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what do you mean profiting. .org is open source. where in the open source licenses you are supposed to pay the original maintainer a share of your revenue or co

what do you mean profiting. .org is open source. where in the open source licenses you are supposed to pay the original maintainer a share of your revenue or contribute back in code? free software gives 4 freedoms. none of them say about contributing back. they only talk about freedom of source code. same for OSI approved licenses. they are either permissive, MIT aka, do whatever you want or like AGPL provide source code but none that i can think of forces downstream users to contribute back to main.

bayindirh 2y ago
Think in infrastructure costs. A simple VPS is around $5/mo which is enough for some users. When you're running a company which has tons of users, all of them are doing updates, theme pulls and whatnot. ..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org. This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software. SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management. I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.
- bawolff 2y ago
  Yes, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean it isn't a dick move. If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability). In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off. Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
  - consteval 2y ago
    > Especially since no notice I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested. Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      Was it publicly posted what "acceptable usage" of the api is? Was the same standard applied to other users of the api?
      - consteval 2y ago
        Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is. It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good. Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away. But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
        bawolff 2y ago
        > Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is. The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person. Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal. Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block. > But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal. An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.

bayindirh 2y ago

Think in infrastructure costs. A simple VPS is around $5/mo which is enough for some users. When you're running a company which has tons of users, all of them are doing updates, theme pulls and whatnot. ..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org. This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software. SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management. I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.

bawolff 2y ago
Yes, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean it isn't a dick move. If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability). In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off. Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
- consteval 2y ago
  > Especially since no notice I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested. Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Was it publicly posted what "acceptable usage" of the api is? Was the same standard applied to other users of the api?
    - consteval 2y ago
      Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is. It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good. Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away. But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
      - bawolff 2y ago
        > Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is. The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person. Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal. Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block. > But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal. An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.