11 ms·

WP Engine is not WordPress

267 points by pentagrama 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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throwbmw 2y ago
Related: https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
teddyh 2y ago
Isn’t this what trademarks are for?
- realce 2y ago
  I don't think you read the article
  - rgbrenner 2y ago
    If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes: What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
    - gumboshoes 2y ago
      You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
  - cantSpellSober 2y ago
    The author's argument is that calling WP Engine's causing confusion. If so, wouldn't they be suing instead of blogging?
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      But it is WordPress, Mullenweg hasn't shown that it's anything other than stock WordPress with a setting turned off.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sgammon 2y ago
> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.
- sgammon 2y ago
  You can also just turn it on by emailing support...
  - SadTrombone 2y ago
    You can turn on an extremely limited version. Did you read the post?
    - sgammon 2y ago
      I did read the post, yes. Why does everyone keep asking everyone that?
      - jodrellblank 2y ago
        Because they don't read the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - sgammon 2y ago
    Are my downvoters here drafting posts that have greater than 5 revisions? Or?
- np_tedious 2y ago
  The revision system is not (not is it claimed to be) a sacred principle of life, morality, or society at large. It's a core tenet of WordPress.
pluc 2y ago
I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanilla WordPresses... and while the WordPress people may not like it, ain't nothing wrong with it.
- tomphoolery 2y ago
  > while the WordPress people may not like it hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/ https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/ always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!
  - SadTrombone 2y ago
    Did you read the post? They have no problem with other Wordpress hosts and are calling out WP Engine specifically. They even suggest switching to literally any other WP host that isn't WP Engine.
  - mattl 2y ago
    And this post is on WordPress.org See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/ https://wordpress.org/hosting/
- rgbrenner 2y ago
  You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing. Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.
lightlyused 2y ago
They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine. That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lightlyused 2y ago
  Wow. I was right. https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-Desist-Letter-to-Automattic-and-Request-to-Preserve-Documents-Sent.pdf https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De... IYKYK I guess.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Amazed that this got to the point where an official post was deemed necessary.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators. It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
- coliveira 2y ago
  > rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
  - clankyclanker 2y ago
    That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction. As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
    - mxey 2y ago
      WordPress is licensed under GPL.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - Sparyjerry 2y ago
tonymet 2y ago
You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.
- blendergeek 2y ago
  Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line. Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering. Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
  - Kye 2y ago
    This isn't the WP.org folks. This is Matt Mullenweg. Whether this is representative of the open source project is uncertain.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    The post and your comment are missing the argument for why it’s immoral though. Is taking an open source server project and offering paid hosting based on it immoral? Is it only immoral because they changed a setting from the default? Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?
toxican 2y ago
I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well: 1. Dead-simple staging environments 2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy. 3. Dead-simple backup/restore features 4. Simplified cache-management And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface. I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.
- walterfreedom 2y ago
  Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.
graeme 2y ago
This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it. I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine. I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with. Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.
- pluc 2y ago
  It's a little telling that 1) Matt has nobody around him to say hey maybe don't post that on our corporate site without context and 2) if he does nobody pointed that this reads like another millionaire hissy fit because someone is doing something they don't want them do and they're used to getting their ways with no resistance.
racked 2y ago
It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.
bdcravens 2y ago
We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company) My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.
- donohoe 2y ago
  I hear you for marketing. On journalism side it is helpful - depends on editorial workflow which varies from org to org.
shortformblog 2y ago
I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs. Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved. But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.
bsder 2y ago
Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress. Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone." If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.
sublinear 2y ago
I can only speak as someone who has done enough web dev to feel like every CMS is designed to get in the way and extract money. Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.
Kye 2y ago
This has the same energy as a spat between two Mastodon instances. Did he make any effort to work this out with them in private? I'd think he would mention that if he did. Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.
- usaphp 2y ago
  He mentioned during the talk that he made multiple attempts to resolve this in private but the other side wasn’t interested in hearing him, he also said he did not want to do this presentation
  - Kye 2y ago
    That's an hour long video. This detail should be in the post. A few sentences at most.
bastawhiz 2y ago
Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.
- Kye 2y ago
  Automattic's own managed WordPress platform severely restricts features all the way up to the top plan. I guess it's okay for them to do it. edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.
  - donohoe 2y ago
    I think you need to give more context. I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement. It really depends on context.
    - snowwrestler 2y ago
      I think they are referring to WordPress.com.
  - n3storm 2y ago
    Cannot upload own themes or plugins at WordPress.com Also there has been issues for years when trying to move away and transfer __your__ domain to another provider.
    - desas 2y ago
      > Cannot upload own themes or plugins at WordPress.com You can, just not on the free plan, or the two cheapest paid plans.
  - deleted 2y ago
bkyan 2y ago
In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.
- b0ner_t0ner 2y ago
  Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.
  - racked 2y ago
