The accusation that WPE is responsible for there not being redundancy in API access to WordPress.org services is absurd. If AWS rents me a server running Windows, there's not an expectation that they run their own update servers and app store.

Automattic cut off API access for users who hosted on WPE. Let that be very clear: Automattic's position is that you can install WordPress on any server and get updates and plugins, so long as it's not WPE's servers. This is Automattic trying to extract rent from the people hosting the servers and preinstalling the software.

> the inside track of WordPress is a mess right now

Well, far as I know, WP has always been a mess ;)

> Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project

Wasn't it forked from 2/cafelog? Anyway, Automattic is also holder of the .blog TLD so better don't mess with Matt I guess ..,

Matt Mullenweg did a video segment with ThePrimeagen yesterday.

I found Matt’s stance a bit confusing in areas but admit it may just be too early in the morning for me to process.

https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM

The most confusing part for me is wordpress.com.

I was literally mistaken once and thought that Wordpress was no longer open source.

As someone only familiar with WP at the surface level, I had assumed that WP Engine actually was affiliated with WP, so it seems to me the market confusion is certainly intentional.

Anecdote: I'm helping a family member set up a personal brand website. He has a brand/marketing person for the content/design, but wanted me to manage the tech side of email, domains, providers, etc. I've used Wordpress a handful of times in my life, but it's an easy recommendation to make. We've spent maybe 30 mins a week for the past few weeks chipping away at it. We chose https://getflywheel.com/ as the managed WP provider[1]. They are owned by WP Engine.

Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week.

I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally.

[1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me.

[2] https://wpmailsmtp.com/

While this blog post is a very balanced take and definitely not a knee-jerk reaction, I disagree with some of the biases pointed out. Sure, WP Engine advertises itself contributing back on their home page. But, rightfully so? Yeah, they don't contribute back as much as Matt or anyone would like to, but, they still contribute back, right?

Next, one of the author's arguments is that WP Engine doesn't stop others as advertising itself as the "Wordpress Engine". Sure, but this same parallel can be drawn towards Wordpress.org itself. The homepage of Wordpress.org SCREAMS open-source. But, is it really though? It is an ecosystem around a centralised (plugin) repository controlled by one person/entity. That's not truly open source. Today WP Engine is blocked because they upset the overlords. Tomorrow, it could be anyone of us.

Also, the whole argument made on the official blog post was WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source? In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points.

If Wordpress is truly open source and if Matt's concerns are really around the spirit of open source, the fair thing that he/his company should have done is released the whole source code that powers the entire Wordpress.com eco-system including their backend systems on how they handle billing and scale. But, you know what? That will never happen, because that is their competitive advantage.

As someone who handles multi-million visitor sites on Wordpress, I can tell you this - the whole Wordpress eco-system thrives because the code is bad and it just won't scale - both performance wise and development wise as your content grows. The entire competitive advantage of Wordpress.com is actually masking this bad code and scaling difficulty behind a pretty interface. I would love to see them open source that. Of course, that won't happen.

This is just one entity abusing another with their power. I am in no way supporting WP Engine (they seem sleazy and I would never host any of my client sites with them). But, there are plenty of people they could have gone after - how about Kinsta? They do the same thing.

This was just a personal attack. You simply can't sugar-coat that.

This ignores the massive conflict of interest going on. Matt has two competing commercial hosting projects that WPE is directly on the way of.

Whatever perceived sins WPE is accused of, that trumps them all. Extremely fishy and unprofessional.

This blog is so disingenuous.

> I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine’s fault and responsibility to fix.

Users are impacted because the update mechanism was pulled out from under them with no advanced warning, that's not WP Engine's fault.

Automattic and Matt have been good stewards of WordPress and it's hard for me to fault him for trying to get some money from people who've built their whole business on the back of his team & free software contributors' generosity.

The free software world still has no good answer to the free rider problem. This is the same problem with AWS/ElasticSearch