12 ms·

Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

82 points by _morgs_ 2y ago

yieldcrv 2y ago
Oh no, marketing teams everywhere are in disarray and might need to talk to their organization’s full stack developer teams
_morgs_ 2y ago
WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.
- prox 2y ago
  Something I wonder, is it possible to have 3rd party plugin registries, so unconnected to .org ?
  - dncornholio 2y ago
    Yes. It's all just PHP. You can write your own plugin that does all this.
  - JPLeRouzic 2y ago
    As far as I know, you can still download a plugin, install it in the plugin folder, and possibly restart WordPress, but it's a bit more risky. Installing a plugin via the admin interface is much more comfortable. That said, as a WP admin of a tiny commercial website, I find it distressing that someone else can influence the functionalities of my Website. I already didn't install Jetpack because I dislike the intrusiveness and, frankly, the spying by Autommatic which is enabled by this plugin on our revenues and commercial transactions. All this points toward a direction that is not pleasant.
  - kennydude 2y ago
    Not out of the box really. It's incredibly frustrating where everyone "rolls their own solution" for commercial plugins
prox 2y ago
This needs to be higher up really. Big news with impact to those working with Wordpress.
arbol 2y ago
Why though?
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  > "I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit. > What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources. If you read the full (pretty short) statement, it comes of as something written at the end of a bad day with a lot of petty and vindictive emotion behind it all. Regardless of the actual issues, which I know no more of than the statement on the website. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
openplatypus 2y ago
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655967
Deukhoofd 2y ago
Related announcement from Wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Regardless of the claims made, that is a startlingly immature piece of communication.
  - dspillett 2y ago
    Yep. Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place! ---- [0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues.
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      > [...] and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues I'm occasionally forced to work with Wordpress, so I'm not an expert or anything, but that's my impression as well. Wordpress was designed for publishing articles but people want to use it as a foundation for building highly dynamic websites. The paradox of these highly dynamic WP websites is that people usually try to build that way because they don't have the development expertise to make a custom solution, so they need lots of plugins to achieve what they want, but those plugins are often built to such poor quality and security standards that they really need to be reviewed before use, but to review them you need developer expertise.
- kgeist 2y ago
  >The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer I wonder what it means.
mappu 2y ago
This spat is embarrassing for both companies.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
  What do you mean by both? What should have WPEngine done differently?
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.) Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.
    - bmelton 2y ago
      I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1] I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542
      - Ukv 2y ago
        > I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1] To at least partially back up my claim linked for the latter, WP Engine is part of WordPress.org's "Five for the Future" program, stating "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" and listing developers they sponsor: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress... Their own open-source projects can be found on GitHub, like FaustJS: https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs The primary events they sponsor are, to my understanding, WordCamps and DE{CODE}.
meindnoch 2y ago
Is anyone still using WordPress?
- dangrossman 2y ago
  Just 478 million websites representing 43% of the web.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    How many of those get more than 1 human visitor per day?
- mashmac2 2y ago
  40+% of the websites online? https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
robjwells 2y ago
I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.
- timkq 2y ago
  This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).
  - pooper 2y ago
    The question still stands though. Why does wp engine get to infringe on WordPress trademark AND get access to server resources for free?
    - Ukv 2y ago
      WordPress's trademark policy[0] explicitly said: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. and > Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.” [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
      - cr125rider 2y ago
        That makes this seem pretty cut and dry…
  - bilekas 2y ago
    Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.
ookblah 2y ago
while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back, if Mullenweg were serious about gaining support from the community he would give a date for people to migrate their systems off of WPEngine before they blocked it. this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's something not more critical than updating some plugins. you also can't deny the obvious conflict of interest here where it feels like he's trying take a "competitor" down. sucks all around.
- prox 2y ago
  Yeah this is my take as well. This feels like a mudsling fight and it’s messy. Whatever the .coms do is theirs, but the .org should not be in this one.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back To my understanding this isn't even particularly true - WPEngine have contributed significantly to events/sponsorships and with their own open source contributions. Matt's demand was allegedly instead for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic".
tomgp 2y ago
This whole thing seems petty and vindictive and will surely only damage Wordpress as a whole.
snatchpiesinger 2y ago
I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.
- createaccount99 2y ago
  The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events. Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.
    - graemep 2y ago
      I thought the trademarks were owned by the Wordpress Foundation?
      - Ukv 2y ago
        They are, and the foundation's policy[0] already explicitly states: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell. According to WP Engine: > Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
yellow_lead 2y ago
So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that. Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.
- timkq 2y ago
  His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.
  - yellow_lead 2y ago
    Yep, it sounds like he is jealous/envious that they are making more off of WordPress hosting than Automattic. WordPress being open source makes this even more ridiculous, because he's complaining about modifications to open source software.
  - debesyla 2y ago
    Yeah, I expected something more serious (like tracking usage analytics, scrapping data for some content generator or etc.) but it seems like the real problem is a minor function that {a lot} of users don't even know about?
    - ivanmontillam 2y ago
