23 ms·

WordPress.org bans WP Engine

567 points by openplatypus 2y ago

openplatypus 2y ago
Likely the aftermath of https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-engine-a-cancer-to-wordpress-and-urges-community-to-switch-providers/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...
- 3np 2y ago
  Between all the threads, this video is the best for context I think. Juicy part start around 10min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
nailer 2y ago
> Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.
- lnxg33k1 2y ago
  It's important to point out, since probably the whole automattic is still leeching from b2 and hasn't added anything
  - kgeist 2y ago
    Just checked out the original version of b2 Wordpress was forked from and could immediately spot a SQL injection which I can use to take over the whole site: $log = $HTTP_POST_VARS["log"]; <..> $user_login=$log; <..> SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM $tableusers WHERE user_login = '$user_login' AND MD5(user_pass) = '$password' Later it also stores the hashed password as a cookie. Some quality 2003 code :)
    - admissionsguy 2y ago
      Not necessarily if magic quotes are enabled!!
      - hedgehog 2y ago
        Oh "magic quotes", we hardly miss you.
    - lnxg33k1 2y ago
      2003? If I remember correctly, SQL injection has been in OWASP Top 10 until 2016
      - kgeist 2y ago
        The code is from 2003.
        lnxg33k1 2y ago
        Yeah, I got that, it's just that could as well be more recent^^
chx 2y ago
This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control? This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't. Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
- tgv 2y ago
  > This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...
  - DonnieBurger 2y ago
    How about using the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit, to attack a for-profit's competitors. They could lose their tax-exempt status.
    - shakna 2y ago
      A nonprofit removed access to resources from a for-profit, with whom they did not have a contract. That's a non starter.
      - DonnieBurger 2y ago
        There is more to the story than just this event. For context: 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... https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhibits.pdf https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhib...
ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
I don't use any their products, so I don't have any community insider insights, but based on what I've read so far, it seems like WordPress did the right thing. If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.
- sureIy 2y ago
  Makes no sense. Everyone is profiting off WordPress and probably 0.1% of those ever contributed back. Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
  - ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
    I don't think the issue is about WordPress, the open source software, but rather about using up ressources on the wordpress.org servers.
    - 1116574 2y ago
      Yep, Matt (wordpress guy) has a dramatic writing style, but in essence WPE is using plugins, their security research, user system, theming store etc, without contributing back that much. Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
      - tbyehl 2y ago
        > Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
      - dncornholio 2y ago
        My company is also a heavy user of WordPress and never have contributed. We also hide those widgets. Do we need to be blocked as well then?
robjwells 2y ago
Here's Matt Mullenweg's post on Wordpress.org announcing this: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578
- martin_a 2y ago
  I don't understand what the actual problem is. What did WPEngine do to use "wordpress.org resources"? That article is very... non-informative.
  - robjwells 2y ago
    I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries. There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this. Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project. Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest. Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
    - _cenw 2y ago
      Automattic also has a very direct competitor in Pressable - who are currently running a WP Engine contract buyout promotion in their header. Horrid look.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
Raed667 2y ago
TBH i don't mind this, open-source means you can use the code, but you're not entitled to infra and services.
- _cenw 2y ago
  If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad. WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed. But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims. Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
  - Raed667 2y ago
    I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example) This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.
    - seb1204 2y ago
      I also don't have a dog in the fight but reading for a few minutes I have the impression there have been previous attempts to engage with WPE to contribute. I might be wrong.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I've used Wordpress self-hosted for a long time and this seems like a non-issue. WPEngine can use the Wordpress codebase but why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? I say this is a good thing.
- yreg 2y ago
  > why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? They are not entitled to them, but Wordpress has previously decided to offer those services. Wordpress donors most probably expected that these services will continue to be provided to anyone. The controversial part is that now they apparently establish a policy that Matt Mullenweg (the owner of for-profit Wordpress.com) can arbitrarily ban competitors in case he doesn't like them.
  - batuhanicoz 2y ago
    WordPress.org (the service that banned WP Engine) is not funded by donors. WordPress Foundation is the non profit entity that has donations.
    - paulgb 2y ago
      Interesting, so then who pays to run wordpress.org? I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
      - batuhanicoz 2y ago
        WordPress.org is operated by Matt Mullenweg as a free service that hosts plugins, themes, docs and more. It does not take donations, or as far I am aware, make any profits. Instead, people are encouraged to donate to the Foundation, which helps with the development of WordPress the software and organizes things like WordCamps.
jeswin 2y ago
If like Matt says, they contribute little back to Wordpress then I am with Automattic on this. If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way. Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid. Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.
- _cenw 2y ago
  This is a horrible way to go about it though. WP Engine users are still WordPress users, and cutting them off without notice is very shitty. I wouldn't trust WordPress for anything after this, if all that it takes to cut you off from updates - potentially security updates - is Matt Mullenweg not liking you (or your ISP).
  - cies 2y ago
    They could move their sites over to the WordPress.com, can't they? Since they offer competing services in the first place.
    - RealStickman_ 2y ago
      Is that supposed to make this blatantly anti-competitive behaviour okay?
      - cies 2y ago
        Sorry? Their service is... their service! They can extend of refuse service to whom they want. Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wg0 2y ago
Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo and now WordPress - it seems that Open source is as good and only good when you and only you can sell it. The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort, does things better than you to market/host/package your open source project, the moment things to start to fall apart. None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc. EDIT: typos
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  WordPress has been around for a long time, and there is no change to how open it is. It is GPL code, Automattic is not forking it and selling access to the fork. We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on. This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
  - DonnieBurger 2y ago
    Are you going to be "just asking" other businesses as well? Or does it only apply to competitors of Automattic?
    - batuhanicoz 2y ago
      As long as competitors of Automattic does not infringe on the trademarks owned (in the case of WooCommerce) or licensed (WordPress) by Automattic, I don't see any reason for us taking any action. I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
      - prox 2y ago
        Honestly I tried at one point, but the community was rather hostile and unwelcoming. I help out with Godot sometimes and it’s far more welcoming and low friction.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
jaggs 2y ago
[flagged]
- throwbmw 2y ago
  Agree 100 percent. Perhaps the present generation doesn't know about the early days of Wordpress. Also, all this wording may be because Matt is very committed and so emotional about the protection of open source projects
- hackerbeat 2y ago
  100%
- Sebb767 2y ago
  It looks like Matt is using the WordPress non-profit to attack a competitor. Additionally, he cut off services to that competitor with the clear intent of disrupting their service and customers and talks about trademark infringement, despite their use of the trademark clearly being covered by their very own guidelines, and, to literally add insult to injury, he describes the situation in very emotional language. It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.
  - consteval 2y ago
    You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice. If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day. Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
rado 2y ago
Always found it interesting that the core WP lacks CDN support, caching, multilingual etc out of the box and leverages the paid WP.com, while using open source contributions.
throwbmw 2y ago
Related: https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
joshstrange 2y ago
This is _so_ rich coming from Wordpress who offers a bastardized version of Wordpress themselves on Wordpress.com I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.
- meonkeys 2y ago
  Yep. wordpress.com locks people in, making it hard to later migrate to the open source version of WordPress.
Communitivity 2y ago
My empathy is with Automatic on this one, but I still think it's the wrong move. "Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks. However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.
- timeon 2y ago
  I'm do not want to talk about whole thing, I do not know what to think about that but: > If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it... Isn't this more about infrastructure (wordpress.org)? All plugins are still downloadable and able to install via SFTP.
- troyvit 2y ago
  > If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
I’m a little surprised WPE didn’t have some kind of contingency plan for this in place already, even if it was just to handle a Wordpress.org outage.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760
wfjackson3 2y ago
This is one of the worst attempts to handle a corporate dispute that I have ever seen. Forget all of the he said he said arguments for a second and see what a random person who decided to use WordPress will see. If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress. I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.
philsquared_ 2y ago
The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine. There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute. The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way. It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them. To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.
- rgbrenner 2y ago
  this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately. even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses. the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
  - kadoban 2y ago
    The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
    - rgbrenner 2y ago
      if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service. and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments) WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments) Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments) Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments) WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  Why not merge this with the existing thread on the official post that it references? This is a dupe. An after-the-fact submission talking about the source.
- rmccue 2y ago
  Also: WP Engine Must Win -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480 (Disclaimer: my submission and post. I am a WordPress core committer and built the REST API for it.)
- rpgbr 2y ago
  Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 (31 comments)
kotaKat 2y ago
Matt's really out here with the cars covered in hammers that explode more than a few times and hammers went flying everywhere.
dcchambers 2y ago
I understand why Matt is frustrated and I sympathize with the situation, but I don't think his approach is going to win him any public favor nor have a long term positive payout.
- lioeters 2y ago
  Anyone who may have had sympathies for his arguments are all turned off now that he's gone on a "scorched earth" path. He dragged the non-profit foundation into a business spat involving Automattic and WP Engine, or maybe even between two rich guys, Matt Mullenweg and Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, who owns WPE. Using the org website to make a nasty post slandering WPE. Spreading it via the built-in news metabox on every WordPress dashboard. The org's plugin repository to block WPE's domains/IPs specifically. That's a single person wielding power in his domain, maybe all legal, but the org should be making decisions as a group and community.
  - tacker2000 2y ago
    Seriously, he spread it to every WP dashboard via the news widget? Thats pretty hilarious and insane at the same time. I’m really interested to see how this plays out. Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?
    - gkoberger 2y ago
      Sure, but that won't make the problem go away. The (most recent) issue is that WP is blocking downloading of extensions, so WPEngine would have to find a way to mirror every extension (and that might not be permissible by licensing?)
      - ipaddr 2y ago
        Would they just move the external call client side and use customers ips to download extension data or use proxies or tor to avoid ip ban?
tomphoolery 2y ago
This went from "hey you guys shouldn't use WP Engine because it's not Real WordPress" to "WP Engine is violating trademarks and isn't welcome in the WordPress community anymore" really f'in quick!
