15 ms·

WordPress Drama: From the Sidelines

44 points by eamann 2y ago

tcfunk 2y ago
As someone only familiar with WP at the surface level, I had assumed that WP Engine actually was affiliated with WP, so it seems to me the market confusion is certainly intentional.
- mattbeck 2y ago
  For many years, the official guidance on the trademark has explicitly been that WP was not the trademark and people should use that instead of WordPress. Tons and tons of people use WP in their businesses, domains, product names, etc.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    And, as it turns out, consumer confusion happened anyway.
    - Aurornis 2y ago
      Who are these confused consumers? The people who don’t know much anything about Wordpress except that they want it will end up at Wordpress.com. You have to go out of your way to find alternative hosting providers like WP Engine. The “confused consumers” thing feels like a manufactured justification for whatever this spat is.
  - kijin 2y ago
    But WPEngine is toeing the line especially precariously. The company is called WPEngine, sure, but their tagline says "Most trusted WordPress platform". Their plans are named "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", etc. Are those products they're selling, or just descriptions? There's enough gray area there to attract a lawyer's attention, which Mullenweg is clearly using to his advantage.
    - Aurornis 2y ago
      Honestly, what do you expect these people to call their services? “Essential Blog Hosting Service using a Commonly Used Open Source Software That We Cannot Name”?
      - graeme 2y ago
        Yeah nominative use explicitly covers this. >"In other words, individuals are not compelled by trademark law to use "absurd turns of phrase" simply to avoid trademark liability." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
        FireBeyond 2y ago
        "Welcome to the Something Like A Hyper Plate for 2024".
    - graeme 2y ago
      The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark, not an explosion of articles, interviews, shutdown of network access and demands for money paid to a private company in order to prevent the explosion.
      - cj 2y ago
        > The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark Which I believe was their legal response. The problem is it should have stopped there. I'm sure Matt's lawyers aren't very happy with him at the moment. Legally, it's usually not advantageous to retaliate so strongly and publicly. It greatly muddies the legal waters.
        flutas 2y ago
        > Which I believe was their legal response Really? I see extortion in those texts, not a legal lawsuit to enforce a trademark. I mean, is this a legal and well crafted lawsuit? Or just extortion. > Just called. Should I run these slides or not? > Is next week a negotiation on the % or it happening at all? I am not going to be able to walk it back > I know that this is the nuclear option, it sets us down a specific path
- Aurornis 2y ago
  WordPress.com has hosting services. It’s one of the first things anyone runs into when searching for WordPress hosting. It’s hard to mistake it for anything other than the official affiliated hosting provider. They’ve had the Wordpress.org and .com distinction for a long time. You can’t miss it if you’re searching for Wordpress things online. I don’t think you can blame a Wordpress hosting service for using WP in their name, given that doing so has respected the nature of the Wordpress/WP distinction that they’ve had going for years. Something is very off about this recent attack on WP Engine and the released text messages show that Mullenweg is not the noble guy he’s been portrayed as for years.
- codegeek 2y ago
  No it is not. If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic. I have worked with WP for 10+ years now and in my opinion like many others, this is nothing but jealously from Matt whose for profit competitor (wordpress.com and VIP) got beaten by WPEngine. In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com. I will not comment on any legalities of course but the fact remains that WPEngine is not doing anything different than all the others for profit WordPress providers except 1 thing. Guess what that is ? They make more revenue than WordPress.com.
  - DangitBobby 2y ago
    Who do you think is more likely to look for someone to host WordPress for them? Someone who knows everything and can do it themselves anyway? > If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic. Obviously YOU know because YOU have worked with WordPress for over 10 years now.
  - flutas 2y ago
    > In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com. Yup, it's mentioned by others in this thread but I was also confused by this for a small period before doing further research early in the .COM beginning.
- kolanos 2y ago
  If their name was "Wordpress Engine", I think you'd have a point. But I don't think the use of "WP" has the same implication. Why would Wordpress proper abbreviate their own name like that?
runjake 2y ago
Matt Mullenweg did a video segment with ThePrimeagen yesterday. I found Matt’s stance a bit confusing in areas but admit it may just be too early in the morning for me to process. https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Mullenweg is a well-practiced interviewee. He’s been cozied up to influencers and podcasters for a long time. He’s an expert in the art of PR and spin. Keep this in mind when trying to understand the situation through his one-sided interpretation. Anything Matt says publicly should be viewed in contrast to the texts he was sending to WP Engine. It’s clear that his public spin on the situation didn’t match the dirty games he was playing with them via text and via actions with the WordPress services. I think he’s getting a lot of benefit of the doubt from people who have seen his name across the Internet for years, but getting a peak behind the curtain at his texts really shattered any ideas I had about how trustworthy he is.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    > He’s an expert in the art of PR and spin Claims that have been not at all in evidence this week. He's applying his "scorched earth nuclear approach" on his next door neighbor, forgetting a few things about nuclear warfare...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - arp242 2y ago
