7 ms·

WordPress retaliation impacts community

239 points by chmaynard 2y ago

ookblah 2y ago
Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes. If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that. So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player. "Capturing value" I suppose.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player. Just taking a page out of the app store playbooks. I guess Matt hasn't been keeping up with courts starting to rule against those stores.
- x3n0ph3n3 2y ago
  > even that response to DHH Can you link to what you're referring?
  - angch 2y ago
    https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/ https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      He appears to have replaced the original post, which was a lot more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/UZZit https://archive.ph/UZZit
      - serial_dev 2y ago
        Funnily enough, your archive is already a friendlier version, there is one with even more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/7ZRbY https://archive.ph/7ZRbY
        stevage 2y ago
        > I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling. > DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale ... Yep, real respectful. I don't even understand the point of the post, other than to shit on the other guy. It doesn't advance any debate or raise any questions.
      - zo1 2y ago
        The post as it is now sounds really decent and a step in the right direction. Let's not air all the dirty laundry happening here, it looks like Matt is trying to do the "right" thing here. Here is the current iteration of that post from Matt: "I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake."
        ookblah 2y ago
        but content is sacred right? /s he can link to his original post and put the clarification alongside if that's the case. i can change my mind if his actions show he's trying to do "right", but that takes time. for me, it's very important to know that he was even capable of writing the original post.
  - ookblah 2y ago
    i think the original got taken down but you can find it on archive or just searching around
- dotcoma 2y ago
  > "Capturing value". Matt behaving like a PE fund, or any standard Big Tech company. In other words, enshittification as usual.
- anon7000 2y ago
  Yeah the DHH post is an example or projection… Automattic is hosting a lot of WordPress sites but not making anywhere near as much money as the WP Engines and Go Daddy’s of the ecosystem. (And yet automattic contributes the most to the project.) So it’s definitely a point of frustration to the business.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    They only contribute the most because they reject anyone else's contributions.
    - phatskat 2y ago
      For real this hits home! I worked in the WP space for many years and in that time have participated maybe twice in the actual WordPress OSS project: once to submit a patch to remove the “final” keyword from the Post class (lots of support from others that wanted this, and ultimately DoA because no one at the core level supported this) and once for some small thing that was relevant to my work at the time. The hostility and difficulty in having a reasonable discussion, along with using SVN fwiw, made contributing feel like a chore. I had hopes of being a regular contributor and helping to enhance and extend a project I genuinely enjoyed working with, and nothing about how the core team operated made me feel welcomed.
- immibis 2y ago
  "WordPress hosting" is an accurate description of what the product does and uses the term nominatively, which is legal. You couldn't call your company that, but within the company, you could call the product that hosts WordPress "WordPress hosting". (IANAL;TINLA)
bullenweg 2y ago
Rumors are that another round of voluntary layoffs are coming to Automattic today. I am optimistic for the future of WordPress because it looks less and less likely to involve Matt. Matt has created the ideal conditions for a fork to succeed: WordPress (the software) is a fixture of the internet, it is never going away no matter how much Matt sabotages it but Matt's control over it is not a foregone conclusion given all Matt really controls is the brand. The name and leadership may change, but WordPress will live on.
- serial_dev 2y ago
  I have been thinking about the alignment offer that Automattic has offered its employees. It’s hard for me to imagine any scenario at any company where I would not take the money and go. Six months of salary is a lot of money for just simply walking away. To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if that’s the reason less than 10% accepted the first offer.
  - simonw 2y ago
    If you're a PHP developer with expertise in WordPress Automattic is pretty much your version of FAANG - I can totally understand why people wouldn't want to trade even six months salary for never being able to work there again.
    - pmontra 2y ago
      The 8% of the company left. IMHO it's not uncommon than the 8% of any company is willing to leave at any time because of any reason. They got a payoff so they anticipated their move. Some of them could have been even on Matt's side, some not.
      - 4hg4ufxhy 2y ago
        Matt even dunked on DHH that only 8% left automattic, while 30% left badecamp back when they banned politics. Nevermind the fact that DHHs offer was without a timelimit, allowing people to figure out their options. Also the job markets couldn't be more different. However, I do think a fair amount of automattic employees do not want to leave since their benefits seem actually really nice. Not many companies provide constant pay regardless of your cost of living, so I commend them for that. It could be impossible to find an equivalent job for non US employees, so 6 months pay for leaving in this market is hardly worth it, unless like you said you had plans to do it anyway.
badlibrarian 2y ago
My mother has a WordPress site talking about hedgehogs and at this point it seems like it's only a matter of time before Matt's vendetta shows up in her site footer.
- enews01 2y ago
  curious, whats that hedgehog website?
  - tomovo 2y ago
    sega.com?
  - pixxel 2y ago
    There’s a ‘sport’ where contestants see who can kick a rolled up hedgehog over the most garden fences. Maybe that one? Or it was a Sean Lock joke. I forget.
jcranmer 2y ago
On the off-chance that Matt is doing the irresponsible thing here and still getting involved in social media discussions on this topic: People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth policy against those who don't take your side... the side that's going to be picked isn't your side. There's just too much risk to taking your side.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > People don't like being involved in drama, Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.
  - Teever 2y ago
    It's not weird if you think about it. How can you sit back and watch the drama if you're a part of it?
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Oh yeah, this is a fantastic thing to sit back and munch popcorn to. It's when the people involved are demanding that you stop munching the popcorn and start throwing knives at someone that the fun stops.
    - labster 2y ago
      Yep, I’m browsing this topic with popcorn right now, with no skin in the game. It’s great fun! Sorry if this is your livelihood, folks, but I can’t do anything to actually help. So I’ll just enjoy the fireworks and try to apply any lessons learned to other OSS communities.
