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Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP Engine's conduct. However I do not u
by safety1st 2y ago
Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP Engine's conduct.
However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
To be entirely blunt it's all damage control for us at this point when your name comes up, and it's because of that one singular mistake, if this was just WPE and Automattic duking it out in court no one would really care, but now the reliability of the WPOrg infrastructure is being questioned by a big chunk of the people who depend on WordPress and they will probably be inclined to walk away from your infrastructure and deeper into the arms of someone like WPEngine when they get the chance.
If you care about the broad perception of your efforts and your business practices I think you need to address this. Again I see that there are plenty of reasons to take issue with WPE's conduct but this singular decision you made has people calling for you to step aside and let someone else run WordPress. It's not going to go away on its own.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- prox 2y agoWell said, I hope that there will be forum to discuss the ethos of these actions and see if there isn’t a better way to go about this, and how we can strengthen the community of open source. An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder) and others.
- astockwell 2y agoLink?
- chuckadams 2y agohttps://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem Good thread on reddit too: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fup9gb/solving_the_makertaker_problem_dries_buytaert/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fup9gb/solving_...
- mike_d 2y ago> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
- JimDabell 2y ago> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers. This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions: > What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. — https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes. Making WordPress contact something other than api.wordpress.org requires altering the codebase. Making this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected: > Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885 So according to Mullenweg: - If WP Engine alters WordPress, even just to alter its configuration, they are “butchering” it. - If WP Engine doesn’t alter WordPress and leaves it pointing at api.wordpress.org, they are unfairly using community resources. – Huge numbers of people using api.wordpress.org is actually “great” and scales to tens of millions of servers. As far as I can see, he doesn’t have a consistent position. He’s just grabbing hold of the nearest accusation that he thinks will harm WP Engine in the heat of the moment, regardless of what he has previously claimed or who else it hurts.
- jamespo 2y agoI don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a fork
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moneylotion 2y agoA million people trusted WPE’s resources. WPE, in turn, relied on someone else’s. The real issue here is that WPE completely overlooked the fact that they haven’t done the work to maintain the availability of their apps. It’s like buying a fridge, stocking it with $200 worth of food, and forgetting to plug it in.
- None4U 2y agoMore like buying a fridge and then the landlord stops paying for electricity suddenly
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- austhrow743 2y agoThis is accurate if by landlord you mean "the person in whose house you have been squatting without paying rent or signing a lease."
- immibis 2y agoActually, it's the person who signed a contract with me to give me a free house.
- austhrow743 2y agoWhat is the contract that gives WP Engine the free house?
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe GPL, and WordPress's trademark policy, which up to a week ago stated " The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit."
- ThinkBeat 2y agoI have not heard of anyone being turned off from using WordPress from this. That does not mean it does/has not happened, I am sure some folks got mad. It is a stupid hissyfit and some bad judgments. People make mistakes. There are far better purely technical / code issues to turn people away from WordPress, but WordPress is spectacularly popular.
- marpstar 2y agoUhh. I am. I've launched probably 30 websites using WP over the last 10 years, a couple for household name brands. WordPress stopped being "cool" awhile ago (because "PHP sucks" and the like), I've defended my usage of it in plenty of past comments, despite it being long past "cool". The way MM talks about enforcing the trademark, the licensing distinction (i.e. the commercial use of "WordPress" to Automattic only) -- am I allowed to call myself a "WordPress" developer and charge people money for it anymore? Or do I have to worry about a trademark troll? I'll admit that I'd already been looking for a modern alternative. I'm a web developer, I almost exclusively write in TypeScript, something running on Node just makes more sense for me. I recently built a project on PayloadCMS and NextJS -- Payload has since integrated directly into Next's server and has a really nice "website" template to get started. I'll be using that from now on.
- ThinkBeat 2y agoUp can run WordPress just fine headless. Not my own cup of coffee but it works I think the data schema in Wordpress is decent. With the addition of Pods it has become a lot more flexible. (There were other solutions that mostly cost $$) Most of my issues with WP has to do with the front end.
- pwillia7 2y agoTo me, the military language used in a few of their execs messages was telling.... I have seen that more than once in anti competition lawsuits and Heather has as well
- Spastche 2y ago>However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites. yup. I'm about to make a new site and I dont care about the platform, I just want to write. but I'm not gonna use wordpress ever again now, probably. Matt seems friendly but this is evil CEO garbage
- caeril 2y ago> but this is evil CEO garbage Correction: this is Evil CEO vs Evil CEO garbage. Casting WPEngine as some sort of saint is highly inaccurate.