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WP Engine is not WordPress

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131–140 of 175 posts

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#131

Post by PeterZaitsev »

Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that.

This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success.

Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well.

WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#132

Post by jcoletti »

Curious why the post has two hyperlinks to the WP Engine domain, and additionally without rel="nofollow", if they despise them so much. Isn't that WordPress essentially passing SEO link juice to WP Engine?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#133

Post by mynameyeff »

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…

Gnarly...

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#134

Post by mynameyeff »

jonas21 wrote: post #60
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.

Agreed.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#135

Post by mxey »

clankyclanker wrote: post #44
coliveira wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.

That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction. As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/

WordPress is licensed under GPL.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#137

Post by pluc »

graeme wrote: post #22

This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it. I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine. I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things…

It's a little telling that 1) Matt has nobody around him to say hey maybe don't post that on our corporate site without context and 2) if he does nobody pointed that this reads like another millionaire hissy fit because someone is doing something they don't want them do and they're used to getting their ways with no resistance.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#139

Post by tonymet »

blendergeek wrote: post #29
tonymet wrote: post #20

You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.

Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use p…

His case for WP engine being immoral was even flimsier.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#140

Post by b112 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #125
b112 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The cost of epipens affects someone's ability to not die. Whether WP Engine contributes back to WordPress enough does not. In fact, Mullenweg says WP Engine does contribute back, but not enough, and tries to justify it by saying they've "hacked up" WordPress. The latter statement has no legs to stand on (at least without real evidence). How much is enough? Should WP Engine be fixing bugs that don't affect their custo…

The cost of epipens affects someone's ability to not die. Whether WP Engine contributes back to WordPress enough does not.

My example also cited two non-life threatening issues, and discussed legal vs morality.

You have not addressed this point, so I'll be more direct about it. Doing something legal doesn't make it OK. In fact doing something legal does not imply right or wrong.

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