    It's not like WP-Engine isn't trying to explain things in their favour. I once had someone strategically edit and delete some of their GitHub comments to make me look like an asshole (before GitHub showed you this). Their only motivation was "revenge" for denying a feature request (after which they got all pissy, I told him off, and then a few months later he edited things to make it look like I was being highly abrasive to random people). What I'm trying to say is: I wouldn't be so quick to trust a one-sided limited set of screenshots from various conversations. Maybe Mullenweg is the "bad guy" here, I don't know, but even if he is that doesn't automatically mean WP Engine are the good guys, or that everything they say is spinless truth. I'll also add that Mullenweg's communications and actions mostly come across as rash and without much thought. Certainly not polished spin.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
> the inside track of WordPress is a mess right now Well, far as I know, WP has always been a mess ;) > Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project Wasn't it forked from 2/cafelog? Anyway, Automattic is also holder of the .blog TLD so better don't mess with Matt I guess ..,
- b3ing 2y ago
  It was forked from b2evolution, which might of forked from something else long ago
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    No, b2evolution was a fork of b2 (aka cafelog), as was WordPress. AIUI, cafelog was itself a PHP port of Movable Type, back when MT was open-source and in Perl.
    - evanelias 2y ago
      AFAIK, there is no connection between b2/cafelog and Movable Type, other than that they were both self-hostable blogging software. Completely different core architecture. MT built static HTML pages using Perl CGI scripts, while b2 was dynamic PHP. Disclosures: I worked for Six Apart (makers of MT) although my employment was a while after all this; and later I worked for Tumblr, but well before Automattic acquired them.
      - chuckadams 2y ago
        I stand corrected then, thanks :)
neya 2y ago
While this blog post is a very balanced take and definitely not a knee-jerk reaction, I disagree with some of the biases pointed out. Sure, WP Engine advertises itself contributing back on their home page. But, rightfully so? Yeah, they don't contribute back as much as Matt or anyone would like to, but, they still contribute back, right? Next, one of the author's arguments is that WP Engine doesn't stop others as advertising itself as the "Wordpress Engine". Sure, but this same parallel can be drawn towards Wordpress.org itself. The homepage of Wordpress.org SCREAMS open-source. But, is it really though? It is an ecosystem around a centralised (plugin) repository controlled by one person/entity. That's not truly open source. Today WP Engine is blocked because they upset the overlords. Tomorrow, it could be anyone of us. Also, the whole argument made on the official blog post was WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source? In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points. If Wordpress is truly open source and if Matt's concerns are really around the spirit of open source, the fair thing that he/his company should have done is released the whole source code that powers the entire Wordpress.com eco-system including their backend systems on how they handle billing and scale. But, you know what? That will never happen, because that is their competitive advantage. As someone who handles multi-million visitor sites on Wordpress, I can tell you this - the whole Wordpress eco-system thrives because the code is bad and it just won't scale - both performance wise and development wise as your content grows. The entire competitive advantage of Wordpress.com is actually masking this bad code and scaling difficulty behind a pretty interface. I would love to see them open source that. Of course, that won't happen. This is just one entity abusing another with their power. I am in no way supporting WP Engine (they seem sleazy and I would never host any of my client sites with them). But, there are plenty of people they could have gone after - how about Kinsta? They do the same thing. This was just a personal attack. You simply can't sugar-coat that.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
  Yeah the most confusing thing to me is how the hell code that bad ever got so big. It’s literally my go-to example of why the MVC design pattern is so good for web development. There is basically no view/controller separation - you can change core behavior of the backend in a template.
bastawhiz 2y ago
The accusation that WPE is responsible for there not being redundancy in API access to WordPress.org services is absurd. If AWS rents me a server running Windows, there's not an expectation that they run their own update servers and app store. Automattic cut off API access for users who hosted on WPE. Let that be very clear: Automattic's position is that you can install WordPress on any server and get updates and plugins, so long as it's not WPE's servers. This is Automattic trying to extract rent from the people hosting the servers and preinstalling the software.
- BCM43 2y ago
  $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
  - Twirrim 2y ago
