OK you've convinced me to get invested in this.
When I refer to the eternal recurrence in Star Wars, I simply mean that they blow up the Death Star in Episodes IV, VI, VII, and arguably I and definitely put an end to Sith control of the galaxy every time wink.
Yeah, you've got your GPL copy of all the source code. But next week's discovery of vulnerabilities in whatever random plugin gets to be this weeks news means you need to download/install the updated version. Which canonically is found at wordpress.org. We host a couple of dozen sites on WPEngine (and have done for about a decade, very happily with the price, features, and service). Our internal business continuity planning is now investigating ClassicPress, keeping an eye on comms from WPEngine to see what their path forward in terms of keeping WP sites updated without wordpress.org access, and questioning whether it's time to stop using WordPress at all. We already have a few sites that use WP as the admin/publishing tool, and generate the site as static html for hosting via S3/CloudFront - we may make that our standard deployment bit if we had to move all our WP sites off WPE, we may as well investigate other newer tools.
We are certainly having conversations right now with potential new clients warning them of the drama in the WordPress ownership/ecosystem, and advising considering alternative options or at least waiting until the dust settles on Matt's current ill advised crusade.
The real issue is if WP gets fractured or abandoned or weird license issues etc. Then I take my luggage to hugo or similar.
A restorable backup isn't really a priority versus the above.
CentOS did this to Redhat for decades. They literally stripped out the trademarks and distributed the OS to anyone with no contracts at all. Patches were available same day that RH published them, and were applied from CentOS update servers.
The endgame for WP seems to be that they give up this fight or close their source and act like a real licensed software company. You can’t play GPL until it no longer suits you, then start making insane demands about revenue sharing and all this nonsense.
Downloading update from https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixte...
The risk I need to address is what's stopping Matt denying WPE access to that place where all the plugins and themes are published? Where does plugin-updates.wpengine.com get its content from, and how soon is Matt gonna block that? And an arms race of WPE needing to use proxies or other workarounds is not a business grade answer.
As I see things, either
1) the "WordPress community" that Matt thinks he's fighting for step up and tells him "No thanks, we absolutely do not want you to fight this fight" and removes him from power,
2) WPE wins the court case and a judge tells Matt "Nope, you're wrong about trademark law and you're wrong about the GPL and you are going to be held to the claims you made in the past about WordPress the software and WordPress the foundation and wordpress.org the software distribution and update service."
or
3) We are witnessing the start of the end of WordPress being trusted to run almost half of the internet.
I doubt the courts will demand that WordPress foundation must provide servers and bandwidth indefinite and free of charge to anyone, especially when there is no contract between WPEngine and WordPress foundation. When Youtube removed API functionality and under a night destroyed companies that relied on those free API's, courts did not demand that Youtube went back. It is inherently risky for companies to depend on someone else servers and network service being provided for free without any contract.
The more easy path forward would be for WPEngine to switch dependency. Debian has an reliable repository. Core wordpress is already packaged there, it get updates, and a handful of the most popular themes are also packaged. If that is not enough then WPEngine could spend employee hours to package more themes. No need for proxies or workarounds. I would estimate that 90% of the customers on WPEngine could continue to exist using just that.
That's not only on their website, it's also stated in their 501c3 filings with the IRS.
Another thing to note is that "wordpress.org" is hardcoded into several places in the source code, and Matt has outright refused to make it more directly configurable.
There are even more issues involved, so while your point is sound, the reality of the situation is pretty complicated.
Regarding Debian, I don't know if the Debian package has anything hardcoded to wordpress.org. The generally recommended update path is to use debian package manager rather than internal updating mechanics. Debian maintainers often patch thing or change defaults as part of the packaging in order to make software behave nicely with the debian eco-system.
Yeah, but.
Do we trust Matt now to not required the Debian packagers to, as he says, "choose sides" before giving Debian access to the wordpress.org infrastructure to download updated WordPress core and plugins/themes? I can _easily_ see him escalating like that.
> As a customer and user of WPEngine, what role do you see wordpress in that relationship?
