9 ms·

Did Automattic commit open source theft?

110 points by ValentineC 2y ago

paulgb 2y ago
> Amusingly, in its war against WP Engine, Automattic might have created the single best advertisement for their chief rival. WP Engine now has proof it’s immune to unauthorized plugin takeover. This is a great point. By weaponizing the fact that Automatic controls the plugin registry against a rival by doing something (at best) dangerously adjacent to a supply chain attack, WP Engine stands out now as uniquely immune to that type of attack. This whole thing makes me sad, I used to use wordpress back in the 2000s and even had some plugins in the directory at the time. I was rooting for Matt but the more I read about this the more it seems like Automattic isn't the good actor here.
badlibrarian 2y ago
Once the self-sabotage is over perhaps we can dig into the self-dealing.
icodemuch 2y ago
This seems like a pretty damning indictment of Automattic. The WordPress foundation (that they presumably set up) may have rules that give them legal cover for some of the moves they’re making, but it’s going to hurt them in the court of public opinion. I think that matters to developers, who are the people ultimately responsible for choosing whether or not to contribute to / use their product. It’s true that migration cost might prevent churn from these actions right now but stopping the train of logic there seems short sighted. What about all the business that they may have received in the future that they might not get now because they’ve tarnished their brand?
- benatkin 2y ago
  I don't see it catching on that this is a "supply-chain attack" (from the article, but what came to mind when you said that it seems pretty damning). It isn't an attack because it's done deliberately by the owner (yes, owner) of the platform users are downloading from and not some upstream platform. The part of the chain involved is only one level deep. Maybe it's time to stop hyping up the term "software supply chain" because it gives me You Wouldn't Download a Car vibes. Judged on its merits and not an exaggeration, I predict that the court of public opinion is going to go the same way as the court of law – a light pushback.
  - labster 2y ago
    It’s only technically a supply chain attack. Pretty much all they did was apply a security patch and remove the other company’s IP. It doesn’t really attack a user or put anyone at risk, which is what you normally mean with an attack, so it sounds hyperbolic. That said it is absolutely scummy and dumb, and a sign that Automattic puts its own whims ahead of its clients’ stability. Even if this issue gets settled tomorrow, we now know that Automattic is an irrational actor. Who is going to choose a software platform for new projects where every week a new drama unfolds?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - benatkin 2y ago
      > Automattic is an irrational actor They're more human than the WP Engines of the world, though.
      - labster 2y ago
        Indeed. To err is human. No one wants to talk about what WP Engine does, because Matt is making own-goals twice a week.
        hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
        I'll talk about what WP Engine does, because I've been following this whole saga and I think they've done nothing wrong. Worse, I'm pissed that some open source folks are defending Matt's position that's basically "well, open source is whatever I say it is". That is, WP Engine's cardinal sin (according to their detractors) appears to be that they make a ton of money from WordPress but they don't contribute back "sufficiently" to the ecosystem. I believe (as someone who has contributed a bunch to different open source projects) that this is complete and total bullshit. Since when do individual open source creators get to decide "how much" other people/companies need to "give back"? There is a very good reason open source licenses explicitly specify what you can and can't do with code. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be releasing your code as open source. More to the point, even outside of WP Engine's legal obligations (which nobody is really seriously believing they are in violation of, Matt's post-hoc ridiculous claims of trademark infringement notwithstanding), I think the arguments that they were a bad actor in the community were false, too, especially given Matt's actions. Other open source creators have discovered that the economics of the cloud world means that it's easier for hosting providers to make a lot of money off open source projects than the original creators of that open source software. And while this may suck, many of these other creators handled this situation in a sane, adult manner, e.g. by forking and relicensing their software, or also see the whole nascent "fair source" movement. What they haven't done is decide to hold the whole community hostage because they decide, after the fact, that they're "owed" 8% of another company's revenue. Seriously, I'd be interested to hear any rational argument about what WP Engine did that was so objectionable. If the best they can come up with is "they don't support infinite versions as the default out of the box", you'll have to excuse me if I don't think that's some sort of cardinal sin.
SahAssar 2y ago
Regardless of all else I'm hoping we can all agree on: * The wordpress foundation (and wordpress.org) is not independent enough from Matt & Automattic * taking over a package in a package registry with automatic updates is really, really bad
- benatkin 2y ago
  > The wordpress foundation (and wordpress.org) is not independent enough from Matt & Automattic I see people call for this, and I'd like to see that energy used to call for antitrust against Facebook, which grew at the same time as WordPress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Meta_Platforms,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Me.... I don't think they meant to express the intention of it being independent when creating a nonprofit. I think they just created a nonprofit because that's what made the most sense of the available options. I think a B Corp is more along the lines of what was intended.
  - SahAssar 2y ago