    Only if you avoid common plugins that need some server-side interaction, for instance Gravity Forms. (Probably _unless_ you use some custom rewrite rules, but then you're walking on less-trodden paths)
  - bkyan 2y ago
    The performance bottleneck with regards to revisions is on write, rather than on read.
dbg31415 2y ago
WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed. The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.
softwaredoug 2y ago
What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.
amanzi 2y ago
The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/ https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/ For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!
snowwrestler 2y ago
WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine. It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform. What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want? The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?
steviedotboston 2y ago
It's pretty bizarre to claim that WP Engine is causing confusion here when the real confusion is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
- sureIy 2y ago
  Is it honestly that confusing? One has a download button and one lets you sign up. Anyone knowing who to set up that zip file knows the difference. What you could argue is that Automattic is gatekeeping the best features to the .com and using it as a manager/trojanhorse for the .org version.
tr3ntg 2y ago
A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times. “But when I go to Wordpress.com…” SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress. This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves
- creinhardt 2y ago
  I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.
  - PedroBatista 2y ago
    And leave huge chunk of brand recognition money on the table while having to spend copious amounts of it to build another brand? If me or you were in the same position we would do the exact same.
- jacobyoder 2y ago
  And github != git, which we're still wrestling with over a decade in to its life. Yet, for some people 'github===git' so that just compounds the issue.
- bubblesnort 2y ago
  You just turned off the capital_p_dangit filter! WordPress ;)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
usaphp 2y ago
It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
- Kye 2y ago
  This seems like a detail that could be covered in a few sentences in the post. In fact it seems central to his argument so it's weird that he didn't. Allegedly it's in the hour-long video, but that's asking a lot.
  - b112 2y ago
    Some people, even smart ones, make the mistake of thinking people pay attention to an entire event like this. Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.
- mynameyeff 2y ago
  Gnarly...
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago
  Maybe Wordpress should consider a different license.
  - rmccue 2y ago
    WordPress cannot relicense; it’s a fork of a GPL project originally (b2) and there is no copyright assignment, so you would need explicit permission from every contributor including the forked project’s.
    - 2y ago
ActualHacker 2y ago
Says the company with a competing product
browningstreet 2y ago
I hosted on WP Engine for many, many years and everything got slower, including their control panel. I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too. WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.
thr0waway001 2y ago
WP Engine is so incredibly overpriced.
erlend_sh 2y ago
That whole post boils down to Mark & co(s) not having the necessary protections for their product, so they’re left with nothing to do but cry “foul” as a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work. (A)GPL provides no protection here. Polyform NonCommercial however does protect against this, because WP Engine would have to pay for the privilege of re-sale. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ See also the closely aligned Fair Source: https://fair.io https://fair.io
- echoangle 2y ago
  > a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work I would argue that releasing your code as open source already is the consent, and you can’t really revoke the consent later (make the license more strict when you already released it). They might not like it now but I wouldn’t call it non-consensually.
dz0ny 2y ago
I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages. Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default. So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value. TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing. Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.
- pbowyer 2y ago
  > I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages. And if you could say "Keep revisions for 30 days" and/or "Keep the last 10 revisions for every post". Why that hasn't been implemented...
  - dz0ny 2y ago
    Indeed :)! It's not well thought feature. Also WordPress.com limits to 25 revisions, for exactly the same issue. https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/ https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/
librasteve 2y ago
It’s probably worth mentioning that WP Engine author the _Local_ app https://localwp.com/ https://localwp.com/ which is far and away the best tool to build WP sites errr on your local machine. Then just upload to WP Engine and your are live. This valuable innovation is fueling the growth of WP Engine and makes this a bit of a honey trap. Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…
rpgbr 2y ago
Using .org blog to attack an Automattic rival is unacceptable. Matt must resign from WP leadership and focus on his business — and post this nonsense over there.
PeterZaitsev 2y ago
Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that. This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success. Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well. WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.
- Kye 2y ago
  He didn't choose to keep it open source. He has no choice unless he tracks down all the contributors back to B2 and gets them to assign copyright. This would be the most controversial thing he's done so far and likely lead to a fork. That's the point of a license like GPL.
jcoletti 2y ago
Curious why the post has two hyperlinks to the WP Engine domain, and additionally without rel="nofollow", if they despise them so much. Isn't that WordPress essentially passing SEO link juice to WP Engine?
mynameyeff 2y ago
In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.
merb 2y ago
tbf I dislike revisions in the forever space as a default and would prefer if they are off. If revisions can expire by default that is fine tough. I have no idea how Wordpress handles it. But most of the time you should backup your hosting data anyway , especially Wordpress, because updates will break stuff and these revisions are useless for that.
Kye 2y ago
The gist I get reading all the commentary is: a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path? Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.
imiric 2y ago
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not? This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging. The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period. As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.
RadixDLT 2y ago
[flagged]
tone 2y ago
Why is the .org mouth speaking with the .com's words? This is nothing more than commercially focused.
mrkramer 2y ago
One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!
Kye 2y ago
It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mullenweg_needs_to_step_down_from/lokzvec/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul... >> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."
bravetraveler 2y ago
I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it. A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement

