How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source
Duncan Riley has an article on Tech Crunch where he goes after Matt Mullenweg and WordPress for stopping ad sponsored themes and yet having a business model . . . please. I usually think of Tech Crunch as an authority but this one makes me wonder (and the guy never backs down in the comments!!! Incidentally, read the comments, they are more entertaining than the article . . . and yes, Matt does defend himself. Go Matt!) Duncan . . . what were you thinking?
Thought we could continue the discussion that we started on my site over here on your post.
I do think you have a good point on how when you become successful that there will be people that will come after you. In the case of this article, I think Duncan made some valid points but then he lost some credibility in his comments as he began to make more personal attacks.
Matt does a nice job of defending his opinions and it is nice to see him participating in the comments. IMO, Matt and the other WordPress contributors have done a great thing for the blogging community with their work on WP.
It was a shame to see the tail end of the comments take a turn for the worse as there were some great points made throughout.
Yes yes. I have read a lot of Duncan Riley’s stuff and I think he is a smart guy. As you know, I have gotten into the whole “over-commercialization” discussion on this site.
I have found an Oasis in not only the code but the culture of Wordpress. I also have lots of friends who use Wordpress to make money . . . I don’t see the problem. When people stand up for something and say: “This is what I am about.” People criticize it. I’ve seen it in teaching, I’ve seen it in my own life in college and society in general.
I agree with you it is too bad Duncan Riley got personal with Matt making fun of his age at one point even. That alone kind of makes me want to see Matt succeed and show Duncan that no one should look down on ones youthfulness.
I for one am glad there is a respectable company making choices that represent non-monetization as a service goal. There are many many bloggers out there using free Wordpress and the fact that it exists in a dog-eat-dog corporate world continues to be an exciting thing to me.
It will be interesting to watch future Tech Crunch articles dealing with this down the road. i have added them to my Google Reader.