The same role as I always used to see WordPress (the project, including WordPress core and the entire 1st and 3rd party plug/theme community) has with other companies that have a WordPress installation capability like cPanel and Plesk, and with every other hosting company that makes is easier to deploy WordPress than starting from a bare Linux VM - like GoDaddy or Dreamhost or practically any SMB oriented web hosting vendor.
And I think Matt is being entirely disingenuous, probably to the point I'd be happy to accuse him of outright lying, when he says WPEngine don't contribute back to the WordPress community. WPE have listed out the support they provide to the community which is in the form of conference sponsorship and development of open of the important plugins (ACF). While they obviously _could_ do more, I think the blackmail tactic Matt's using to extort them into paying 8% of revenue (at many million dollars a year) not to "the WordPress Community", but into a company (Automatic) that's directly owned by Matt, and that is a direct competitor in the WordPress hosting space.
And the recent news the the WordPress Foundation has applied to trademark "Wordpress Hosting" and "Managed WordPress" is totally off the charts punching "the WordPress Community" in the face. In my experience, by far the most common WordPress user acquisition channel is people using $5/month GoDaddy or similar hosting with a one click WP install, and sooner or later outgrowing that level of over subscribed web hosting and moving on to more dedicated WordPress hosting either through a digital agency or consultant, or going directly to WPEngine (often on recommendation from people just like me).
If Matt gets _any_ traction in enforcing 8% revenue (or more, as he's threatened) from WPEngine for using the word "WordPress" on it's website, how quickly do you think the lawyers at low margin/low cost of entry vendors like GoDaddy will say "Just take down every single mention of WordPress _anywhere_ and stop offering it to customers."
As I said, absent some adult supervision over Matt's tantrums, I believe we are witnessing the start of the end of WordPress.
So why isn't this thing forked yet? It seems like WP Engine has the resources and now the motivation to do it. Advertise as a 100% compatible drop in replacement. MariaDB did it.
The issue with this is that it absolutely will require a fork:
The WordPress Foundation President is Matt. There are only two other board members, only one of whom is active, and both were appointed by Matt unilaterally.
The WordPress Foundation (i.e. Matt) granted Automattic (i.e. Matt) an "exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable" license to Automattic re use of WordPress identity.
Wordpress.org is the exclusive property of Matt (although he has long played fast and loose here - just yesterday he was caught editing Automattic blog posts from referring erroneously to WP.org as a non-profit charity to 'a website that performs a community service').
The thing is, once you organize a foundation as a non-profit with the government, you lose some of your ability to make decisions that are contrary to whatever charter and goals and such you specified when it was created. Matt may have screwed himself over by putting the stuff he wants to profit off of into ownership of the non-profit.
Perhaps?
There is a significant group of people Automattic relies on to make the WordPress project and community a thing. While Matt probably can afford to pay enough devs to maintain WP core, I doubt he's wanting to pay to do all the maintenance for all the OSS/GPL plugins and themes on wordpress.org that are a big part of what makes WP attractive over other free and OSS CMS/blog alternatives.
Those people could probably mount a campaign that'd threaten Automattic's financial bottom line, which since Matt's extortion show that for him this is all about money that someone else has that he wants, perhaps that'd be "enough"?
Which I can sympathise with. But this isn’t what open source is about both legally and morally. And there are better ways to achieve this goal than by making a mockery of the Wordpress foundation and harming end users.
It does kinda seem that way as an outsider looking in. There definitely seems to be some legal shenanigans going on when he's using his for-profit company Automattic to complain about stuff happening to the non-profit Wordpress Foundation. They should be legally separate enough that what he's doing shouldn't be possible.
Matt painstakingly forked b2 into wordpress and now WPE is freloading while Matt donates a whooping 0% of his revenue to b2 while WPE doesn't. /s
That's what Matt says. WPEngine claims otherwise -- in a legal document, no less.
There’s zero reason to use Wordpress in 2024 imo.
Many folk, companies don't have the resources nor skillset to set up a LAMP equivalent for such.
