4 ms·

The nice thing is it's GPL, so the founder/owner can't just take his ball and go home. It's also widely-used/important enough that it will get forked if leaders

by Zak 2y ago

The nice thing is it's GPL, so the founder/owner can't just take his ball and go home. It's also widely-used/important enough that it will get forked if leadership problems start to make it unusable for too many people.

dylan604 2y ago
Isn't that essentially what caused this kerfuffle? Someone forked it and the original guy got upset about the how/why of the fork?
- threeseed 2y ago
  It’s more that WP Engine is successful and hasn’t meaningfully contributed back to the Wordpress project. Which I can sympathise with. But this isn’t what open source is about both legally and morally. And there are better ways to achieve this goal than by making a mockery of the Wordpress foundation and harming end users.
  - nchmy 2y ago
    The wordpress foundation has never been anything BUT a mockery. It doesnt do anything - it is a shell for Matt's trademark schemes and tax fraud
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >The wordpress foundation has never been anything BUT a mockery. It doesnt do anything - it is a shell for Matt's trademark schemes and tax fraud It does kinda seem that way as an outsider looking in. There definitely seems to be some legal shenanigans going on when he's using his for-profit company Automattic to complain about stuff happening to the non-profit Wordpress Foundation. They should be legally separate enough that what he's doing shouldn't be possible.
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    Hearsay tells me they maintain a small fleet of Wordpress plugins, sponsor conferences, etc. Are those not meaningful contributions to the ecosystem?
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      No you don't understand! Matt painstakingly forked b2 into wordpress and now WPE is freloading while Matt donates a whooping 0% of his revenue to b2 while WPE doesn't. /s
  - chx 2y ago
    > and hasn’t meaningfully contributed back to the Wordpress project. That's what Matt says. WPEngine claims otherwise -- in a legal document, no less.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- graeme 2y ago
  No, no fork at all. There may be a fork though because of how erratically the founder is behaving
bigiain 2y ago
The problem though, for people who want to use WordPress, is that WP sites fundamentally rely on wordpress.org for downloading and installing plugins and themes, and critically for security updates to plugins and themes. (You can install/update manually, but the standard admin dashbord is set up to make wordpress.org integration by far the best way to do so.) Yeah, you've got your GPL copy of all the source code. But next week's discovery of vulnerabilities in whatever random plugin gets to be this weeks news means you need to download/install the updated version. Which canonically is found at wordpress.org. We host a couple of dozen sites on WPEngine (and have done for about a decade, very happily with the price, features, and service). Our internal business continuity planning is now investigating ClassicPress, keeping an eye on comms from WPEngine to see what their path forward in terms of keeping WP sites updated without wordpress.org access, and questioning whether it's time to stop using WordPress at all. We already have a few sites that use WP as the admin/publishing tool, and generate the site as static html for hosting via S3/CloudFront - we may make that our standard deployment bit if we had to move all our WP sites off WPE, we may as well investigate other newer tools. We are certainly having conversations right now with potential new clients warning them of the drama in the WordPress ownership/ecosystem, and advising considering alternative options or at least waiting until the dust settles on Matt's current ill advised crusade.
- mingus88 2y ago
  The update issue doesn’t sound like a big deal. What’s stopping WP Engine from setting up their own mirror system? CentOS did this to Redhat for decades. They literally stripped out the trademarks and distributed the OS to anyone with no contracts at all. Patches were available same day that RH published them, and were applied from CentOS update servers. The endgame for WP seems to be that they give up this fight or close their source and act like a real licensed software company. You can’t play GPL until it no longer suits you, then start making insane demands about revenue sharing and all this nonsense.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    WPEngine do have their own mirrors. This is what a test theme upgrade this morning tells me: Downloading update from https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixteen.3.3.zip… https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixte... The risk I need to address is what's stopping Matt denying WPE access to that place where all the plugins and themes are published? Where does plugin-updates.wpengine.com get its content from, and how soon is Matt gonna block that? And an arms race of WPE needing to use proxies or other workarounds is not a business grade answer. As I see things, either 1) the "WordPress community" that Matt thinks he's fighting for step up and tells him "No thanks, we absolutely do not want you to fight this fight" and removes him from power, 2) WPE wins the court case and a judge tells Matt "Nope, you're wrong about trademark law and you're wrong about the GPL and you are going to be held to the claims you made in the past about WordPress the software and WordPress the foundation and wordpress.org the software distribution and update service." or 3) We are witnessing the start of the end of WordPress being trusted to run almost half of the internet.

