wp + microsoft = wp hypocrisy

[DannyGSmith]

I agree the first post link was off base. Tim O'reilly, may be blowing in the wind. It may all be just a way to leverage Matt's popularity to help sell Azure. I am just surprised they are going to run a separate stack besides the .net, but I can see how that might not scale well. Anyway, I am biased as well. I have been a unix sys-admin for the last 17 years, so take it with a grain of salt.

[matt]

Really guys? Inquisitr is horribly biased against WP for some reason. I wish they would at least email someone before posting a story like that which says some horrible things. The original non-tech source looks like they confused Cheezburger Network, that uses WordPress, with Automattic and WordPress.com.

[Brad]

Rumors fly faster than pigs

Inquisitr edits the first post
http://www.inquisitr.com/48394/mullenweg-fails-again/

and writes a second

http://www.inquisitr.com/48474/boo-h...t-of-interest/

[Jeffro]

God, reading anything on the Inquisitr is very frustrating if not infuriating. I wonder if that guy even knows what planet he's on.

Unlike Mullenweg though I know that I’m fallible and can make the occasional mistake, and I’m happy to admit it. Mullenweg though continues to take a highly hypocritical role between his role at Automattic and his role behind the WordPress open source effort.

Has this guy never seen anyone bring up the mistakes of Matts past? He has admitted a number of times that he has made mistakes and hopes to not make those same mistakes in the future but no one is perfect so they are bound to happen. Give me a break!

James’ crime according to Mullenweg is that he both offers money for the development of, and sells (be it via a membership) premium WordPress plugins. We documented part of the spat here, and James has now been completely banned from WordPress.org sites

If he were banned from the entire domain, I'm sure the Edublogs site on the Showcase would have been removed as well.

[davecoveney]

Funny, Amazon's S3 cloud isn't open and, if no longer used by WP it certainly used to be. For every that was OK. As soon as Matt gets up and shows that WP can run on Azure he gets attacked - by some, at least.

Too much anti-Microsoft bias in the industry doesn't help.

Anyway, I do think Matt has to look closely at why he keeps finding himself at the centre of unhappy arguments. A lot of it has to do with his non-consultative approach - or at least, the appearance of being non-consultative. When those 200 themes were pulled from the repository, I don't remember any advance notice. When he asked for submissions to the WordPress Themes Markeplace, we got in and put our weight behind it but we were never ever told that it was being dropped. Imagine investing a week or so of your life to someone only to find that your exclusive (because that was a condition) contribution is left lying around until eventually you just give up waiting. No e-mail, no clear communication, nothing.

The stuff that goes on about premium themes and the like is not about GPL purism - it's about a view and level of control that is somewhat parallel to Apple's approach to the iPhone. It makes for a good phone, but leaves us with a somewhat dissatisfied group of developers who are wondering if they'll be more appreciated elsewhere.

Ultimately, we all need to make a living from providing our services. If we choose to become Sharepoint* implementers the only contributions we have to make to MS are the annual £200 fees for all their software. Clients have to 'contribute' too with license fees, but that's their problem, not ours. £200 is less than a day's work. To be seen as pure in the WP world you have to contribute rather more than half a day. Let's see now, which makes the most business sense when you're trying to find money to pay your mortgage and feed the kids?

* Sharepoint was the first to come to mind because I'm pitching WP against Sharepoint for an Intranet right now, but you could say Sitefinity or others. Plenty of software out there, and we have choices.

[Ryan]

That guy is a total muppet. I recall reading an anti-Matt article of his a while back and wasn't impressed.

I hope Matt doesn't take too much offense to junk like this.

[duncanriley]

[QUOTE=Jeffro;8678]God, reading anything on the Inquisitr is very frustrating if not infuriating. I wonder if that guy even knows what planet he's on.

Actually, I know the very planet I'm on. Perhaps admitting an error is foreign to you, I know that Mullenweg groupies fail to understand the idea of making a mistake, after all your god can do no wrong.

Seriously though, what don't you get? I ran a report based on other reports that said Mullenweg and Automattic sold out to Microsoft; the issue (and error) was a matter of degrees: I picked up others saying that Wordpress.com was going to Azure, I've said that was wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that Mullenweg is now pushing Microsoft while pushing out anyone who competes with Automattic.

If you really have a serious issue, explain to me why Mullenweg's actions in Wordpress.org don't conflict with his role at Autoamattic. Explain to me why Automattic gets free links from Wordpress.org while others get banned?

Convince me, I'm open to it. And I've joined your forum to ask for that VERY reason.

[PaulCunningham]

All that happened was Matt stood in front of a crowd, that included bloggers and developers who use WordPress, and showed how Azure can be used to backend WordPress.org blogs and help those sites deal with scaling, performance and availability issues.

Great news for Wordpress.org bloggers - another choice in the market of paid cloud services and highly available hosting options.

Nothing to do with GPL, Edublogs, perceived conflicts of interest, Automattic's revenue streams, or Nazis.

[samh]

Can I quickly just chip in (as I'm now awake!) to say that the original link that I posted was just the first I'd heard of it. I wasn't aware of of any preceeding anti WP bias from this guy...apologies to any offence caused from posting that particular reference to the news. "WP breaking news naivity" syndrome I guess.

[wpmuguru]

[QUOTE url=http://brandingdavid.com/blogging/my-thoughts-on-the-current-state-of-the-wordpress-project/]To speak to the James issue, it’s not as personal as they’ve implied. The main reason we no longer promote their sites on the homepage of MU is that it was confusing to people. I’ve had countless folks tell me they came across (wpmu, wpmudev, wp.mu, edublogs, wpplugins, et al) and thought it was an official resource because they all link together and their confusing naming and gratuitous use of our logo. Besides, it is nobody’s God-given right to be linked from the homepage of our plugin directory and mu.wordpress.org.[/QUOTE]

That's Matt's actual statement on the reason he has removed links to incsub run sites. IOW, nothing to do with selling plugins or being a commercial enterprise.

In September, Matt asked James to change the look so that their sites did not look official. The tone of the response was "go to hell".

I applaud Matt for having far more patience than any of his critics have. How many of those critics would have stripped out every link to the offending party's sites within 24 hours?