    I don't think anyone thinks of Meta or Facebook products as open-source in the same way as WordPress (they have open source projects but none that are as core to their business as WordPress is to Automattic). Even now it seems like Matt is trying to shroud himself in open-source as a defense. If so the foundation should be more independent.
stevenicr 2y ago
The title made me wonder where they would go with this, then it starts with "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business threat that it had to take unfair measures to limit Spotify’s growth on the App Store." Um, okay - apple's store is not open, and spotify is not open source - so the article is over in it's first line.. but let go further Lock Spotify out of its developer ecosystem - sharecropping on someone else's land has risks - good thing about then a plugin or theme gets kicked out of wordpress.org's system is that WP users can "sideload" from anywhere with any sort of 'jailbreaking', you don't even need to click/tap 'it's okay to load from outside sources' (point 1 from the story) point 3 - this is completely false - see https://wordpress.org/news/ https://wordpress.org/news/ - and everyone got to see news about this in the wp-admin dashbaord (I think I recall from more than one source) the other 4 points are eye-roll worthy from me, again see point one. This is not the first time a similar thing has happened with the wordpress plugin or theme directory. The rest of this post is clearly very one sided and includes other falsehoods such as "The response was universally negative:" Growing tired of the article, I scroll and I see a headline "Is WP Engine the only enterprise-ready WordPress hosting provider left" are you kidding me? Disagree with the entire piece. and a return how about "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business"... that they could easily afford to pay 30% of the proceeds they make from an app that lives in their ecosystem so that Apple can continue to develop, secure and grow - so that the app could enjoy those benefits and all can grow.. and if they didn't pay up, they get kicked out of the Apple store, I mean that would be outrageous! And you could re-write the article replacing automatic with apple.. oh wait.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > then it starts with "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business threat that it had to take unfair measures to limit Spotify’s growth on the App Store." > Um, okay - apple's store is not open, and spotify is not open source - so the article is over in it's first line.. Exactly. "Imagine that Apple wrote a GPL streaming music app, and Spotify was a redistributor of that app with almost no changes, but also used some of their own infrastructure to serve part of the backend of their fork. Now imagine that the reseller started doing nearly as much business as Apple with the app, but barely contributed any code. Apple asks Spotify to contribute more, Spotify replies 'lol.' Then, Apple tells Spotify that they can't call their fork 'Apple Music' anymore, and bans the Spotify fork from relying on Apple's infra for what Spotify doesn't find profitable to do."
cycomanic 2y ago
It's worth pointing out that even Apple (whom the auther uses as an exam to illustrate the point) has engaged in similar behavior. Not quite as bad, i.e. they didn't take over an app, but they have suddenly blocked apps from updating when the app had similar functionality to one they released.
- SahAssar 2y ago
  That is not as bad, taking the url, auto-updates, reviews, etc. makes it so much worse. Apple might be anticompetitive, but replacing the app via auto updates is really bad.
- bmacho 2y ago
  Throwing someone out from a marketplace is .. quite common. They (marketplace owners/publishers) don't need much reasoning for it, and I'm sure they did it many times bc they've perceived on of their clients dangerous to them, or wanted to take over their businesses. But silently redirecting the users to yourself is practically unheard of, and it is indeed a red line.
pessimizer 2y ago
This debate is extremely dumb, and everybody gish gallops and implies something terrible when they try to explain what Automattic is doing wrong, because they can't figure it out. So they instead give reasons why they insist it will be bad for his business (isn't that his business?) and pretend like that's him "technically" not doing anything tortious. It's not technical, the lawsuit from WPE is there to read. It's silly, and if it's not thrown out it will be because the judge needs time to understand the complexities of the license (and the promise that "Wordpress" will be turned over to the community after Automattic, who has an exclusive license to the trademark, shuts down.) Using the reasons that you think this is a bad business decision as proxy reasons why he's wronged everyone making a living from his work is a veiled threat. Don't threaten to leave, just leave. Maybe the problem is this haunting by the "Spirit of Open Source" where people insist that they have all of these rights that aren't in the license. Wordpress is not open source. It is Free Software. You already own it. Fork it if you want. If WPEngine is already doing almost as much business as Wordpress.com, they can handle everything themselves. If people love WPEngine more, they can leave. Don't whine when the value proposition for WPEngine changes after they have to take care of everything themselves, and they start violating the Spirit of Open Source until their bottom line looks better again. I'm swearing an oath to violate the Spirit of Open Source wherever I see a hint of it, I'm just sticking to the licenses. The Spirit of Open Source somehow makes already wealthy people feel entitled to everything in the world. Free Software is important to me, and the people who make it should be as aggressive as will financially benefit them, as long as they abide by the letter of the GPL. The software is what's important, not that your half-billion dollar business is built on top of somebody else's half-billion dollar business. That's a you-problem. Also, this is just straight up abuser behavior towards this guy. He doesn't do what you want with what is his, so you degrade him and accuse him of stealing his own property. It's hard to watch. I'm going to stop commenting on these threads, but this mobbing is ridiculous. I hope he's emotionally stable; but a lot of tech CEOs aren't, and his awkward reactions to the pitchforks don't give me confidence. If you're compulsively reading all of these threads, stop now. Stay strong and know that 95% of this is coming from people who are directly connected to this financially and just don't want to be inconvenienced.
