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This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson. Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial st

This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson. Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial stake in the company he used to work for, WP Engine, after his company was acquired. He merely claims that he isn’t a “fan of either party”, so we should value his opinion and trust that it is impartial. As for myself, I’ve never used WordPress or any CMS, I’m a lowly embedded software engineer. If Matt, the progenitor and steward of one of the most successful open source products in the world, asserts that an entity in the ecosystem is a leech, I’m inclined to believe him.

mvkel 2y ago
> asserts that an entity in the ecosystem is a leech By that definition, TinyMCE should be able to disable all textareas in Wordpress, since the product has used it freely for years without contributing anything. And Lodash should be able to disable TinyMCE. And QUnit should be able to disable Lodash. It's open source. Should every Linux user be -required- to contribute? I'd bet the OS quality would degrade if that were so. I am left with the question: why, after 13 years of WP Engine doing the exact same thing, is Matt now willing to burn down the house?
- mitjafelicijan 2y ago
  I partially agree with you that this could be a slippery slope, but there is a difference here. TinyMCE is not burning through API and CDN resources of the dependencies it is using. Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide. And he also mentioned that they can host these services on their own, since the code is GPL2. They don't do this because they don't want to pay these costs themselves.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mvkel 2y ago
    Perfectly acceptable to make that claim, which would be a ToS violation. Why couch it as something else? if WP Engine contributed to source, would they suddenly be allowed to rack up API and CDN bills?
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    Where's the pricing page? Where's the terms that say "once your customers use our service enough you have to pay"? Where's the option in WordPress to switch to another backend?
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      The converse of this is where’s the contract or terms that says WP has to keep providing API access for free? It’s open source software after all, almost all of which comes with some form of “no warranty or guarantees” of any kind. Certainly I’ve never seen one offering contractual access to any and all future updates or patches.
      - bastawhiz 2y ago
        Nahhhh that's not how that works at all. Real users are now not getting security updates or features that they had expected before they invested in the WP ecosystem. There's literally no way for a user to pay for API access. Instead, the onus is on the company they're paying for servers from to pay tens of millions of dollars (with no rhyme or reason for that amount). There's no passive "well we never guaranteed this!" from WordPress, they're actively going out of their way to break installations. This wasn't an issue of "it's abusive traffic"—and how could it be, being the code that Automattic wrote!—it's an issue of Matt Mullenweg throwing a temper tantrum and turning unsuspecting WordPress users into collateral damage. There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure (you might even argue that it's not feasible, as it's never been done before by someone other than Automattic!). WordPress isn't just "not providing updates", they're actively blocking these users for purely political reasons. The users have been turned into cannon fodder.
        tpmoney 2y ago
        The problem with these sorts of discussions is both sides always want to have it both ways. When the complaint is they aren't doing something and that's against the spirit of the thing, the response is "show me the contract that says I have to do it". But when it comes to talking about how their opponent is being unfair, the words of the contract don't matter anymore. That's just not how things work, either the contract is all controlling, or the relative behaviors and non-contractual expectations matter. Matt might well be throwing a temper tantrum, and almost certainly causing brand damage, and the result of the conflict might be actual harm to end users. BUT WP Engine doesn't get to hide behind the limits of their obligations under the open source licenses and then shift the blame they should rightfully be taking onto Matt because of his temper tantrum. Real users are not getting security updates or features they expected because the company / vendor they are buying their product from did not do due diligence to secure their supply chain. Matt could decide tomorrow to stop releasing new WP versions, or change the license (modulo CLA stuff). It's not like sudden, fundamental changes to the upstream licensing / sourcing hasn't been a constant source of headlines and conflicts for the last few years now. CentOS, Redis, HashiCorp, Akka, CockroachDB, and many more projects have fundamentally "altered the deal" and downstream customers relying on them have been caught in the crossfire. Heck, even the GPL2 vs GPL3 debate is an example of this. Are all the projects that switched to GPL3 for anti-TiVoization clauses guilty of throwing temper tantrums? Plenty of real world users were harmed by moves to GPL3, for example, Bash on macOS is stuck at 3.2 and users were forced to migrate to zsh over this move. > There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure Is WordPress not open source? What stops WPEngine from doing it themselves, they have the source. If its too hard, well that might explain then why their upstream vendor wants some compensation for the work. We (rightfully) criticize commercial companies for not putting resources into the huge numbers of open source projects and labor that underpins their very existence. Well this is another example of that. If an upstream source is so critical to your business that its loss would cripple you or your customers... maybe consider spending some money on securing and retaining access to that source.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ValentineC 2y ago
    > Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide. A single hosted plugin repository is a huge multiplier towards ecosystem growth, but WordPress always had the option of distributing the load by asking others to set up mirrors, and offering a selection of mirrors. Y'know, redundancy. They've never done so. There's also no option in the WordPress core to easily point towards a different repository URL. Maybe this whole debacle would lead to slightly more decentralisation of WordPress, which might be a good thing for the long-term health of the project and community.
    - vbtechguy 2y ago
      There's discussions on this https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1frd37p/its_time_to_solve_the_singlepointoffailure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1frd37p/its_time...
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  1. Provide proof of your claim that they don’t contribute, or a request for them to do so. I suspect Matt and his companies have contributed to many of their dependencies. 2. All those products have no marginal cost for users, WordPress.org does. 3. Just because bad behavior has been tolerated for a time doesn’t mean it must be tolerated forever.
- archargelod 2y ago
  > It's open source. Should every ... user be -required- to contribute? No, not every user. Only entities that make millions of $$$ directly with that free software. They should be required to contribute! Either donate directly or contribute hours proportional to your dependency on the project.
mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial stake in the company he used to work for It would hardly be shocking if he had some stock or whatever, given how prevalent that is for tech workers' comp. However, if it were me, and I did have a financial stake in WPE, I would not/could not write either of these sentences from TFA under my personal view of honesty: I really don’t have any reason to be a WP Engine cheerleader. I can assure you it’s not me defending my old company just because I used to work for them. I’ve got literally no reason to do that.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  If it were you and you did have a financial stake, would you make a post like this? I doubt it, and it would be wrong to do so. If he didn’t have a financial stake, he would have listed it in his myriad reasons to trust him.
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    It's worth noting that Matt Mullenweg invested in WP Engine's Series A.
- glenstein 2y ago
  I think the quotes you choose arguably are not even the strongest, because the author also said: >I’ve watched from the sidelines as the company has implemented a bunch of scummy policies and shady sales tactics to squeeze money from their customers and make it harder to leave. And >On most days, if you wanted to have a conversation about how much WP Engine sucks, frankly, I’d be a happy participant.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The author goes to pretty great lengths to be transparent about his background and employment history. More to the point, he lays out a ton of specifics about how Matt acted like a Grade A Asshat. If you have any issue with those specifics, you can and should state your objections. But your comment here is just nebulous BS. Saying "This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson" sounds exactly to me like when Elizabeth Holmes gave her now infamous retort "first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world". Both are equally vacuous statements that don't address the specific criticisms put forth.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  I will concede that my remark about a “smear campaign” is worthless or detrimental to the discussion. 1. The author claims dozens of other companies behave similarly and claims that Matt has not taken any action against them. However, the author makes no claim of what level of contribution to WordPress, cost to Wordpress.org, or any contractual agreements those companies may have with WordPress entities. Multiple companies do pay for trademark licenses. Scale is also an important factor here. Estimates are in the hundreds of millions of revenue for WP Engine. They are one of the largest companies in the ecosystem, of course they should be contributing more than smaller players. 2. The author claims that Matt attempted “extortion” and refused to give WP Engine more time to address his demands. It does seem true that Matt refused to give them more time. However, Matt claims this conversation has been going on for more than a year. A deadline seems appropriate if your counterparty keeps delaying. 3. The author claims that trademark confusion between WordPress and WP Engine is an unfounded concern, citing confusion Shopify and Spotify. This is ludicrous on its face, those companies serve completely different market needs, compared to the WP Engine literally offering the product produced by the trademark holder. The author claims that WordPress.com and WordPress.org is confusing the trademark, but doesn’t state whether WordPress.com has a license to use the trademark. 4. The author claims that Matt’s dissatisfaction with WP Engine’s contribution is unreasonable because there aren’t terms and conditions or a contract. This is missing the point entirely. The point is that good members of the community shouldn’t need to be forced to contribute. If they want to play by the letter of the law, Matt isn’t obligated to provide the free services that their business relies on, just as they aren’t obligated to give back. It cuts both ways, and if they won’t operate in good faith, it is self destructive to continue to enable them. I’m out of energy to continue, so I’ll stop here.

