AND latest Financial Times profile Mayayoshi Son opens with the SoftBank CEO seemingly hitting all-time low, gazing his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I haven’t done anything to be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the general public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund suffered huge losses on investments like WeWork. But FT journalist Lionel Barber, whose latest biography of Son is titled “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son gave the impression to be “doing penance,” he was in actual fact “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is specializing in artificial intelligence and has achieved success by taking integrated circuit design company Arm public.

The profile also includes some amusing personal details, resembling Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When the activist investor mentioned Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business men.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I’m not a CEO. I’m building an empire.”

CEO of Automattic and Co-Founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg this week unleashed a devastating attack on a rival company, calling it WP engine “WordPress cancer.”

Mullenweg criticized the corporate — which has been commercializing the WordPress open source project since 2010 — for making profits without giving much in return, in addition to disabling key features that make WordPress such a robust platform in the primary place.

For context, WordPress has the facility over 40% network, and while any person or company is free to use the open-source project and run an internet site themselves, various firms have sprung up that sell hosting services and technical expertise based on it. These include Automattic, which Mullenweg founded in 2005 to monetize a project he created two years earlier; and WP Engine, a managed WordPress hosting provider that has raised nearly $300 million in funding over its 14 years of operation, the vast majority of which got here from a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

This week I shall be speaking at WordCamp USA 2024WordPress-focused conference held in Portland, Oregon, Mullenweg didn’t mince his words in his criticism of WP Engine. Taking the stage, Mullenweg read get out of the post has just published on his personal blog, where he points out a separate “five for the long run“investment commitments made by Automattic and WP EngineWith former co-creator 3900 hours per week and the last one spending just 40 hours.

While he admitted that these numbers are only “approximate” and will not be entirely accurate, Mullenweg said the disparity in contributions is critical, as each Automattic and WP Engine “are about the same size, with revenues of around half a billion (dollars).”

Mullenweg has criticized a minimum of one other outstanding hosting provider up to now, accusing GoDaddy of making the most of an open-source project without giving anything meaningful in return — or more precisely, he called GoDaddy is “parasitic company“and “an existential threat to the future of WordPress.”

In his latest offensive, Mullenweg didn’t stop at WP Engine, but prolonged his criticism to the corporate’s major investor.

“The company (WP Engine) is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm $102 billion in assets under management,” Mullenweg said. “Silver Lake doesn’t care about your open source ideals, they just want a return on their capital. So at this point, I’m asking everyone in the WordPress community to vote with their wallets. Who are you giving your money to — someone who will feed the ecosystem, or someone who will extract every bit of value from it until it withers?”

In response to query asked by audience member Later, when asked to make clear whether Mullenweg was urging WordPress users to boycott WP Engine, he said that he hopes every WP Engine customer watches his presentation and that when it comes time to renew their contract, they need to consider their next steps.

“There are other hosts who’re really hungry — Hostinger, Bluehost Cloud, Pressableetc., that will love to have that business,” Mullenweg said. “You can get faster performance even by going to someone else, and migrating has never been easier. That’s part of the idea of ​​liberating data. It’s like a day’s work to change your site to something else, and I highly encourage you to think about that when it comes time to renew your contract if you’re a current WP Engine customer.”

“WordPress Cancer”

In response to the uproar over the speech, Mullenweg published continuation of the blog postwhere he calls WP Engine a “cancer” on WordPress. “It’s important to remember that if left untreated, the cancer will spread,” he wrote. “WP Engine sets a bad standard that others may find appropriate to replicate.”

Mullenweg said WP Engine is making the most of the confusion that exists between the WordPress project and the business services company WP Engine.

“It needs to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress,” Mullenweg wrote. “My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they are giving you WordPress, but they are not. And they are profiting off of that confusion.”

Mullenweg also said that WP Engine is actively selling an inferior product since the core WordPress project stores every change made to allow users to revert their content to a previous version — something that WP Engine doesn’t allow, according to his support page.

While customers can request to enable revisions, support only covers three revisions, that are routinely deleted after 60 days. WP Engine recommends customers use an “external editing system” in the event that they need extensive revision management. The reason for this, according to Mullenweg, is straightforward: saving money.

“They turn off commits because it costs them more money to keep a history of changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that money protecting your content,” Mullenweg says. “That goes to the heart of what WordPress does, and it destroys it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to recover your content, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is to manage and protect your content.”

TechCrunch has reached out to WP Engine for comment. We’ll update here after we hear back.

The sensible pillar of Linux, Linus Torvaldssays that despite long-standing reports of open source development burnoutLinux is as strong as ever — though I admit its project is maybe a bit unique in its scale and scope.

In conversation with Verizon’s open source chief Dirk Hohndel on the Linux Foundation conference Open Source Summit Europe In Vienna on Monday, Torvalds addressed a topic that always comes up in Linux World AND aside from: some aging developer community vulnerable to burnout.

“It’s absolutely true that the (Linux) kernel maintainers are getting older, but there’s something positive about that,” Torvalds said. “How many (open source) projects have maintainers who have been around for literally more than three decades? That’s very unusual. So when people say ‘programmers burn out and leave’ — yes, that’s true, but that’s kind of normal. What’s not normal is people actually staying for decades, that’s unusual, and I think that’s a good sign to some extent.”

Historically, Linux has been largely a C-centric kernel, but in 2022 the project official support for Rust introduceduniversal open-source programming language supported by many well-known technology corporations. Just a few weeks ago, the leader of the Rust for Linux project, Wedson Almeida Filho announced They quit after almost 4 years because they felt they “lacked the energy and enthusiasm” to take care of a few of the “non-technical crap” related to the project.

AND back in januarySenior Engineer Rust Jyn Nelson also noted that the issue of burnout may be very real. “The number of people who have left the Rust project due to burnout is shockingly high,” Nelson wrote. “The number of people on the project who are close to burnout is also shockingly high.”

Trust factor

Linux is arguably essentially the most successful open-source project of all time, connecting all the pieces from web servers and ATMs to the operating systems of desktop computers and mobile devices. In those years of growth, Torvalds branched out and created a ubiquitous version control system referred to as Git. But some 33 years later from LinuxSince its inception, Torvalds has been the core maintainer of the kernel, with support tens of 1000’s of collaborators from corporations depending on Linux, in addition to from closer sources corresponding to a member of the Linux Foundation Greg Kroah-Kartmanwhich is chargeable for the stable version of the Linux kernel.

“I think part of the problem with having a lot of developers is that we’ve always had a lot of people who are very competent and could grow,” Torvalds said. “Greg wasn’t always Greg—before Greg, there were the Andrews and the Allens, and after Greg, there will be the Shannons and the Steves. There are people who have been around for decades, and the real problem is that you have to have a person—or a group—that people in the development community can trust. And part of trust is basically being around ‘long enough’ for people to know how you work.”

Torvalds admitted, nonetheless, that such an ecosystem will be intimidating and difficult for younger or less experienced developers to enter, especially once they see the present ones who’ve been around for thus long. But there are still newcomers who manage to get into the guts of the Linux project.

“We have core developers who are the core maintainers of core subsystems who have come in over the course of just a few years,” Torvalds said. “It’s not instantaneous, but you have new people coming in who are core developers in three years. It’s not impossible. I think we have a pretty healthy core developer subsystem, but this whole monkey dance about programmers, programmers, programmers… we have them. The fact that we also have these old, graying people—I don’t see that as a big deal.”