this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Bunch of great points, thanks. Funny you mention Linus, I'm pretty sure he's done that a bunch. First thing that comes to mind is the "f*** you Nvidia" on stage 😂 in the grand scheme of things I just hope this blows over quickly, takes power away from all the ceos and companies involved. I don't see anyone benefitting from this in the short or long term, especially the users.
I really don't want WordPress to suffer, I feel like it's one of the last pillars standing against a bland sea of identical social media profiles. Given enough time, completely unchecked, I see WP Engine moving heavily towards enshitification like that, and I think Matt wants to avoid that too? 🙏
Linus is a character, but he's not the kind of character that'd have this kind of public breakdown and start demanding everyone pay him. Which is good, considering that he's also the shepherd of a shocking amount of hard and soft power since the world has decided to mostly run on his little kernel.
I'll disclaim this by saying I hhhhaaaaaate Wordpress, but that's mostly because it's an insecure buggy mess that has made most of my 25 years in IT an absolute chore every time it gets anywhere near me, lol. (And I think Wordpress in general is as bland as a bucket of warm wallpaper paste, and we should bring back MySpace, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)
I think the ultimate end here is going to be that we have a hard fork, and the commercial providers will just fuck off with the code and go make NewPress or something. It'll still be GPL and thus open, so there's a limited amount of enshittification you can do there, but this whole thing kind of covers why I've always been leery of projects that have someone who owns IP rights in it, and also owns the primary commercial provider of hosted services of said product without there being a proper firewall between the two organizations.
That's two VERY opposing sets of interests, and it's far too easy to, well, do what he's doing now and regardless of if he's right or wrong, he's still going to torch a ton of trust in wordpress-the-software since the people who actually use it are not going to give half a shit why they couldn't update a plugin or whatever and got hacked, they're going to (rightfully, in my opinion) go 'fucking wordpress!' and move to something less open, like Wix or Squarespace.