If you want to be the next wonder-host for $CMS be my guest. I recommend Kirby. No database required and only uses text files for its backend.
I’ve used it before, and many clients sites are now dead because their web host didn’t want to support old PHP versions anymore.
Any cloud-based CMS doesn’t have that problem.
That, plus, Kirby just isn’t robust enough to compare to something like Webflow.
Also
“many clients sites are now dead because their web host didn’t want to support old PHP versions anymore”
Isn’t the solution to that as simple as upgrading your CMS?
That fact that you constantly have to upgrade Kirby and pay new licensing fees (and bill your customers for this) because no web host wants to support an old version of PHP...betrays the idea that Kirby is a way out of this. Sure it doesn't have a database to hassle with like Wordpress so it's better in that regard. But it's still objectively worse than any cloud platform.
If you're on a cloud subscription platform you're completely hands off (no upgrades necessary) and the client now has permanent support from said subscription they're paying for. It's fundamentally a better model than dumping websites on clients and letting them slowly rot away while they forget how to do anything with them.
Sure you’re just letting someone else do the job but at a significant higher price. It’s a trade off like everything else. In some situations a cloud solution is probably good. But in other cases it might be way too expensive in the long run. So it’s a balance and every situation is different.
Cost of maintaining, whos going to keep up with latest CVEs?
Cost of domain, registrars, SSL certificates.
Cost of all adds up. A non-tech IT business has minimal resources for all of that. They want "pay $, click, it works". Not a dedicated IT worker to serve all of above.
If you take say a tutor, a bassist, they don't want all that overhead. They want a platform where they can advertise their tutoring costs, a contact form and be done with it. WP isn't ideal but it works.
For someone who can host WAMP/LAMP, fine. But for the average folk, it's not. There was a reason why WP gained popularity to begin with and it was because it was easy to adapt and junior PHP developers were plentiful, just as junior python developers are now.
Yeah and especially if they want to update it themselves. Wordpress makes that easy even for the non techies so the customer can do it themselves.
Of course the big Achilles heel of WordPress is the plugins and their vulnerabilities. So really you still need someone technical to keep it up to date, which is often forgotten.
When it comes to e-commerce, Shopify. Or if open source and control is important to you, Saleor.
the funny thing is, to the vast majority of people that use WP, they won't even care if even know about all of the drama. even people that took some sort of WP bootcamp and earn a living managing other people's WP site probably are blissfully ignorant of this drama.
the people that might have some actual interest are the devs that create the various plugins/templates. but as someone else mentioned, if everything goes nuclear and everyone loses their damn minds, a more sane party can just fork the thing and call it something totally different without using the terms like "word" or "press".
I've actually been pretty happy with Pocketbase, though it really straddles the line of rolling your own CMS. You aren't technically writing the db wrapper or visual editor itself, but any functionality you need beyond authentication is up to you to build.
For those interested in migrating away, I wrote an exporter from WordPress to Grav [2], which, given recent events, I've pulled back out and am updating again.
[1] https://getgrav.org/ [2] https://github.com/jgonyea/wp2grav_exporter
They are good people, but they definitely need more contributors!
What Grav lacks is momentum.
Imo it's easier to just roll a fresh rails project and use any admin gem than to write a custom theme for Wordpress
I cannot believe how much money people are will to pay for blog hosting.
I suspect some of the controversy is fake. I've heard one of the previous 404 articles, alleging Wordpress training AI on self-hosted Wordpress sites, is fake according a semi-trustworthy source.
Speaking based on my gut feeling, the fact that so many low-caliber Wordpress controversy articles are all arising in quick succession seems odd to me. Some allegations seem credible, but I question to what degree they are newsworthy, given all the other scummier things corporations and institutions do these days. Perhaps now that Wordpress and Tumblr are owned by the same company, Wordpress is now seen as a more valuable target to attack.
