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WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

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Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not for Microsoft I'd suggest calling it "Word" , no need for the Press.

What about "Press"?

I like it, a lot of room to play with things like 'imPress'

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#84

Honestly I don't get the backlash Mullenweg is getting - a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community, GPL let's them have the code - but I'm all in favor of kicking then off of everything else.

It’s a bit two faced. He’s clearly abusing his position, annd every time this topic comes up (see elasticsearch, terraform, redis from recent memory) HN has clearly been on the side of the open source license.

But, that’s not why he’s getting backlash. He’s getting backlash because he does what the “other side” did in all of these scenarios - invent reasons that are unrelated to the license dispute to cause the split. In this case, delisting their plugins from the central marketplace and implying trademark violations - while claiming that the problem is that they don’t contribute back to the ecosystem.

The real problem is that automattic want wpengine to “contribute their share” - by development or rev share, and they’re using dirty tricks and smear tactics to do so.

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#85
post #60

> It’s not clear what security problem Mullenweg is referring to in the post. Where is the CVE? What risk is there continuing to use the original plugin? No details at all. This results in fear: we don't know if the original is safe to use. > Going forward, Secure Custom Fields is now a non-commercial plugin Does this imply that Wordpress is potentially going after a revenue stream from WPEngine? If the plugin had Pr…

> This results in fear: we don't know if the original is safe to use. The exact result intended by Matt, I presume. He wants to scare WPEngine's customers away from their services. At this point, this looks more like a war between personalities.

> At this point, this looks more like a war between personalities.

There only seems to be one personality at play to me.

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Matt would be quite happy with that. His issue is WP Engine not contributing to WordPress. If they decide to maintain a fork and infrastructure, they won't be freeloading anymore. Edit: That attracted a lot of downvotes. I was giving my option in response to the parent comment. In my option Automattic would be happy if they forked it.

Where is it in the license that you need to contribute to the project if you make big bucks? We have open source licenses for a reason, contributing back is never a requirement. If you believe that is his issue, I have a bridge to sell you.

> Where is it in the license that you need to contribute to the project if you make big bucks? We have open source licenses for a reason, contributing back is never a requirement. If you believe that is his issue, I have a bridge to sell you.

I never said that the license forced them to contribute.

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#87

Honestly I don't get the backlash Mullenweg is getting - a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community, GPL let's them have the code - but I'm all in favor of kicking then off of everything else.

> a corp is trying to freeload on OSS community

automattic is worth a few billion. what are talking about?

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#88
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those reviewing the changeset: There are two places where they read a value directly from $POST into an $args array. There is no validation applied, which means an attacker can inject whatever value they wish.

In 2024, wtf. How can anyone especially on software with this kind of reach still do such absolute amateur things?

I can't speak for WP Engine devs specifically but for Wordpress customization developers, the ones I've worked with were just absolute amateurs. The people doing this are mostly untrained people hacking together stuff layer upon layer until it kind of worked. Don't even ask about using version control. I don't want to say this applies to every Webdev but it attracts a group of people that aren't too much into IT but want to quickly learn programming to have a job.

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#89

They either have some of the best or worst legal counsel; or they just ignore the legal counsel.

They also have the worst social media team I have ever seen: https://x.com/WordPress/status/1845121130207535524

Seems to be unavailable to me now, but Archive link here: https://archive.is/WKx4a

Re: WordPress.org's latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

#90

Even if they find a middle ground to this mess that Matt has created, I very much fear that the damage to the community is done and it's only a matter of time before the popularity of the once famous platform that almost everyone uses in one way or another collapses.

Good. WordPress is merely the tallest dwarf.
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