- _cenw 2y ago
  The "spirit of open source" or whatever implicit terms come with the piece of free software was that Matt/Automattic are good stewards of the software, especially in regards to it being hardcoded to use to wp.org. It's incredibly silly to throw that goodwill away when you're load-bearing for almost half the web. These actions will create forks with different stewards and at worst fragment the codebase.
mediumsmart 2y ago
maybe they made a commit to some open source that they stole in broad daylight.
pushedx 2y ago
Under which open source license was ACF originally released? That would help to answer the question.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  GPL. All WordPress code is GPL and plug-ins need to call WP APIs to register themselves with the CMS.
- patmorgan23 2y ago
  Forking ACF is not the issue, automatic is perfectly within their rights to do that. Hijacking the ACF WordPress.org page and having everyone who uses WordPress.org for plugin updates to auto update to the fork is the problem.
  - chii 2y ago
    > Hijacking the ACF WordPress.org page is it a hijacking, if they own that page in the first place? The community placed trust on that owner of the page to be impartial, which was shown to be false here of course. This means that this community page/list should no longer be trusted, and an alternative be sought out.
    - pushedx 2y ago
      IANAL, but the only expressly illegal thing that they seem to have done is maintain the "acf" tag, and used the "advanced-custom-fields" URL, which could be trademark violations. I'm sure there are other laws that are relevant here related to deception and misuse of the subscription to the plugin updates by the 2 million users involved. Legal issues aside, this is an extreme erosion in trust for any user of the WordPress.org platform. They can no longer have confidence that their commerical (or non-commerical) plugin won't be chopped up and have its users stolen at any moment.
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        > Legal issues aside, this is an extreme erosion in trust for any user of the WordPress.org platform. They can no longer have confidence that their commerical (or non-commerical) plugin won't be chopped up and have its users stolen at any moment. Not just the plug-in creators, but those (“stolen”) plug-in users, too. There is an example in TFA, the guy who had to update many (150, IIRC?) of his customers’ sites after the plug-in was switched out from under him.
yoddler 2y ago
[flagged]
Lash_LaRue 2y ago
I don't know if they committed "theft" under criminal law, but I would bet lots of money that Automattic is going to get obliterated by the complaint filed by WP Engine, probably including injunctive relief. Tortious interference in a contract is normally difficult to prove because one of the elements is malice or intent to cause harm, but Matt basically handed WP Engine's lawyers all the ammo they would ever need during his yappy media tour. I would further bet that Matt's either on drugs or maybe has a brain tumor or some other undiagnosed medical condition. Only an insane person would destroy their entire reputation and life's work like this.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  Alternatively, he could have been like this all along and now he’s just striking. It’s in vogue to “re-align” your corporate backed FOSS project to squeeze money out of everything you can. Collateral damage be damned. Enshittification seemingly knows no bounds.
idm_guru 2y ago
This is a trademark dispute. WP-Engine uses the trademark, and made a tactical decision not to license it. Their thought was better to ask for forgiveness later then pay up front. Protecting your trademark is critical for an organization governing an open source product. Just look at Docker to see what happens when you lose control of your trademark. Last I checked, most owners aggressively protect their trademark. It's one of the few IP protections open source companies have. Why are you all defending the freeloading open source strip miner? Is WP Engine's use of the trademark fair use? Something tells me that they will end up settling this out of court...
- Lash_LaRue 2y ago
  Bollocks and hallucinatory nonsense. The trademark page had made it abundantly clear that use of "WP" was not protected by trademark and only made it an issue ex-post-facto when Matt decided one day that he didn't like the competition. The trademark claims are bollocks, nonsense, bogus — entirely without merit. If you don't like your open source work being used by others to do for-profit things then don't license it as GPL or don't open source it to begin with. You can't retroactively come out and complain after the fact once you've already given all your IP away and made it abundantly clear that "WP" isn't a trademark, and BY THE WAY the jurisprudence on trademark law makes it difficult to even try to claim a trademark or servicemark from two letters put together!
  - idm_guru 2y ago
    We will see. You can say it's bollocks, but I'm betting you are not an IP lawyer. Silverlake, the PE firm that acquired WP-Engine has a gaggle of IP lawyers that assessed the risk before the investment. Were they right or wrong? Like any sporting event, everyone has a strong opinion before the game. But it's only the final score that matters. I'm wishing Automatic the best of luck.
- edanm 2y ago
  Even if you agree with the trademark claim (I have no idea one way or the other), the way that Automattic is acting is wrong, pure and simple.
bzmrgonz 2y ago
[flagged]
- CRConrad 2y ago
  No, not as far as I can see. In order to make your claim plausible, you'd have to 1) Tell us exactly what “sins” those are; and 2) Above all, explain WTF they have to do with this.