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  Publicly, perhaps but we've been trying to resolve these issues with WP Engine for at least 18 months now.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Just as an FYI: this is a really really bad look from the outside. Your CEO's comments and the new trademark policy sound borderline deranged, and this step of banning them dangerously destabilizes the ecosystem. WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.
    - acdha 2y ago
      Yes - I don’t use WP and have no experience with either of those companies but everything I’ve heard about this has been people looking into alternatives because this raises the question of whether it’s motivated by a desire to boost revenue and merely the first step in the process.
  - graeme 2y ago
    What are the issues? Nothing publicly articulated so far appears to have breached any licensing terms or trademark law. If there are issues then Matt would do well to clearly articulate the problem.
  - raoulw 2y ago
    Therein lies the problem. Why is a8c even involved? This is a WordPress Foundation problem.
    - deleted 2y ago
simonjgreen 2y ago
What does Wordpress.com contribute upstream to THEIR dependencies I wonder…
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Nemo_bis 2y ago
  There are some financial contributions listed at https://opencollective.com/automattic https://opencollective.com/automattic
nijave 2y ago
I have a hard time being sympathetic for Matt given what I've read so far. The C&D WPR sent shows plenty of quotes about Matt threatening to talk poorly about WPE unless they pay up. If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here. As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them. From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/ https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/ Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trebor 2y ago
I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem. But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms. Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt. Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.
- orf 2y ago
  What database is burdened by 200k rows? That’s tiny.
  - trebor 2y ago
    It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better). But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …
    - orf 2y ago
      But a database can handle tens of millions of rows with those resources. If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.
      - trebor 2y ago
        Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves? We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog. Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text. Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem. Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why. The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.
lolinder 2y ago
Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement. > To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0] The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself. I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF. [0] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
- schneems 2y ago
  From the article: > WordPress’s GPL code Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    It's a question of philosophy, not license. The whole "release code under GPL but get angry when other people besides you start making more money than you do from it" thing is strikingly different from the attitude in the GPL FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm... The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.
urbandw311er 2y ago
[flagged]
- lolinder 2y ago
  What harm is done to the free software by WP Engine using it? Is it somehow more difficult to share WordPress code than if they didn't exist? Are they breaking the license terms? This conflict doesn't feel like a Free Software conflict, it feels like a repeat of what we saw with Mongo & Elastic & Hashicorp—a company that founded itself on being Open Source came to regret the side effects.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  As a follow up, explain how Wordpress.com isn't using free software for their own profit.
rty32 2y ago
Somewhat off-topic: WordPress has proven that there is still a market for WordPress-style CRM and managed solution even in 2024. Why hasn't a strong, open source competitor emerged over the years? Because if there is an alternative, this article would be much less relevant, and the events may not have happened in the first place. Is it because CRM, especially the dynamic kind, is no longer cool, and developers are not interested in this area any more?
- deleted 2y ago
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- evantbyrne 2y ago
  Part of it is that there are more choices these days in terms of highly customizable CMSs. I stopped building new WordPress sites when I discovered Wagtail. There's also Payload which I've heard good things about. The other part is that agencies are being squeezed out of the side of the custom website market where WordPress offers appropriate trade-offs. Most agencies that build on WordPress anymore are theme chop shops.
- rty32 2y ago
  *CMS -- I don't know what I was thinking
- b3ing 2y ago
  WordPress has done a good job of taking the top ideas and incorporating them quickly into its CMS. Many times not right away, but under the hood they are there and they can easily built a UI for it later. They got a lot of ideas from Drupal, Tumbler, SquareSpace, Ghost, Headless CMSes, etc.
stock_toaster 2y ago
Seems very similar to AWS and Elastic, Mongodb, etc.
progmetaldev 2y ago
Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content). Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.
- btown 2y ago
  Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence. (Nice username, btw!)
stock_toaster 2y ago
Interview with Matt Mullenweg about his side in all this a little bit ago: [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
system2 2y ago
I don't care who's right or wrong; I’m just glad WP Engine is finally facing some consequences. Their treatment of clients is appalling—lying through their teeth, charging absurd prices, and offering abysmal support. My company lost many clients because of them.
nargella 2y ago
Not this specifically, but I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Redis, elastic, openai, wordpress. Each came to realize that the open source benefit has a glaring issue with their corporate interests.
tiffanyh 2y ago
Slight OT: I thought WordPress.com migrated away from using “WordPress” nearly a decade ago (to a custom nodejs app) https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-new-wordpress-com/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...
- maxloh 2y ago
  So basically they are not WordPress too.
iambateman 2y ago
This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign. WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully. Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint. That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
- itsFolf 2y ago
  A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
  - Maxious 2y ago
    A couple of hours ago Matt dropped into a twitch stream and offered up an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM > Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there" > Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
ModestoBorn 2y ago
