This thread was mentioned yesterday in another thread, but lost in the shuffle is that MM and one of Automattic's legal team have been posting today, including Peretz apparently trying to clarify Matt's position and how much Matt actually rules over. They are correcting some "typos" that caused a lot of confusion, among other things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41781008
Somebody asked: "I will ask on behalf of the entire WordPress community – is there any part of the WordPress cluster of organizations that do not ultimately answer to Matt?"
Neil Peretz: "I will work with colleagues on a response to your question. It's a broad topic given how many facets there are to the WordPress community."
and
Neil Peretz: "So you interpret "is there any part of the WordPress cluster of organizations that do not ultimately answer to Matt?" as being a YES or NO question?
I interpret it as a request for information about what is Matt's role in the ecosystem and I was gathering information to share about that.
However, if you are not interested in factual information, the answer is: YES, there are various parts of the the WordPress cluster of organizations that do not ultimately answer to Matt."
Finally, a few hours ago, he mentioned he would come up with a blog post to try and clarify things:
Neil Peretz: I appreciate the question and it deserves a lengthier blog post reply that I will work on and share. In the interim, some brief thoughts on the topic that may be relevant.
The WordPress community operates on an open source, non-commercial basis. The community decides what is included in each release of WordPress, how it's tested, what documentation accompanies it, etc.
Because the WordPress Foundation, not Automattic, owns the WordPress trademarks for non-commercial use, Automattic has no control or veto of what code is stamped with the WordPress label.
By contrast, if Automattic retained non-commercial control over the WordPress trademarks it could refuse to affix the WordPress label to work done by and released by core contributor groups.
In case you are not familiar with how WordPress decisionmaking works: Volunteer contributors self-organize into groups that set their own goals, interface with other groups, allocate resources, plan a schedule, and resolve issues according to a Community Code of Conduct (see https://make.wordpress.org/handbook/community-code-of-conduc…). You can learn about how decisions are made in the WordPress project at https://learn.wordpress.org/course/how-decisions-are-made-in….
I am going to operate under the assumption that others may have similar questions, which is why I think this is a good topic for a blog post.
——
I'm just posting this here because there's a lot of good info in that Hacker News thread and I think you all who are interested in the topic of what Matt controls should go hit up that thread and ask questions. Having Automattic's associate general counsel posting all the way up to a few hours ago is some recognition of the community being angered and confused about how all of this stuff is shaking out.
The moderators are going to bury this in the megathread
edit: pleasantly surprised!
“The community decides what is included in each release of WordPress”.
Yeah, okay.
I’m pretty sure ChatGPT wrote Neil’s non-reply of a reply to the question.
Wow. Matt is just getting cooked (rightfully so) in that thread. And my guess is that he’ll have absorbed absolutely nothing from that experience.
Please, beyond the Politics, if anyone of power is reading this, WordPress Core needs : Social Login, Mega Menus, ACF PRO and FacetWP as part of Core.
Let us take it to the next level, in addition for Social Login, we need the ability to be able to map users to Role Type.
I am a big believer in the Plugin Ecosystem, but the listed functionalities are critical.
Hang on a sec, did Neil say that the WordPress Foundation owns the trademark for non-commercial use..? So who owns the trademark for commercial use? Is that separate or can it be? Can a trademark be split by use case?
But man, the longer this isn’t settled in court the more negative publicity WordPress or rather negative perception WordPress is gathering from outside the ecosystem.
What stood out to me the most, and why I started this thread, is apparently it will take multiple people to come up with an explanation for the WP community to explain what WP organizations *do not* report to Matt. Because apparently they don’t have a chat that says “this is what Matt controls, and this is what he doesn’t”.
After they come up with an answer that they are legally satisfied with, I’d love it if they came up with an answer about *why* Matt should be able to control as much as he does.
Is this a wordpress.com subreddit or a wordpress.org subreddit
😉