110 points by ValentineC 2y ago

> Amusingly, in its war against WP Engine, Automattic might have created the single best advertisement for their chief rival. WP Engine now has proof it’s immune to unauthorized plugin takeover. This is a great point. By weaponizing the fact that Automatic controls the plugin registry against a rival by doing something (at best) dangerously adjacent to a supply chain attack, WP Engine stands out now as uniquely immune to that type of attack. This whole thing makes me sad, I used to use wordpress back in the 2000s and even had some plugins in the directory at the time. I was rooting for Matt but the more I read about this the more it seems like Automattic isn't the good actor here.

badlibrarian 2y ago

Once the self-sabotage is over perhaps we can dig into the self-dealing.

icodemuch 2y ago

This seems like a pretty damning indictment of Automattic. The WordPress foundation (that they presumably set up) may have rules that give them legal cover for some of the moves they’re making, but it’s going to hurt them in the court of public opinion. I think that matters to developers, who are the people ultimately responsible for choosing whether or not to contribute to / use their product. It’s true that migration cost might prevent churn from these actions right now but stopping the train of logic there seems short sighted. What about all the business that they may have received in the future that they might not get now because they’ve tarnished their brand?

benatkin 2y ago
I don't see it catching on that this is a "supply-chain attack" (from the article, but what came to mind when you said that it seems pretty damning). It isn't an attack because it's done deliberately by the owner (yes, owner) of the platform users are downloading from and not some upstream platform. The part of the chain involved is only one level deep. Maybe it's time to stop hyping up the term "software supply chain" because it gives me You Wouldn't Download a Car vibes. Judged on its merits and not an exaggeration, I predict that the court of public opinion is going to go the same way as the court of law – a light pushback.
- labster 2y ago
  It’s only technically a supply chain attack. Pretty much all they did was apply a security patch and remove the other company’s IP. It doesn’t really attack a user or put anyone at risk, which is what you normally mean with an attack, so it sounds hyperbolic. That said it is absolutely scummy and dumb, and a sign that Automattic puts its own whims ahead of its clients’ stability. Even if this issue gets settled tomorrow, we now know that Automattic is an irrational actor. Who is going to choose a software platform for new projects where every week a new drama unfolds?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - benatkin 2y ago
    > Automattic is an irrational actor They're more human than the WP Engines of the world, though.
    - labster 2y ago
      Indeed. To err is human. No one wants to talk about what WP Engine does, because Matt is making own-goals twice a week.
      - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
        I'll talk about what WP Engine does, because I've been following this whole saga and I think they've done nothing wrong. Worse, I'm pissed that some open source folks are defending Matt's position that's basically "well, open source is whatever I say it is". That is, WP Engine's cardinal sin (according to their detractors) appears to be that they make a ton of money from WordPress but they don't contribute back "sufficiently" to the ecosystem. I believe (as someone who has contributed a bunch to different open source projects) that this is complete and total bullshit. Since when do individual open source creators get to decide "how much" other people/companies need to "give back"? There is a very good reason open source licenses explicitly specify what you can and can't do with code. