As a wordpress dev, yeah. I've got a small file that's almost entirely devoted to reversing stupid things he unilaterally shoved into core. Off the top of my head, full screen editing by default, the stupid 'howdy' that crops up in several places, and the silent user content edit that he added to translate Wordpress into WordPress in the content of every single wp install (no, really, go try it. And then listen to the guy talk about how user content is sacred, lol.)

And I say this as somebody who thinks that the block editor is... fine. I use it in a hybrid style, using ACF to create blocks that behave and perform natively but don't require directly using all the stupid build tool cruft.

The court opinion doesn't mean what he is implying, although he isn't outright lying. See my explanation in this top-level comment I just made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927

Agreed about Matt, completely. It should be remembered that although it's framed as a legal win, it's not THE legal win. I am not a lawyer, but I think the practice is generally to make as many arguments as the law will support up front– but not all of them were ever going to stick. And WP Engine can still remedy any deficiencies in their pleading to try to make them stick (I'll wait for legal minds to finish reading this and explain it to me, though).

> I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic

There are 11 claims in WPE's complaint, three were dismissed, and as I understand it, only one of them decisively. Matt wants to spin it as good news, good for him. He's still potentially getting taken to the cleaners if he doesn't settle.

The company, or the software? It's held pretty steady for 4 years, powering some 43% of the web.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...

you didnt even link to the right version of the DHH post! The original had this gem of a paragraph:

> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?

https://archive.md/4yLNR

I wrote to DHH at the time hoping the Hey World part could be open sourced or ONCE as a blogging platform. But he wasn't interested in the idea.

IIRC: guy made a CMS, built a successful company and organization and trademarks around it, decided last year that another company was using it unfairly, created lots of drama, lost his marbles

One of his first posts on the topic: https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/

A collection of crazy quotes and events, biased towards the other perspective: https://mullenweg.wtf/

Edit: and HN commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

I remember this to be a pretty good recap of the whole fiasco:

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

It ain't working for him, but it's all he's got.