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WP Engine is not WordPress

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Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#51

Post by fragmede »

bastawhiz wrote: post #41
addicted wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revi…

> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks…

Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#52

Post by b0ner_t0ner »

bkyan wrote: post #39

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#53

Post by adolph »

addicted wrote: post #36
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revi…

> private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can

Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit?

Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software?

Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself?

My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#54

Post by amanzi »

The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/

For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#55

Post by technion »

fragmede wrote: post #51
bastawhiz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks…

Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.

In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#56

Post by wmf »

bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Matt is mad that WP Engine is profiting without contributing much back. This "it's not WordPress" seems like a fig leaf on top of that concern.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#57

Post by gumboshoes »

rgbrenner wrote: post #5
realce wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read the article

If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes: What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it. Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if…

You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#58

Post by snowwrestler »

WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine.

It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform.

What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want?

The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#59

Post by bastawhiz »

wmf wrote: post #56
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Matt is mad that WP Engine is profiting without contributing much back. This "it's not WordPress" seems like a fig leaf on top of that concern.

It's his right to feel like that, but it's also WP Engine's right under the WordPress source's license to do what they're doing.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#60

Post by jonas21 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of mana…

> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable.

How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.

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