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be releasing your code as open source. More to the point, even outside of WP Engine's legal obligations (which nobody is really seriously believing they are in violation of, Matt's post-hoc ridiculous claims of trademark infringement notwithstanding), I think the arguments that they were a bad actor in the community were false, too, especially given Matt's actions. Other open source creators have discovered that the economics of the cloud world means that it's easier for hosting providers to make a lot of money off open source projects than the original creators of that open source software. And while this may suck, many of these other creators handled this situation in a sane, adult manner, e.g. by forking and relicensing their software, or also see the whole nascent "fair source" movement. What they haven't done is decide to hold the whole community hostage because they decide, after the fact, that they're "owed" 8% of another company's revenue. Seriously, I'd be interested to hear any rational argument about what WP Engine did that was so objectionable. If the best they can come up with is "they don't support infinite versions as the default out of the box", you'll have to excuse me if I don't think that's some sort of cardinal sin.

SahAssar 2y ago

Regardless of all else I'm hoping we can all agree on: * The wordpress foundation (and wordpress.org) is not independent enough from Matt & Automattic * taking over a package in a package registry with automatic updates is really, really bad

benatkin 2y ago
> The wordpress foundation (and wordpress.org) is not independent enough from Matt & Automattic I see people call for this, and I'd like to see that energy used to call for antitrust against Facebook, which grew at the same time as WordPress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Meta_Platforms,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Me.... I don't think they meant to express the intention of it being independent when creating a nonprofit. I think they just created a nonprofit because that's what made the most sense of the available options. I think a B Corp is more along the lines of what was intended.
- SahAssar 2y ago
  I don't think anyone thinks of Meta or Facebook products as open-source in the same way as WordPress (they have open source projects but none that are as core to their business as WordPress is to Automattic). Even now it seems like Matt is trying to shroud himself in open-source as a defense. If so the foundation should be more independent.

stevenicr 2y ago

The title made me wonder where they would go with this, then it starts with "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business threat that it had to take unfair measures to limit Spotify’s growth on the App Store." Um, okay - apple's store is not open, and spotify is not open source - so the article is over in it's first line.. but let go further Lock Spotify out of its developer ecosystem - sharecropping on someone else's land has risks - good thing about then a plugin or theme gets kicked out of wordpress.org's system is that WP users can "sideload" from anywhere with any sort of 'jailbreaking', you don't even need to click/tap 'it's okay to load from outside sources' (point 1 from the story) point 3 - this is completely false - see https://wordpress.org/news/ https://wordpress.org/news/ - and everyone got to see news about this in the wp-admin dashbaord (I think I recall from more than one source) the other 4 points are eye-roll worthy from me, again see point one. This is not the first time a similar thing has happened with the wordpress plugin or theme directory. The rest of this post is clearly very one sided and includes other falsehoods such as "The response was universally negative:" Growing tired of the article, I scroll and I see a headline "Is WP Engine the only enterprise-ready WordPress hosting provider left" are you kidding me? Disagree with the entire piece. and a return how about "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business"... that they could easily afford to pay 30% of the proceeds they make from an app that lives in their ecosystem so that Apple can continue to develop, secure and grow - so that the app could enjoy those benefits and all can grow.. and if they didn't pay up, they get kicked out of the Apple store, I mean that would be outrageous! And you could re-write the article replacing automatic with apple.. oh wait.

