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Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

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Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#301

Post by ValentineC »

RobotToaster wrote: post #290
Topgamer7 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these days, the average WordPress site runner is trying to find a cheap/free. Non-technical solution. I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites. - One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it. - Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updat…

I went with wordpress for a website for a small charity I help with, I'm not usually a web guy but I used it years ago and, hey, it's open source right? I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS. I still don't understand how the…

> I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source.

I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.

"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#302

Post by righthand »

keiferski wrote: post #284
righthand wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what’s unlikely. Customers leaving? My company is a customer, we’re leaving. Or that most free sites are subsidized by paying customers? Why is that unlikely that seems pretty par for the course for free services.

I'm saying that WordPress is incredibly widespread, far more than I think most tech industry people realize. The average WordPress site builder doesn't know or care who Matt Mullenweg is or what open source means. WordPress is just the simplest way to make a usable website – and has been for the last 20 years, almost.

Okay I get that but I’m discussing people that don’t self host or need more than the basics. Those are the users affected by Matt’s action. For example, our site repos only include the site theme we deploy to WP Engine, so our stack is essentially Wordpress, not WP Engine Wordpress. All the WP Engine stuff is handled once deployed invisible to us. So when we log in we expect Wordpress features.

Yes there are a lot of Wordpress installs, a lot of them perhaps never even updated. You can claim those as being loyal to Wordpress but if they just set it up and forget it then there’s probably no real loyalty to Automattic. If you have concerns about just setting up a site on a different platform outside of Automattic for whatever reason, why would you trust it any longer? Those people will move on to another just as easy to install cms. Wordpress hasn’t gotten easier to customize in the last x years since your 3.0 install or whatever.

Easy to install and forget isn’t a Wordpress exclusive idea. It perhaps has a lot of mind share, but this is the 2nd time Matt has taken drastic action. It’s now at historical precedent levels.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#303

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

randomdata wrote: post #293
mtlynch wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like you're bending over backwards to misinterpret what I said, so I'm going to stop engaging with you.

[flagged]

They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.

To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#304

Post by ValentineC »

legitster wrote: post #269
righthand wrote: post #241

It will be interesting how many customers start flying the coop. Wordpress can be entrenching software but I have also found that a lot of the plugin heavy sites are just using plugins/customizations for trivial things you could easily eclipse. Migrating off of it is easier done than said in that case. We will be leaving WP Engine and Wordpress behind after we spend 2 months rebuilding on sensible software on a sensi…

Matt himself suggested the exodus: fork Wordpress, call it something else, host the plugin directory yourself. And it's not like Wordpress is known for it's phenomenal code quality or anything. This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas ( cough Gutenberg cough ) or legacy code.

> This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas (cough Gutenberg cough) or legacy code.

ClassicPress is already a thing:

https://www.classicpress.net

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#306

Post by Manuel_D »

legitster wrote: post #213

I've brought this up in another thread, but what's stopping Automattic from going after anyone making a profit in the WP community? Website developers, plugin makers, theme designers, etc. Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire…

It's unclear if WP Engine is actually violating any copyright or trademark: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/automattic-deman...

> WP Engine's lawsuit points to promises made by Mullenweg and Automattic nearly 15 years ago. "In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all," the lawsuit said.

> Mullenweg wrote at the time that "Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company."

This sure sounds like Automattic made WordPress - both it's technology and the trademark - free to use. Apparently Automattic basically lied about making WordPress open:

> WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg did not disclose "that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being 'independent of any company' as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."

It's possible that Automattic's trademark claims are not valid. Trademark claims become weaker if companies don't actively defend the use of their trademark. Even if the secret revocation of its permission to use the WordPress trademark is real, the fact that they've ignored 15 years of WP Engine's use of the trademark really weakens their case.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#307

Post by righthand »

dgacmu wrote: post #294
ppseafield wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second the sibling poster here by saying anything useful you want to do with WordPress will probably have a non-negligible cost, and usually a subscription. WooCommerce for instance requires a subscription to add a minimum quantity to a product! I volunteer for a non-profit that uses it, and it's absolutely insane how many plugins will give you a little for free but charge $5/month or $50/year for just slightly…

If you were to guide them today, what would you set them up that's not WP that gives functionality similar to wp+woo? (asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)

I would point you at headless cms software like ContentStack or Payload which are easy as pie to use and integrate with a react frontend.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#309

Post by [deleted] »

senadir wrote: post #214
lolinder wrote: post #206

The article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain. For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPres…

WordPress division doesn’t mean the open source one, it means anyone working on WordPress related products, like jetpack, Woo, VIP, dotcom… The rest work on non-wp like tumblr, dayone, beeper and other apps.

[deleted]

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#310

Post by subarctic »

fvrghl wrote: post #51
closewith wrote: post #37

TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?

What is bad about overcast?

Hard to say now but I was coming from AntennaPod on Android, and when I switched to iPhone I needed a new podcast app, and Overcast was different in annoying ways and with Pocket Casts I was able to change some settings to get it to be more like AntennaPod. I think part of it was having a download button on each episode in the list.
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