WordPress drama

`5:47:58`

to become such an integral part of commerce too. I mean, back when open source was initially finding its feet, it was at war with commercial software. Stallman is at war with commercial software and always has been. Bill Gates was in return at war with open source for the longest time. The open source licensees and the clarity that they provide allowed us to end that war. Today, commercial software and open source software can peacefully coexist. I make commercial software. I sell Basecamp, I sell HEY, and then I also make a bunch of open source software that I give away for free as gifts. That can't happen if we start violating these contracts. No commercial company is gonna go, "Let me base my next project off this piece of open source. If I'm also running the liability that some mad maker is gonna show up seven years in and demand, I give them $50 million." That's not an environment conducive to commerce collaboration or anything else. And it's just basically wrong.

`5:49:00`

I think there's one analysis that's all about kind of the practical outcomes of this, which I think are bad. There's also some an argument that's simply about ethics. This is not right. You can't just show up afterwards and demand something. This is not too dissimilar in my opinion, to the whole Apple thing we talked about earlier. Apple just showing up and feeling like they're entitled to 30% of everyone's business. No, that's not right. That's not fair. So I think Matt unfortunately kind of steered himself blind on the indignity he thought was being perpetrated against him because there was all this money being made by VP Engine making a good product and not giving quite enough back in Matt's opinion, tough cookie. — I think there, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but there might be some personal stuff too, which they weren't only not giving enough, but probably implicitly promising that they will give

`5:50:01`

and then taking advantage of him in that way in his mind, just like interpersonal interaction. And then you get like interpersonally frustrated, that forget like the bigger picture ethics of it. It's like when a guy keeps saying, you know, promising you'll do something. And then you realize you wake up one day like a year or two later. Wait a minute, I was being lied to this whole time and that I don't even know if it's about money. — I'd get mad too. It's totally fine to get mad when people disappoint you. That's not justification for upending decades of open source licensees and the essential de facto case law we've established around it. This is why I chose to even weigh in on this because I like WordPress. I don't use WordPress. I'm not a part of that community. I don't actually have a dog in this fight. I'm biased if anything towards Matt just as a fellow BDFL. I would like to see him do well with this.

`5:51:01`

But I also think there's some principles at stake here that ring much louder. I don't want Rails to suddenly be tainted by the fact that it's open source and whether companies can rely on it and build businesses on it. Because wait, maybe one day I'm gonna turn Matt and I'm gonna turn Matt King and I'm gonna show up with a demand ransom letter. No, screw that. We have way more to protect here. There's way more at stake than your personal beef with someone or your perceived grievance over what you're owed. — What would you recommend? What do you think he should do, can do to walk it back to heal? — Decide, this is the curious thing. He could decide to give this up. That's very, very difficult for driven, ambitious people to do. To accept that they're wrong and to give up and lay down their sword. So I had a hope earlier on in this that that was possible. I haven't seen any evidence that Matt is interested in that and I find that deeply regretful,

`5:52:02`

but that's his prerogative. I continue to speak out when he's violating the spirit and ethics of open source, but I wish he would just accept that this was a really bad idea. He made a bad bet and I thought, I think he thought he'd just get away with it. That they'd just pay up and that he could put pressure. I mean, I know that temptation. When you sit as the head of a very important project, you know that that comes with a great degree of power and you really need a great degree of discipline to reign that in and not exercise that power at every step where you feel aggrieved. I've felt aggrieved a million times over in the 20 plus years of Ruby on Rails. I've really tried very hard not to let those... sometimes petty, sometimes substantial grievances over time seep in to the foundation of the ecosystem and risk ruining everything.