One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!
WP Engine is not WordPress
161–170 of 175 posts
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#162Am 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…
He owns a competitor, Wordpress.com. That said, his point is valid. WPEngine is one of the most expensive hosts in the industry yet they meddle with the behavior of WP as well as the underlying PHP and web server and disable a lot of things. Anyone who would like to build a website on WPEngine is advised to read: https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ And that's just the stuff they admit to. The revisions be…
> disable a lot of things
Like how wordpress.com disables stats unless you're on a premium tier? Or like how wordpress.com disables plugins entirely unless you're on another premium tier? That kind of disabling of things?
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s about as much theft as me baking cookies, putting them on the street with a sign „free to take“ and people eating them is theft. Who would expect other people to add cookies and call everyone else thieves? You open source license doesn’t say „you can use it if you contribute“, it says „everyone can use it (as long as they attribute or fulfill some other requirement). How is that theft? You can’t be a thieve if…
To use your metaphor, let's say you baked a batch of cookies and put them on the street with "free to take", and then later when you noticed they were all gone and went to your local coffee shop, in their case it had "fresh baked cookies $5 each" and you saw that it was the same cookies you had put out earlier.
Does that feel like theft to you?
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s about as much theft as me baking cookies, putting them on the street with a sign „free to take“ and people eating them is theft. Who would expect other people to add cookies and call everyone else thieves? You open source license doesn’t say „you can use it if you contribute“, it says „everyone can use it (as long as they attribute or fulfill some other requirement). How is that theft? You can’t be a thieve if…
To use your metaphor, let's say you baked a batch of cookies and put them on the street with "free to take", and then later when you noticed they were all gone and went to your local coffee shop, in their case it had "fresh baked cookies $5 each" and you saw that it was the same cookies you had put out earlier. Does that feel like theft to you?
That’s not exactly what’s happening though, because they aren’t selling Wordpress, they are selling Wordpress hosting.
To align the analogy more closely to the Wordpress situation:
I put out leaflets with cake recipes which I give everyone for free. And then BakingCorp comes along, takes my recipe and sells the actual cookies they baked with my recipe in their store.
The difference is that they aren’t just selling what I made and gave out for free, they are providing an actual service based on my contribution.
And also, Wordpress copies don’t run out, so even selling the cookies for $5 wouldn’t exactly be immoral, because I would still give out infinite free cookies. If Wordpress engine just sold copies of Wordpress, people would just get it for free.
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#165It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul...
>> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#166I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress
The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it.
A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#167They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine. That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.
Wow. I was right. https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
IYKYK I guess.
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 customi…
We must live in a different world because for me, Bing's results have always been completely unusable. As a consequence, DuckDuckGo's results as well, although I understand that it must work for certain types of users located in certain countries; otherwise I can't understand how anyone would use it. I just logged into Kagi, and searched for “restaurants”. Kagi can see my country because their UI says so, yet it gave…
Conversely, I often find Google's local focus to be counter-productive when I want to search for the most relevant sources in the world (for physical things) or on the internet (for virtual things) and Google insists on giving me local examples of the physical thing or local providers of the virtual thing, neither of which I have interest in.
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#169You 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.
WordPress itself was forked from b2 which is GPL, and now Automattic is worth billions of dollars. Ironic, isn't it, when they accuse WP Engine of the very same behavior they had exhibited?
Re: WP Engine is not WordPress
#170It 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…
Thanks for the context!
Are there some sources you (or someone with twitter account) could provide to this?