I'm a WordPress (WP) developer and avid user of WP Engine. I just tested some of my WordPress sites hosted on WP Engine and can confirm that it's currently not possible to take some actions that pull data from https://wordpress.org/ https://wordpress.org/, such as not updating WP plugins or installing new WP plugins. I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage: [quote] The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software. ... People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. [/quote] After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software. Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core. I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  I think that is exactly Matt’s problem with the conduct of WP Engine—they have done next to nothing to support the infrastructure that they profit from. It’s like a person who uses ad block saying they won’t watch YouTube if google breaks the ad blocking. That is exactly what they want, you have negative value.
pier25 2y ago
It's weird Matt would generate all this drama. By not allowing WP Engine to use the plugin ecosystem he is first and foremost damaging the actual WP users hosting there. Probably millions of users.
phplovesong 2y ago
Wordpress, the thing keeping PHP alive!
mastazi 2y ago
The community should fork Wordpress so that is no longer controlled by Automattic, thus eliminating the conflict of interest. They would have to pick a different name, such as LibrePress (just like LibreOffice vs OpenOffice), in order to avoid copyright or trademark claims by Automattic.
- seriocomic 2y ago
  Kind of been done (in a minor protest against the change to the back-end editing system: https://www.classicpress.net/ https://www.classicpress.net/
linotype 2y ago
Sounds like people should start migrating off of WordPress altogether. See: Elastic and Redis.
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munbun 2y ago
Let’s call this what it is: Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business. But a service disruption like this is bad strategy. WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over. Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider. And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  > And Matt might not realize... My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is. Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks. It's about money.
- safety1st 2y ago
  1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities. All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days. In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself. But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately. He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction. To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.
  - eXpl0it3r 2y ago
    My guess is, that he knows, that his trademark claims will likely not hold up in court and he'd need to spend some money to get to court in the first place. As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way. Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted. I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation. Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.
nektro 2y ago
seems pretty clearcut in favor of Automattic
FlamingMoe 2y ago
IMO the craziest revelation in this whole ordeal is that Matt personally owns WordPress.org. I have worked with WP for close to a decade and I was always under the impression that it was owned by the nonprofit foundation. So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.
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silverliver 2y ago
From an operational standpoint, this is completely WP Engine's fault. You should not depend on other people's services, doubly so if they're public and free, when your big as Wordpress Engine is. Wordpress is completely within its rights, morally or otherwise, to block free access to its services. The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.
- racked 2y ago
  I've never heard of Wordpress.org banning any legitimate WordPress site from accessing their plugins and themes repository. It would have made zero business sense for WP Engine to prepare for being banned like this.
kapitanjakc 2y ago
As a developer, I'll take this opportunity and ask my clients to move away from WordPress.
runako 2y ago
No dog in this fight, but 1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com. 2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.
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low_tech_punk 2y ago
Really saddened by the FOSS landscape. Docker, Terraform, Redis, and now Wordpress. Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, the sheer drama and rug pulls make it feel like the beginning of an end to open source as a viable business model.
- ConstrPlus8561 2y ago
  All parties are making millions off open-source WordPress. Matt's team are upset because they only make tens of millions, whereas purportedly, WP-engine makes hundreds of millions. Matt gives back much more than WP-engine. All their clients are businesses also making money through their WordPress-hosted websites. I don't think there is a problem with open source and viability. It is raining money. It's simply an in-house fight over inequities in giving back to the open source pot of gold.
fakedang 2y ago
I don't see how this is WordPress' fight to win, given that WP Engine has the backing and resources of private equity (not to mention, while also being in the right). This is like David coming up against Goliath, except Goliath isn't stupid and wore armor and a helmet.
surfingdino 2y ago
I have a feeling the gap of opportunity has just opened for an alternative to WordPress. Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend? PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.
ActualHacker 2y ago
I'm long on this backfiring Petty, and befitting WP is trash, always has been WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand
sfmike 2y ago
Emphasizes that build on another platform even one that claims a healthy ethos and open source you can be cutoff and left to die in the cold.
MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago
I’ve been following this closely. Not to be a scaremonger, but after Matt Mullenweg’s last post on WP Engine, the underlying financier Silver Lake started doing opposition research on MM trying to undermine him. I view this as a pretty scummy tactic, but not unexpected from a PE firm trying to squeeze as much profit out of whatever it is investing in. That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.
immibis 2y ago
Big lawsuit against Automattic incoming. Which WPEngine will easily win. Given that Automattic is clearly desperate for funds it will probably bankrupt them.
hadad 2y ago
Bad leadership from Wordpress.org , you cannot bans company that use modified version of Wordpress and promote using that name ( choice of plugins installed and feature example maximum history ), your company also dosing that ( limit plugin installed on Wordpress.com/Automatic ).
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dbg31415 2y ago
Oh nerds, stop fighting. This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?
giorgioz 2y ago
Wordpress.org should change it's license like Mongo did to protect itself from Amazon. The license should allow free hosting for indiduals and organiation bt for profit hosting should pay something. It's okay for third party hosting to pay a fee to help maintaining the original open source software.
erikthiart 2y ago
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
raoulw 2y ago
This is all very problemattic.
bitbasher 2y ago
ThePrimeagen did an interview with Matt regarding his response and demands. He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best. He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do"). He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.