  - bad_user 2y ago
    Website owners and admins don't have the luxury of enjoying this particular drama, and they are the ones that matter.
CamelCaseName 2y ago
Perhaps I missed something, but I wonder why WP didn't just include ACF functionality in WP Core from the very beginning? Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  Leadership is short sighted and not acting rationally. Doing as you said is much smarter, but maybe takes a bit longer. My guess is Matt was reaching for some way to "hit them back" quickly.
- Pikamander2 2y ago
  WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality. It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.
  - lrae 2y ago
    Those 20 poorly written plugins make a good amount of money though, which is why many of those plugins' creators and affiliated "wordpress influencers" also do an outstanding job pushing the sentiment against more integrations into the core.
dovin 2y ago
I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other. I haven't used Wordpress in years, and this drama makes me never want to use it again.
- slg 2y ago
  It reminds me of Reddit cracking down on 3rd party apps or Twitter changing that policy and a whole lot more once Musk took over. The problem isn't necessarily the actions or policies in a vacuum. There are legitimate benefits to these approaches. The problem is it feels like these communities were built up around certain practices and there was no reason to expect those practices to change. So when there is a big change that only happens after a platform has already reached near monopoly status, it feels like a bait and switch to users because many people would have never signed up for a platform with those policies in the first place.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    I guess the moral of the story is that everything must be assumed to be bait-and-switch in the presence of capital interests.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Why can’t other interests, such as labour interests, also bait-and-switch?
      - immibis 2y ago
        They CAN, but capital interests ARE. Speculation: labour interests care about making enough money to get by, while capital interests care about making maximum money and are therefore insatiable.
kmeisthax 2y ago
> Mullenweg had also asked Automattic employees to pick a side, shortly after banning WP Engine from WordPress.org. He wrote on October 3 that Automattic had extended an ""Alignment Offer"" to its employees. The company provided a buyout package of $30,000 or six months of salary (whichever was higher) to employees who wanted to leave because they disagreed with Mullenweg's actions. Employees who accepted the buyout were immediately terminated and are not eligible for rehire. According to the post, 159 people — 8.4% of the company — accepted the offer. Hot take: it should be illegal to do these "agree with me or take a silver parachute" deals. This is the CEO blatantly forcing their political views on their workers and purging anyone who has a different opinion and wants to speak it. And yes, just for completeness sake (and because he's tangentially involved in the Matt drama), that includes DHH's "no politics" rule at 37signals, which (if my fuzzy memory is correct) was also enforced by a similar "agree or parachute" deal. Yes, "no politics" is political, it's stopping the music after claiming a seat in musical chairs.
- primitivesuave 2y ago
  It's called freedom of association, a foundational principle of capitalism and free markets.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Within limits. Because it also allows all sorts discrimination against folks that as a society we have decided not to allow. The question then becomes where to draw the line, not allegiance to the principle at all cost.
    - jmb99 2y ago
      In this case though, the “discrimination” is against people who don’t want to work for the company by offering them 6 months’ salary to no longer work for the company. I don’t really see how that really falls under discrimination.
    - primitivesuave 2y ago
      You're right that there are limits (just as there are limits on free speech), and I don't think any sensible person is advocating for freedom of association on the basis of religion/race/gender. The original comment was proposing that merely holding an ideological position should afford some sort of legal protection - this is akin to firing someone for political affiliations, which is allowable in most cases for private enterprise, with greater latitude for political activity afforded to government employees.
renewiltord 2y ago
If this were Reddit, where purging the “community” was obviously going to lead to a more successful company I’d get it. But the Wordpress community produces. I suppose that’s the trick. They’ll produce afterwards as well.
ValentineC 2y ago
One of the most recent losses to the WordPress community is bluesix, a former r/Wordpress mod, and arguably one of the most altruistic members of the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_what_is_going_on_here_bluesix_deleted_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_wha...
- thr0w555 2y ago
  Worth noting that this was entirely the fault of the /r/wordpress users though, not Matt. The users threw wild accusations and conspiracy theories at the moderators and apparently threats in PM. The level of madness in the sub really reached embarrassing levels.
  - jjgon1781 2y ago
    I mean the remaining mod is on matt payroll and there is a conflict of interest which cause the subreddit not to trust the mods
    - thr0w555 2y ago
      The mods never behaved as if they were on "matts payroll" or anything of the like. They had a pinned megathread at the top of the front page, they opened up the sub in the past few days to allow any posts even outside megathreads. They also redirected for a period all posts to r/wpdrama, giving free promotion to that sub. Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doing anything but trying to keep the sub clean and not totally overridden by Matt controversy posts which is normal on Reddit.
      - lrae 2y ago
        That's not true. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition_to_remove_uotto4242_as_a_a_mod/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition... And they did apologize for it, I think. Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a different language. Probably slightly biased summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wordpress_the_software_is_currently_embroiled_in/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wor... Yes, I'm sure some reddit users went too far in DMs (it's reddit...), but ultimately, - the moderators of the subreddit clearly wanted to suppress that topic. - one (the remaining one) works for Matt, and thinks the whole thing is a nothingburger (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/lqirjwn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/...) - the creator of the subreddit still seemed completely pro-Matt and also friendly with him That said, bluesix seemed like a very helpful mod, so, still not great to see them delete their account. And also, some users are for sure in it just for the blood. The obvious move on moderation side would've been to allow big news around that "drama" to have their own threads, to remove duplicates and have random opinion tweets, blog posts & influencer's thoughts in the megathread / a pinned comment on each of the "big news'" threads. This is what most mods who wouldn't want to suppress the topic but keep the sub somewhat clean would've done. For some reason, that wasn't even up for discussion. It was either a "we go on strike and stop moderating" (which ended quickly when it didn't result in the chaos they anticipated), megathread or complete ban of the topic for them.