Honestly, I have no horse in the race, so to speak. I think the people responsible for Wordpress code still suck because they still, in 2024, want the software itself to be able to write to where the software itself lives and runs, which is just bananas. It violates the first two rules of anything and everything on the web that I learned in the '90s:
* do not allow writing to anywhere that's executable
* do not allow execution anywhere that's writable
Is it much different from a windows app installer asking admin permissions then editing the registry and can plaster files anywhere.
Besides, read-only file systems can be used to handle massive sites that need better security (like nasa.gov). And those types sites are either writing their own plugins or heavily auditing which plugins they use.
I can't see how anybody who knows a bit about the situation would ever want to continue to be affiliated with Wordpress knowing this guy could go over the top at any moment.
Is he just totally ignoring his own lawyers? He has to be, because no lawyer who charges more than $20 an hour would tell him any of this is advisable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784343
"Despite our sometimes fervent wishes, lawyers don't control clients. We are not puppeteers"
It just feels so very odd. Why would Matt’s lawyer care what people say here? He doesn’t have to convince of us anything. The PR folks would like to convince us of stuff and I wouldn’t be surprised if they showed up, but why legal?
And what kind of lawyer says that about a client in an ongoing case on a public forum using an account in their own name?! It’s a level of unprofessionalism that I struggle to believe a reputable lawyer would engage in. If Matt is unreasonable to the point of needing to make a public comment, Neil should have just forced him to find new council and quit.
I’ll likely never have need for this specific type of council, but if I do there’s a brand new list of people I won’t hire with only a single name on it.
The whole thing is strange, and I can’t figure out why anyone would tie their ship to Matt in this storm. He’s a liability not just to himself, but to everyone supporting him as his antics start to reflect on his supporters. Even if people did support his position, Matt is preventing them from doing so publicly without also looking insane.
Maybe photomatt is also a hacked account and real Matt just hasn't noticed yet?
Even there he's inconsistent. He spent a day or so talking about how his lawyer said "If you're in the right, talk all you like!", then a few days after that made an announcement about how he'd retained a lawyer just that day.
Hilariously bad look all around.
EDIT (to save having a 2nd post). Looking at the HTML tags for the requirement it has the class "login-lawsuit", so guessing this is tried to the suit WPE are bringing against WordPress/Matt.
On one hand, I personally feel like Matt is trying to speed run burning all the goodwill of the wordpress project, on the other hand if you are being sued by an entity its pretty much recommended to cut ties with said entity and only deal with them via your lawyers so I can see why they would put in such a requirement.
Regardless, .org and .com are claimed to be separate legal entities, so there is no lawsuit against .org. This is just an escalation out of a sense of moral righteousness.
Yes, it's confusing.
I got the following error: "You cannot use that email address to signup. There are problems with them blocking some emails from WordPress. Please use another email provider."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...
They need to take a step back. Again, I think they probably do have a trademark case, and they can set whatever rules they like for accessing their plugin repo, but this drama isn't something users appreciate.
This isn't a static website we're talking about — WordPress is probably one of the most attacked web software in the world given its footprint.
WordPress doesn't do LTS releases or backports either.
> The only current officially supported version is the last major release of WordPress. Previous major releases before this may or may not get security updates as serious exploits are discovered.
> …
> Security updates will be backported to older releases when possible, but there are no guarantee and no timeframe for older releases. There are no fixed period of support nor Long Term Support (LTS) version such as Ubuntu’s. None of these are safe to use, except the latest series, which is actively maintained.
https://x.com/javiercasares/status/1843963052183433331
This is shunning, which is literally one of the hallmarks of a cult. If you are associated in any way with a suppressive person (WP Engine), you now cannot be a member of the WordPress.org community. Members of the community have to decide whether to shun WP Engine or be excommunicated themselves. He’s trying to use the community as a weapon.
It also seems a fertile ground to claim tortious interference. He’s trying to sever relationships between WP Engine and everybody they interact with.
* https://x.com/xwolf/status/1842548019289338346
* https://x.com/rmccue/status/1843967630585311595
* https://x.com/jonoalderson/status/1843985559745921046
* https://x.com/LinuxJedi/status/1843966957495939093
And from Javier's thread, Matt is gaslighting people by telling them to consult attorneys to decide the meaning of "affiliated" in a checkbox HE introduced.