567 points by openplatypus 2y ago

Likely the aftermath of https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-engine-a-cancer-to-wordpress-and-urges-community-to-switch-providers/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...

3np 2y ago
Between all the threads, this video is the best for context I think. Juicy part start around 10min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU

nailer 2y ago

> Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.

lnxg33k1 2y ago
It's important to point out, since probably the whole automattic is still leeching from b2 and hasn't added anything
- kgeist 2y ago
  Just checked out the original version of b2 Wordpress was forked from and could immediately spot a SQL injection which I can use to take over the whole site: $log = $HTTP_POST_VARS["log"]; <..> $user_login=$log; <..> SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM $tableusers WHERE user_login = '$user_login' AND MD5(user_pass) = '$password' Later it also stores the hashed password as a cookie. Some quality 2003 code :)
  - admissionsguy 2y ago
    Not necessarily if magic quotes are enabled!!
    - hedgehog 2y ago
      Oh "magic quotes", we hardly miss you.
  - lnxg33k1 2y ago
    2003? If I remember correctly, SQL injection has been in OWASP Top 10 until 2016
    - kgeist 2y ago
      The code is from 2003.
      - lnxg33k1 2y ago
        Yeah, I got that, it's just that could as well be more recent^^

chx 2y ago

This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control? This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't. Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.

tgv 2y ago
> This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...
- DonnieBurger 2y ago
  How about using the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit, to attack a for-profit's competitors. They could lose their tax-exempt status.
  - shakna 2y ago
    A nonprofit removed access to resources from a for-profit, with whom they did not have a contract. That's a non starter.
    - DonnieBurger 2y ago
      There is more to the story than just this event. For context: 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... https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhibits.pdf https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhib...

ahmedfromtunis 2y ago

I don't use any their products, so I don't have any community insider insights, but based on what I've read so far, it seems like WordPress did the right thing. If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.

sureIy 2y ago
Makes no sense. Everyone is profiting off WordPress and probably 0.1% of those ever contributed back. Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
  I don't think the issue is about WordPress, the open source software, but rather about using up ressources on the wordpress.org servers.
  - 1116574 2y ago
    Yep, Matt (wordpress guy) has a dramatic writing style, but in essence WPE is using plugins, their security research, user system, theming store etc, without contributing back that much. Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
    - tbyehl 2y ago
      > Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
    - dncornholio 2y ago
      My company is also a heavy user of WordPress and never have contributed. We also hide those widgets. Do we need to be blocked as well then?

robjwells 2y ago

Here's Matt Mullenweg's post on Wordpress.org announcing this: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578

martin_a 2y ago
I don't understand what the actual problem is. What did WPEngine do to use "wordpress.org resources"? That article is very... non-informative.
- robjwells 2y ago
  I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries. There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this. Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project. Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest. Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
  - _cenw 2y ago
    Automattic also has a very direct competitor in Pressable - who are currently running a WP Engine contract buyout promotion in their header. Horrid look.
    - deleted 2y ago
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Raed667 2y ago

TBH i don't mind this, open-source means you can use the code, but you're not entitled to infra and services.

_cenw 2y ago
If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad. WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed. But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims. Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
- Raed667 2y ago
  I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example) This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.
  - seb1204 2y ago
    I also don't have a dog in the fight but reading for a few minutes I have the impression there have been previous attempts to engage with WPE to contribute. I might be wrong.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

I've used Wordpress self-hosted for a long time and this seems like a non-issue. WPEngine can use the Wordpress codebase but why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? I say this is a good thing.

yreg 2y ago
> why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? They are not entitled to them, but Wordpress has previously decided to offer those services. Wordpress donors most probably expected that these services will continue to be provided to anyone. The controversial part is that now they apparently establish a policy that Matt Mullenweg (the owner of for-profit Wordpress.com) can arbitrarily ban competitors in case he doesn't like them.
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  WordPress.org (the service that banned WP Engine) is not funded by donors. WordPress Foundation is the non profit entity that has donations.
  - paulgb 2y ago
    Interesting, so then who pays to run wordpress.org? I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
    - batuhanicoz 2y ago
      WordPress.org is operated by Matt Mullenweg as a free service that hosts plugins, themes, docs and more. It does not take donations, or as far I am aware, make any profits. Instead, people are encouraged to donate to the Foundation, which helps with the development of WordPress the software and organizes things like WordCamps.

jeswin 2y ago

If like Matt says, they contribute little back to Wordpress then I am with Automattic on this. If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way. Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid. Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.

