WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business.
But a service disruption like this is bad strategy.
WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over.
Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider.
And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.
If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them.
From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/
Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...
If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress.
I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.
Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments)
WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments)
Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments)
Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments)
WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)
"Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin
If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks.
However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.
So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.
Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid.
Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.
None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
EDIT: typos
But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.
Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.
Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.
There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com.
2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.
The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.
Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.
I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage:
[quote]
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software.
...
People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
[/quote]
After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software.
Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core.
I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.
I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.
Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.
https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...
He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best.
He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do").
He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.
This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?
Petty, and befitting
WP is trash, always has been
WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand
Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend?
PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.
That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.