267 points by pentagrama 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

throwbmw 2y ago

Related: https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

teddyh 2y ago

Isn’t this what trademarks are for?

realce 2y ago
I don't think you read the article
- rgbrenner 2y ago
  If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes: What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
  - gumboshoes 2y ago
    You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
- cantSpellSober 2y ago
  The author's argument is that calling WP Engine's causing confusion. If so, wouldn't they be suing instead of blogging?
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    But it is WordPress, Mullenweg hasn't shown that it's anything other than stock WordPress with a setting turned off.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sgammon 2y ago

> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.

sgammon 2y ago
You can also just turn it on by emailing support...
- SadTrombone 2y ago
  You can turn on an extremely limited version. Did you read the post?
  - sgammon 2y ago
    I did read the post, yes. Why does everyone keep asking everyone that?
    - jodrellblank 2y ago
      Because they don't read the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sgammon 2y ago
  Are my downvoters here drafting posts that have greater than 5 revisions? Or?
np_tedious 2y ago
The revision system is not (not is it claimed to be) a sacred principle of life, morality, or society at large. It's a core tenet of WordPress.

pluc 2y ago

I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanilla WordPresses... and while the WordPress people may not like it, ain't nothing wrong with it.

tomphoolery 2y ago
> while the WordPress people may not like it hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/ https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/ always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!
- SadTrombone 2y ago
  Did you read the post? They have no problem with other Wordpress hosts and are calling out WP Engine specifically. They even suggest switching to literally any other WP host that isn't WP Engine.
- mattl 2y ago
  And this post is on WordPress.org See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/ https://wordpress.org/hosting/
rgbrenner 2y ago
You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing. Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.

