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Honestly I don't get the backlash Mullenweg is getting - a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community, GPL let's them have the code - but I'm all in favor of k

Honestly I don't get the backlash Mullenweg is getting - a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community, GPL let's them have the code - but I'm all in favor of kicking then off of everything else.

maccard 2y ago
It’s a bit two faced. He’s clearly abusing his position, annd every time this topic comes up (see elasticsearch, terraform, redis from recent memory) HN has clearly been on the side of the open source license. But, that’s not why he’s getting backlash. He’s getting backlash because he does what the “other side” did in all of these scenarios - invent reasons that are unrelated to the license dispute to cause the split. In this case, delisting their plugins from the central marketplace and implying trademark violations - while claiming that the problem is that they don’t contribute back to the ecosystem. The real problem is that automattic want wpengine to “contribute their share” - by development or rev share, and they’re using dirty tricks and smear tactics to do so.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- josephg 2y ago
  Yep. And they’ve gone 0-to-100 within days. I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). But the expectations have to be a fair & transparent, and ideally communicated from the start, so people and companies can make informed choices about how they want to be involved. Not suddenly enforced with no lead time, with demands of money amounts seemingly made up on the spot, and “scorched earth” tactics when the demands aren’t met. As a rule of thumb, bikes can start and stop fast. Cars should be more predictable on the roads. And trucks should accelerate and turn more slowly still. If you’re big and powerful (government, standards body, maintainer of a huge opensource project, etc) you need to telegraph your moves and act slowly and predictably so other people can react to you. This is not how you do that.
  - chii 2y ago
    > ideally communicated from the start if only a minority could grow big and sufficiently high revenue generating to be capable of paying anything, then having this concept of "paying back" from the start would've been a chilling effect on the adoption in the first place. wordpress ecosystem is big, but it is the network effect, rather than the software itself. This network effect require lots of individual participants to kick start it at the beginning. Those participants will benefit from the software being free. If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. This makes the ecosystem small. They don't call it bait and switch for nothing. The expectation of contribution will never be transparent from the beginning.
    - josephg 2y ago
      > If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. Maybe! But you could say the same thing about every paid service. “Oh, if Netflix charges customers money every month they won’t grow as fast and might never be financially profitable!”. The answer isn’t to remain free forever. It’s to accept the trade off. And it’s gotta line up with the license too. I’d be happy if the policy was “look, if you’re doing >1M monthly revenue, we expect your company to fund some people full time to work on opensource contributions. (With some specified minimum revenue / developer ratio). After all, your business depends on this free software but software isn’t free to make. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine - but you’re getting rich off our voluntary labor without giving back in turn. It’s an opensource licence. You’re legally welcome to do that. But know that so long as you do that you aren’t welcome at conferences or community events or spaces since you’ve opted yourself our community of contributors.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). I agree with you, but this is a well trodden topic in the development community, particularly on HN - see Terraform for example [0]. One of the problems is that the world WP came to exist in and came to dominate the web in doesn't exist in the same form. There's been a few attempts at thisand they've caused large fractures - nobody has really got it right yet. On one hand you have a very vocal, and powerful group of people who believe that the freedom of the software is far more important than anything else, and those groups are often backed by large organisations that have the people-power to continue that effort (see: TF -> OpenTofu with Spacelift and co, Redis -> Valkey backed by AWS, and the OG split with Elastic). On the other hand you have a less vocal group who are more concerned with the functionality of the software rather than the original agreement that was signed (fair warning I fall in this category - I'm trying to remain Swiss in this comment), and accept that the terms of the deal have changed in that being Jeff'ed. (My reading of) The value of OSS in this group is the ability to for community to improve things, and to not end up locked into a problem that you have no solution to. The advantage here is that this group can just hitch their wagon to whichever solution appears to win out. I don't see an easy path out of this that satisfies both camps, unfortunately. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  > The real problem is that automattic want wpengine to “contribute their share” - by development or rev share, and they’re using dirty tricks and smear tactics to do so. Again I don't see what's wrong with this ? Clearly they have no recourse through GPL but they have trademarks and infrastructure. I don't see anything unreasonable about his behavior.
kmlx 2y ago
> a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community automattic is worth a few billion. what are talking about?
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  They are the single largest contributor to the project ?
ThatPlayer 2y ago
Because I disagree with this definition of freeloading. They've offer a free, open source, very popular plugin for Wordpress, according to the Wordpress.org's plugin page, with 2+ million installs. Wordpress forking and taking over the plugin seems like they've accepted the code/contribution.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  Not contributing back to the project you're basing your business (eg. the smallest example being infrastructure they are cut off from). Honestly zero sympathy for WP engine, and I don't really see a better way to force them to pay.
  - misnome 2y ago
    They contribute in both plugins, core developers, and conference sponsorships. “Don’t contribute anything” is pure lies from Matt conveniently excluding anything he doesn’t want to count.
    - rafaelmn 2y ago
      I don't know enough about the ecosystem - but mentioning conference sponsorships is enough for me to realize they/you are being dishonest. Conference sponsorships are 100% company promotion, it even gets budgeted towards that.
xd1936 2y ago
There's history. https://bullenweg.com/ https://bullenweg.com/
that_guy_iain 2y ago
Are you honestly saying that when Matt just stole an OSS project's users? ACF is OSS. If that's not freeloading I don't know what is.

Honestly I don't get the backlash Mullenweg is getting - a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community, GPL let's them have the code - but I'm all in favor of kicking then off of everything else.

maccard 2y ago

It’s a bit two faced. He’s clearly abusing his position, annd every time this topic comes up (see elasticsearch, terraform, redis from recent memory) HN has clearly been on the side of the open source license. But, that’s not why he’s getting backlash. He’s getting backlash because he does what the “other side” did in all of these scenarios - invent reasons that are unrelated to the license dispute to cause the split. In this case, delisting their plugins from the central marketplace and implying trademark violations - while claiming that the problem is that they don’t contribute back to the ecosystem. The real problem is that automattic want wpengine to “contribute their share” - by development or rev share, and they’re using dirty tricks and smear tactics to do so.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josephg 2y ago
Yep. And they’ve gone 0-to-100 within days. I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). But the expectations have to be a fair & transparent, and ideally communicated from the start, so people and companies can make informed choices about how they want to be involved. Not suddenly enforced with no lead time, with demands of money amounts seemingly made up on the spot, and “scorched earth” tactics when the demands aren’t met. As a rule of thumb, bikes can start and stop fast. Cars should be more predictable on the roads. And trucks should accelerate and turn more slowly still. If you’re big and powerful (government, standards body, maintainer of a huge opensource project, etc) you need to telegraph your moves and act slowly and predictably so other people can react to you. This is not how you do that.
- chii 2y ago
  > ideally communicated from the start if only a minority could grow big and sufficiently high revenue generating to be capable of paying anything, then having this concept of "paying back" from the start would've been a chilling effect on the adoption in the first place. wordpress ecosystem is big, but it is the network effect, rather than the software itself. This network effect require lots of individual participants to kick start it at the beginning. Those participants will benefit from the software being free. If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. This makes the ecosystem small. They don't call it bait and switch for nothing. The expectation of contribution will never be transparent from the beginning.
  - josephg 2y ago
    > If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. Maybe! But you could say the same thing about every paid service. “Oh, if Netflix charges customers money every month they won’t grow as fast and might never be financially profitable!”. The answer isn’t to remain free forever. It’s to accept the trade off. And it’s gotta line up with the license too. I’d be happy if the policy was “look, if you’re doing >1M monthly revenue, we expect your company to fund some people full time to work on opensource contributions. (With some specified minimum revenue / developer ratio). After all, your business depends on this free software but software isn’t free to make. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine - but you’re getting rich off our voluntary labor without giving back in turn. It’s an opensource licence. You’re legally welcome to do that. But know that so long as you do that you aren’t welcome at conferences or community events or spaces since you’ve opted yourself our community of contributors.
- maccard 2y ago
  > I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). I agree with you, but this is a well trodden topic in the development community, particularly on HN - see Terraform for example [0]. One of the problems is that the world WP came to exist in and came to dominate the web in doesn't exist in the same form. There's been a few attempts at thisand they've caused large fractures - nobody has really got it right yet. On one hand you have a very vocal, and powerful group of people who believe that the freedom of the software is far more important than anything else, and those groups are often backed by large organisations that have the people-power to continue that effort (see: TF -> OpenTofu with Spacelift and co, Redis -> Valkey backed by AWS, and the OG split with Elastic). On the other hand you have a less vocal group who are more concerned with the functionality of the software rather than the original agreement that was signed (fair warning I fall in this category - I'm trying to remain Swiss in this comment), and accept that the terms of the deal have changed in that being Jeff'ed. (My reading of) The value of OSS in this group is the ability to for community to improve things, and to not end up locked into a problem that you have no solution to. The advantage here is that this group can just hitch their wagon to whichever solution appears to win out. I don't see an easy path out of this that satisfies both camps, unfortunately. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306
rafaelmn 2y ago
> The real problem is that automattic want wpengine to “contribute their share” - by development or rev share, and they’re using dirty tricks and smear tactics to do so. Again I don't see what's wrong with this ? Clearly they have no recourse through GPL but they have trademarks and infrastructure. I don't see anything unreasonable about his behavior.

kmlx 2y ago

> a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community automattic is worth a few billion. what are talking about?

rafaelmn 2y ago
They are the single largest contributor to the project ?

ThatPlayer 2y ago

Because I disagree with this definition of freeloading. They've offer a free, open source, very popular plugin for Wordpress, according to the Wordpress.org's plugin page, with 2+ million installs. Wordpress forking and taking over the plugin seems like they've accepted the code/contribution.

rafaelmn 2y ago
Not contributing back to the project you're basing your business (eg. the smallest example being infrastructure they are cut off from). Honestly zero sympathy for WP engine, and I don't really see a better way to force them to pay.
- misnome 2y ago
  They contribute in both plugins, core developers, and conference sponsorships. “Don’t contribute anything” is pure lies from Matt conveniently excluding anything he doesn’t want to count.
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    I don't know enough about the ecosystem - but mentioning conference sponsorships is enough for me to realize they/you are being dishonest. Conference sponsorships are 100% company promotion, it even gets budgeted towards that.

xd1936 2y ago

There's history. https://bullenweg.com/ https://bullenweg.com/

that_guy_iain 2y ago

Are you honestly saying that when Matt just stole an OSS project's users? ACF is OSS. If that's not freeloading I don't know what is.