by Zak 2y ago

dylan604 2y ago

Isn't that essentially what caused this kerfuffle? Someone forked it and the original guy got upset about the how/why of the fork?

threeseed 2y ago
It’s more that WP Engine is successful and hasn’t meaningfully contributed back to the Wordpress project. Which I can sympathise with. But this isn’t what open source is about both legally and morally. And there are better ways to achieve this goal than by making a mockery of the Wordpress foundation and harming end users.
- nchmy 2y ago
  The wordpress foundation has never been anything BUT a mockery. It doesnt do anything - it is a shell for Matt's trademark schemes and tax fraud
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >The wordpress foundation has never been anything BUT a mockery. It doesnt do anything - it is a shell for Matt's trademark schemes and tax fraud It does kinda seem that way as an outsider looking in. There definitely seems to be some legal shenanigans going on when he's using his for-profit company Automattic to complain about stuff happening to the non-profit Wordpress Foundation. They should be legally separate enough that what he's doing shouldn't be possible.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  Hearsay tells me they maintain a small fleet of Wordpress plugins, sponsor conferences, etc. Are those not meaningful contributions to the ecosystem?
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    No you don't understand! Matt painstakingly forked b2 into wordpress and now WPE is freloading while Matt donates a whooping 0% of his revenue to b2 while WPE doesn't. /s
- chx 2y ago
  > and hasn’t meaningfully contributed back to the Wordpress project. That's what Matt says. WPEngine claims otherwise -- in a legal document, no less.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
graeme 2y ago
No, no fork at all. There may be a fork though because of how erratically the founder is behaving

bigiain 2y ago

The problem though, for people who want to use WordPress, is that WP sites fundamentally rely on wordpress.org for downloading and installing plugins and themes, and critically for security updates to plugins and themes. (You can install/update manually, but the standard admin dashbord is set up to make wordpress.org integration by far the best way to do so.) Yeah, you've got your GPL copy of all the source code. But next week's discovery of vulnerabilities in whatever random plugin gets to be this weeks news means you need to download/install the updated version. Which canonically is found at wordpress.org. We host a couple of dozen sites on WPEngine (and have done for about a decade, very happily with the price, features, and service). Our internal business continuity planning is now investigating ClassicPress, keeping an eye on comms from WPEngine to see what their path forward in terms of keeping WP sites updated without wordpress.org access, and questioning whether it's time to stop using WordPress at all. We already have a few sites that use WP as the admin/publishing tool, and generate the site as static html for hosting via S3/CloudFront - we may make that our standard deployment bit if we had to move all our WP sites off WPE, we may as well investigate other newer tools. We are certainly having conversations right now with potential new clients warning them of the drama in the WordPress ownership/ecosystem, and advising considering alternative options or at least waiting until the dust settles on Matt's current ill advised crusade.

mingus88 2y ago
The update issue doesn’t sound like a big deal. What’s stopping WP Engine from setting up their own mirror system? CentOS did this to Redhat for decades. They literally stripped out the trademarks and distributed the OS to anyone with no contracts at all. Patches were available same day that RH published them, and were applied from CentOS update servers. The endgame for WP seems to be that they give up this fight or close their source and act like a real licensed software company. You can’t play GPL until it no longer suits you, then start making insane demands about revenue sharing and all this nonsense.
- bigiain 2y ago
  WPEngine do have their own mirrors. This is what a test theme upgrade this morning tells me: Downloading update from https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixteen.3.3.zip… https://theme-updates.wpengine.com/twentysixteen/twentysixte... The risk I need to address is what's stopping Matt denying WPE access to that place where all the plugins and themes are published? Where does plugin-updates.wpengine.com get its content from, and how soon is Matt gonna block that? And an arms race of WPE needing to use proxies or other workarounds is not a business grade answer. As I see things, either 1) the "WordPress community" that Matt thinks he's fighting for step up and tells him "No thanks, we absolutely do not want you to fight this fight" and removes him from power, 2) WPE wins the court case and a judge tells Matt "Nope, you're wrong about trademark law and you're wrong about the GPL and you are going to be held to the claims you made in the past about WordPress the software and WordPress the foundation and wordpress.org the software distribution and update service." or 3) We are witnessing the start of the end of WordPress being trusted to run almost half of the internet.