lightlyused 2y ago

They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine. That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lightlyused 2y ago
Wow. I was right. https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-Desist-Letter-to-Automattic-and-Request-to-Preserve-Documents-Sent.pdf https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De... IYKYK I guess.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Amazed that this got to the point where an official post was deemed necessary.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators. It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

coliveira 2y ago
> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
- clankyclanker 2y ago
  That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction. As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
  - mxey 2y ago
    WordPress is licensed under GPL.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- Sparyjerry 2y ago

tonymet 2y ago

You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.

blendergeek 2y ago
Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line. Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering. Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
- Kye 2y ago
  This isn't the WP.org folks. This is Matt Mullenweg. Whether this is representative of the open source project is uncertain.
- echoangle 2y ago
  The post and your comment are missing the argument for why it’s immoral though. Is taking an open source server project and offering paid hosting based on it immoral? Is it only immoral because they changed a setting from the default? Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?

toxican 2y ago

I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well: 1. Dead-simple staging environments 2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy. 3. Dead-simple backup/restore features 4. Simplified cache-management And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface. I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.

walterfreedom 2y ago
Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.

graeme 2y ago

This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it. I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine. I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with. Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.

pluc 2y ago
It's a little telling that 1) Matt has nobody around him to say hey maybe don't post that on our corporate site without context and 2) if he does nobody pointed that this reads like another millionaire hissy fit because someone is doing something they don't want them do and they're used to getting their ways with no resistance.

racked 2y ago

It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.

bdcravens 2y ago

We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company) My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.

donohoe 2y ago
I hear you for marketing. On journalism side it is helpful - depends on editorial workflow which varies from org to org.

shortformblog 2y ago

I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs. Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved. But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.

bsder 2y ago

Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress. Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone." If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.

sublinear 2y ago

I can only speak as someone who has done enough web dev to feel like every CMS is designed to get in the way and extract money. Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.

Kye 2y ago

This has the same energy as a spat between two Mastodon instances. Did he make any effort to work this out with them in private? I'd think he would mention that if he did. Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.

usaphp 2y ago
He mentioned during the talk that he made multiple attempts to resolve this in private but the other side wasn’t interested in hearing him, he also said he did not want to do this presentation
- Kye 2y ago
  That's an hour long video. This detail should be in the post. A few sentences at most.

bastawhiz 2y ago

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.

Kye 2y ago
Automattic's own managed WordPress platform severely restricts features all the way up to the top plan. I guess it's okay for them to do it. edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.
- donohoe 2y ago
  I think you need to give more context. I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement. It really depends on context.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    I think they are referring to WordPress.com.
- n3storm 2y ago
  Cannot upload own themes or plugins at WordPress.com Also there has been issues for years when trying to move away and transfer __your__ domain to another provider.
  - desas 2y ago
    > Cannot upload own themes or plugins at WordPress.com You can, just not on the free plan, or the two cheapest paid plans.
- deleted 2y ago

bkyan 2y ago

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

b0ner_t0ner 2y ago
Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.
- racked 2y ago
  Only if you avoid common plugins that need some server-side interaction, for instance Gravity Forms. (Probably _unless_ you use some custom rewrite rules, but then you're walking on less-trodden paths)
- bkyan 2y ago
  The performance bottleneck with regards to revisions is on write, rather than on read.

dbg31415 2y ago

WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed. The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.

softwaredoug 2y ago

What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.

amanzi 2y ago

The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/ https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/ For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!

snowwrestler 2y ago

WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine. It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform. What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want? The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?

steviedotboston 2y ago

It's pretty bizarre to claim that WP Engine is causing confusion here when the real confusion is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

sureIy 2y ago
Is it honestly that confusing? One has a download button and one lets you sign up. Anyone knowing who to set up that zip file knows the difference. What you could argue is that Automattic is gatekeeping the best features to the .com and using it as a manager/trojanhorse for the .org version.

tr3ntg 2y ago

A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times. “But when I go to Wordpress.com…” SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress. This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves

creinhardt 2y ago
I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.
- PedroBatista 2y ago
  And leave huge chunk of brand recognition money on the table while having to spend copious amounts of it to build another brand? If me or you were in the same position we would do the exact same.
jacobyoder 2y ago
And github != git, which we're still wrestling with over a decade in to its life. Yet, for some people 'github===git' so that just compounds the issue.
bubblesnort 2y ago
You just turned off the capital_p_dangit filter! WordPress ;)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

usaphp 2y ago

It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.