pessimizer 2y ago
> then it starts with "Imagine Apple decided Spotify was a big enough business threat that it had to take unfair measures to limit Spotify’s growth on the App Store." > Um, okay - apple's store is not open, and spotify is not open source - so the article is over in it's first line.. Exactly. "Imagine that Apple wrote a GPL streaming music app, and Spotify was a redistributor of that app with almost no changes, but also used some of their own infrastructure to serve part of the backend of their fork. Now imagine that the reseller started doing nearly as much business as Apple with the app, but barely contributed any code. Apple asks Spotify to contribute more, Spotify replies 'lol.' Then, Apple tells Spotify that they can't call their fork 'Apple Music' anymore, and bans the Spotify fork from relying on Apple's infra for what Spotify doesn't find profitable to do."

cycomanic 2y ago

It's worth pointing out that even Apple (whom the auther uses as an exam to illustrate the point) has engaged in similar behavior. Not quite as bad, i.e. they didn't take over an app, but they have suddenly blocked apps from updating when the app had similar functionality to one they released.

SahAssar 2y ago
That is not as bad, taking the url, auto-updates, reviews, etc. makes it so much worse. Apple might be anticompetitive, but replacing the app via auto updates is really bad.
bmacho 2y ago
Throwing someone out from a marketplace is .. quite common. They (marketplace owners/publishers) don't need much reasoning for it, and I'm sure they did it many times bc they've perceived on of their clients dangerous to them, or wanted to take over their businesses. But silently redirecting the users to yourself is practically unheard of, and it is indeed a red line.

pessimizer 2y ago

This debate is extremely dumb, and everybody gish gallops and implies something terrible when they try to explain what Automattic is doing wrong, because they can't figure it out. So they instead give reasons why they insist it will be bad for his business (isn't that his business?) and pretend like that's him "technically" not doing anything tortious. It's not technical, the lawsuit from WPE is there to read. It's silly, and if it's not thrown out it will be because the judge needs time to understand the complexities of the license (and the promise that "Wordpress" will be turned over to the community after Automattic, who has an exclusive license to the trademark, shuts down.) Using the reasons that you think this is a bad business decision as proxy reasons why he's wronged everyone making a living from his work is a veiled threat. Don't threaten to leave, just leave. Maybe the problem is this haunting by the "Spirit of Open Source" where people insist that they have all of these rights that aren't in the license. Wordpress is not open source. It is Free Software. You already own it. Fork it if you want. If WPEngine is already doing almost as much business as Wordpress.com, they can handle everything themselves. If people love WPEngine more, they can leave. Don't whine when the value proposition for WPEngine changes after they have to take care of everything themselves, and they start violating the Spirit of Open Source until their bottom line looks better again. I'm swearing an oath to violate the Spirit of Open Source wherever I see a hint of it, I'm just sticking to the licenses. The Spirit of Open Source somehow makes already wealthy people feel entitled to everything in the world. Free Software is important to me, and the people who make it should be as aggressive as will financially benefit them, as long as they abide by the letter of the GPL. The software is what's important, not that your half-billion dollar business is built on top of somebody else's half-billion dollar business. That's a you-problem. Also, this is just straight up abuser behavior towards this guy. He doesn't do what you want with what is his, so you degrade him and accuse him of stealing his own property. It's hard to watch. I'm going to stop commenting on these threads, but this mobbing is ridiculous. I hope he's emotionally stable; but a lot of tech CEOs aren't, and his awkward reactions to the pitchforks don't give me confidence. If you're compulsively reading all of these threads, stop now. Stay strong and know that 95% of this is coming from people who are directly connected to this financially and just don't want to be inconvenienced.

