This may seems harsh, but I reccommend people take a look at platypus's profile (the person ninemiletower is calling out).
They are 35 years old, have posted a lot of this sort of stuff, and have not actually mentioned any physical issue or disabilities over the course of their very public pity party.
Hoping this gives the DS romhacking side a good kick in the pants. It's amazing what the community has done with R/S/E, but I'd love to see what they can get up to with fewer hardware limitations (while not going the full PC fangame route)
This buries the lede quite a bit.
Mullenweg effectively runs both the non-profit organization Wordpress.org and is the CEO of Automattic, a for profit conpany that sells support for Wordpress (and a direct competitor to WPEngine).
A large part of Wordpress functionality is kept behind an Automattic plugin that forces any Wordpress site using it to collect telemetry/data for Automattic.
The update servers for Wordpress plugins are hardcoded to use Automattic's servers, and this is not configurable or changable unless you modify the Wordpress source code itself.
With Mullenweg's position over both the non-profit org and Automattic, he has direct control over these choices. If he's doing this for the sake of open source, why is he gating things that should be core functionality behind a data collection scheme? If there are problems with load on the update servers, why has no effort been made to allow the community to host update servers themselves that check update hashes against Automattic? That would significantly reduce the load on the for-profit resources (that you called APIs). At the very least, the setting needs to be something exposed to the user and configurable without modifying the source code. Otherwise he's complaining about a problem he has created.
It's also worth noting that at no point has Mullenweg tried to set up any sort of free vs paid tier of access to his update servers. This is a specifically targeted campaign. He has also not publically provided evidence of the increased load by WPEngine despite publically shooting off about a ton of other things that would be best saved for the courtroom.
Mullenweg has also publicly stated some very questionable things about how the resources of the non-profit and his for-profit are intermingled, which may have some legal repurcussions. But that's more of a footnote.
Wordpress's license makes explicit exception to copyright to allow anyone to use "WordPress" or "WP".
The initial reasoning (and I believe the lawsuit) for Mullenweg's attempt to claim 8% of all WPEngine profit, is explicitly based on the claim that they are breaching copyright due to their use of "WP".
So while I agree that lack of upstream contribution and the amount of load on the upgrade servers are important and valid reasons to try and seek some contribution, that is not the angle he took to start this.
At one point during all of this, he switched off the WordPress plugin update servers for all users with no warning.
Now he's done a direct hostile takeover of his competitor's plugin. Of the two security issues, WPEngine disclosed both of them themselves and had already fixed one. There was no evidence that they were going to stop and not fix the other, and the issue is of questionable severity. The main change Automattic did to the plugin was to remove the code that checked for an upgraded/upsold license, effectively cracking the plugin to offer paid features for free.
With the long history of WordPress, I find it incredibly hard to believe that there are not a considerable number of other plugins containing upsells, so the implication that those somehow are in violation of terms is weak.
In my opinion, we have someone in the perfect position to make changes to ensure the upgrade server load (the only quantifiable reason for all this mess) never would have been able to be a problem in the first place. He has singled out the largest competitor to his own for-profit company and targeted them specifically instead of announcing blanket changes that would apply to anyone causing their level of load on his systems. He has taken incredibly poorly thought out and reactionary steps intended to spank his competitor that have had far larger negative effects for the rest of his users and customers. He has and continues to make very piblic statements that any sane lawyer would tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut about. Now he has once again singled out his largest competitor, taken one of their paid products, and modified it to be free rather than creating his own implementation with the problems fixed and no upsells.
Matt Mullenweg has not done anything explicitly evil, wrong, or super obviously illegal. But he's doing a hell of a lot of very concerning and questionable things when he had every opportunity to prevent any of this from ever being a problem in the first place.
I have no love for WPEngine, but Matt isn't a saint and is ridiculously mismanaging all of this.
Something I love about old PC games is that the files usually aren't protected or some proprietary format. I'd expect stuff like the textures and sound files are right there for you to mess with for humorous results.
Holy crap he is just continuing to build the case against him. His own for-profit automattic's plugins have built in upsells and add additional data harvesting code that you can't opt out of while you use them.
He just keeps treating the non-profit .org stuff and his Automattic for-profit as interchangable.
It's time for the community to find a solution for distributed update servers that at most only rely on Mullenweg for hash checking to prevent tanpering. This is blatantly just a vendetta now.
Heads up, SD Maid is being rebuilt as SD Maid SE now with more/better features.
I'll quote what you just replied to
people working in high COL locations
SF Bay, Cupertino, Redmond, etc... the big "tech hub" cities are known reality warps.
No, you explicitly were saying that you had never heard anyone criticise a piece of media for including a minority.
Then you claimed that it was a strawman (further implying such people do not exist).
I pointed out that those people do exist, most obviously on 4chan, and that whether or not you think they matter has no bearing on whether or not they exist.
I never made any claims as to how important those opinions on 4chan were. I likewise did not say anything about them only existing there.
Pretending people with those opinions do not exist is provably wrong with minimal effort and intellectually dishonest. There's no argument I'm making here. Nothing but me pointing out fact that you have decided doesn't matter because some companies have used it as to excuse valid criticism.
We can all see your comment history in this chain man. Moving the goalposts like this is just sad.
Comments in case they are edited or deleted after being called out
My man, "regular" programmers aren't making 120k a year plus enough for taxes to end up with 10k a month take home. Seniors, people working in high COL locations, working for FAANG or whatever the buzzword is now, sure maybe.
But that's not average pay.
Same thing happens every time Windows has a major revision update. The amount of unpatched XP boxes around years into the lifecycle of Windows 7 was hilarious and terrifying.
Ugh, I hate that the actual ethical issues in games journalism got swallowed up by all the other hateful bullshit.
Like, sponsored articles weren't being disclosed, and some games journalists were being fired for refusing to give favorable reviews to games that were advertising on their site. There were private mailing lists where behind the scenes coordination was happening to push kinder reviews of one member of the list's friend's indie game. White jounalists were claiming themselves as mouthpieces for minority gamers who never asked for someone else to speak for them.
Which gave cover for explicit mysogyny and hate... then further got twisted by far-right idealogues like Milo Yannopolous and Breitbart.
If they do, they have never mentioned it over a fairly long course of posting "everything sucks" and not accepting any advice. Check their posting history.