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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

#171

Post by that_guy_iain »

Crazyontap wrote: post #52

So, ACF injected notices into everyone's dashboards to push their own legal agenda. It’s a move that reeks of self-interest more than community benefit. While everyone’s ready to grab their pitchforks at Matt, this actually sounds somewhat reasonable. Still, given its impact, this could easily be seen as a breach of trust. Definitely a move that's going to stir the pot.

Just like WordPress does, right?

I assume you work for automattic, right? I've noticed when it comes to comments like this, normally they're made by automattic employees.

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

#172

Post by tiffanyh »

Didn’t WPE change ACF to pull updates from WPE (on Oct 2nd), essentially at Matt’s request … because one of Matt issues with WPE, is that they were putting undue infrastructure load/cost on Wordpress.org

And then days after WPE makes this update, Matt then hijacks their plugin.

Am I understanding this correctly?

https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/changelog/

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

#173

Post by chii »

josephg wrote: post #97
maccard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. And they’ve gone 0-to-100 within days. I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). But the expectations have to be a fair & transparent, and ideally communicated from the start, so people and companies can make informed choices about how the…

> ideally communicated from the start

if only a minority could grow big and sufficiently high revenue generating to be capable of paying anything, then having this concept of "paying back" from the start would've been a chilling effect on the adoption in the first place.

wordpress ecosystem is big, but it is the network effect, rather than the software itself. This network effect require lots of individual participants to kick start it at the beginning. Those participants will benefit from the software being free.

If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. This makes the ecosystem small.

They don't call it bait and switch for nothing. The expectation of contribution will never be transparent from the beginning.

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

#174

Post by saaaaaam »

serial_dev wrote: post #108
saaaaaam wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullenweg literally said that this was his issue. That’s what kicked off the whole debacle.

Bill Clinton said he didn’t have relations with that woman. At some point in life, people usually stop believing everything that others “literally said”.

Right, sorry, I see what you mean. You mean “if you believe that the issue is truly as he describes it publicly and not in fact something else” rather than the literal interpretation of “if you believe that this is his issue”.

My answer was based on the fact that I’ve seen several people who are unaware of what Mullen’s said that precipitated the row.

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

#175

Post by Kye »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #69
thih9 wrote: post #31

The appropriate twist here would be to have WPEngine find a trusted third party (one or more), start a foundation together and successfully fork wordpress.

Didn't this whole thing start because Automattic was complaining that WPEngine wasn't contributing much to the Wordpress development but competing with them for free?

The claim is they spent over a year trying to convince WP Engine to pay up. But based on what I've seen, it was probably increasingly pouty complaints and demands leading up to the threat to go nuclear at WCUS 2024.

I wouldn't take how this played out as evidence that WP Engine was opposed to making more significant contributions like sponsoring a real, independent foundation or even putting a significant portion of its revenue toward the project.

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

#176

Post by Kye »

closewith wrote: post #126
batuhanicoz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our attempts at resolving trademark issues with WPE predate our discovery of the attribution removal.

Who is our in this context? If you are a party to this dispute, why on Earth would you comment publicly?

It really is strange Automattic's lawyers haven't clamped down on any public comment. Have any of WP Engine's people been as free with commentary as Automattic employees have been?

If I were an employee at a company being sued I wouldn't say anything related to it even without an order from legal because I wouldn't want to have to risk answering for it in the trial. Why dangle yourself out there as a target for the opposition's lawyers?

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

#177

Post by shprd »

DonnieBurger wrote: post #160
shprd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supply chain attack. Where's the "attack" part? I thought that was a crucial part in the definition

This is how users will unknowingly update from ACF to Secure Custom Fields: https://x.com/Brugman/status/1845195750550143424 https://archive.is/u6ZbY

As user how were you affected? Are there any features you can no longer access?

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

#178

Post by xd1936 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #77

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.

There's history.

https://bullenweg.com/

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

#179

Post by pluc »

srmarm wrote: post #125
josephg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they banned Wpengine from updating their package in the repository. Then the package maintainers found security problems - which they can’t fix with an update because they’re locked out. It makes a weird sort of sense. Ie, wp.org backed themselves into a corner where they needed to close the security hole. And to do that, they needed to patch it themselves, which in turn requires them taking over the package. I…

They could have backed down and allowed WPEngine to publish an update or even published it on their behalf. Instead they've doubled down and taken this ridiculous action that undermines the whole wp/plugin eco system. None of this is necessary.

This was engineered and deliberate, they were never gonna let WPEngine have their space back. We called this a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41751856

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

#180

Post by maccard »

josephg wrote: post #97
maccard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. And they’ve gone 0-to-100 within days. I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events). But the expectations have to be a fair & transparent, and ideally communicated from the start, so people and companies can make informed choices about how the…

> I think he has a fair point - I’d be totally comfortable with a standing expectation in a community like Wordpress for companies to pay their way (or be looked down on & excluded from taking part in community events).

I agree with you, but this is a well trodden topic in the development community, particularly on HN - see Terraform for example [0]. One of the problems is that the world WP came to exist in and came to dominate the web in doesn't exist in the same form. There's been a few attempts at thisand they've caused large fractures - nobody has really got it right yet.

On one hand you have a very vocal, and powerful group of people who believe that the freedom of the software is far more important than anything else, and those groups are often backed by large organisations that have the people-power to continue that effort (see: TF -> OpenTofu with Spacelift and co, Redis -> Valkey backed by AWS, and the OG split with Elastic). On the other hand you have a less vocal group who are more concerned with the functionality of the software rather than the original agreement that was signed (fair warning I fall in this category - I'm trying to remain Swiss in this comment), and accept that the terms of the deal have changed in that being Jeff'ed. (My reading of) The value of OSS in this group is the ability to for community to improve things, and to not end up locked into a problem that you have no solution to. The advantage here is that this group can just hitch their wagon to whichever solution appears to win out.

I don't see an easy path out of this that satisfies both camps, unfortunately.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

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