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WP Engine is not WordPress

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Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#101

Post by jpc0 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95
jonas21 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My thoughts were posted in Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 but the TL;DR is that writing code adds value, and that value will be realized by people who take it for free, even if you don't want them to. From my perspective (not saying its the right one, just one that I've reasoned to) that is theft.

Counterpoint for this. How may of the packages in your node_modules folder have you contributed even an issue to, never mind a patch? Do you even know what packages are in there?

Does that not make you or your company a thief?

If your argument is you don't use JS/node then answer the same question about your languages package manager / standard library / compiler etc.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#102

Post by sfmike »

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…

Agreed this is a shocking amount of cognitive dissonance.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#103

Post by bigiain »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94
blackoil wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft. Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.

I posted it on Mastodon https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783

I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art".

There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.

I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#104

Post by b112 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #59
wmf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a devil's advocate sort of thing...

For no reason I can give you the finger, scream obscenities at you, and there are no legal ramifications.

Was I wrong?

The legal side is not the end all.

Otherwise, why is anyone complaining about Meta's data mining? About the cost of epipens?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#105

Post by b112 »

Kye wrote: post #79
usaphp wrote: post #77

It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress op…

This seems like a detail that could be covered in a few sentences in the post. In fact it seems central to his argument so it's weird that he didn't. Allegedly it's in the hour-long video, but that's asking a lot.

Some people, even smart ones, make the mistake of thinking people pay attention to an entire event like this.

Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#106

Post by creinhardt »

tr3ntg wrote: post #65

A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times. “But when I go to Wordpress.com…” SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress. This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compar…

I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#107

Post by fakedang »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #72
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…

If this is their worst complaint about one of WPs biggest hosts then he isn’t doing too badly. I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it. WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the…

Didn't Jason Cohen sell to private equity?

Highly recommend reading his smartbear blogs.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#108

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#109

Post by can16358p »

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.

To be honest forget being better, if there's a Google competitor even on-par with Google, I'd switch to that immediately and never use Google or any of their services again.

Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#110

Post by darby_nine »

bad_user wrote: post #93
fragmede wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "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." This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google. Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most…

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?

What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.

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