_cenw 2y ago
The "spirit of open source" or whatever implicit terms come with the piece of free software was that Matt/Automattic are good stewards of the software, especially in regards to it being hardcoded to use to wp.org. It's incredibly silly to throw that goodwill away when you're load-bearing for almost half the web. These actions will create forks with different stewards and at worst fragment the codebase.

mediumsmart 2y ago

maybe they made a commit to some open source that they stole in broad daylight.

pushedx 2y ago

Under which open source license was ACF originally released? That would help to answer the question.

yurishimo 2y ago
GPL. All WordPress code is GPL and plug-ins need to call WP APIs to register themselves with the CMS.
patmorgan23 2y ago
Forking ACF is not the issue, automatic is perfectly within their rights to do that. Hijacking the ACF WordPress.org page and having everyone who uses WordPress.org for plugin updates to auto update to the fork is the problem.
- chii 2y ago
  > Hijacking the ACF WordPress.org page is it a hijacking, if they own that page in the first place? The community placed trust on that owner of the page to be impartial, which was shown to be false here of course. This means that this community page/list should no longer be trusted, and an alternative be sought out.
  - pushedx 2y ago
    IANAL, but the only expressly illegal thing that they seem to have done is maintain the "acf" tag, and used the "advanced-custom-fields" URL, which could be trademark violations. I'm sure there are other laws that are relevant here related to deception and misuse of the subscription to the plugin updates by the 2 million users involved. Legal issues aside, this is an extreme erosion in trust for any user of the WordPress.org platform. They can no longer have confidence that their commerical (or non-commerical) plugin won't be chopped up and have its users stolen at any moment.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > Legal issues aside, this is an extreme erosion in trust for any user of the WordPress.org platform. They can no longer have confidence that their commerical (or non-commerical) plugin won't be chopped up and have its users stolen at any moment. Not just the plug-in creators, but those (“stolen”) plug-in users, too. There is an example in TFA, the guy who had to update many (150, IIRC?) of his customers’ sites after the plug-in was switched out from under him.

yoddler 2y ago

[flagged]

Lash_LaRue 2y ago

I don't know if they committed "theft" under criminal law, but I would bet lots of money that Automattic is going to get obliterated by the complaint filed by WP Engine, probably including injunctive relief. Tortious interference in a contract is normally difficult to prove because one of the elements is malice or intent to cause harm, but Matt basically handed WP Engine's lawyers all the ammo they would ever need during his yappy media tour. I would further bet that Matt's either on drugs or maybe has a brain tumor or some other undiagnosed medical condition. Only an insane person would destroy their entire reputation and life's work like this.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
Alternatively, he could have been like this all along and now he’s just striking. It’s in vogue to “re-align” your corporate backed FOSS project to squeeze money out of everything you can. Collateral damage be damned. Enshittification seemingly knows no bounds.

idm_guru 2y ago

This is a trademark dispute. WP-Engine uses the trademark, and made a tactical decision not to license it. Their thought was better to ask for forgiveness later then pay up front. Protecting your trademark is critical for an organization governing an open source product. Just look at Docker to see what happens when you lose control of your trademark. Last I checked, most owners aggressively protect their trademark. It's one of the few IP protections open source companies have. Why are you all defending the freeloading open source strip miner? Is WP Engine's use of the trademark fair use? Something tells me that they will end up settling this out of court...

Lash_LaRue 2y ago
Bollocks and hallucinatory nonsense. The trademark page had made it abundantly clear that use of "WP" was not protected by trademark and only made it an issue ex-post-facto when Matt decided one day that he didn't like the competition. The trademark claims are bollocks, nonsense, bogus — entirely without merit. If you don't like your open source work being used by others to do for-profit things then don't license it as GPL or don't open source it to begin with. You can't retroactively come out and complain after the fact once you've already given all your IP away and made it abundantly clear that "WP" isn't a trademark, and BY THE WAY the jurisprudence on trademark law makes it difficult to even try to claim a trademark or servicemark from two letters put together!
- idm_guru 2y ago
  We will see. You can say it's bollocks, but I'm betting you are not an IP lawyer. Silverlake, the PE firm that acquired WP-Engine has a gaggle of IP lawyers that assessed the risk before the investment. Were they right or wrong? Like any sporting event, everyone has a strong opinion before the game. But it's only the final score that matters. I'm wishing Automatic the best of luck.
edanm 2y ago
Even if you agree with the trademark claim (I have no idea one way or the other), the way that Automattic is acting is wrong, pure and simple.

bzmrgonz 2y ago

[flagged]

CRConrad 2y ago
No, not as far as I can see. In order to make your claim plausible, you'd have to 1) Tell us exactly what “sins” those are; and 2) Above all, explain WTF they have to do with this.