_cenw 2y ago
This is a horrible way to go about it though. WP Engine users are still WordPress users, and cutting them off without notice is very shitty. I wouldn't trust WordPress for anything after this, if all that it takes to cut you off from updates - potentially security updates - is Matt Mullenweg not liking you (or your ISP).
- cies 2y ago
  They could move their sites over to the WordPress.com, can't they? Since they offer competing services in the first place.
  - RealStickman_ 2y ago
    Is that supposed to make this blatantly anti-competitive behaviour okay?
    - cies 2y ago
      Sorry? Their service is... their service! They can extend of refuse service to whom they want. Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.

deleted 2y ago

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wg0 2y ago

Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo and now WordPress - it seems that Open source is as good and only good when you and only you can sell it. The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort, does things better than you to market/host/package your open source project, the moment things to start to fall apart. None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc. EDIT: typos

batuhanicoz 2y ago
WordPress has been around for a long time, and there is no change to how open it is. It is GPL code, Automattic is not forking it and selling access to the fork. We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on. This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
- DonnieBurger 2y ago
  Are you going to be "just asking" other businesses as well? Or does it only apply to competitors of Automattic?
  - batuhanicoz 2y ago
    As long as competitors of Automattic does not infringe on the trademarks owned (in the case of WooCommerce) or licensed (WordPress) by Automattic, I don't see any reason for us taking any action. I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
    - prox 2y ago
      Honestly I tried at one point, but the community was rather hostile and unwelcoming. I help out with Godot sometimes and it’s far more welcoming and low friction.
- ceejayoz 2y ago

jaggs 2y ago

[flagged]

throwbmw 2y ago
Agree 100 percent. Perhaps the present generation doesn't know about the early days of Wordpress. Also, all this wording may be because Matt is very committed and so emotional about the protection of open source projects
hackerbeat 2y ago
100%
Sebb767 2y ago
It looks like Matt is using the WordPress non-profit to attack a competitor. Additionally, he cut off services to that competitor with the clear intent of disrupting their service and customers and talks about trademark infringement, despite their use of the trademark clearly being covered by their very own guidelines, and, to literally add insult to injury, he describes the situation in very emotional language. It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.
- consteval 2y ago
  You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice. If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day. Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.
  - DannyBee 2y ago

rado 2y ago

Always found it interesting that the core WP lacks CDN support, caching, multilingual etc out of the box and leverages the paid WP.com, while using open source contributions.

throwbmw 2y ago

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

joshstrange 2y ago

This is _so_ rich coming from Wordpress who offers a bastardized version of Wordpress themselves on Wordpress.com I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.

meonkeys 2y ago
Yep. wordpress.com locks people in, making it hard to later migrate to the open source version of WordPress.

Communitivity 2y ago

My empathy is with Automatic on this one, but I still think it's the wrong move. "Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks. However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.

Terretta 2y ago
> Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.
timeon 2y ago
I'm do not want to talk about whole thing, I do not know what to think about that but: > If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it... Isn't this more about infrastructure (wordpress.org)? All plugins are still downloadable and able to install via SFTP.
troyvit 2y ago
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

I’m a little surprised WPE didn’t have some kind of contingency plan for this in place already, even if it was just to handle a Wordpress.org outage.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

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

wfjackson3 2y ago

This is one of the worst attempts to handle a corporate dispute that I have ever seen. Forget all of the he said he said arguments for a second and see what a random person who decided to use WordPress will see. If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress. I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.

philsquared_ 2y ago

The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine. There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute. The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way. It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them. To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.

rgbrenner 2y ago
this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately. even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses. the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
- kadoban 2y ago
  The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
  - rgbrenner 2y ago
    if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service. and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments) WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments) Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments) Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments) WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Why not merge this with the existing thread on the official post that it references? This is a dupe. An after-the-fact submission talking about the source.
rmccue 2y ago
Also: WP Engine Must Win -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480 (Disclaimer: my submission and post. I am a WordPress core committer and built the REST API for it.)
rpgbr 2y ago
Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 (31 comments)

kotaKat 2y ago

Matt's really out here with the cars covered in hammers that explode more than a few times and hammers went flying everywhere.

dcchambers 2y ago

I understand why Matt is frustrated and I sympathize with the situation, but I don't think his approach is going to win him any public favor nor have a long term positive payout.

lioeters 2y ago
Anyone who may have had sympathies for his arguments are all turned off now that he's gone on a "scorched earth" path. He dragged the non-profit foundation into a business spat involving Automattic and WP Engine, or maybe even between two rich guys, Matt Mullenweg and Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, who owns WPE. Using the org website to make a nasty post slandering WPE. Spreading it via the built-in news metabox on every WordPress dashboard. The org's plugin repository to block WPE's domains/IPs specifically. That's a single person wielding power in his domain, maybe all legal, but the org should be making decisions as a group and community.
- tacker2000 2y ago
  Seriously, he spread it to every WP dashboard via the news widget? Thats pretty hilarious and insane at the same time. I’m really interested to see how this plays out. Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    Sure, but that won't make the problem go away. The (most recent) issue is that WP is blocking downloading of extensions, so WPEngine would have to find a way to mirror every extension (and that might not be permissible by licensing?)
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      Would they just move the external call client side and use customers ips to download extension data or use proxies or tor to avoid ip ban?

tomphoolery 2y ago

This went from "hey you guys shouldn't use WP Engine because it's not Real WordPress" to "WP Engine is violating trademarks and isn't welcome in the WordPress community anymore" really f'in quick!

