The note currently displayed to my account disputes the claims made in the linked tweet (that the Internet Archive is run by the US government(???)), not the supposed motivation of the attackers.
That said, this just seems to me like the attackers are trying to come up with some justification after the fact to explain why they would go after something as universally beloved as the Internet Archive. Actual pro-Palestine activists are not happy, eg (strong language): https://x.com/Aldanmarki/status/1844155616199413969
This is only true of typical UK-style roundabouts which are designed for motor vehicle throughput.
It’s extremely common in the Netherlands to replace crossroads and T-junctions with roundabouts to improve safety, but Dutch urban roundabouts are designed with safety as the main priority. This is achieved through single lanes, sharp entries, limiting forward visibility, and pedestrian and cyclist priority (via what are effective zebras).
We should absolutely be deploying these where we can, but they do take up a lot of space relative to their traffic throughput, and are only really suitable for a fairly narrow range of traffic volumes.
NL seems to quite commonly have this kind of physically large but medium traffic suburban junction, but outside of Milton Keynes and the outskirts of some towns that got heavily developed in the 60s, it's hard to see many places where we could just drop it in.
> That the Dutch roundabout, including the cycle tracks all around it, can be built in almost the same space of a traditional junction is the reason why so many are being converted.
Xtensa is from Tensilica (now Cadence) but, as sibling comments point out, new Espressif designs use RISC-V. There's a bit of an overlap point: the ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 are recent designs that use Xtensa, and they were released at roughly the same time as the ESP32-C3 (I believe the first Espressif RISC-V part).
The S2 & S3 are more powerful and capable than the currently available Espressif RISC-V microcontrollers. Perhaps it's best to think of them marking the summit or climax of Espressif's Xtensa parts. But the future clearly lies with RISC-V.
The Xtensa support in LLVM/Clang appears to have resulted (at least in part) from Espressif's active support for Rust on their microcontrollers. The recent Rust 1.81 release merged support for the ESP32, ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 into upstream rustc. It's great to see a microcontroller vendor directly support the use of Rust on its parts, and not just its "new" parts.
Edit: To be clear, the ESP-IDF framework is a huge C project, so Espressif working on LLVM support for Xtensa is clearly _not just_ for Rust. And "easy mode" Rust-on-Espressif (std support!) relies on the ESP-IDF so merging their patches into LLVM is beneficial all-round.
For those curious about this history, you can watch John Pilger’s 2004 documentary Stealing a Nation for free on his website: https://johnpilger.com/stealing-a-nation/
Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on WordPress as a whole.
WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging comments.
In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP Engine customers from the theme and plugin repositories hosted at WordPress.org — which until recently people had believed to be under the control of the WordPress Foundation, but is actually under the personal control of Mullenweg.
Now this lawsuit has been filed.
Edit: Characters for the unaware:
Matt Mullenweg: The "top" person in WordPress in its various forms, including the non-profit WordPress Foundation, and the for-profit company Automattic (whichs runs the for-profit WordPress.com host, among other things).
I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries.
There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this.
Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project.
Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest.
Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
WP Engine is also claiming that Mullenweg tried to "extort" them. He allegedly asked WP Engine to pay astronomical amounts of money to WordPress, or he'd go on a smear campaign against them. THe demands were allegedly refused, and it seems that he has indeed started such a campaign.
The claims were made in an official letter to Automattic that included proof in the form of screenshots, and that was written by a legal professional[1]. I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.
> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
I see. What a BS. It's obvious that this is a business move by Automattic.
Akismet was (is?!) bundled with every fresh WP installation. That is a product by Automattic, so why is it bundled with the Open Source "product"? It's an unfair competitive advantage over every other company/person that provides a plugin for that. Nobody cared or was just feared to pick up that fight.
Drawing the line at WPEngine seems random, too. There are so many bigger or smaller competitors in that space, it's just somewhat random to pick them out and complain that they don't give back.
Conflict of interest, perhaps. Reading about the issues though, gimping the product for pennies and then modifying customers sites to censor things.
At some point, every bad behaviour in a software ecosystem affects other parties and even if his personal role does cause a conflict of interest all the things mentioned seems to point to a party that doesn't respect the ecosystem.
This is the equivalent of NPM, Maven or PyPi cutting off an enterprise artifact repository because they don't donate enough to keep those services running. Especially the lack of notice makes it an unprofessional garbage move.
Does the notice need to be public? They are fighting for a while, I think WPEngine knew what Automattic demanded (and hence could foresee what happens if they continue). They were/are probably already working on an alternative.
Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service.
Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
That's pretty much what happened here. I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Automattic offers more than just the source code of WP.
Anyone is still free to use the source, but the services they provide are not free.
> Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service. Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
It's a good analogy. AWS does it a lot, but it does so with open source projects that do not have much paid services. Reading from the article, Automattic provides many services (possibly paid, in some freemium model).
I'd welcome if some projects manage to get AWS to give back. They do way too little if you ask me.
> I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Yes. Giving back could be a deal that involves money.
I understand it would be ideal for business to give back with money to open source projects, but this issue is being handled in the worst possible way by Matt.
So WordPress code is FOSS, so you can theoretically change the code, except when you change the line that will keep revisions to cut your costs, if you do that he will yell at you.
WordPress' repository is free as in beer, you can download all you want without paying. Heck, even WP code is setup so it downloads from there by default. Except when you happen to host in a company that has a very specific set of issues (alleged trademark issues + profits over a particular threshold + not giving back to community; other companies who have only one of those issues but not all of them are fine), then he'll block you.
The main issue here is the lack of a clear contract of what you can or cannot do. Seems like he is just figuring out the rules along the way. This gives to external observers the impression that the whole thing is unreliable.
Open source makes absolutely zero distinction about how the source code is provided. You aren't required to keep a free-to-use service up to download your code. You only must produce it when requested.
Not too long ago you would pay for disks containing open source software.
I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour.
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.
This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).
> This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company.
I am only looking at this from the outside but given that Wordpress.org (not the wordpress hosting company wordpress.com) is involved here, it's clear that this dispute involves the Wordpress project itself and not just the commercial Automattic entity/Matt Mullenweg.
It's 40% of websites, but bear in mind that not all websites are of equal significance. Some websites are just spam and never receive any visits. If we measured how much time people spend on different websites, I would guess that WordPress wouldn't even reach 5% of time spent web surfing.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
and
> Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
I hid the font names and still ended up with my current go-to font (JetBrains mono). I’m not sure if that’s the effect of familiarity or if we are truly meant for each other.
—JetBrains Mono is the font I find myself orbiting these days. And as far as I know it was made with good first principles in mind. I’m willing to call it objectively good.
That said, this just seems to me like the attackers are trying to come up with some justification after the fact to explain why they would go after something as universally beloved as the Internet Archive. Actual pro-Palestine activists are not happy, eg (strong language): https://x.com/Aldanmarki/status/1844155616199413969