If you really want to see the shady, dishonest side, try to have a discussion about nulling plugins. You'll get called every name in the book for adhering to the GPL.
The part which did it in for me was learning that Matt personally owns Wordpress.org. It's not the Foundation. It's not Automattic. It's Matt, personally.
> The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
The a large percentage of these listings are fake. They're run by a single company who has blanketed Chicago with "lead generation" listings across several local service business industries.
You can report them to Google. Nothing gets done most of the time. Redressal form? Same thing. Escalate on the forums? Same result.
And this is only one such lead gen network that I know of. Google doesn't care.
The article update links to a Google Doc in which Matt takes issue with the following remark from the article:
> he's a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor
Matt responds:
> WP Engine is a “competitor”, but so is every other web host in the world. Automattic and WordPress.org have had good relations with all the others for 21 years. WordPress.org recommends a number of hosts.
It seems Matt is forgetting his "friendly" spat with GoDaddy a few years ago.
Matt continues:
> His criticism of certain practices focuses on maintaining the platform’s integrity and open-source commitment to ensure the community can grow further with sustainable investments.
Let's assume this is all true. It doesn't change the fact that he's attacking a direct competitor.
Matt continues:
> Silver Lake is far wealthier than Matt or Automattic.
This is how you know that Matt wrote the response. It's the same ego defending behavior that he used when responding to DHH.
Matt is very, very bad at PR. It's really time he learns that and lets others take over those roles. And it's time he learns to shut up. He hurts more than he helps.
Matt made a post a few weeks ago about his charitable donations.[0] It's really just a "I'm better than them" post. And it doesn't say where any of it was donated.
> The launch is an intense marketing push with a component of artificial scarcity.
I consider artificial scarcity to be an unethical practice. It's literally lying. It uses fake timers to pressure people into buying or fake limits to suggest that they need to buy now. Does it work? Absolutely. Is it ethical? Not a chance.
Wordpress.org isn't a legal entity. It's simply a domain owned by Matt. It seems Matt has a license to use the Wordpress trademarks.
The Wordpress Foundation is a non-profit legal entity with a tiny budget. It appears the only thing it does is serve as a holding entity for the trademarks and the for-profit company than operates the WordCamp conferences.
I suspect that Automattic is the one who foots the bill for the infrastructure behind Wordpress.org, but that's not clear.
Matt talks about transparency, but how everything operates is a muddled mess.
"Due to recent events in the WordPress ecosystem, WP Engine employees have been blocked from accessing WordPress.org. This means the ACF team is unable to deploy updates to the free version of ACF hosted on WordPress.org and users running this plugin on their sites were removed from the ability to automatically update to newer versions."[0]
Matt really meant it when he said he was going nuclear.
Matt Mullenweg is angry at WP Engine (owners of ACF). He thinks they don't contribute enough to Wordpress development, so he's enacted a "nuclear" approach to dealing with it. WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt, so not Automattic is claiming they know of a vuln in ACF and will disclose it in 30 days.
He demanded either 8% of their gross revenue, the equivalent in development time for employees who would be directed by WordPress.org, or some combination thereof.
He also demanded auditing of WP Engine by their direct competitor, Automattic.