alt Hacker NewsExpect to see this kind of drama happening regularly and frequently as the gazillion dollar commercial industry continues to subvert every ideal of the original open source ethos.
Some of the best and now most commercially critical open source software started a long time ago, by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Turns out, we did not arrive in that future.
We arrived in the one where both $xxxB companies and their countless cargo cultists explot every means possible to profit from open source software, making angry demands on volunteers and small teams, while giving back as little as possible.
It's essentially a test to find every open source developer's breaking point. Recently, we found Matt's. Next month, it'll be someone else's.
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RMS was and still is right.
If you care what someone else does with free software beyond making the source available, that is a you problem.
Matt is worth $400 million off the backs of open source developers. He is the big bad in this scenario.
He's just mad someone else is also making money.
What?
WordPress was a fork of B2 and quickly intended to make money.
Matt and Automattic bought into WPE. They were the ones who sold their shares to the Private Equity firm that now owns it!
The only other board member of the Foundation is ... drum roll ... the Managing Partner of another Private Equity firm, that Matt himself appointed.
All his hand wringing about PE is to distract from the simple fact that he has repeatedly been an asshole through this process, and it's not because he "reached his breaking point" as an open source developer. This is so apologistic it's not funny.
He reached a breaking point as a CEO, because he made a horrible business decision to buy Tumblr, which has been nothing but a money pit, ever since.
Since then, MATT's for profit business has had this boat anchor around it, so he's looking for extra cash.
That's why he demanded their royalties be paid to Automattic, his for profit company, not the open source project.
> by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.
Horseshit. People with RMS-like visions for the future don't see the commercial potential for an open source project, immediately spin up a Foundation with themselves as President, and immediately grant their own for-profit company a perpetual, exclusive and irrevocable commercial use license for said open source project. (They may however release self-congratulatory press releases talking about how they are champions of open source for assigning ownership of the project to their Foundation while neglecting to mention the licensing that they[1] signed off on, that very same day.)
You have apparently fully bought into the narrative.
> making angry demands on volunteers and small teams
What "angry demands" has WPEngine made of the project? I'd love to hear of at least one.
[1] I say 'they' but really, the licensing was signed for the Foundation by "Matt Mullenweg, President", and for Automattic by "Matt Mullenweg, President and CEO".
I do see OSS as free labour for Bezos, Altman et. al. and act accoringly.
Closed source (but open data formats) may be the new open source.
We can only blame ourselves here. We knew that the companies would exploit it all along. Since before Free Software became a thing. Actually, this knowledge is the very ting that started Free Software. And we watched how Open Source came along to cozy up to businesses and bolster adoption. All this time we knew very well that no one’s going to pay for what’s available for free.
And even after we’ve seen it happening time and time again we keep insisting that FLOSS is the best thing out there.
We’ll have to move on to something else to see a meaningful change. I’d suggest excluding businesses from using software for free. You can keep your collective development, community building, and all the warm fuzzies. But you have to start requiring paid licensing for businesses if you want to stop the exploitation. You simply can not win on the moral basis in a system that has no strong moral aspect to it, such as free market capitalism.
Agreed, but Matt is not the innocent and distressed open source maintainer who hit a breaking point, he's the extremely wealthy CEO of a company that brings in hundreds of millions a year in revenue. The CEO who recently tried to extort another large company for tens of millions of dollars per year to be directed to his personal for-profit company.
The problem with Open Source as a movement isn't just the megacorps using it, it's also that paying for the project's ongoing development stopped being the goal for many monetization efforts—making the shareholders or the maintainers themselves (or in this case both) wealthy (or in this case even more wealthy) has become the new goal.
That is why it's such a problem that these companies don't "give back". Having the software in the world doing its job is no longer the primary goal of starting an open source project, and the "takers" are encroaching on the founders' market cap.