Is paying for WPEngine hosting "affiliated"? https://x.com/LucP/status/1843926970763227255
Can we now agree that Matt has lost his marbles and his ego is leading him to burn the entire Wordpress ecosystem down? These are megalomaniacal and dictatorial actions.
Wow, that's telling. 8.4% of his company decided he was acting in enough bad faith to quit without another job lined up in this economy? And he takes it as a good sign? Wow...
No, they just took the offer. Some probably for that reason, some for other. You'd need to interview them to know their actual views.
Wordpress is nearly half of the Internet. There’s a pretty compelling argument that Matt is using his market power to prevent competition in violation of the Sherman act.
By that logic, Linux has a monopoly on cloud web servers or something? But there’s no one company making that happen.
I know there's an extra layer in the WordPress situation, because Matt personally owns wordpress.org, but he very evidently uses that position to further the goals of Automattic.
People have asked for a way to host all the wordpress.org online services themselves. There isn't even a way to configure a different endpoint. I'm sure that'll change after today, in WordPress itself, or in a fork.
For competitors, on the small scale side, you have Wix/Squarespaxe/Weebly. Or just Shopify for e-commerce. For enterprise, Adobe experience manager is huge. Loads of places just write their own website and have their own CMS solution.
So no, it doesn’t even come close to having a monopoly on anything. And even if WordPress did, no individual company does. There are a huge number of different companies competing in the WordPress hosting space. Automattic doesn’t even host that much (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ho-automattic)
So, while you're right - online publishing doesn't have popular mindshare - it is a massive part of the online economy.
I'm not saying that qualifies WP for anti-trust investigation, but your underlying premise that WordPress is irrelevant is not congruent with reality.
Section 2, which covers "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce [...]" has been found by courts, I believe, to require 50% market share (or sometimes more) to apply.
But section 1, which applies to "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce [...]", does not as far as I've been able to tell have any market size threshold.
Also Matt: shuts off all ways for WPEngine to contribute
I’m thinking part of the problem is that the software itself is GPL and so is it’s ecosystem, which means that the standard next step of changing the license (followed by an inevitable fork) is infeasible.
From https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-term-sheet.pdf:
Fee. In exchange for the License Grant, WP Engine shall do one of the following:
(a) Pay Automattic a royalty fee equal to 8% of its Gross Revenue on a monthly basis, within fifteen days of the end of each month. "Gross Revenue" means all revenue generated by WP Engine from the sale of its services, calculated without deductions for taxes, refunds, or other costs. WP Engine will also provide Automattic a detailed monthly report of its Gross Revenue within fifteen days of the close of each calendar month, including a product line breakdown of all revenues generated. Automattic will have full audit rights.
(b) Commit 8% of its revenue in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees working on WordPress core features and functionality to be directed by WordPress.org. WP Engine will provide Automattic a detailed monthly report demonstrating its fulfillment of this commitment. WordPress.org and Automattic will have full audit rights, including access to employee records and time-tracking.
(c) Some combination of the above two options.
I’ve seen subsidies where hourly totals are required ‘employee records’?
Why does money go to Automattic instead of the Foundation?
Matt wants Automattic to get the money and he controls both of them.
Given how much they sunk into the boat anchor that is Tumblr, and how well Tumblr is doing right now, I'm not surprised they need any competitive advantage they can get.
Wordpress seems like the dying Emperor in 40k where the daily sacrifice of thousands of psykers (developers) is the only thing sustaining its life.
If this drama craters the developer base then Wordpress might collapse under its own weight.
Some years later I believe the story I saw said that they had less than $200 / month being donated to the project to keep it going.
Now I LOVE the idea of a wordpress minus gutenberg, with all the code quality and security updates and modern themes and plugins all working together..
Do I think this is legit going to be sustainable with hardly anyone chipping in time and money - well, for an open source hobby site, $200 a year put into security might be fine..
Some of the more important websites using wordpress as a backend might want to rethink all of that.
