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.
They don't "support WP". All the fees are going to Automattic, as was revealed in term sheet Matt himself shared.
The "volunteers" on the WP project that approve all of the work and revisions are full time Automattic employees. The work that the Foundation does primarily benefits Automattic.
There is nothing to even support besides Automattic.
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 Foundation's public filings are online, and I think they only had $22k in donations last year. Doesn't mean his contributions were all charitable, but they don't appear to have gone to the Foundation at least.
How much would you bet against most (or all?) of Matt's "donations" being money he spent to keep wordpress.org running? (which he explicitly admits is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is owned by Matt personally)
I love that people can say anything they want online. “It is unethical to publicly speculate on my mental health” is a sentence that sounds like it could be true, but it certainly is not. That’s not true! People are very much allowed to wonder out loud about extremely public behavior that has real impacts on real people.
That argument sounds more like “it is unethical to treat me as anything but God’s Special Fancy Boy, as my crusade is righteous and my foes ontologically evil”, which has the opposite effect when you’re trying to discourage people from asking “What the fuck is going on with this guy?”
