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Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument.

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revision data as just “changing a default setting” in a content management system is disingenuous to say the least.

bastawhiz 2y ago
> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?
- fragmede 2y ago
  Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.
  - technion 2y ago
    In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress. Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire. If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
  - bad_user 2y ago
    > "It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete." This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best. And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else. You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)
    - darby_nine 2y ago
      > This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap. > This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask? What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.
      - Diti 2y ago
        > how could [Google] know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask? They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.
      - bad_user 2y ago
  - can16358p 2y ago
    To be honest forget being better, if there's a Google competitor even on-par with Google, I'd switch to that immediately and never use Google or any of their services again. Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
softwaredoug 2y ago
Matt Mullenweg, author of this post, is CEO of Automattic, a for profit company with valuation in the billions. Largely raised from private capital
adolph 2y ago
> private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit? Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software? Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself? My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.
blackoil 2y ago
Why open source the software, if you don't want others to use it?
- dathos 2y ago
  [flagged]

bastawhiz 2y ago

> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?

fragmede 2y ago
Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.
- technion 2y ago
  In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress. Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire. If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
- bad_user 2y ago
  > "It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete." This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best. And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else. You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap. > This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask? What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.
    - Diti 2y ago
      > how could [Google] know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask? They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.
    - bad_user 2y ago
- can16358p 2y ago
  To be honest forget being better, if there's a Google competitor even on-par with Google, I'd switch to that immediately and never use Google or any of their services again. Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

softwaredoug 2y ago

Matt Mullenweg, author of this post, is CEO of Automattic, a for profit company with valuation in the billions. Largely raised from private capital

adolph 2y ago

> private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit? Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software? Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself? My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.

blackoil 2y ago

Why open source the software, if you don't want others to use it?

dathos 2y ago
[flagged]