Which is funny, because essentially that is what Matt is saying in the first place - for those who profit from it and can afford to, please donate so we can keep on keeping on.
However I have around 50 websites or so that are running just fine without Gutenberg.. and if you count the number of updates WP and plugins and themes have rolled out since Gutenberg and multiple that by 50, most of these updates have been an annoying use of time.
That being said, Gutenberg stuff today is pretty mature and I do recommend it and use it projects launched post 2024, partially because it's mature at this point, but not insignificantly because it is built into core.
I railed long ago that Matt and co should develop Gutenberg, but do it as an optional add-in.
I would still build sites today without it if it wasn't baked into core..
altough I will say that as of today, core gutenberg and default theme with FSE is a fine way to build,
it's different in many ways, sometimes confusing especially for those who are not used to navigating around FSE differently - but it can be decent to look at on the front end with default tools, and it's lean as far as size and page speed / load time (comparatively speaking).
But depending on the use case, and what tooling one may already have at hand, I still feel it could be fine to build without Gutenberg completely.. astra / spectra and stuff from brainstorm force for example would be decent to build with the past few years with not guten needed..
other page builders like siteorigin's were already doing most the things without the delays in development, and removal of standard long standing features like the menus screen and hiding the custom css option..
Sure, some sites may have chosen to use a site builder or Classic Editor with ACF, but those that didn't are left out in the cold by ClassicPress's decisions.
I don't think it's just 'some sites' choosing to use other builders and reject Gutenberg. the plugin repo shows that the 'classic editor' plugin has over 10 million active installations.
(classic editor removes gutenberg from the backend screens) - so it's not being left out in the cold, it's keeping things running fine without Gutenbloat.
So there was/is a huge need for ClassicPress - it's just that there is an easier way to get a very similar result with WordPress and that is install an extra plugin to remove the 'new plugin' of Gutengerg -
and since it's so easy to get back the functionality with a few clicks, may people are leaving many websites without the performance boost of leaner WP and getting the same classic backend..
If autaomattic had not put the classic editor in the repo, many more would of sought out the fork and classicPress would be dealing with more than 10 million sites relying on it.
This has been a pretty big issue for some time now, and only very recently would I start to lean into Gutenberg being a mature enough replacement that I start to advocate for it's use.
But really there is no need for it - if you wanted a page builder years ago there were plenty, and still are.
The great thing about it has been the pulling in other aspects like performance issues and reusable styles and such - so it has helped make WP better in other areas along the way, so now I am okay with it.
Being left out in the cold without Guten just means a leaner site that loads faster unless you get into elementor or some other heavy bloatware to have click/drag GUI - but it's not the only option now or back then.
Today, it's fine either way.
Several of the most popular plugins are maintained by WPEngine.
WPEngine donates/sponsors hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to WordPress community events. Indeed, the convention where Matt went "nuclear" was sponsored by WPE to the tune of $75,000 (and despite these all being supposedly independent entities, somehow WPE was banned from attending by the Foundation. No refund, though).
> So if you're eager to volunteer to be their free labor, be my guest.
Matt is demanding that WPE provide his for-profit company, Automattic, free labor, to be directed as Automattic see fit. Not the Foundation, not the open source project.
> WordCamps come in all different flavors, based on the local communities that produce them, but in general, WordCamps include sessions on how to use WordPress more effectively, beginning plugin and theme development, advanced techniques, security, etc. To get an idea of the types of sessions typically seen at WordCamps, check out the WordCamp channel at WordPress.tv.
Open source is based on idealistic and community based mindset and modern tech is now based around extracting the dollars. The two aren't really compatible and it's really quite sad to see.
That being said this the most stupid way to go about it.
The moral obligation to not screw over a million innocent users also outweighs Matt's driving desire for more money.
Maybe setting up a proper independent governance of the WordPress project would encourage more independent contributions.
>"it's free but only until the project owners deem you too successful and then you'll have to pay 8% of your revenues to support the project".
https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-di...