    Which is run by... who? Debian? AWS? I know from personal experience that Canonical choose to run mirrors for some clouds, on those clouds, for example.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    There's no obligation to do this. AWS chooses to do this for performance/experience/bandwidth reasons (and it enhances the user experience).
- bad_user 2y ago
  WordPress.org isn't renting anything, it's providing those services for free. The analogy with AWS doesn't work because with WP money doesn't change hands. WP Engine or their users aren't paying for the services provided by WordPress.org and these are services that cost money for continued hosting. Anything provided is a gift and WP.org is under no obligation, moral or contractual, to keep providing those services. There are many issues with how this was handled but this isn't one of them.
  - 2y ago
InsomniacL 2y ago
This blog is so disingenuous. > I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine’s fault and responsibility to fix. Users are impacted because the update mechanism was pulled out from under them with no advanced warning, that's not WP Engine's fault.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  I’m amazed by how many people are defaulting to Mullenweg’s side in this spat. I think a lot of people are giving Wordpress.com (the hosting business) the credibility and respect that they normally give to open source projects, but that credibility should be going to Wordpress.org. The way Mullenweg is trying to blur the lines between .org and .com as convenient for his business purposes is the most confusing thing about this argument.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    Even attributing the credit to WordPress.org seems hairy. On another thread, someone (claiming to be an Automattic employee) said that the WordPress.org website is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and that it has no formal affiliation with the WordPress Foundation [0]. (Even though DNS records place its IP address with the Foundation.) So really, I think the blurring here might run even deeper than it may appear at first. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656670
- tpmoney 2y ago
  If I sign a contract with you for 10,000 barrels of apples, and the next day your sole apple vendor decides they don't like you anymore and cut you off, that's not my problem. I might be sympathetic to you, but I didn't sign a contract with your vendor, I signed it with you. You owe me the barrels and not needing to worry about the details of how you fulfill that contract is one of the things that makes contracting stuff out useful.
sccxy 2y ago
The most confusing part for me is wordpress.com. I was literally mistaken once and thought that Wordpress was no longer open source.
- calibas 2y ago
  It's a major source of confusion for people that are new to Wordpress, and I suspect it generates quite a bit of extra money for Wordpress.com.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ForHackernews 2y ago
Automattic and Matt have been good stewards of WordPress and it's hard for me to fault him for trying to get some money from people who've built their whole business on the back of his team & free software contributors' generosity. The free software world still has no good answer to the free rider problem. This is the same problem with AWS/ElasticSearch
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  The answer is an unambiguous “no”, people just don’t want to hear it. The right for anyone to resell your software is part of Stallman’s fundamental freedoms and item 1 of the Open Source definition. I’m sympathetic to the guy, getting your lunch eaten by a competitor is no fun, but I don’t think he’s in a different position than any other proprietary software dev who wants to get paid according to the value of what he wrote.
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    Maybe RMS is wrong, though. Why is it a fundamental right that I should be able to take something you create and resell it without giving anything back? Does that benefit users?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      I don’t agree with the fundamental freedoms angle myself, but I do think it’s vital to the health of the ecosystem. React is the example I always use - would it be better if social media companies had a permanent disadvantage in the market because anti-competition clauses prohibit them from using the biggest interface library?
      - ForHackernews 2y ago
        That's an interesting example because I find React to be an absolute disaster every time I've tried to use it. I feel like anyone using not-React would have a competitive advantage, and yet we're all stuck with Facebook's droppings because they're the 800lb gorilla.
fortyseven 2y ago
This ignores the massive conflict of interest going on. Matt has two competing commercial hosting projects that WPE is directly on the way of. Whatever perceived sins WPE is accused of, that trumps them all. Extremely fishy and unprofessional.
jiayo 2y ago
Anecdote: I'm helping a family member set up a personal brand website. He has a brand/marketing person for the content/design, but wanted me to manage the tech side of email, domains, providers, etc. I've used Wordpress a handful of times in my life, but it's an easy recommendation to make. We've spent maybe 30 mins a week for the past few weeks chipping away at it. We chose https://getflywheel.com/ https://getflywheel.com/ as the managed WP provider[1]. They are owned by WP Engine. Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week. I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally. [1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me. [2] https://wpmailsmtp.com/ https://wpmailsmtp.com/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