batuhanicoz 2y ago
Publicly, perhaps but we've been trying to resolve these issues with WP Engine for at least 18 months now.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Just as an FYI: this is a really really bad look from the outside. Your CEO's comments and the new trademark policy sound borderline deranged, and this step of banning them dangerously destabilizes the ecosystem. WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.
  - acdha 2y ago
    Yes - I don’t use WP and have no experience with either of those companies but everything I’ve heard about this has been people looking into alternatives because this raises the question of whether it’s motivated by a desire to boost revenue and merely the first step in the process.
- graeme 2y ago
  What are the issues? Nothing publicly articulated so far appears to have breached any licensing terms or trademark law. If there are issues then Matt would do well to clearly articulate the problem.
- raoulw 2y ago
  Therein lies the problem. Why is a8c even involved? This is a WordPress Foundation problem.
  - deleted 2y ago

simonjgreen 2y ago

What does Wordpress.com contribute upstream to THEIR dependencies I wonder…

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Nemo_bis 2y ago
There are some financial contributions listed at https://opencollective.com/automattic https://opencollective.com/automattic

nijave 2y ago

I have a hard time being sympathetic for Matt given what I've read so far. The C&D WPR sent shows plenty of quotes about Matt threatening to talk poorly about WPE unless they pay up. If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here. As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them. From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/ https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/ Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

trebor 2y ago

I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem. But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms. Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt. Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.

orf 2y ago
What database is burdened by 200k rows? That’s tiny.
- trebor 2y ago
  It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better). But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …
  - orf 2y ago
    But a database can handle tens of millions of rows with those resources. If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.
    - trebor 2y ago
      Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves? We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog. Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text. Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem. Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why. The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.

lolinder 2y ago

Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement. > To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0] The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself. I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF. [0] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

schneems 2y ago
From the article: > WordPress’s GPL code Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?
- lolinder 2y ago
  It's a question of philosophy, not license. The whole "release code under GPL but get angry when other people besides you start making more money than you do from it" thing is strikingly different from the attitude in the GPL FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm... The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.

urbandw311er 2y ago

[flagged]

lolinder 2y ago
What harm is done to the free software by WP Engine using it? Is it somehow more difficult to share WordPress code than if they didn't exist? Are they breaking the license terms? This conflict doesn't feel like a Free Software conflict, it feels like a repeat of what we saw with Mongo & Elastic & Hashicorp—a company that founded itself on being Open Source came to regret the side effects.
FireBeyond 2y ago
As a follow up, explain how Wordpress.com isn't using free software for their own profit.

rty32 2y ago

Somewhat off-topic: WordPress has proven that there is still a market for WordPress-style CRM and managed solution even in 2024. Why hasn't a strong, open source competitor emerged over the years? Because if there is an alternative, this article would be much less relevant, and the events may not have happened in the first place. Is it because CRM, especially the dynamic kind, is no longer cool, and developers are not interested in this area any more?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
evantbyrne 2y ago
Part of it is that there are more choices these days in terms of highly customizable CMSs. I stopped building new WordPress sites when I discovered Wagtail. There's also Payload which I've heard good things about. The other part is that agencies are being squeezed out of the side of the custom website market where WordPress offers appropriate trade-offs. Most agencies that build on WordPress anymore are theme chop shops.
rty32 2y ago
*CMS -- I don't know what I was thinking
b3ing 2y ago
WordPress has done a good job of taking the top ideas and incorporating them quickly into its CMS. Many times not right away, but under the hood they are there and they can easily built a UI for it later. They got a lot of ideas from Drupal, Tumbler, SquareSpace, Ghost, Headless CMSes, etc.

stock_toaster 2y ago

Seems very similar to AWS and Elastic, Mongodb, etc.

progmetaldev 2y ago

Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content). Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.

btown 2y ago
Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence. (Nice username, btw!)

stock_toaster 2y ago

Interview with Matt Mullenweg about his side in all this a little bit ago: [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM

system2 2y ago

I don't care who's right or wrong; I’m just glad WP Engine is finally facing some consequences. Their treatment of clients is appalling—lying through their teeth, charging absurd prices, and offering abysmal support. My company lost many clients because of them.

nargella 2y ago

Not this specifically, but I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Redis, elastic, openai, wordpress. Each came to realize that the open source benefit has a glaring issue with their corporate interests.

tiffanyh 2y ago

Slight OT: I thought WordPress.com migrated away from using “WordPress” nearly a decade ago (to a custom nodejs app) https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-new-wordpress-com/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...

maxloh 2y ago
So basically they are not WordPress too.

iambateman 2y ago

This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign. WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully. Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint. That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.

itsFolf 2y ago
A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
- Maxious 2y ago
  A couple of hours ago Matt dropped into a twitch stream and offered up an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM > Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there" > Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"

ModestoBorn 2y ago

I'm a WordPress (WP) developer and avid user of WP Engine. I just tested some of my WordPress sites hosted on WP Engine and can confirm that it's currently not possible to take some actions that pull data from https://wordpress.org/ https://wordpress.org/, such as not updating WP plugins or installing new WP plugins. I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage: [quote] The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software. ... People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. [/quote] After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software. Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core. I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
I think that is exactly Matt’s problem with the conduct of WP Engine—they have done next to nothing to support the infrastructure that they profit from. It’s like a person who uses ad block saying they won’t watch YouTube if google breaks the ad blocking. That is exactly what they want, you have negative value.