Among all the more visible issues with this whole situation, he calls out a few things that I think need more awareness:
1. Matt decries Private Equity as leeches and freeloaders on free software, open source, and their community.
2. Automattic invested in WPE in the early days. In fact, Silver Lake, the PE firm that owns WPE, bought Automattic's share! Automattic sold to PE.
3. The WP Foundation has three members, two of whom show any sign of activity: Matt himself, and another person that Matt personally appointed who is... drum roll... the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm.
Somewhat ironic for someone who shit talks their competitors and Private Equity so vocally.
He chose to use an open source license and benefit from all that open source entails.
You can’t turn around and ignore the terms of the license just because it doesn’t suit you.
They don't get secretly blackmailed and publicly shamed for failure to do so. There are a lot of other WP hosts too (Pantheon, Cloudways, etc.) and they also don't get this same treatment, unless they all silently paid up and we just didn't know...?
Sure, there's a gentleman's understanding that companies with resources should contribute back to the projects they use, but it's not a hard and fast moral or legal code.
It's disturbing and frankly terrifying for all downstream WordPress companies and users for Matt to blow this so out of proportion to the actual crime of "failing to contribute back to open source", which so many of us are guilty of every single day.
If a 'company' is just digital landlordism it's not surprising makers don't want to subsidize your free ride...
Does anyone know what the context about this is? What did WP-Engine change which Matt disliked?
As I understand they were disabling page revision history (but would enable it if you asked) and only because they had some other proprietary to wp-engine method of versioning and rollbacks but this seems like a massive overreaction to that.
However, disabling revision history is a setting offered as part of WordPress: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/#revis...
I'd argue that WordPress.com, the paid hosting platform that Automattic operates, is more of a "hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code". By default you can only load a subset of themes or plugins and only if you choose the Business plan or higher. This seems like a bigger issue than having revisions turned off with a WordPress-provided setting.
It also seems a bit rich to be offering a product using the GPL license and then being upset that people make changes to it?
Youre absolutely right though - WP dot com is by far the worst offender of his own standards.
I suppose I understand the argument about wp-engine using significant wordpress.org resources has some merit (but is entirely unrelated to the bastardization argument) if wp-engine is just fetching things like wordpress updates and plugin lists and plugin updates, etc, all directly from wordpress.org servers on a per-blog basis but I find it hard to believe that wp-engine doesn't cache or have their own layer for that.
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP...
So, it's not just his dual role, it's his triple role.
I believe that WPEngine disabling the admin news feed that displayed his posts directly to WPEngine's customers was the tipping point for calling it a hacked up, bastardized simulacra
I read the revisions are often turned off as they cause major issues with database performance. It is a standard feature of wordpress too but them turning it off by default triggered matt
That is a weird thing to get upset about.
Matt is also on record criticizing WP Engine for never having donated to the WordPress Foundation.
This is all coming to light after the breakdown of licensing negotiations between Automattic and WPEngine
EDIT: https://www.therepository.email/mullenweg-threatens-corporat...
That’s… a very odd way of portraying this.
The policy, for like a decade, was:
“The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1foknoq/the_word...
Matt voices a number of grievances including WP Engine's changes to WordPress, their use of the term "WP", their donation/sponsorships, and more. At first glance they all seem a bit silly.
The important context, in my opinion, is that this comes after the breakdown of a licensing agreement between WP Engine and Automattic, an agreement that would've seen tens of millions of dollars paid to Automattic by WP Engine for a license that WP Engine does not think they need.
To put a point on it, none of the things WP Engine is accused of doing were problematic before the breakdown of licensing negotiations or the filing of WP Engine's lawsuit.
You can’t turn around and try to enforce that.
The main legal issues are around using "WordPress" and "WooCommerce"
Donate, perhaps. Sponsor? The Foundation event where Matt "went nuclear" last month was sponsored by WP Engine to the tune of $75,000. And was one of many donations this year.
(Adding insult to injury, the "independent" Foundation banned WP Engine from attending the event they were sponsoring... because they were in dispute with Automattic.)