44 points by eamann 2y ago

As someone only familiar with WP at the surface level, I had assumed that WP Engine actually was affiliated with WP, so it seems to me the market confusion is certainly intentional.

mattbeck 2y ago
For many years, the official guidance on the trademark has explicitly been that WP was not the trademark and people should use that instead of WordPress. Tons and tons of people use WP in their businesses, domains, product names, etc.
- teddyh 2y ago
  And, as it turns out, consumer confusion happened anyway.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    Who are these confused consumers? The people who don’t know much anything about Wordpress except that they want it will end up at Wordpress.com. You have to go out of your way to find alternative hosting providers like WP Engine. The “confused consumers” thing feels like a manufactured justification for whatever this spat is.
- kijin 2y ago
  But WPEngine is toeing the line especially precariously. The company is called WPEngine, sure, but their tagline says "Most trusted WordPress platform". Their plans are named "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", etc. Are those products they're selling, or just descriptions? There's enough gray area there to attract a lawyer's attention, which Mullenweg is clearly using to his advantage.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    Honestly, what do you expect these people to call their services? “Essential Blog Hosting Service using a Commonly Used Open Source Software That We Cannot Name”?
    - graeme 2y ago
      Yeah nominative use explicitly covers this. >"In other words, individuals are not compelled by trademark law to use "absurd turns of phrase" simply to avoid trademark liability." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
      - FireBeyond 2y ago
        "Welcome to the Something Like A Hyper Plate for 2024".
  - graeme 2y ago
    The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark, not an explosion of articles, interviews, shutdown of network access and demands for money paid to a private company in order to prevent the explosion.
    - cj 2y ago
      > The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark Which I believe was their legal response. The problem is it should have stopped there. I'm sure Matt's lawyers aren't very happy with him at the moment. Legally, it's usually not advantageous to retaliate so strongly and publicly. It greatly muddies the legal waters.
      - flutas 2y ago
        > Which I believe was their legal response Really? I see extortion in those texts, not a legal lawsuit to enforce a trademark. I mean, is this a legal and well crafted lawsuit? Or just extortion. > Just called. Should I run these slides or not? > Is next week a negotiation on the % or it happening at all? I am not going to be able to walk it back > I know that this is the nuclear option, it sets us down a specific path
Aurornis 2y ago
WordPress.com has hosting services. It’s one of the first things anyone runs into when searching for WordPress hosting. It’s hard to mistake it for anything other than the official affiliated hosting provider. They’ve had the Wordpress.org and .com distinction for a long time. You can’t miss it if you’re searching for Wordpress things online. I don’t think you can blame a Wordpress hosting service for using WP in their name, given that doing so has respected the nature of the Wordpress/WP distinction that they’ve had going for years. Something is very off about this recent attack on WP Engine and the released text messages show that Mullenweg is not the noble guy he’s been portrayed as for years.
codegeek 2y ago
No it is not. If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic. I have worked with WP for 10+ years now and in my opinion like many others, this is nothing but jealously from Matt whose for profit competitor (wordpress.com and VIP) got beaten by WPEngine. In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com. I will not comment on any legalities of course but the fact remains that WPEngine is not doing anything different than all the others for profit WordPress providers except 1 thing. Guess what that is ? They make more revenue than WordPress.com.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  Who do you think is more likely to look for someone to host WordPress for them? Someone who knows everything and can do it themselves anyway? > If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic. Obviously YOU know because YOU have worked with WordPress for over 10 years now.
- flutas 2y ago
  > In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com. Yup, it's mentioned by others in this thread but I was also confused by this for a small period before doing further research early in the .COM beginning.
kolanos 2y ago
If their name was "Wordpress Engine", I think you'd have a point. But I don't think the use of "WP" has the same implication. Why would Wordpress proper abbreviate their own name like that?

runjake 2y ago

Matt Mullenweg did a video segment with ThePrimeagen yesterday. I found Matt’s stance a bit confusing in areas but admit it may just be too early in the morning for me to process. https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM https://youtu.be/H6F0PgMcKWM

