Mad Kings  ## Metadata - Author: [[Crossword]] - Full Title: Mad Kings - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e8331618-e2d6-4d0b-9ded-5e92322fa16e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Shift in Open Source Perception** - DHH's recent critical comments about Matt Mellenweg reflect deeper concerns beyond personal rivalry. - The perception of open source within enterprise environments has notably shifted, affecting WordPress's standing. Transcript: Jonathan Jonathan, did you see that our favorite benevolent dictator is having jabs at Matt Mellenweg again on the Lex and the Friedman podcast? Luke I'm not sure DHH is my favorite benevolent dictator. DHH is my spirit animal. I did. I have not listened to it. I am intrigued, but I have a general aversion to anything that I perceive is overly popular. So what is my own problem? Jonathan So you don't like Crossword anymore? Okay, well, no, we're still, we're still a nice little niche. So that's, that's acceptable. All right. Yeah, no, DHH, you know, just a, just a few friendly jabs, I think. I think he realizes, I think he's feeling it, you know? If I called you a mad king, would you consider that to be a friendly jab? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. For sure. Between friends, you should hear what my mates call me. No, I think DHH is feeling it. I think he recognizes that there's something bigger at stake here. WordPress is at stake, but also the way that people feel about open source is at stake. I feel like that used to be a thing going into sales calls, right? Going into an enterprise environment, meeting with the chief technology officer, the chief digital officer and saying, oh yeah, no, WordPress, it's open source. ([Time 0:00:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61b58fcc-2258-4be3-be30-c7ff0c9d6daa)) - **Community Estrangement Validated** - Matt's unilateral decisions have alienated parts of the WordPress community. - External criticism from figures like DHH validates the community's feelings of estrangement. Transcript: Jonathan What do you think? Is it going to happen? Luke This has reminded me of the little bit of blogging back and forth that took place between DHH and Matt, which I don't think that was all that helpful. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess I wouldn't be too surprised if Matt responded. Jonathan I think, no, I think it is helpful. It's not helpful for Matt, but what it does is it validates the community, right? Like that people are feeling this and people are rightly questioning. Luke Are you talking about the same community that Matt referenced as being like making the decisions with him? Jonathan Oh man, let's come back to that. That drives me nuts. But rightly so, we wonder, well, maybe we got this wrong. Maybe, you know, he has more context than us of what's happening behind the scenes. Maybe this is all in our best interest. Maybe, just maybe we've got this wrong. And having another person at that level, another benevolent dictator, BDFL, sort of say, yeah, no, this isn't okay. ([Time 0:02:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e2332ddc-204c-4c07-9cf7-cb5cafc9524a)) - **Unilateral Action Causes Tension** - Matt claimed that the decision against WP Engine was a community decision, but many community members were not involved. - The lack of open discussion and unilateral action upset many, creating tension and feelings of gaslighting. Transcript: Luke This is making me like a little sad to remember, fuzzily, but Matt's commentary, but a lot of Matt's response was more akin to like, what have you done, DHH? Where's Ruby these days? And it was, I'm not sure that line of inquiry wasn't, I don't know, didn't inspire much confidence in me. Jonathan Yeah, but I mean, a jab and then a return hook is completely reasonable, really. Luke You know, I think you're on to something though we had uh john gruber on recently and i found it refreshing to hear him reference that he considers matt a friend he's a he's an outside observer He doesn't have the closeness that we've got to this and gruber himself was like if he could take matt aside he would ask him like hey what's what's going on? Like something didn't smell right about all this. Jonathan Yeah, doesn't sit right. Yeah. And then, I mean, speaking of not smelling right, not sitting right, what Matt said about recently, he said on another podcast, what was it? The one with Decoder, I think it is. Yeah. He said, this was a community decision to go up against WP Engine. Luke Right. And I'm like, I don't remember being a part of that decision. Jonathan I am a member of the community. I really do feel I am a member of the community. And it was out of nowhere. It was a complete surprise. And if anybody I know was asked, they would tell you, no, WP Engine contributes a lot. Luke And Luke, as soon as I said that, that