      The revisions history disabled feature is more of a scapegoat, imho. Matt is being unreasonable and petty here. Posts once published, they are rarely edited. Matt just bursted because of envy. He's used to be pampered with attention.
SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
Has WP Engine actually done anything wrong? Wordpress is released under GPLv2 which allows modification and commercial use. I don't see the justification for Automattic demanding royalties.
- timkq 2y ago
  They've realized it's an untapped source of revenue and they want their share, somehow
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  They are intending on enforcing this via trademarks and not code license. So the dispute is about "WP" and how "Wordpress" is used on the WP Engine website as a trademark.
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  Using WordPress the software is totally free, in both senses of the word. Using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks outside of fair use is not. Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    The WordPress Foundation's trademark policy[0] seemed fairly clear that: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. and > a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.” To me it looks like a conflict of interests that Matt's using his role as the director of the non-profit to try to make a competitor pay his for-profit business (which it's worth disclosing that you are an employee of, edit: now disclosed) tens of millions of dollars. Particuarly since WP Engine do already seem to contribute to the WordPress project/community/non-profit side, through events/sponsorships/open-source contributions. Even WordPress.org states "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" under their "Five for the Future" program[1]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...
mylastattempt 2y ago
The statement at Wordpress.org reads like a very emotionally charged e-mail. While I am not in the know of the situation, it seems like a bit of terrible PR. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
- monkey_monkey 2y ago
  The statement isn't at wordpress.com
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    Need more coffee, edited!
toenail 2y ago
God the hubris of the Wordpress camp.. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ > WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Wordpress people have been rewriting content without asking for permission FOREVER, potentially breaking code embedded in content. They rewrite (or perhaps stopped by now, I've moved on) Wordpress to WordPress.
- bilekas 2y ago
  > Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia If I was a hosting service I would have that noise off by default too.
hnarayanan 2y ago
I’ve been using WordPress since b2/cafelog, and hilariously it’s this hubbub that’s made me aware of WPEngine.
genmon 2y ago
I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all. Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc. All seems so sudden and disproportionate.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  > did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?
  - genmon 2y ago
    Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.
    - notpushkin 2y ago
      I’d go with the most obvious explanation: Matt found out their biggest competitor makes more money than WP.com and does’t give back (money or development time), got rughtfully pissed, but started doing ridiculous things instead of just calling them out.
  - batuhanicoz 2y ago
    If WP Engine wanted to dedicate resources to build on the code they are using, they would've contributed more to the core itself. Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this. Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
    - Deukhoofd 2y ago
      You might want to add a disclaimer that you work at Automattic.
elashri 2y ago
Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting. WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck? The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now. If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.
- ivanmontillam 2y ago
  The current best practice for solving that is to flatten your WordPress installation in HTML files, or to use a WP cache plugin. Caches like CloudFlare also help a lot. I don't know the exact details about it, but that solves the bottleneck. Once pages are flattened they do not have to call the database again. There's also a flat-file CMS called FlatPress, but I was not able to reliably determine if it's a fork or not.
nodesocket 2y ago
This behavior seems incredibly hostile, especially considering both companies have been around for over a decade. So, what changed? WP Engine got big? They've been that way for quite some time. My guess is that developments over the past eight years—such as the rise of static sites, JavaScript, and Node.js have likely led to a decline in market share and revenue for both WordPress and WP Engine (though I don’t have specific data to back this up). This is just bad business. Focusing on competitors is a distraction, and at this point, it feels like a personal feud for Matt. What are the motives? Money (unlikely Matt already is wealthy), seems like hubris.
raverbashing 2y ago
Matt needs to calm down, talk to their lawyers and keep the ego in check Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine. Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store
- graemep 2y ago
  Wordpress is a fork of a GPL licensed blog CMS so they had no choice but for it to be GPL.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > Matt needs to calm down ... ... means, "this seems more important to Matt than it does to me" and "he should just accept it shouldn't matter to him any more than it does to me". Which, when paraphrased, explains why the comment tends to further provoke those who are passionate about something dear to them. Often it's dear, and they are uncalm, because it came from them or is part of them in some way. That's the anti-calm appealed to by "think of the children", an inciting phrase. We're to recognize that our creations are worth our care. Put another way: not all indignation is unrighteous.
throwbmw 2y ago
Related: https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760
speckx 2y ago
Ugh! I manage a large number of sites on WPE for clients, and keeping them updated and secure via manual method is going to be a pain. I might as well spin up my servers and migrate away instead of waiting for things to settle.
bilekas 2y ago
I thought this didn't affect me until tonight I had a call from a freelance client maybe 5 years ago call me. Just spent the better part of 3 hours after work trying to help him out, what WordPress have done here is ridiculous. It feels like something more petty than a child. Mullenweg needs to grow up and realise that open source is open source. I've read through the cease and desist claims. It's Mullenweg's petty ego destroying an ecosystem of WPE users. So much for his high and mighty 'wordpress is the pinicle of user's experience' Whatever his angle is, I just replaced Wordpress with a home rolled cms for my client. WordPress can die for all I care. The web would be safer for it.
ILILILIL 2y ago
WPEngine has been a supreme disappointment in the last year. Agency Partner Program is a bogus seduction tactic. The development instance you can have now is embarrassing when displaying progress to clients as they swear no caching exists when the instance is password-protected. I'm tired of WPEngine and love that this is happening. Been much happier with Kinsta.