Aurornis 2y ago
Mullenweg is a well-practiced interviewee. He’s been cozied up to influencers and podcasters for a long time. He’s an expert in the art of PR and spin. Keep this in mind when trying to understand the situation through his one-sided interpretation. Anything Matt says publicly should be viewed in contrast to the texts he was sending to WP Engine. It’s clear that his public spin on the situation didn’t match the dirty games he was playing with them via text and via actions with the WordPress services. I think he’s getting a lot of benefit of the doubt from people who have seen his name across the Internet for years, but getting a peak behind the curtain at his texts really shattered any ideas I had about how trustworthy he is.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  > He’s an expert in the art of PR and spin Claims that have been not at all in evidence this week. He's applying his "scorched earth nuclear approach" on his next door neighbor, forgetting a few things about nuclear warfare...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 2y ago
  It's not like WP-Engine isn't trying to explain things in their favour. I once had someone strategically edit and delete some of their GitHub comments to make me look like an asshole (before GitHub showed you this). Their only motivation was "revenge" for denying a feature request (after which they got all pissy, I told him off, and then a few months later he edited things to make it look like I was being highly abrasive to random people). What I'm trying to say is: I wouldn't be so quick to trust a one-sided limited set of screenshots from various conversations. Maybe Mullenweg is the "bad guy" here, I don't know, but even if he is that doesn't automatically mean WP Engine are the good guys, or that everything they say is spinless truth. I'll also add that Mullenweg's communications and actions mostly come across as rash and without much thought. Certainly not polished spin.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

> the inside track of WordPress is a mess right now Well, far as I know, WP has always been a mess ;) > Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project Wasn't it forked from 2/cafelog? Anyway, Automattic is also holder of the .blog TLD so better don't mess with Matt I guess ..,

b3ing 2y ago
It was forked from b2evolution, which might of forked from something else long ago
- chuckadams 2y ago
  No, b2evolution was a fork of b2 (aka cafelog), as was WordPress. AIUI, cafelog was itself a PHP port of Movable Type, back when MT was open-source and in Perl.
  - evanelias 2y ago
    AFAIK, there is no connection between b2/cafelog and Movable Type, other than that they were both self-hostable blogging software. Completely different core architecture. MT built static HTML pages using Perl CGI scripts, while b2 was dynamic PHP. Disclosures: I worked for Six Apart (makers of MT) although my employment was a while after all this; and later I worked for Tumblr, but well before Automattic acquired them.
    - chuckadams 2y ago
      I stand corrected then, thanks :)

neya 2y ago

While this blog post is a very balanced take and definitely not a knee-jerk reaction, I disagree with some of the biases pointed out. Sure, WP Engine advertises itself contributing back on their home page. But, rightfully so? Yeah, they don't contribute back as much as Matt or anyone would like to, but, they still contribute back, right? Next, one of the author's arguments is that WP Engine doesn't stop others as advertising itself as the "Wordpress Engine". Sure, but this same parallel can be drawn towards Wordpress.org itself. The homepage of Wordpress.org SCREAMS open-source. But, is it really though? It is an ecosystem around a centralised (plugin) repository controlled by one person/entity. That's not truly open source. Today WP Engine is blocked because they upset the overlords. Tomorrow, it could be anyone of us. Also, the whole argument made on the official blog post was WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source? In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points. If Wordpress is truly open source and if Matt's concerns are really around the spirit of open source, the fair thing that he/his company should have done is released the whole source code that powers the entire Wordpress.com eco-system including their backend systems on how they handle billing and scale. But, you know what? That will never happen, because that is their competitive advantage. As someone who handles multi-million visitor sites on Wordpress, I can tell you this - the whole Wordpress eco-system thrives because the code is bad and it just won't scale - both performance wise and development wise as your content grows. The entire competitive advantage of Wordpress.com is actually masking this bad code and scaling difficulty behind a pretty interface. I would love to see them open source that. Of course, that won't happen. This is just one entity abusing another with their power. I am in no way supporting WP Engine (they seem sleazy and I would never host any of my client sites with them). But, there are plenty of people they could have gone after - how about Kinsta? They do the same thing. This was just a personal attack. You simply can't sugar-coat that.

fhdsgbbcaA 2y ago
Yeah the most confusing thing to me is how the hell code that bad ever got so big. It’s literally my go-to example of why the MVC design pattern is so good for web development. There is basically no view/controller separation - you can change core behavior of the backend in a template.

bastawhiz 2y ago

The accusation that WPE is responsible for there not being redundancy in API access to WordPress.org services is absurd. If AWS rents me a server running Windows, there's not an expectation that they run their own update servers and app store. Automattic cut off API access for users who hosted on WPE. Let that be very clear: Automattic's position is that you can install WordPress on any server and get updates and plugins, so long as it's not WPE's servers. This is Automattic trying to extract rent from the people hosting the servers and preinstalling the software.