benatkin 2y ago
Nice detailed article. However, in these two places it doesn't seem clear that it was just the Slack account that was deactivated. Here: > Javier Casares shared that his account was deactivated after he asked a series of questions in a Slack thread started by Colin Stewart. And here, referring to Terence Eden: > He later reported on Mastodon that his account was deactivated. Another thing – with that headline, I was hoping for some more info on how it impacts community like how many migrated away from WordPress or even a change in market share. However I'm not sure where that's available on a daily or weekly basis. Edit: here's one that does a report once a month. Not sure how accurate it is: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
- edent 2y ago
  I can confirm that only my Slack account has been deactivated. Although, that said, I anticipate an eventual purge of all WP related accounts for users involved in Lèse-majesté. Regarding usage, I wouldn't expect to see an immediate decline. It takes a long time to plan a migration, as users of ReiserFS found out.
- anon7000 2y ago
  I mean. It’s too early to say. If we’re talking raw traffic — the high profile enterprise sites have long term contracts. And it’s VERY hard to migrate hosting providers, let alone entire CMSes. So it will take a long period of enterprises not wanting to buy into WordPress for the traffic to die down. Beyond that, which sides would move? Those owned by people who were invested in WordPress. Honestly, that’s probably not a super massive share of the websites. The random small businesses and individual people might not ever hear about this drama. It would take a while for new projects to stop getting built with WordPress. So we won’t see that impact over the course of a couple weeks. Maybe several years. But the community is way more about contributing to the core project (there are many hundreds of contributors in each release). With plenty of high profile ones leaving, it’s gonna be a blow to the project if good people don’t or can’t step up.
crabmusket 2y ago
I hope that one positive outcome of this whole debacle will be people realising that the Wordpress Foundation board is apparently three Matt Mullenwegs in a trenchcoat: https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-the-wordpress-foundation-board/ https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... (I exaggerate, slightly.) This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like. If this mess creates pressure to put more separation between the Foundation and Automattic, I think that can only be a good thing.
- labster 2y ago
  I’m the president of an internet nonprofit (miraheze.org) and we have five active directors with an annual budget of ~$10k. We have elections for community appointed directors as well. This stuff is not hard. By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.
  - Ennea 2y ago
    Oh heck, Miraheze spotted in the wild. Thank you for the work you do, it's invaluable.
  - cdaringe 2y ago
    I wanted to learn more about your vision, how you operate, etc, so i clicked your about link: > There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or create this page.
    - labster 2y ago
      Thanks for the report. It’s a wiki farm so most of us go directly to the RecentChanges page instead of the landing page. I will change the link to point here instead: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/FAQ https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/FAQ
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cortesoft 2y ago
I honestly have been starting to wonder if this open source business model (a for-profit company whose business model centers around being the owners and maintainers of open source projects) is the best way to fund the development of open source. I think a vast majority of software should be open source, but I also don’t think these sorts of businesses are the best way to achieve that goal. There just ends up being too much conflict between the need to run a business and the needs of the open source project and community. They can end up downright hostile, as in this case. I personally think the best funding model is companies who have a software need that is outside their core business to pay for their employees to work on the open source software, either full time or as part of their duties. It aligns the development of the software with the needs of the people using the software. If a company wants more of their own needs to be addressed in the development, they can contribute more developer time to work on those things. You are also free to fund the development effort yourself as an individual by contributing, if you want to drive development in a certain way you think is best.
- ookblah 2y ago
  I mean that problem does exist as a whole, but in this specific case this has nothing to do with some scrappy open source project not being able fund itself. Automattic is a 7.5 billion dollar company with ~800 million in rev lol. The "giving back" angle is just smokescreen for wanting to charge more rent IMO.
- CaptArmchair 2y ago
  That's at the heart of this discussion. There are two legal entities at play here: automatic, a for profit company, and the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. It's believed that the latter carries independent governance over the open source project. As it turns out: that's likely not the case, and there's a potential conflict of interests. That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this. Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation. https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's. As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.
CodeWriter23 2y ago
@WPEngine - fork Wordpress, rebrand yourself and the code. Setup a plugin / update hub like Wordpress.org and provide a pathway for your customers and devs to migrate. I recognize this is non-trivial. Ending an abusive relationship usually is.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    > They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”. The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith. > The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down. The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
    - pixxel 2y ago
      > Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.
      - bigiain 2y ago
        OK, replace "WPEngine" with AWS/GCE/Azure/every-other-server-host. Thery all sell customer's services that rely on linux kernel (and gnu utilities). I don't see Torvalds or Stallman getting high and trying to extort them...
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nubinetwork 2y ago
This has gone on for far too long... while I don't use a paid/managed WP on my personal blog, I'm seriously considering dumping WP entirely and writing my own CMS for my personal blog.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  I can't do that, given that I run an e-shop with a card payment system etc. on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The ecosystem of plugins is just too damn useful.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Feels like WooCommerce should buy WPEngine and sell blackjack and h… WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.
