#wordpress drama

My Freedom of Speech

October 20, 2024 | Asides

WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. It is inconvenient and important. It’s also short, so I’m going to quote the First Amendment in its entirety:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This means that, with rare exceptions, the government cannot tell you not to say something.

Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach

The First Amendment says I should be able to state facts and my opinions about WP Engine. However, the New York Times is not required or compelled to publish them in their newspaper and distribute them to their subscribers.

WP Engine is free to publish whatever GPL code they want to the world. WordPress.org should not be compelled to distribute it or provide it free hosting.

Quiet For A While

After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction. I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights to promote others’ speech. However, I hope others speak up on our battle with WP Engine, and I will boost their speech wherever I can.

Matt, c’mon. https://xkcd.com/1357/

You know you’re not oppressed in the least, right? I mean you’re not THAT out of touch with reality, are you?

You are a person that wields massive power and influence - over your employees’ financial security, over thousands of businesses that rely on WordPress as users, agencies or hosting platforms.

You have a reported nine-figure net worth (granted, not all liquid assets). That is more money than actually oppressed people will ever see in their lifetimes, or their great-grandchildren’s.

You could walk away right now, cash out, stick it all in an index-linked pension fund, sit on the beach and just enjoy life!

Or do something really memorable like… I dunno, giving all your money away to pay for underprivileged kids to go to college. Set up a scholarship program for HBCUs. Maybe you could start over and teach photography or something.

It’s clear to most of us who don’t hang out at Davos that money and power enables people to turn their worst instincts into reality, and that it distorts reality around them. I fear you have fallen victim to this.

You’re used to getting your own way because you’ve pushed away the people who did stand up to you, leaving only the people who rely on you for their kids’ medical bills, who can’t say no to you.

Unfortunately, you can’t wish us ALL into the cornfield.

The best thing you could do for WordPress right now is step away from it, truly separate the Foundation from Automattic, open the membership up, and have members elect a Board that will be stewards of the project as common infrastructure; that operates the repositories in a nonpartisan way; ie they don’t play favorites or use access to it as a cudgel to hurt the competition.

Because if you don’t, everyone else will rally behind a group that will, it’ll be forked, and quite possibly Automattic will be locked out of the thing it helped create.

Imagine if a collective of big agencies like 10up.com, WPP, Ionos, E2M, et al —who collectively build things for thousands of capital-I Institutional customers like banks, universities, government agencies and large businesses, AND their customers — decided that all this capital-D Drama was bad for business and decided to back a stable fork instead?

How’s the ecosystem? If all I ever used was ACF would the included field types cover most vanilla use cases (forms etc?)

How easy is styling with SCSS?

This is technically legal because ACF had a GPL license, but it’s… petty doesn’t begin to describe it.