pier25 2y ago

It's weird Matt would generate all this drama. By not allowing WP Engine to use the plugin ecosystem he is first and foremost damaging the actual WP users hosting there. Probably millions of users.

phplovesong 2y ago

Wordpress, the thing keeping PHP alive!

mastazi 2y ago

The community should fork Wordpress so that is no longer controlled by Automattic, thus eliminating the conflict of interest. They would have to pick a different name, such as LibrePress (just like LibreOffice vs OpenOffice), in order to avoid copyright or trademark claims by Automattic.

seriocomic 2y ago
Kind of been done (in a minor protest against the change to the back-end editing system: https://www.classicpress.net/ https://www.classicpress.net/

linotype 2y ago

Sounds like people should start migrating off of WordPress altogether. See: Elastic and Redis.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

munbun 2y ago

Let’s call this what it is: Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business. But a service disruption like this is bad strategy. WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over. Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider. And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.

chiefalchemist 2y ago
> And Matt might not realize... My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is. Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks. It's about money.
safety1st 2y ago
1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities. All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days. In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself. But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately. He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction. To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.
- eXpl0it3r 2y ago
  My guess is, that he knows, that his trademark claims will likely not hold up in court and he'd need to spend some money to get to court in the first place. As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way. Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted. I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation. Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.

nektro 2y ago

seems pretty clearcut in favor of Automattic

FlamingMoe 2y ago

IMO the craziest revelation in this whole ordeal is that Matt personally owns WordPress.org. I have worked with WP for close to a decade and I was always under the impression that it was owned by the nonprofit foundation. So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.

deleted 2y ago

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silverliver 2y ago

From an operational standpoint, this is completely WP Engine's fault. You should not depend on other people's services, doubly so if they're public and free, when your big as Wordpress Engine is. Wordpress is completely within its rights, morally or otherwise, to block free access to its services. The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.

racked 2y ago
I've never heard of Wordpress.org banning any legitimate WordPress site from accessing their plugins and themes repository. It would have made zero business sense for WP Engine to prepare for being banned like this.

kapitanjakc 2y ago

As a developer, I'll take this opportunity and ask my clients to move away from WordPress.

runako 2y ago

No dog in this fight, but 1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com. 2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.

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low_tech_punk 2y ago

Really saddened by the FOSS landscape. Docker, Terraform, Redis, and now Wordpress. Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, the sheer drama and rug pulls make it feel like the beginning of an end to open source as a viable business model.

ConstrPlus8561 2y ago
All parties are making millions off open-source WordPress. Matt's team are upset because they only make tens of millions, whereas purportedly, WP-engine makes hundreds of millions. Matt gives back much more than WP-engine. All their clients are businesses also making money through their WordPress-hosted websites. I don't think there is a problem with open source and viability. It is raining money. It's simply an in-house fight over inequities in giving back to the open source pot of gold.

fakedang 2y ago

I don't see how this is WordPress' fight to win, given that WP Engine has the backing and resources of private equity (not to mention, while also being in the right). This is like David coming up against Goliath, except Goliath isn't stupid and wore armor and a helmet.

surfingdino 2y ago

I have a feeling the gap of opportunity has just opened for an alternative to WordPress. Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend? PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.

ActualHacker 2y ago

I'm long on this backfiring Petty, and befitting WP is trash, always has been WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand

sfmike 2y ago

Emphasizes that build on another platform even one that claims a healthy ethos and open source you can be cutoff and left to die in the cold.

MOARDONGZPLZ 2y ago

I’ve been following this closely. Not to be a scaremonger, but after Matt Mullenweg’s last post on WP Engine, the underlying financier Silver Lake started doing opposition research on MM trying to undermine him. I view this as a pretty scummy tactic, but not unexpected from a PE firm trying to squeeze as much profit out of whatever it is investing in. That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.

immibis 2y ago

Big lawsuit against Automattic incoming. Which WPEngine will easily win. Given that Automattic is clearly desperate for funds it will probably bankrupt them.

hadad 2y ago

Bad leadership from Wordpress.org , you cannot bans company that use modified version of Wordpress and promote using that name ( choice of plugins installed and feature example maximum history ), your company also dosing that ( limit plugin installed on Wordpress.com/Automatic ).

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dbg31415 2y ago

Oh nerds, stop fighting. This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?

giorgioz 2y ago

Wordpress.org should change it's license like Mongo did to protect itself from Amazon. The license should allow free hosting for indiduals and organiation bt for profit hosting should pay something. It's okay for third party hosting to pay a fee to help maintaining the original open source software.

erikthiart 2y ago

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt

raoulw 2y ago

This is all very problemattic.

bitbasher 2y ago

ThePrimeagen did an interview with Matt regarding his response and demands. He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best. He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do"). He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.