BCM43 2y ago
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
- Twirrim 2y ago
  Which is run by... who? Debian? AWS? I know from personal experience that Canonical choose to run mirrors for some clouds, on those clouds, for example.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  There's no obligation to do this. AWS chooses to do this for performance/experience/bandwidth reasons (and it enhances the user experience).
bad_user 2y ago
WordPress.org isn't renting anything, it's providing those services for free. The analogy with AWS doesn't work because with WP money doesn't change hands. WP Engine or their users aren't paying for the services provided by WordPress.org and these are services that cost money for continued hosting. Anything provided is a gift and WP.org is under no obligation, moral or contractual, to keep providing those services. There are many issues with how this was handled but this isn't one of them.
- 2y ago

InsomniacL 2y ago

This blog is so disingenuous. > I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine’s fault and responsibility to fix. Users are impacted because the update mechanism was pulled out from under them with no advanced warning, that's not WP Engine's fault.

Aurornis 2y ago
I’m amazed by how many people are defaulting to Mullenweg’s side in this spat. I think a lot of people are giving Wordpress.com (the hosting business) the credibility and respect that they normally give to open source projects, but that credibility should be going to Wordpress.org. The way Mullenweg is trying to blur the lines between .org and .com as convenient for his business purposes is the most confusing thing about this argument.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Even attributing the credit to WordPress.org seems hairy. On another thread, someone (claiming to be an Automattic employee) said that the WordPress.org website is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and that it has no formal affiliation with the WordPress Foundation [0]. (Even though DNS records place its IP address with the Foundation.) So really, I think the blurring here might run even deeper than it may appear at first. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656670
tpmoney 2y ago
If I sign a contract with you for 10,000 barrels of apples, and the next day your sole apple vendor decides they don't like you anymore and cut you off, that's not my problem. I might be sympathetic to you, but I didn't sign a contract with your vendor, I signed it with you. You owe me the barrels and not needing to worry about the details of how you fulfill that contract is one of the things that makes contracting stuff out useful.

sccxy 2y ago

The most confusing part for me is wordpress.com. I was literally mistaken once and thought that Wordpress was no longer open source.

calibas 2y ago
It's a major source of confusion for people that are new to Wordpress, and I suspect it generates quite a bit of extra money for Wordpress.com.
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ForHackernews 2y ago

Automattic and Matt have been good stewards of WordPress and it's hard for me to fault him for trying to get some money from people who've built their whole business on the back of his team & free software contributors' generosity. The free software world still has no good answer to the free rider problem. This is the same problem with AWS/ElasticSearch

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
The answer is an unambiguous “no”, people just don’t want to hear it. The right for anyone to resell your software is part of Stallman’s fundamental freedoms and item 1 of the Open Source definition. I’m sympathetic to the guy, getting your lunch eaten by a competitor is no fun, but I don’t think he’s in a different position than any other proprietary software dev who wants to get paid according to the value of what he wrote.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  Maybe RMS is wrong, though. Why is it a fundamental right that I should be able to take something you create and resell it without giving anything back? Does that benefit users?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I don’t agree with the fundamental freedoms angle myself, but I do think it’s vital to the health of the ecosystem. React is the example I always use - would it be better if social media companies had a permanent disadvantage in the market because anti-competition clauses prohibit them from using the biggest interface library?
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      That's an interesting example because I find React to be an absolute disaster every time I've tried to use it. I feel like anyone using not-React would have a competitive advantage, and yet we're all stuck with Facebook's droppings because they're the 800lb gorilla.

fortyseven 2y ago

This ignores the massive conflict of interest going on. Matt has two competing commercial hosting projects that WPE is directly on the way of. Whatever perceived sins WPE is accused of, that trumps them all. Extremely fishy and unprofessional.

jiayo 2y ago

Anecdote: I'm helping a family member set up a personal brand website. He has a brand/marketing person for the content/design, but wanted me to manage the tech side of email, domains, providers, etc. I've used Wordpress a handful of times in my life, but it's an easy recommendation to make. We've spent maybe 30 mins a week for the past few weeks chipping away at it. We chose https://getflywheel.com/ https://getflywheel.com/ as the managed WP provider[1]. They are owned by WP Engine. Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week. I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally. [1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me. [2] https://wpmailsmtp.com/ https://wpmailsmtp.com/

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