    - mpol 2y ago
      WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, so that won't happen. Owned as in, the trademark and the place in the plugin directory. Automattic bought it some years ago.
    - jpc0 2y ago
      "WooThemes was acquired by Automattic, the company best-known for WordPress.com and Jetpack, in 2015."[1] It's the other way around my dude. Woocommerce is owned by Matt... 1. https://woocommerce.com/about/ https://woocommerce.com/about/
- threatofrain 2y ago
  If your blog isn't too complicated, consider Astro with markdown as your authoring experience. It's really delightful and blazing fast.
inglor_cz 2y ago
This is an interesting case of Dear Leader going haywire even outside of a real power context. No armies and billions of dollars involved. It indicates that building a community not prone to self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos is a hard task even if its individual members are smart people. Politics seems to be harder than tech to pull off right.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  > It indicates that building a community not prone to self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos is a hard task even if its individual members are smart people. My prior is that if anything, self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos are more likely if the individual members are smart people. At least for certain values of "smart".
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Quite a few dollars though are involved.
weinzierl 2y ago
"That is deeply unfortunate, because the questions about sustainability of open-source projects, and who profits from them versus who produces them, are in need of addressing. Instead of having that conversation, Mullenweg has put questions about governance, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains at the forefront." Oh, I wish, because the discussion about, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains will have to be had and it cannot be separated from the open-source profits discussion.[1] In my opinion some take aways from this should be: 1. As users we should do better avoiding unilateral dependencies. Specifically, every central repository we are using for free is a risk. Be it wordpress.org, npm or crates.io.[2] 2. As open-source author, decide if your project is a charity or not. Expect people to be angry, when you change your mind, even if the law is on your side. 3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you. [1] I am a bit disappointed that LWN, which I hold in high regard, recognized this, but still decided to ride the drama train. LWN I am used to better things from you. [2] Java's convention of using domains in package names was ugly, inconvenient and did not solve the problem completely (see the issues around javax and sun packages), but it gave us a far better chance to avoid a dangerous dependency. EDIT: I am tempted to add a fourth point, even if it is not 100% applicable to the case: 4. Don't expect people to understand open source licensing. Neither the authors who decided on a license in the first place, nor corporate lawyers - especially corporate lawyers.
- Sebb767 2y ago
  > 3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you. As far as I see, he did defend his trademark - he just had some very reasonable rules under which you could use it (like saying that you're hosting WordPress). He then walked back on those rules to attack WPEngine for his personal vendetta.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    That's what I meant with "Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you." Hoping for free publicity by letting your trademark defense slip was never a good idea. The rules might have seemed reasonable but they were asking for trouble from the get go.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
A thoughtful article that I'd say is recommended reading for people who have only a peripheral interest in WordPress as such but would like to know what's going on, aerial view.
chubs 2y ago
I’m trying to get a better picture of this. Can someone tell me what percentage of code contributions are paid for by Matt/automattic? If it’s like 99% then I’m a little more sympathetic, I’m reminded of the centos/redhat thing. Either way, peace :)
- bigiain 2y ago
  In WordPress core? I dunno, but I doubt it's as high as 99%, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was way below 50%, most likely way way below. In the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo that Matt's weaponised in his tantrum? I'd be surprised if it's as high as 1%
- mpol 2y ago
  I have the impression that many long time contibutors walked away. Since the addition of the Gutenberg editor, I mostly see Automattic employees. I wouldn't dare to say that other companies don't want to contribute, I do wonder what was and is going on. Outside Gutenberg, there is hardly any change in WordPess.
- anon7000 2y ago
  I mean, it’s a lot. Certainly the majority of regular contributors. Probably 80-100ish full time employees working solely on WordPress OSS projects. (Some in community roles, executive director, tech leads, devs, designers, etc.) There are certainly other regular contributors (Yoast sponsors a couple people to work full time), and lots of volunteers. But without question, Automattic spends a lot of developer time on WP. And in other parts of the business, there is a strong desire to “fix it in core,” so if WordPress.com wants easier site building for customers, well hey, send devs to help build full site editing in WordPress.
u8_friedrich 2y ago
Why do we care so much about Wordpress? Wordpress has always been a swamp, why are we now all suddenly pretending like it’s this glamorous thing Matt is destroying? How did we get here? It has never been a user friendly or sensible way to host a god damn website…
- anilakar 2y ago
  It's one of the few services I actively refuse to host because of security issues. You either run a Wordpress hosting company or buy a managed instance from one.
- anon7000 2y ago
  Because it’s one of the most prolific OSS projects on the web, and hosts more than 40% of websites (and that number was growing until a year or two ago)? It was pretty sensible when it was created compared to other CMSes of the day! So “never sensible” is probably an exaggeration, if even massive, massive sites like nasa.gov are using it. But putting its merits to the side, people firstly love drama and love sharing their opinions about contentious situations. And secondly, hopefully there are lessons to be learned for other OSS projects and other founders about how NOT to handle this kind of situation.
lagniappe 2y ago
One positive outcome of this entire dispute is I picked up an old project where I wrote my own cms. It's been fun stepping through the code, and I'm tempted to take it further under a permissive license.
Hellenlogan 2y ago
[dead]
octacat 2y ago
- "most people agree that WP Engine should contribute more to WordPress" - ban them from the contributing. That is a special kind of logic. Also forking a plugin and replacing the original in the repo - that smells bad, even if it is "legal".
sirolimus 2y ago
I honestly dont see the problem. Wp-engine should and must pay some trobute to the open source maintainers considering their revenue of over half a billion dollars. Matts decision has no effect of people wanting to run wordpress free on their own server.