82 points by _morgs_ 2y ago

Oh no, marketing teams everywhere are in disarray and might need to talk to their organization’s full stack developer teams

_morgs_ 2y ago

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.

prox 2y ago
Something I wonder, is it possible to have 3rd party plugin registries, so unconnected to .org ?
- dncornholio 2y ago
  Yes. It's all just PHP. You can write your own plugin that does all this.
- JPLeRouzic 2y ago
  As far as I know, you can still download a plugin, install it in the plugin folder, and possibly restart WordPress, but it's a bit more risky. Installing a plugin via the admin interface is much more comfortable. That said, as a WP admin of a tiny commercial website, I find it distressing that someone else can influence the functionalities of my Website. I already didn't install Jetpack because I dislike the intrusiveness and, frankly, the spying by Autommatic which is enabled by this plugin on our revenues and commercial transactions. All this points toward a direction that is not pleasant.
- kennydude 2y ago
  Not out of the box really. It's incredibly frustrating where everyone "rolls their own solution" for commercial plugins

prox 2y ago

This needs to be higher up really. Big news with impact to those working with Wordpress.

arbol 2y ago

Why though?

mylastattempt 2y ago
> "I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit. > What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources. If you read the full (pretty short) statement, it comes of as something written at the end of a bad day with a lot of petty and vindictive emotion behind it all. Regardless of the actual issues, which I know no more of than the statement on the website. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

openplatypus 2y ago

Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655967

Deukhoofd 2y ago

Related announcement from Wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 2y ago
Regardless of the claims made, that is a startlingly immature piece of communication.
- dspillett 2y ago
  Yep. Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place! ---- [0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    > [...] and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues I'm occasionally forced to work with Wordpress, so I'm not an expert or anything, but that's my impression as well. Wordpress was designed for publishing articles but people want to use it as a foundation for building highly dynamic websites. The paradox of these highly dynamic WP websites is that people usually try to build that way because they don't have the development expertise to make a custom solution, so they need lots of plugins to achieve what they want, but those plugins are often built to such poor quality and security standards that they really need to be reviewed before use, but to review them you need developer expertise.
kgeist 2y ago
>The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer I wonder what it means.

