It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.
After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?
I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.
No big deal on splitting the community in half? Matt will not go and you will have half the people supporting him, half forking the project. Actually less than half on each side, when you count in the people that will completely leave the ecosystem...
Sure he controls a scary amount of the ecosystem NOW, but we've seen big vendors express interest in hosting repositories, and major plugin vendors move quickly to secure their distribution and update models.
My tiny agency has already mitigated many risks and shifted our support towards developers who see a future PostMatt™
We'll be fine because WordPress belongs to us, not Matt.
Sure, WP isn't going away overnight. But it's dead in the water at this point. Literally like a dead whale, still going to support an ecosystem for some period of time. Though, it's peak is behind us and the unwinding was accelerated immeasurably.
They aren't acquiring new customers faster than they are losing existing customers. Squarespace and similar products are to eating it's proverbial lunch among a large portion of their audience (small to medium businesses who just want a website that is easy to update).
If some of the biggest hosters forked wordpress and started adding features that their customers are asking for, that wordpress the organization were ignoring or slow to produce, I think it would be a good thing. Providing wordpress the org with some motivation to compete.
This would be an okay strategy if his core product wasn't in such a state of disrepair. I've seen multiple issues on Github projects from Automattic developers saying "this would be easy to fix upstream but we're not allow to fix anything in WordPress right now." It's pathetic and actively harming his own business.
I wish this all had happened before Full Site Editing was put into .org.
^<-- hard to justify doing so when Wordpress' package ecosystem (the open source platform) is tethered to Wordpress.org (matt's personal website)
https://www.theverge.com/news/642187/automattic-wordpress-la...
As UX Designer and UI Developer who does all the above (also do UX Research which anything where you interface with humans i think is safe for awhile) it's slightly disheartening to see my skill-sets future worth.....
Where I work we were told we can't use GPT and that is fine, but in what a year to three or five Im sure their stance will change.
I have had some success with some UI components but I usually need to massage them a bit and anything big or requiring a lot of changes it starts to trip over itself.
Is that fair? No probably not, but I don't know what to tell you. That's always been a rule of thumb for me: if the marketing presence of anything, services, products, tooling, what have you is cheaply/poorly made, I avoid it. I always have almost instinctively.
Personally it's a wake up call for my skill-sets of over 15 years and that increasing my skillsets to 2025 modern day skill sets is best thing for me and any in my field!
Loss of words.
I'd be happy to have your standards in life.
Can you give me one example of a decent logo design made by ChatGPT that does exactly that — look good or better than your typical professional design consulting firm? I have literally tried today, but the results have been... very meh. :)
The stripes one is rounded (looks shit when small), the complicated one is complicated for no reason.
Good logos work when black-and-white and when very small or very large.
And one more thing: The high cost of a rebrand isn’t paid for the logo or the redesign of stationary. It’s for the pain & process of aligning a committee of aloof decision-makers around a single choice.
Everyone in these threads that dismisses AI needs to remember 5 years ago we didn't have somewhat human level intelligence that we could command to complete tasks in 30 seconds. There are a lot of cases where it fails right now, but imagine what it's going to look like in 5 or 10 more years. I think it's good to at least play around with it (prompt experimenting) to see what it can do, because your competitors, coworkers, etc are going to do that and get ahead whether you like it or not.