239 points by chmaynard 2y ago

Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes. If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that. So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player. "Capturing value" I suppose.

dylan604 2y ago
> I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player. Just taking a page out of the app store playbooks. I guess Matt hasn't been keeping up with courts starting to rule against those stores.
x3n0ph3n3 2y ago
> even that response to DHH Can you link to what you're referring?
- angch 2y ago
  https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/ https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    He appears to have replaced the original post, which was a lot more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/UZZit https://archive.ph/UZZit
    - serial_dev 2y ago
      Funnily enough, your archive is already a friendlier version, there is one with even more ad hominem: https://archive.ph/7ZRbY https://archive.ph/7ZRbY
      - stevage 2y ago
        > I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling. > DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale ... Yep, real respectful. I don't even understand the point of the post, other than to shit on the other guy. It doesn't advance any debate or raise any questions.
    - zo1 2y ago
      The post as it is now sounds really decent and a step in the right direction. Let's not air all the dirty laundry happening here, it looks like Matt is trying to do the "right" thing here. Here is the current iteration of that post from Matt: "I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake."
      - ookblah 2y ago
        but content is sacred right? /s he can link to his original post and put the clarification alongside if that's the case. i can change my mind if his actions show he's trying to do "right", but that takes time. for me, it's very important to know that he was even capable of writing the original post.
- ookblah 2y ago
  i think the original got taken down but you can find it on archive or just searching around
dotcoma 2y ago
> "Capturing value". Matt behaving like a PE fund, or any standard Big Tech company. In other words, enshittification as usual.
anon7000 2y ago
Yeah the DHH post is an example or projection… Automattic is hosting a lot of WordPress sites but not making anywhere near as much money as the WP Engines and Go Daddy’s of the ecosystem. (And yet automattic contributes the most to the project.) So it’s definitely a point of frustration to the business.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  They only contribute the most because they reject anyone else's contributions.
  - phatskat 2y ago
    For real this hits home! I worked in the WP space for many years and in that time have participated maybe twice in the actual WordPress OSS project: once to submit a patch to remove the “final” keyword from the Post class (lots of support from others that wanted this, and ultimately DoA because no one at the core level supported this) and once for some small thing that was relevant to my work at the time. The hostility and difficulty in having a reasonable discussion, along with using SVN fwiw, made contributing feel like a chore. I had hopes of being a regular contributor and helping to enhance and extend a project I genuinely enjoyed working with, and nothing about how the core team operated made me feel welcomed.
immibis 2y ago
"WordPress hosting" is an accurate description of what the product does and uses the term nominatively, which is legal. You couldn't call your company that, but within the company, you could call the product that hosts WordPress "WordPress hosting". (IANAL;TINLA)

bullenweg 2y ago

Rumors are that another round of voluntary layoffs are coming to Automattic today. I am optimistic for the future of WordPress because it looks less and less likely to involve Matt. Matt has created the ideal conditions for a fork to succeed: WordPress (the software) is a fixture of the internet, it is never going away no matter how much Matt sabotages it but Matt's control over it is not a foregone conclusion given all Matt really controls is the brand. The name and leadership may change, but WordPress will live on.

serial_dev 2y ago
I have been thinking about the alignment offer that Automattic has offered its employees. It’s hard for me to imagine any scenario at any company where I would not take the money and go. Six months of salary is a lot of money for just simply walking away. To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if that’s the reason less than 10% accepted the first offer.
- simonw 2y ago
  If you're a PHP developer with expertise in WordPress Automattic is pretty much your version of FAANG - I can totally understand why people wouldn't want to trade even six months salary for never being able to work there again.
  - pmontra 2y ago
    The 8% of the company left. IMHO it's not uncommon than the 8% of any company is willing to leave at any time because of any reason. They got a payoff so they anticipated their move. Some of them could have been even on Matt's side, some not.
    - 4hg4ufxhy 2y ago
      Matt even dunked on DHH that only 8% left automattic, while 30% left badecamp back when they banned politics. Nevermind the fact that DHHs offer was without a timelimit, allowing people to figure out their options. Also the job markets couldn't be more different. However, I do think a fair amount of automattic employees do not want to leave since their benefits seem actually really nice. Not many companies provide constant pay regardless of your cost of living, so I commend them for that. It could be impossible to find an equivalent job for non US employees, so 6 months pay for leaving in this market is hardly worth it, unless like you said you had plans to do it anyway.

badlibrarian 2y ago

My mother has a WordPress site talking about hedgehogs and at this point it seems like it's only a matter of time before Matt's vendetta shows up in her site footer.

enews01 2y ago
curious, whats that hedgehog website?
- tomovo 2y ago
  sega.com?
- pixxel 2y ago
  There’s a ‘sport’ where contestants see who can kick a rolled up hedgehog over the most garden fences. Maybe that one? Or it was a Sean Lock joke. I forget.

jcranmer 2y ago

On the off-chance that Matt is doing the irresponsible thing here and still getting involved in social media discussions on this topic: People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth policy against those who don't take your side... the side that's going to be picked isn't your side. There's just too much risk to taking your side.

dylan604 2y ago
> People don't like being involved in drama, Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.
- Teever 2y ago
  It's not weird if you think about it. How can you sit back and watch the drama if you're a part of it?
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Oh yeah, this is a fantastic thing to sit back and munch popcorn to. It's when the people involved are demanding that you stop munching the popcorn and start throwing knives at someone that the fun stops.
  - labster 2y ago
    Yep, I’m browsing this topic with popcorn right now, with no skin in the game. It’s great fun! Sorry if this is your livelihood, folks, but I can’t do anything to actually help. So I’ll just enjoy the fireworks and try to apply any lessons learned to other OSS communities.
- bad_user 2y ago
  Website owners and admins don't have the luxury of enjoying this particular drama, and they are the ones that matter.

