I also noticed in his list of disclaimers he did not say whether he has a financial stake in either party. I assume he does own stock in his old employer, WP Engine, given that his company was acquired.

If he's an idiot maybe. Or at least desperately in need of a competent financial planner. Who the hell would hold onto the stock of a (still relatively small) acquiring company a decade plus after the acquisition?

Being transparent about one's potential conflicts of interest is exactly what you are supposed to do.

Contrast that with Matt's original tirade where he didn't mention the licensing deal he put in front of WP Engine that they turned down.

But being transparent does not change the fact.

But it does mean we're empowered to proceed and consider his claims on the merits and not just go into a shutdown and disregard which I would suggest is an intellectually lazy cop out, and not at all in nuanced way of bringing consideration of potential biases to bear on the merit of the arguments. If the effect of encountering that information is that you refuse to consider any arguments on their merits then I think there's a kind of information literacy issue at play, because the correct assessment would be to assess the extent to which they do or don't mitigate the severity of the claims, rather than to brush them aside wholesale.

In general you’re correct. But this is a political matter. Putting intellectual principles above common sense is just naive.

I don't understand what for you are the pertinent intellectual principles or what for you counts as common sense in this context.

I don't understand what it means for those principles to be in conflict and I'm not sure that I would agree, upon clarification, that one is being put above the other or that the nature of the relationship between them is such that you choose between them with mutual exclusivity.

I think the author is being open with their conflicts of interest.

Which is a bit of a contrast to what Matt is doing.

There’s a difference between being awkward and being wrong; being persuasive and being right.

> I haven’t really been involved in WordPress for about five years now....Yes, I used to work for WP Engine. I even kinda liked them, for a while (mostly while they just kinda left us alone for the first year or so). But I wouldn’t say my time at the company left a good taste in my mouth.

> We don’t need to dredge up a bunch of old and buried stuff that isn’t really important anyway, but suffice to say: I really don’t have any reason to be a WP Engine cheerleader. Most of the people I knew there have left, and I’ve watched from the sidelines as the company has implemented a bunch of scummy policies and shady sales tactics to squeeze money from their customers and make it harder to leave.

If this isn't good enough for you then you're not being honest, you are just desperately looking for any excuse to defend Mullenweg.

If he didn’t have a financial stake in his former company, WP Engine, he would have put it at the top of his list of disclaimers. His company was acquired by WP Engine, it would be crazy if he didn’t get stock as part of that deal.

The omission of that suggests that he does have a financial stake.