Don't even start me on how "President of the WordPress Foundation, Matt Mullenweg", accepted their sponsorship check and then disinvited them from the event because they were in a conflict with "President of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg", and wouldn't even return the sponsorship check. In essence, if nothing else, that makes it a donation, because they sponsored the event, but got nothing for their sponsorship except knowing they... uhh... contributed to the community.
Just to get this straight. If you are in the business of creating websites for clients, and most of them are hosted on Wordpress.com, but a few are hosted on WPEngine, you are now forced to no longer use Wordpress.org and can't participate in the community?
Our company website is hosted on WPEngine, and has been there for years because we don't really touch it much. I literally log in once a year or so. The idea that because of this, I am barred from logging in to Wordpress.org is offensive and disgusting.
I really don't have much of a dog in this fight, I'm a lightweight customer of WPEngine but barely interact with it so don't care much. All I know is - I'll never, ever agree to work with Wordpress again.
"Please check this box if you want to proceed."
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/denounce
I think the word "disavow" is almost a perfect fit here, as in "the logon page requires users to disavow WP Engine".
> [Disavow:] to say that you know nothing about something, or that you have no responsibility for or connection with something
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/renounce
While Wordpress.org would probably like its visitors to oppose or criticize WP Engine, you don't have to do that to get past the logon page, being uninvolved is sufficient.
There’s still something entertaining to this for sure, but it also hurts so much. Wordpress used to be a respectable project, Automattic a respectable company and Matt a respectable person. Maybe it was too good to last.
The only way any of this (already serve) damage can somewhat be undone is Matt stepping back (as a sudden change of mind seems unlikely). Please don’t keep making it worse.
This was a mask off moment, but he's always been like this. He had a similar blow up in February when he harassed trans users on Tumblr (https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-transphobia-matt-mullenw...) (https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/told_you_so).
The reality: https://i.redd.it/asjc0wtjarkc1.png
Basically, Matt was in the right that time.
Private equity (SilverLake) bought WP Engine in 2018 and presumably the company has not been paying a trademark licensing fee far longer.
If no viable fork of WordPress arises out of this drama then it just goes to show that it is actually a product fully controlled by Automattic and WordPress.com and everyone else involved is just spineless with no real power or contribution.
When a single identity can dictate terms of an open source product with no genuine conversation or compromise, then it may as well be a closed source commercial product.
That just reads like petty tyrantry to me. Stop me if I'm wrong here but isn't wordpress itself just some PHP on top of a database? The value that he's gatekeeping here is actually the contributions of _other open source developers_?
Stop me if I'm wrong but isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?
how to get me never to recommend or use your software or services ever again, 101
get fucked, wordpress
Let this be a lesson to all of us - if you rely on a service provided by another organization external to your organization, get an SLA! Get a contract that guarantees you the provision of services you depend on.
Getting "takers" to pay for SLAs/licences is pretty much what Automattic or whoever's behind WordPress dot org wants.
Even crying foul over WP.org costs is disingenuous though. It's not WPE consuming the resources, it's the sites they host for customers. It'd be like Matt demanding 8% of AWS revenue because so many sites are hosted by them and accessing WP.org resources. Simply collecting the hosting of multiple WP sites under one provider should in no way obligated the provider directly. Either it's a freely accessable resource for WP sites or it's not. It should not be subject to the whims of a single person and used as a tool in their personal crusade.
Given that it's clear that WP.org is not actually a freely available resource, it's imperative that the WP codebase be adjusted to not use that resource anymore.
As I've said in most of my posts on this, I'm not involved in the WP world and have no ties to any party to this debacle.
Care to share?
I imagine if I had a company that asked someone to chip to help cover bandwidth and server resources, and they refused to pony up, I would say you are going to be limited in your access - and this would be another way to limit it.
If someone setup a system to steal all youtube videos and republish them, would it be reasonable for Google to add a captcha and demand that they not use thier bandwidth or content in way they don't like? Would it be cool to have a login system similar if detected?
This is more about access to a site and those servers than it is about being able to clone and use WP code imho.