mvkel 2y ago

> asserts that an entity in the ecosystem is a leech By that definition, TinyMCE should be able to disable all textareas in Wordpress, since the product has used it freely for years without contributing anything. And Lodash should be able to disable TinyMCE. And QUnit should be able to disable Lodash. It's open source. Should every Linux user be -required- to contribute? I'd bet the OS quality would degrade if that were so. I am left with the question: why, after 13 years of WP Engine doing the exact same thing, is Matt now willing to burn down the house?

mitjafelicijan 2y ago
I partially agree with you that this could be a slippery slope, but there is a difference here. TinyMCE is not burning through API and CDN resources of the dependencies it is using. Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide. And he also mentioned that they can host these services on their own, since the code is GPL2. They don't do this because they don't want to pay these costs themselves.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mvkel 2y ago
  Perfectly acceptable to make that claim, which would be a ToS violation. Why couch it as something else? if WP Engine contributed to source, would they suddenly be allowed to rack up API and CDN bills?
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Where's the pricing page? Where's the terms that say "once your customers use our service enough you have to pay"? Where's the option in WordPress to switch to another backend?
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    The converse of this is where’s the contract or terms that says WP has to keep providing API access for free? It’s open source software after all, almost all of which comes with some form of “no warranty or guarantees” of any kind. Certainly I’ve never seen one offering contractual access to any and all future updates or patches.
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      Nahhhh that's not how that works at all. Real users are now not getting security updates or features that they had expected before they invested in the WP ecosystem. There's literally no way for a user to pay for API access. Instead, the onus is on the company they're paying for servers from to pay tens of millions of dollars (with no rhyme or reason for that amount). There's no passive "well we never guaranteed this!" from WordPress, they're actively going out of their way to break installations. This wasn't an issue of "it's abusive traffic"—and how could it be, being the code that Automattic wrote!—it's an issue of Matt Mullenweg throwing a temper tantrum and turning unsuspecting WordPress users into collateral damage. There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure (you might even argue that it's not feasible, as it's never been done before by someone other than Automattic!). WordPress isn't just "not providing updates", they're actively blocking these users for purely political reasons. The users have been turned into cannon fodder.
      - tpmoney 2y ago
        The problem with these sorts of discussions is both sides always want to have it both ways. When the complaint is they aren't doing something and that's against the spirit of the thing, the response is "show me the contract that says I have to do it". But when it comes to talking about how their opponent is being unfair, the words of the contract don't matter anymore. That's just not how things work, either the contract is all controlling, or the relative behaviors and non-contractual expectations matter. Matt might well be throwing a temper tantrum, and almost certainly causing brand damage, and the result of the conflict might be actual harm to end users. BUT WP Engine doesn't get to hide behind the limits of their obligations under the open source licenses and then shift the blame they should rightfully be taking onto Matt because of his temper tantrum. Real users are not getting security updates or features they expected because the company / vendor they are buying their product from did not do due diligence to secure their supply chain. Matt could decide tomorrow to stop releasing new WP versions, or change the license (modulo CLA stuff). It's not like sudden, fundamental changes to the upstream licensing / sourcing hasn't been a constant source of headlines and conflicts for the last few years now. CentOS, Redis, HashiCorp, Akka, CockroachDB, and many more projects have fundamentally "altered the deal" and downstream customers relying on them have been caught in the crossfire. Heck, even the GPL2 vs GPL3 debate is an example of this. Are all the projects that switched to GPL3 for anti-TiVoization clauses guilty of throwing temper tantrums? Plenty of real world users were harmed by moves to GPL3, for example, Bash on macOS is stuck at 3.2 and users were forced to migrate to zsh over this move. > There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure Is WordPress not open source? What stops WPEngine from doing it themselves, they have the source. If its too hard, well that might explain then why their upstream vendor wants some compensation for the work. We (rightfully) criticize commercial companies for not putting resources into the huge numbers of open source projects and labor that underpins their very existence. Well this is another example of that. If an upstream source is so critical to your business that its loss would cripple you or your customers... maybe consider spending some money on securing and retaining access to that source.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ValentineC 2y ago
  > Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide. A single hosted plugin repository is a huge multiplier towards ecosystem growth, but WordPress always had the option of distributing the load by asking others to set up mirrors, and offering a selection of mirrors. Y'know, redundancy. They've never done so. There's also no option in the WordPress core to easily point towards a different repository URL. Maybe this whole debacle would lead to slightly more decentralisation of WordPress, which might be a good thing for the long-term health of the project and community.
  - vbtechguy 2y ago
    There's discussions on this https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1frd37p/its_time_to_solve_the_singlepointoffailure/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1frd37p/its_time...
Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
1. Provide proof of your claim that they don’t contribute, or a request for them to do so. I suspect Matt and his companies have contributed to many of their dependencies. 2. All those products have no marginal cost for users, WordPress.org does. 3. Just because bad behavior has been tolerated for a time doesn’t mean it must be tolerated forever.
archargelod 2y ago
> It's open source. Should every ... user be -required- to contribute? No, not every user. Only entities that make millions of $$$ directly with that free software. They should be required to contribute! Either donate directly or contribute hours proportional to your dependency on the project.