like, as soon as my response was, well, I don't remember that. I wasn't involved in that. I had this voice in the back of my head to where it's like, well, Matt could just respond and say, well, that's because you're not a member of the community, Jonathan. And to me, I'm like, man, so what does it take? 20 years? Is that not enough? Like putting your – at what point are you a member or not a member of something? And I think that's part of the problem. It's very nebulous. Jonathan Yeah. And Neelai was right, though, to push back on Matt. And he said, well, you've been always about decisions in the open. That's your thing, right? And he was really clever. He put that up front and he said, do you still do that? Matt said, yeah, yeah. And so then he said, well, where was this decision made in the open? Right. Show me the Slack logs. Show me the P2 posts, you know, the community comments. It never happened. And this is the definition of gaslighting. Luke Is like when those first couple of posts came out from matt on dot org to me there may have been someone else who looked at him and to me they very clearly were like matt wrote this and executed Like he made this call this didn't seem like something that josepha would have been involved in for instance even though she was the the director at the time it's like unilateral action Surprised by it yes and she even publicly said so that there were there. She publicly called up. This is the first time that I'm hearing about like a certain decision or not. And that unilateral action, I think, was at the heart of what many of us found so upsetting. He set some initial context with the blog post and then jumped into unilateral, at least what seemed like unilateral action. But for him to now say it was us as a community doing it, it's like, well, there may have been people who were saying thumbs up. And I would hope that I wouldn't have been one of those in that situation. But it's hard. I don't want to be, I don't want to judge those who may have done so. ([Time 0:03:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db76b102-09ca-4428-a2f3-3fec482e68da)) - **Plugin Team's Broader Role** - Jonathan describes the plugin team as custodians of the plugin directory covering reviews, security, and tooling. - They manually review new plugins and increasingly scrutinize updates, balancing automation and human oversight. Transcript: Jonathan But I want to ask you, did you see the news with the plugin review team's name change? Luke I did. I was happy to see this. You, of course, have been on the plugin team, formerly the plugin review team, for over a year and a half now. The team formerly known as the plugin review team, yeah. It's a team that always has held a soft spot in my heart, even before you got involved. Mika Epstein did huge amounts of work on that over the years, and I was happy to see when more people began to get involved and the scope of it expanded. You guys do quite a few things, not just reviewing plugins, but you also work on tools. And I guess, how would you describe like the scope of the team today? Jonathan Oh, that's a good question. I think of us as the custodians of the plugin directory. Okay. Because what we do includes plugin review for new plugins, also increasingly more plugin review for updates. That's something that I could, I'd like to touch on actually also, but then also security, people with questions about transferring ownership and all of that sort of thing, as well As all of the tooling, both internal and public tooling that we publish, for example, the plugin check plugin. Okay. Luke So for those who don't know, let's walk through an example here. Let's say I spin up cursor and I vibe code a sweet new WordPress plugin. And I'm like, the world's got to have this one. I go ahead and submit it to the directory. What happens next? Jonathan You wait next. You wait to have your turn in the queue. And then someone like myself will reply and say, hey, are some changes that we suggest for your plugin now are you guys just throwing that into your own like chat gpt and coming right back With something or like how what's what's going on behind the scenes there yeah we don't use any ai uh we sorry correction we do use some AI to identify trademarked plugin names, actually. So for identifying trademarks, we do. But aside from that, none of the code review is done by AI for the simple reason that AI is not as good as pre-written tests. We just have a series of scripts that run across a code base and output, you know, results that we then can email you. Of course, we check over the results because there are often false positives. And we provide you with tools to be able to check the results yourself, which is called the plugin check plugin. And it's actually a pretty sweet plugin. I've, uh, I've played with that. Luke Okay. So I submit my plugin. I get feedback