
Do I think Wordpress will burn to the ground, dragged down by a capricious manchild? I’d lay even odds.
> 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.
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.
> Like clockwork. [...] The HN community's response to the Raspberry Pi [...]
Dudes. It's not the same picture.
In sum, there are two groups of users who have purchased/considered the R.Pi products: (a) people who have homelab infrastructure, (b-c) people who enjoy a learning platform and may also like the Pi 400 and Pi 500.
The R.Pi's support and community are worth the increased cost.
> "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"
Netscape didn't just try to "latch onto" the popularity of Java.
Netscape _and_ Sun, together, called it JavaScript. The point was that the renamed language had rudimentary bindings that you could use to connect functionality in an HTML page with the applets embedded in it (which were effectively silo'd in HotJava)
Except they didn’t merge patches from RealThunder’s fork for TNP, for example. They used it as a guide and reference implementation and wrote a new implementation.
In general they do not just merge his work; they have to rewrite it. RealThunder is prolific but he evidently doesn’t use the same coding standards as the rest of the project, and makes changes across workbenches where he chooses for his own ideas, when in the core project they have other maintainers.
He has the total freedom to do this, and I agree his fork is illustrative of good solutions in some cases, but this is not a good way to just fix master. So they don’t.
Transparent previews in Part Design — and a general mechanism for them elsewhere - is coming in 1.1.
I notice you talking about the attachment editor choosing a random orientation a lot: in my experience it does not choose randomly, if you use an appropriate attachment scheme. I think I have rotated a sketch attachment once in my last two dozen or so uses, and that rotation was indicated by the design. The heuristic is complicated though, and the interface has several frustrations. There could be better UI for working through the attachment schemes.
1.1 has a change to core datums (Part Design-style LCS, datum planes, lines and points available throughout FreeCAD, not just in Part Design) that should make some of the more esoteric attachment schemes less often required, because you will be able to place an LCS once
It’s also true of transfers (changes) on routine journeys in most of the world I would have thought. Because almost all services are regular. It is the arrival time at your destination you build time into, then you work backwards, right?
IMO booking strict tickets (e.g. booking a seat) makes sense on only a small handful of routes in the UK, for example, and may even result in you being offered fewer possible options.
There are some quite infrequent routes in rural areas where missing a connection is a bigger problem, but on those journeys I tend to consider my arrival time at that connection to be the starting point.
For the train journeys I take it’s pretty normal to have two or three changes, often including a trip across London. I rarely get into a situation where missing a train is a problem, because of the nature of the train timings. The last time I was delayed significantly was due to catastrophic flooding.
The fundamental difference between air travel and train travel is that missed flights have to be rescheduled. Missed train journeys, not so much. In the UK if you miss the train you had booked a seat on, you can usually still travel on another one if it's a travel period covered by your ticket (e.g. only travelling at peak with a peak ticket). You just don't get a seat guarantee.
---
An aside:
Train travel is a flow state/mindset thing. Get one train earlier than you strictly need, find something to do while you're on the train (bonus points for something you can still do while standing). And then try to remember your journey is no more important than anyone else's, maybe a lot less, and you have no more right to timeliness or expedience than anyone else... maybe a lot less. As long as your journey is progressing, things are fine.
The other week I was on a train and there was a thirty-something woman and her parents, taking up a lot of space around me and chatting incessantly and being silly, and I was just about to performatively put my headphones on (the rudest you're allowed to get when people are crossing the threshold of appropriate levels of noise) when it dawned on me that they were being silly because this thirtysomething woman was going to a hospital to find out whether her tumour had returned. And then it dawned on me from their route-planning discussion which hospital it likely was, and what that likely meant for her, and I hugged myself and read my book.
I was on a train about 15 years ago, on a local journey, that was held outside a station about three quarters of a mile from where I worked. Stuck for three hours on a cold train in winter with no working toilet.
About an hour and a half in, people were getting very angry, until a member of the rail staff walked the line back to the train, boarded, and went through the carriage explaining carefully but respectfully exactly why the train couldn't get into the station and why we couldn't all walk along the track. Once they knew why, the angry people started chatting and sharing snacks and talking to strangers like they were old friends for whom life had suddenly become too short to be angry.
> if your train leaves at 0700 you can’t plan to get there at 06:59
Millions of train commuters in the UK optimise for just this sort of thing. Not one minute before, because the doors typically close 30s to a minute before departure, but 06:55 for sure.
I am not a commuter, but later in the day I don’t leave the house much earlier than twelve minutes before the train I want to get will leave the station, which is a third of a mile away on foot, and I will have time to get a ticket from the machine.
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.