mtndew4brkfst 2y ago

Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial stake in the company he used to work for It would hardly be shocking if he had some stock or whatever, given how prevalent that is for tech workers' comp. However, if it were me, and I did have a financial stake in WPE, I would not/could not write either of these sentences from TFA under my personal view of honesty: I really don’t have any reason to be a WP Engine cheerleader. I can assure you it’s not me defending my old company just because I used to work for them. I’ve got literally no reason to do that.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
If it were you and you did have a financial stake, would you make a post like this? I doubt it, and it would be wrong to do so. If he didn’t have a financial stake, he would have listed it in his myriad reasons to trust him.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  It's worth noting that Matt Mullenweg invested in WP Engine's Series A.
glenstein 2y ago
I think the quotes you choose arguably are not even the strongest, because the author also said: >I’ve watched from the sidelines as the company has implemented a bunch of scummy policies and shady sales tactics to squeeze money from their customers and make it harder to leave. And >On most days, if you wanted to have a conversation about how much WP Engine sucks, frankly, I’d be a happy participant.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

The author goes to pretty great lengths to be transparent about his background and employment history. More to the point, he lays out a ton of specifics about how Matt acted like a Grade A Asshat. If you have any issue with those specifics, you can and should state your objections. But your comment here is just nebulous BS. Saying "This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson" sounds exactly to me like when Elizabeth Holmes gave her now infamous retort "first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world". Both are equally vacuous statements that don't address the specific criticisms put forth.

Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
I will concede that my remark about a “smear campaign” is worthless or detrimental to the discussion. 1. The author claims dozens of other companies behave similarly and claims that Matt has not taken any action against them. However, the author makes no claim of what level of contribution to WordPress, cost to Wordpress.org, or any contractual agreements those companies may have with WordPress entities. Multiple companies do pay for trademark licenses. Scale is also an important factor here. Estimates are in the hundreds of millions of revenue for WP Engine. They are one of the largest companies in the ecosystem, of course they should be contributing more than smaller players. 2. The author claims that Matt attempted “extortion” and refused to give WP Engine more time to address his demands. It does seem true that Matt refused to give them more time. However, Matt claims this conversation has been going on for more than a year. A deadline seems appropriate if your counterparty keeps delaying. 3. The author claims that trademark confusion between WordPress and WP Engine is an unfounded concern, citing confusion Shopify and Spotify. This is ludicrous on its face, those companies serve completely different market needs, compared to the WP Engine literally offering the product produced by the trademark holder. The author claims that WordPress.com and WordPress.org is confusing the trademark, but doesn’t state whether WordPress.com has a license to use the trademark. 4. The author claims that Matt’s dissatisfaction with WP Engine’s contribution is unreasonable because there aren’t terms and conditions or a contract. This is missing the point entirely. The point is that good members of the community shouldn’t need to be forced to contribute. If they want to play by the letter of the law, Matt isn’t obligated to provide the free services that their business relies on, just as they aren’t obligated to give back. It cuts both ways, and if they won’t operate in good faith, it is self destructive to continue to enable them. I’m out of energy to continue, so I’ll stop here.