from a volunteer on the team. I then like, Oh wow, there's a real person here. I go in and make the changes. I get it resubmitted. Then finally I get it approved. This updates thing does is, is every time I need to do a new update, is that what's the current state today? Is that manually checked or like does that work? Jonathan We don't check updates, no. So we rely on ([Time 0:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9eea8fb-7899-4149-9658-1e8ac9865bf9)) - **Maintain Plugin Integrity** - Plugin developers should expect manual review and respond to feedback to maintain approval. - Security and trust require monitoring plugin behaviors and taking action when policies are breached. Transcript: Jonathan That your plugin was going to do this and then you changed it. Now it does that. Please change it back or we'll close your plugin permanently. Things like that. Right. Luke Because seems like something that's especially ripe for manipulation if it's not being monitored, right? That's right, yeah. I'm guessing at least historically, there's been a lot of, there's a degree of good faith that you're operating on. But if something grows and increases, I think the incentive to try and game the system just seems like it goes up. Jonathan Yeah, and one thing that we're experimenting with at the moment is using some tools to run against updates and against the diffs and the code that was changed and give a bit of a score. And then we'll just check the highest likelihood of problematic code scores, you know, do things like that. Maybe even down the track, we might hold a plugin update for review. We might say, thanks for submitting your update. We're going to review this one. Please hold while we do that. We're not currently doing that, but maybe we might as we get faster and as the queue reduces. ([Time 0:11:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2b2940b-4e81-46c6-b3c9-233ffff0d4ff)) - **Incremental Plugin Update Rollouts** - Incremental rollout of plugin updates can catch problems early, benefiting large user bases. - Inspired by app store models, this helps reduce widespread impact of faulty updates. Transcript: Jonathan And the other big news that's kind of exciting is at the moment, one thing that's being worked on is a delayed rollout of updates or an incremental rollout. That's pretty cool too. Yeah. What does that mean? Luke I saw, and that's something that Matt himself got involved in directly, if I'm, if I'm recalling. Yeah. Jonathan Yeah. I mean, it was proposed by someone a lot, a few years ago and ignored and then on track. And then Matt also suggested it. I think behind the scenes, I think that it's okay for me to say this. I'm pretty sure behind the scenes, Elementor are the ones who were really sort of pushing for this change. And Elementor, they contribute a lot back to Core, including sponsoring me on the plugins team. So thanks, Elementor. And so I think that they were sort of pushing for this update, pushing for this change. And so that ticket has been created and is now being worked on by automaticians. Luke What's the point of the change? Jonathan Already do this with like the app store with apple or android you basically you say i'm not 100 sure about this update what we'll do is we'll roll it out incrementally see if there are any Bugs or problems and so we will release to 10 give it a few days or i don't know what the time increments are and then release to little bit more and a little bit more until we get to 100%. And that way, if there is a problem, maybe you catch it before all of your users are experiencing it. ([Time 0:12:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7eaaccde-d9e6-417a-86a2-060b88dde4e2)) - **Need for Commercial Incentives** - The WordPress.org plugin ecosystem lacks clear commercial incentives despite its crucial role. - Introducing a commercial model with revenue sharing could benefit the community and support events like WordCamps. Transcript: Luke Amount of installs. You know, the thing that still sits uncomfortably with me with all this, I think that that's also great. At the back of my mind, Luke, there's this like, man, what are the financial incentives? What you're describing is something that an app store does, right? And they also have a whole business model around that. And yet today,.org still famously doesn't really encourage commercial plugins or it kind of does, but at least it feels like it's an odd thing that still relies on volunteers. There's not real direct money connected to it in any obvious ways. Jonathan Yeah, you know, Jonathan, I do believe that a commercial.org would be beneficial. I'd love to see.org take sales and take a 20% cut and give that back to WordCamps. I think that would just really be huge for the community. ([Time 0:14:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5792ce81-796e-49c7-ab54-82503e7d1142))