CamelCaseName 2y ago

Perhaps I missed something, but I wonder why WP didn't just include ACF functionality in WP Core from the very beginning? Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?

yellow_lead 2y ago
Leadership is short sighted and not acting rationally. Doing as you said is much smarter, but maybe takes a bit longer. My guess is Matt was reaching for some way to "hit them back" quickly.
Pikamander2 2y ago
WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality. It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.
- lrae 2y ago
  Those 20 poorly written plugins make a good amount of money though, which is why many of those plugins' creators and affiliated "wordpress influencers" also do an outstanding job pushing the sentiment against more integrations into the core.

dovin 2y ago

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other. I haven't used Wordpress in years, and this drama makes me never want to use it again.

slg 2y ago
It reminds me of Reddit cracking down on 3rd party apps or Twitter changing that policy and a whole lot more once Musk took over. The problem isn't necessarily the actions or policies in a vacuum. There are legitimate benefits to these approaches. The problem is it feels like these communities were built up around certain practices and there was no reason to expect those practices to change. So when there is a big change that only happens after a platform has already reached near monopoly status, it feels like a bait and switch to users because many people would have never signed up for a platform with those policies in the first place.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  I guess the moral of the story is that everything must be assumed to be bait-and-switch in the presence of capital interests.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Why can’t other interests, such as labour interests, also bait-and-switch?
    - immibis 2y ago
      They CAN, but capital interests ARE. Speculation: labour interests care about making enough money to get by, while capital interests care about making maximum money and are therefore insatiable.

kmeisthax 2y ago

> Mullenweg had also asked Automattic employees to pick a side, shortly after banning WP Engine from WordPress.org. He wrote on October 3 that Automattic had extended an ""Alignment Offer"" to its employees. The company provided a buyout package of $30,000 or six months of salary (whichever was higher) to employees who wanted to leave because they disagreed with Mullenweg's actions. Employees who accepted the buyout were immediately terminated and are not eligible for rehire. According to the post, 159 people — 8.4% of the company — accepted the offer. Hot take: it should be illegal to do these "agree with me or take a silver parachute" deals. This is the CEO blatantly forcing their political views on their workers and purging anyone who has a different opinion and wants to speak it. And yes, just for completeness sake (and because he's tangentially involved in the Matt drama), that includes DHH's "no politics" rule at 37signals, which (if my fuzzy memory is correct) was also enforced by a similar "agree or parachute" deal. Yes, "no politics" is political, it's stopping the music after claiming a seat in musical chairs.

primitivesuave 2y ago
It's called freedom of association, a foundational principle of capitalism and free markets.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Within limits. Because it also allows all sorts discrimination against folks that as a society we have decided not to allow. The question then becomes where to draw the line, not allegiance to the principle at all cost.
  - jmb99 2y ago
    In this case though, the “discrimination” is against people who don’t want to work for the company by offering them 6 months’ salary to no longer work for the company. I don’t really see how that really falls under discrimination.
  - primitivesuave 2y ago
    You're right that there are limits (just as there are limits on free speech), and I don't think any sensible person is advocating for freedom of association on the basis of religion/race/gender. The original comment was proposing that merely holding an ideological position should afford some sort of legal protection - this is akin to firing someone for political affiliations, which is allowable in most cases for private enterprise, with greater latitude for political activity afforded to government employees.

renewiltord 2y ago

If this were Reddit, where purging the “community” was obviously going to lead to a more successful company I’d get it. But the Wordpress community produces. I suppose that’s the trick. They’ll produce afterwards as well.

ValentineC 2y ago

One of the most recent losses to the WordPress community is bluesix, a former r/Wordpress mod, and arguably one of the most altruistic members of the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_what_is_going_on_here_bluesix_deleted_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_wha...

thr0w555 2y ago
Worth noting that this was entirely the fault of the /r/wordpress users though, not Matt. The users threw wild accusations and conspiracy theories at the moderators and apparently threats in PM. The level of madness in the sub really reached embarrassing levels.
- jjgon1781 2y ago
  I mean the remaining mod is on matt payroll and there is a conflict of interest which cause the subreddit not to trust the mods
  - thr0w555 2y ago
    The mods never behaved as if they were on "matts payroll" or anything of the like. They had a pinned megathread at the top of the front page, they opened up the sub in the past few days to allow any posts even outside megathreads. They also redirected for a period all posts to r/wpdrama, giving free promotion to that sub. Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doing anything but trying to keep the sub clean and not totally overridden by Matt controversy posts which is normal on Reddit.
    - lrae 2y ago
      That's not true. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition_to_remove_uotto4242_as_a_a_mod/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition... And they did apologize for it, I think. Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a different language. Probably slightly biased summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wordpress_the_software_is_currently_embroiled_in/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wor... Yes, I'm sure some reddit users went too far in DMs (it's reddit...), but ultimately, - the moderators of the subreddit clearly wanted to suppress that topic. - one (the remaining one) works for Matt, and thinks the whole thing is a nothingburger (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/lqirjwn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/...) - the creator of the subreddit still seemed completely pro-Matt and also friendly with him That said, bluesix seemed like a very helpful mod, so, still not great to see them delete their account. And also, some users are for sure in it just for the blood. The obvious move on moderation side would've been to allow big news around that "drama" to have their own threads, to remove duplicates and have random opinion tweets, blog posts & influencer's thoughts in the megathread / a pinned comment on each of the "big news'" threads. This is what most mods who wouldn't want to suppress the topic but keep the sub somewhat clean would've done. For some reason, that wasn't even up for discussion. It was either a "we go on strike and stop moderating" (which ended quickly when it didn't result in the chaos they anticipated), megathread or complete ban of the topic for them.

