Almost certainly the lawyer either A) did NOT ok it, B) OK'd it and then realized that was a huge mistake and reneged, C) was replaced by a different lawyer who made it very clear it was an awful idea.
Matt is pretty clearly a terrible client from a client control perspective. He's simply not good at doing anything but exactly what he wants to do.
As I have said elsewhere, he is now in this situation solely due to his own actions, having gained almost nothing and lost a lot. He'll lose more if this goes to trial.
The lawyer thing was hilarious. Someone actually claiming to be his lawyer was on the HN threads and anytime he was asked a question the response was a version of "Oh, I hadn't heard about this. I can't answer that."
> This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What’s next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?
That's not an accurate description. An accurate description is that the court is ordering an open source maintainer to stop treating one particular user in a hostile and exclusionary manner. Now, you can object to that too, but there's a serious difference. It's like fixing a bug, but intentionally excluding some particular user from getting the bug fix - it's not the same as fixing a bug. Fixing a bug anew requires additional work, and forcing somebody in un-contracted work is usually hard. Allowing a user to access the bug fix everybody else can access requires just stopping being a jerk, no surprise the court is much more willing to grant such kind of relief.
Also, promissory estoppel, which an actual attorney explained as such:
Even though you don't have a contract, you make a promise (Matt: wp.org is free forever to anyone), someone (WP Engine) relies on that promise to their detriment, and the plaintiff's reliance on that promise was reasonable. Discussion of promissory estoppel at 44:17 (over the next 3 minutes or so) in [1].
And note that singling out WP Engine for very explicitly a payment is part of the rationale.
Shortly after Mike also discusses the same point made by /u/DannyBee [2], ie that the attorneys seem to be considering this case not in the context of the wordpress business, in which Matt being allowed to say you all have access to the code / updates / plugins at my whim is not great for wordpress the company outside of this narrow cirumstance.
The court is forcing the operator of wordpress.org into providing services, being an open source maintainer is entirely irrelevant here. This entire thing is closer to app store litigation than anything even vaguely open source.
Given the amount of downvotes his comments attract, I wouldn't be at all surprised that he just behaved like a normal human and decided to stop posting on a site where everyone seems to disagree with him.
I feel like photomatt's comments are going to be enshrined in the same way the Dropbox one was. He talked up such a huge game but everyone knew he was in the wrong - we need to intercept cocky executives before they incriminate themselves in media res.
These people care little of the potential consequences, they operate from a particular mental model in that regard [1]. The harm will be done. When they swan dive from a reputational and legal perspective, step back and the problem solves itself.
I agree if we're talking from the perspective of his lawyers. From the wordpress community perspective, I think we benefited from Matt's extraordinary outspokenness here. It made all the bad acts very easy to bullet point in this injunction!
Also worth reading the poster's follow-up years later and the ensuing discussion. Graeme's observation about the significance of the comment is super important:
Time for another episode of "The Case for 9224" (not criticizing you! it's just my hobby, apparently)
That comment has gotten a bum rap over the years. The commenter was trying to be helpful with Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant on HN in 2007). Back then, file synchronization was widely thought to be a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. I've been trying for years to get people to understand this (starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275, then https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), even though I know you can't argue with the internet.
The comment only became infamous years later [1, 2], after Dropbox was clearly a success—so this is a case of hindsight. If people would only read all three comments, instead of stopping at the first, they'd see that the exchange was pleasant and successful [3]. But a meme is more fun. It didn't exist, so it had to be invented! [4]
Compare that with the other infamous-HN-comment-from-2007, "did you win the Putnam" [5], which got pilloried in real time. No hindsight fallacy there!
If the hivemind had empathy (which alas it does not), people would stop to consider how they'd feel about getting publicly mocked over decades for something they posted with good intentions at age 22 [6]. Alas, this is how the internet works—not much we can do about it. It's amazing, though, what a good sport BrandonM has been about it all this time. That part of the story is actually real, so we should celebrate that too.
I never interpreted these comments as mean-spirited, it’s just funny how the comment is completely wrong on hindsight. Kind of like the 640 kB of RAM thing or horses being better than cars.
I don’t think the point is that the people saying it at the time were stupid, it’s just interesting that people can come to completely wrong conclusions which seem reasonable at the time.
It's not completely wrong in hindsight†. It's only "wrong" if you assume "app" means Dropbox itself, and if you ignore the context of the thread. Brandon was talking about an application that framed Dropbox as an alternative to USB drives, and critiquing the pitch.
There was a time on HN where it actually made sense to bat a YC application back and forth, and to talk about what might make a more or less compelling one. It's long gone, and the people dunking on this comment have completely lost touch with what the original community was. I'm not saying that community was better (it was much more insular), but it was certainly more collegial.
† In fact, I think we now know it was literally correct, and YC had the same qualms, accepting Drew Houston just to get access to him and apparently hoping he'd find something better to work on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726961