mappu 2y ago

This spat is embarrassing for both companies.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
What do you mean by both? What should have WPEngine done differently?
- notpushkin 2y ago
  Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.) Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.
  - bmelton 2y ago
    I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1] I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542
    - Ukv 2y ago
      > I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1] To at least partially back up my claim linked for the latter, WP Engine is part of WordPress.org's "Five for the Future" program, stating "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" and listing developers they sponsor: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress... Their own open-source projects can be found on GitHub, like FaustJS: https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs The primary events they sponsor are, to my understanding, WordCamps and DE{CODE}.

meindnoch 2y ago

Is anyone still using WordPress?

dangrossman 2y ago
Just 478 million websites representing 43% of the web.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  How many of those get more than 1 human visitor per day?
mashmac2 2y ago
40+% of the websites online? https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

robjwells 2y ago

I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.

timkq 2y ago
This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).
- pooper 2y ago
  The question still stands though. Why does wp engine get to infringe on WordPress trademark AND get access to server resources for free?
  - Ukv 2y ago
    WordPress's trademark policy[0] explicitly said: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. and > Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.” [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
    - cr125rider 2y ago
      That makes this seem pretty cut and dry…
- bilekas 2y ago
  Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.

ookblah 2y ago

while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back, if Mullenweg were serious about gaining support from the community he would give a date for people to migrate their systems off of WPEngine before they blocked it. this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's something not more critical than updating some plugins. you also can't deny the obvious conflict of interest here where it feels like he's trying take a "competitor" down. sucks all around.

prox 2y ago
Yeah this is my take as well. This feels like a mudsling fight and it’s messy. Whatever the .coms do is theirs, but the .org should not be in this one.
Ukv 2y ago
> while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back To my understanding this isn't even particularly true - WPEngine have contributed significantly to events/sponsorships and with their own open source contributions. Matt's demand was allegedly instead for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic".

tomgp 2y ago

This whole thing seems petty and vindictive and will surely only damage Wordpress as a whole.

snatchpiesinger 2y ago

I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.

createaccount99 2y ago
The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.
- Ukv 2y ago
  To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events. Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.
  - graemep 2y ago
    I thought the trademarks were owned by the Wordpress Foundation?
    - Ukv 2y ago
      They are, and the foundation's policy[0] already explicitly states: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell. According to WP Engine: > Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...

yellow_lead 2y ago

So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that. Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.

timkq 2y ago
His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  Yep, it sounds like he is jealous/envious that they are making more off of WordPress hosting than Automattic. WordPress being open source makes this even more ridiculous, because he's complaining about modifications to open source software.
- debesyla 2y ago
  Yeah, I expected something more serious (like tracking usage analytics, scrapping data for some content generator or etc.) but it seems like the real problem is a minor function that {a lot} of users don't even know about?
  - ivanmontillam 2y ago
    The revisions history disabled feature is more of a scapegoat, imho. Matt is being unreasonable and petty here. Posts once published, they are rarely edited. Matt just bursted because of envy. He's used to be pampered with attention.

SturgeonsLaw 2y ago

Has WP Engine actually done anything wrong? Wordpress is released under GPLv2 which allows modification and commercial use. I don't see the justification for Automattic demanding royalties.

timkq 2y ago
They've realized it's an untapped source of revenue and they want their share, somehow
the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
They are intending on enforcing this via trademarks and not code license. So the dispute is about "WP" and how "Wordpress" is used on the WP Engine website as a trademark.
batuhanicoz 2y ago
Using WordPress the software is totally free, in both senses of the word. Using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks outside of fair use is not. Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
- Ukv 2y ago
  The WordPress Foundation's trademark policy[0] seemed fairly clear that: > The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. and > a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.” To me it looks like a conflict of interests that Matt's using his role as the director of the non-profit to try to make a competitor pay his for-profit business (which it's worth disclosing that you are an employee of, edit: now disclosed) tens of millions of dollars. Particuarly since WP Engine do already seem to contribute to the WordPress project/community/non-profit side, through events/sponsorships/open-source contributions. Even WordPress.org states "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" under their "Five for the Future" program[1]. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...