benatkin 2y ago

Nice detailed article. However, in these two places it doesn't seem clear that it was just the Slack account that was deactivated. Here: > Javier Casares shared that his account was deactivated after he asked a series of questions in a Slack thread started by Colin Stewart. And here, referring to Terence Eden: > He later reported on Mastodon that his account was deactivated. Another thing – with that headline, I was hoping for some more info on how it impacts community like how many migrated away from WordPress or even a change in market share. However I'm not sure where that's available on a daily or weekly basis. Edit: here's one that does a report once a month. Not sure how accurate it is: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...

edent 2y ago
I can confirm that only my Slack account has been deactivated. Although, that said, I anticipate an eventual purge of all WP related accounts for users involved in Lèse-majesté. Regarding usage, I wouldn't expect to see an immediate decline. It takes a long time to plan a migration, as users of ReiserFS found out.
anon7000 2y ago
I mean. It’s too early to say. If we’re talking raw traffic — the high profile enterprise sites have long term contracts. And it’s VERY hard to migrate hosting providers, let alone entire CMSes. So it will take a long period of enterprises not wanting to buy into WordPress for the traffic to die down. Beyond that, which sides would move? Those owned by people who were invested in WordPress. Honestly, that’s probably not a super massive share of the websites. The random small businesses and individual people might not ever hear about this drama. It would take a while for new projects to stop getting built with WordPress. So we won’t see that impact over the course of a couple weeks. Maybe several years. But the community is way more about contributing to the core project (there are many hundreds of contributors in each release). With plenty of high profile ones leaving, it’s gonna be a blow to the project if good people don’t or can’t step up.

crabmusket 2y ago

I hope that one positive outcome of this whole debacle will be people realising that the Wordpress Foundation board is apparently three Matt Mullenwegs in a trenchcoat: https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-the-wordpress-foundation-board/ https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... (I exaggerate, slightly.) This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like. If this mess creates pressure to put more separation between the Foundation and Automattic, I think that can only be a good thing.

labster 2y ago
I’m the president of an internet nonprofit (miraheze.org) and we have five active directors with an annual budget of ~$10k. We have elections for community appointed directors as well. This stuff is not hard. By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.
- Ennea 2y ago
  Oh heck, Miraheze spotted in the wild. Thank you for the work you do, it's invaluable.
- cdaringe 2y ago
  I wanted to learn more about your vision, how you operate, etc, so i clicked your about link: > There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or create this page.
  - labster 2y ago
    Thanks for the report. It’s a wiki farm so most of us go directly to the RecentChanges page instead of the landing page. I will change the link to point here instead: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/FAQ https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/FAQ

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cortesoft 2y ago

I honestly have been starting to wonder if this open source business model (a for-profit company whose business model centers around being the owners and maintainers of open source projects) is the best way to fund the development of open source. I think a vast majority of software should be open source, but I also don’t think these sorts of businesses are the best way to achieve that goal. There just ends up being too much conflict between the need to run a business and the needs of the open source project and community. They can end up downright hostile, as in this case. I personally think the best funding model is companies who have a software need that is outside their core business to pay for their employees to work on the open source software, either full time or as part of their duties. It aligns the development of the software with the needs of the people using the software. If a company wants more of their own needs to be addressed in the development, they can contribute more developer time to work on those things. You are also free to fund the development effort yourself as an individual by contributing, if you want to drive development in a certain way you think is best.

ookblah 2y ago
I mean that problem does exist as a whole, but in this specific case this has nothing to do with some scrappy open source project not being able fund itself. Automattic is a 7.5 billion dollar company with ~800 million in rev lol. The "giving back" angle is just smokescreen for wanting to charge more rent IMO.
CaptArmchair 2y ago
That's at the heart of this discussion. There are two legal entities at play here: automatic, a for profit company, and the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. It's believed that the latter carries independent governance over the open source project. As it turns out: that's likely not the case, and there's a potential conflict of interests. That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this. Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation. https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's. As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.

CodeWriter23 2y ago

@WPEngine - fork Wordpress, rebrand yourself and the code. Setup a plugin / update hub like Wordpress.org and provide a pathway for your customers and devs to migrate. I recognize this is non-trivial. Ending an abusive relationship usually is.

spiderfarmer 2y ago
They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
- kergonath 2y ago
  > They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”. The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith. > The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down. The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
  - pixxel 2y ago
    > Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.
    - bigiain 2y ago
      OK, replace "WPEngine" with AWS/GCE/Azure/every-other-server-host. Thery all sell customer's services that rely on linux kernel (and gnu utilities). I don't see Torvalds or Stallman getting high and trying to extort them...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nubinetwork 2y ago

This has gone on for far too long... while I don't use a paid/managed WP on my personal blog, I'm seriously considering dumping WP entirely and writing my own CMS for my personal blog.

inglor_cz 2y ago
I can't do that, given that I run an e-shop with a card payment system etc. on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The ecosystem of plugins is just too damn useful.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Feels like WooCommerce should buy WPEngine and sell blackjack and h… WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.
  - mpol 2y ago
    WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, so that won't happen. Owned as in, the trademark and the place in the plugin directory. Automattic bought it some years ago.
  - jpc0 2y ago
    "WooThemes was acquired by Automattic, the company best-known for WordPress.com and Jetpack, in 2015."[1] It's the other way around my dude. Woocommerce is owned by Matt... 1. https://woocommerce.com/about/ https://woocommerce.com/about/
threatofrain 2y ago
If your blog isn't too complicated, consider Astro with markdown as your authoring experience. It's really delightful and blazing fast.

inglor_cz 2y ago

This is an interesting case of Dear Leader going haywire even outside of a real power context. No armies and billions of dollars involved. It indicates that building a community not prone to self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos is a hard task even if its individual members are smart people. Politics seems to be harder than tech to pull off right.