Kye 2y ago
This seems like a detail that could be covered in a few sentences in the post. In fact it seems central to his argument so it's weird that he didn't. Allegedly it's in the hour-long video, but that's asking a lot.
- b112 2y ago
  Some people, even smart ones, make the mistake of thinking people pay attention to an entire event like this. Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.
mynameyeff 2y ago
Gnarly...
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
Maybe Wordpress should consider a different license.
- rmccue 2y ago
  WordPress cannot relicense; it’s a fork of a GPL project originally (b2) and there is no copyright assignment, so you would need explicit permission from every contributor including the forked project’s.
  - 2y ago

ActualHacker 2y ago

Says the company with a competing product

browningstreet 2y ago

I hosted on WP Engine for many, many years and everything got slower, including their control panel. I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too. WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.

thr0waway001 2y ago

WP Engine is so incredibly overpriced.

erlend_sh 2y ago

That whole post boils down to Mark & co(s) not having the necessary protections for their product, so they’re left with nothing to do but cry “foul” as a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work. (A)GPL provides no protection here. Polyform NonCommercial however does protect against this, because WP Engine would have to pay for the privilege of re-sale. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ See also the closely aligned Fair Source: https://fair.io https://fair.io

echoangle 2y ago
> a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work I would argue that releasing your code as open source already is the consent, and you can’t really revoke the consent later (make the license more strict when you already released it). They might not like it now but I wouldn’t call it non-consensually.

dz0ny 2y ago

I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages. Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default. So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value. TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing. Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.

pbowyer 2y ago
> I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages. And if you could say "Keep revisions for 30 days" and/or "Keep the last 10 revisions for every post". Why that hasn't been implemented...
- dz0ny 2y ago
  Indeed :)! It's not well thought feature. Also WordPress.com limits to 25 revisions, for exactly the same issue. https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/ https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/

librasteve 2y ago

It’s probably worth mentioning that WP Engine author the _Local_ app https://localwp.com/ https://localwp.com/ which is far and away the best tool to build WP sites errr on your local machine. Then just upload to WP Engine and your are live. This valuable innovation is fueling the growth of WP Engine and makes this a bit of a honey trap. Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…

rpgbr 2y ago

Using .org blog to attack an Automattic rival is unacceptable. Matt must resign from WP leadership and focus on his business — and post this nonsense over there.

PeterZaitsev 2y ago

Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that. This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success. Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well. WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.

Kye 2y ago
He didn't choose to keep it open source. He has no choice unless he tracks down all the contributors back to B2 and gets them to assign copyright. This would be the most controversial thing he's done so far and likely lead to a fork. That's the point of a license like GPL.

jcoletti 2y ago

Curious why the post has two hyperlinks to the WP Engine domain, and additionally without rel="nofollow", if they despise them so much. Isn't that WordPress essentially passing SEO link juice to WP Engine?

mynameyeff 2y ago

In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.

merb 2y ago

tbf I dislike revisions in the forever space as a default and would prefer if they are off. If revisions can expire by default that is fine tough. I have no idea how Wordpress handles it. But most of the time you should backup your hosting data anyway , especially Wordpress, because updates will break stuff and these revisions are useless for that.

Kye 2y ago

The gist I get reading all the commentary is: a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path? Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.

imiric 2y ago

> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not? This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging. The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period. As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.

RadixDLT 2y ago

[flagged]

tone 2y ago

Why is the .org mouth speaking with the .com's words? This is nothing more than commercially focused.

mrkramer 2y ago

One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!

Kye 2y ago

It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mullenweg_needs_to_step_down_from/lokzvec/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul... >> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."

bravetraveler 2y ago

I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it. A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement