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> 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 r

by 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 ago
  I don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a fork
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - shabgzer 2y ago
    Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-) Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c2fd51bbfb1b6028e5c47c305/wp-includes/rewrite.php#L381 https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
    - spyke112 2y ago
      So in your opinion what's wrong with that code? To me it seems to be nicely documented and everything.
      - shabgzer 2y ago
        That it is - it better be. It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient. Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time. Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!) Edit: this guy said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827
    - darkwater 2y ago
      So even better, WP engine could rewrite it from scratch in a better way. Maybe even use another language. Or maybe it is just fine for their use case and they are making already enough money with it...
- safety1st 2y ago
  > Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes. Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them. Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.) So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really. BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.
  - dncornholio 2y ago
    The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi language plugin on top and your site will be eating memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue at all
    - safety1st 2y ago
      I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our open source project, and when you had problems with the revision system, instead of contributing improvements, you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?" Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will also get access to those improvements. For sure it's disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time to Core.
- austhrow743 2y ago
  "A third party will complain" is not a valid reason to provide poor service to your customers.
  - JimDabell 2y ago
    I’m not really focusing on WP Engine’s service here. I’m pointing out that the constraints Mullenweg has voiced appear to be self-contradictory and unsatisfiable by any WordPress host.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bzmrgonz 2y ago
  I'm sorry but WP-ENGINE lost my vote when they started quoting evangelizing and ambassadorship events as "contributions". Everyone knows that's a 50/50 self-marketing and brand outreach. I don't understand why people are taking WP ENGINE's side, in the past 5 years, the evils and exploits of VC investments have been widely documented. This is a clear and present danger/example of what is wrong with VC in America. Look at VC in other parts of the world, they are heavily regulated for this particular reason. This industry has taken the premise of the movie "pretty woman" and escalated to new hights of corporate GREED.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
safety1st 2y ago
Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that customers didn't lose service. Matt chose to surprise them. It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted. Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy. I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did. Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them." This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in. But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)
- mike_d 2y ago
  > Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with. Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
  - nicce 2y ago
jdub 2y ago
But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those distributions had set.) That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.
- lsaferite 2y ago
  > WordPress.org decision makers That would be Matt as the sole owner of wordpress.org, not a plural 'decision makers'
arielcostas 2y ago
Because Canonical makes it easy to clone their entire repositories and host your own mirrors. You can change your ubuntu mirrors changing the configuration files themselves (or via graphical programs on desktop systems), unlike in WordPress where you'd need to "butcher it" (Matt's words, regarding disabling revisions by WPE) modifying the source code to point to another server.
- bsbsjsusj 2y ago
  Butchering is a right afforded by the GPL. As long as you pass along the dog food.
jantissler 2y ago
It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository, he could have told them so and given them a date. But cutting off access to updates without warning to all these sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option" without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.
- nchmy 2y ago
  From the lawsuit: In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that as a result of his actions, WPE is now a “distressed asset,” worth just a “fraction” of what it was before, because “[c]ustomers are leaving in droves” – calling into question whether Defendants’ motivations extend beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE’s valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander and disrupt them so much that the company would become worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him, after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit too)
ThinkBeat 2y ago
> AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well. A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day. Being able to pull it locally saves all that. Also, it is faster and does provide some security. > They do not depend on Canonical to run their business. That depends on how you look at it. If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be a big problem for both DO and AWS. They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros. But then Amazon does have their own in-house Linux distro, which is/used to be somewhat associated with RedHat/ Centos https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023 https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023 I would expect AWs,Google etc have specific internal only distros that make up the foundation of their cloud business but that is just a guess.

by mike_d 2y ago

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 ago
I don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a fork
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- shabgzer 2y ago
  Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-) Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c2fd51bbfb1b6028e5c47c305/wp-includes/rewrite.php#L381 https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
  - spyke112 2y ago
    So in your opinion what's wrong with that code? To me it seems to be nicely documented and everything.
    - shabgzer 2y ago
      That it is - it better be. It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient. Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time. Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!) Edit: this guy said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827
  - darkwater 2y ago
    So even better, WP engine could rewrite it from scratch in a better way. Maybe even use another language. Or maybe it is just fine for their use case and they are making already enough money with it...
safety1st 2y ago
> Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes. Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them. Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.) So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really. BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.
- dncornholio 2y ago
  The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi language plugin on top and your site will be eating memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue at all
  - safety1st 2y ago
    I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our open source project, and when you had problems with the revision system, instead of contributing improvements, you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?" Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will also get access to those improvements. For sure it's disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time to Core.
austhrow743 2y ago
"A third party will complain" is not a valid reason to provide poor service to your customers.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  I’m not really focusing on WP Engine’s service here. I’m pointing out that the constraints Mullenweg has voiced appear to be self-contradictory and unsatisfiable by any WordPress host.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bzmrgonz 2y ago
I'm sorry but WP-ENGINE lost my vote when they started quoting evangelizing and ambassadorship events as "contributions". Everyone knows that's a 50/50 self-marketing and brand outreach. I don't understand why people are taking WP ENGINE's side, in the past 5 years, the evils and exploits of VC investments have been widely documented. This is a clear and present danger/example of what is wrong with VC in America. Look at VC in other parts of the world, they are heavily regulated for this particular reason. This industry has taken the premise of the movie "pretty woman" and escalated to new hights of corporate GREED.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

safety1st 2y ago

Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that customers didn't lose service. Matt chose to surprise them. It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted. Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy. I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did. Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them." This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in. But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)

mike_d 2y ago
> Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with. Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
- nicce 2y ago

jdub 2y ago

But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those distributions had set.) That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.

lsaferite 2y ago
> WordPress.org decision makers That would be Matt as the sole owner of wordpress.org, not a plural 'decision makers'

arielcostas 2y ago

Because Canonical makes it easy to clone their entire repositories and host your own mirrors. You can change your ubuntu mirrors changing the configuration files themselves (or via graphical programs on desktop systems), unlike in WordPress where you'd need to "butcher it" (Matt's words, regarding disabling revisions by WPE) modifying the source code to point to another server.

bsbsjsusj 2y ago
Butchering is a right afforded by the GPL. As long as you pass along the dog food.

jantissler 2y ago

It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository, he could have told them so and given them a date. But cutting off access to updates without warning to all these sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option" without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.

nchmy 2y ago
From the lawsuit: In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that as a result of his actions, WPE is now a “distressed asset,” worth just a “fraction” of what it was before, because “[c]ustomers are leaving in droves” – calling into question whether Defendants’ motivations extend beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE’s valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander and disrupt them so much that the company would become worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him, after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit too)

ThinkBeat 2y ago

> AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well. A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day. Being able to pull it locally saves all that. Also, it is faster and does provide some security. > They do not depend on Canonical to run their business. That depends on how you look at it. If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be a big problem for both DO and AWS. They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros. But then Amazon does have their own in-house Linux distro, which is/used to be somewhat associated with RedHat/ Centos https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023 https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023 I would expect AWs,Google etc have specific internal only distros that make up the foundation of their cloud business but that is just a guess.