Sharlin 2y ago
> It indicates that building a community not prone to self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos is a hard task even if its individual members are smart people. My prior is that if anything, self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos are more likely if the individual members are smart people. At least for certain values of "smart".
actionfromafar 2y ago
Quite a few dollars though are involved.

weinzierl 2y ago

"That is deeply unfortunate, because the questions about sustainability of open-source projects, and who profits from them versus who produces them, are in need of addressing. Instead of having that conversation, Mullenweg has put questions about governance, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains at the forefront." Oh, I wish, because the discussion about, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains will have to be had and it cannot be separated from the open-source profits discussion.[1] In my opinion some take aways from this should be: 1. As users we should do better avoiding unilateral dependencies. Specifically, every central repository we are using for free is a risk. Be it wordpress.org, npm or crates.io.[2] 2. As open-source author, decide if your project is a charity or not. Expect people to be angry, when you change your mind, even if the law is on your side. 3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you. [1] I am a bit disappointed that LWN, which I hold in high regard, recognized this, but still decided to ride the drama train. LWN I am used to better things from you. [2] Java's convention of using domains in package names was ugly, inconvenient and did not solve the problem completely (see the issues around javax and sun packages), but it gave us a far better chance to avoid a dangerous dependency. EDIT: I am tempted to add a fourth point, even if it is not 100% applicable to the case: 4. Don't expect people to understand open source licensing. Neither the authors who decided on a license in the first place, nor corporate lawyers - especially corporate lawyers.

Sebb767 2y ago
> 3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you. As far as I see, he did defend his trademark - he just had some very reasonable rules under which you could use it (like saying that you're hosting WordPress). He then walked back on those rules to attack WPEngine for his personal vendetta.
- weinzierl 2y ago
  That's what I meant with "Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you." Hoping for free publicity by letting your trademark defense slip was never a good idea. The rules might have seemed reasonable but they were asking for trouble from the get go.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

A thoughtful article that I'd say is recommended reading for people who have only a peripheral interest in WordPress as such but would like to know what's going on, aerial view.

chubs 2y ago

I’m trying to get a better picture of this. Can someone tell me what percentage of code contributions are paid for by Matt/automattic? If it’s like 99% then I’m a little more sympathetic, I’m reminded of the centos/redhat thing. Either way, peace :)

bigiain 2y ago
In WordPress core? I dunno, but I doubt it's as high as 99%, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was way below 50%, most likely way way below. In the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo that Matt's weaponised in his tantrum? I'd be surprised if it's as high as 1%
mpol 2y ago
I have the impression that many long time contibutors walked away. Since the addition of the Gutenberg editor, I mostly see Automattic employees. I wouldn't dare to say that other companies don't want to contribute, I do wonder what was and is going on. Outside Gutenberg, there is hardly any change in WordPess.
anon7000 2y ago
I mean, it’s a lot. Certainly the majority of regular contributors. Probably 80-100ish full time employees working solely on WordPress OSS projects. (Some in community roles, executive director, tech leads, devs, designers, etc.) There are certainly other regular contributors (Yoast sponsors a couple people to work full time), and lots of volunteers. But without question, Automattic spends a lot of developer time on WP. And in other parts of the business, there is a strong desire to “fix it in core,” so if WordPress.com wants easier site building for customers, well hey, send devs to help build full site editing in WordPress.

u8_friedrich 2y ago

Why do we care so much about Wordpress? Wordpress has always been a swamp, why are we now all suddenly pretending like it’s this glamorous thing Matt is destroying? How did we get here? It has never been a user friendly or sensible way to host a god damn website…

anilakar 2y ago
It's one of the few services I actively refuse to host because of security issues. You either run a Wordpress hosting company or buy a managed instance from one.
anon7000 2y ago
Because it’s one of the most prolific OSS projects on the web, and hosts more than 40% of websites (and that number was growing until a year or two ago)? It was pretty sensible when it was created compared to other CMSes of the day! So “never sensible” is probably an exaggeration, if even massive, massive sites like nasa.gov are using it. But putting its merits to the side, people firstly love drama and love sharing their opinions about contentious situations. And secondly, hopefully there are lessons to be learned for other OSS projects and other founders about how NOT to handle this kind of situation.

lagniappe 2y ago

One positive outcome of this entire dispute is I picked up an old project where I wrote my own cms. It's been fun stepping through the code, and I'm tempted to take it further under a permissive license.

Hellenlogan 2y ago

[dead]

octacat 2y ago

- "most people agree that WP Engine should contribute more to WordPress" - ban them from the contributing. That is a special kind of logic. Also forking a plugin and replacing the original in the repo - that smells bad, even if it is "legal".

sirolimus 2y ago

I honestly dont see the problem. Wp-engine should and must pay some trobute to the open source maintainers considering their revenue of over half a billion dollars. Matts decision has no effect of people wanting to run wordpress free on their own server.