mylastattempt 2y ago

The statement at Wordpress.org reads like a very emotionally charged e-mail. While I am not in the know of the situation, it seems like a bit of terrible PR. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

monkey_monkey 2y ago
The statement isn't at wordpress.com
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  Need more coffee, edited!

toenail 2y ago

God the hubris of the Wordpress camp.. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ > WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Wordpress people have been rewriting content without asking for permission FOREVER, potentially breaking code embedded in content. They rewrite (or perhaps stopped by now, I've moved on) Wordpress to WordPress.

bilekas 2y ago
> Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia If I was a hosting service I would have that noise off by default too.

hnarayanan 2y ago

I’ve been using WordPress since b2/cafelog, and hilariously it’s this hubbub that’s made me aware of WPEngine.

genmon 2y ago

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all. Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc. All seems so sudden and disproportionate.

notpushkin 2y ago
> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?
- genmon 2y ago
  Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    I’d go with the most obvious explanation: Matt found out their biggest competitor makes more money than WP.com and does’t give back (money or development time), got rughtfully pissed, but started doing ridiculous things instead of just calling them out.
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  If WP Engine wanted to dedicate resources to build on the code they are using, they would've contributed more to the core itself. Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this. Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
  - Deukhoofd 2y ago
    You might want to add a disclaimer that you work at Automattic.

elashri 2y ago

Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting. WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck? The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now. If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.

ivanmontillam 2y ago
The current best practice for solving that is to flatten your WordPress installation in HTML files, or to use a WP cache plugin. Caches like CloudFlare also help a lot. I don't know the exact details about it, but that solves the bottleneck. Once pages are flattened they do not have to call the database again. There's also a flat-file CMS called FlatPress, but I was not able to reliably determine if it's a fork or not.

nodesocket 2y ago

This behavior seems incredibly hostile, especially considering both companies have been around for over a decade. So, what changed? WP Engine got big? They've been that way for quite some time. My guess is that developments over the past eight years—such as the rise of static sites, JavaScript, and Node.js have likely led to a decline in market share and revenue for both WordPress and WP Engine (though I don’t have specific data to back this up). This is just bad business. Focusing on competitors is a distraction, and at this point, it feels like a personal feud for Matt. What are the motives? Money (unlikely Matt already is wealthy), seems like hubris.

raverbashing 2y ago

Matt needs to calm down, talk to their lawyers and keep the ego in check Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine. Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store

graemep 2y ago
Wordpress is a fork of a GPL licensed blog CMS so they had no choice but for it to be GPL.
Terretta 2y ago
> Matt needs to calm down ... ... means, "this seems more important to Matt than it does to me" and "he should just accept it shouldn't matter to him any more than it does to me". Which, when paraphrased, explains why the comment tends to further provoke those who are passionate about something dear to them. Often it's dear, and they are uncalm, because it came from them or is part of them in some way. That's the anti-calm appealed to by "think of the children", an inciting phrase. We're to recognize that our creations are worth our care. Put another way: not all indignation is unrighteous.

throwbmw 2y ago

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

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760

speckx 2y ago

Ugh! I manage a large number of sites on WPE for clients, and keeping them updated and secure via manual method is going to be a pain. I might as well spin up my servers and migrate away instead of waiting for things to settle.

bilekas 2y ago

I thought this didn't affect me until tonight I had a call from a freelance client maybe 5 years ago call me. Just spent the better part of 3 hours after work trying to help him out, what WordPress have done here is ridiculous. It feels like something more petty than a child. Mullenweg needs to grow up and realise that open source is open source. I've read through the cease and desist claims. It's Mullenweg's petty ego destroying an ecosystem of WPE users. So much for his high and mighty 'wordpress is the pinicle of user's experience' Whatever his angle is, I just replaced Wordpress with a home rolled cms for my client. WordPress can die for all I care. The web would be safer for it.

ILILILIL 2y ago

WPEngine has been a supreme disappointment in the last year. Agency Partner Program is a bogus seduction tactic. The development instance you can have now is embarrassing when displaying progress to clients as they swear no caching exists when the instance is password-protected. I'm tired of WPEngine and love that this is happening. Been much happier with Kinsta.