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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#91

Post by mpol »

chubs wrote: post #72

I’m trying to get a better picture of this. Can someone tell me what percentage of code contributions are paid for by Matt/automattic? If it’s like 99% then I’m a little more sympathetic, I’m reminded of the centos/redhat thing. Either way, peace :)

I have the impression that many long time contibutors walked away. Since the addition of the Gutenberg editor, I mostly see Automattic employees.

I wouldn't dare to say that other companies don't want to contribute, I do wonder what was and is going on. Outside Gutenberg, there is hardly any change in WordPess.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#92

Post by icehawk »

dylan604 wrote: post #9
jcranmer wrote: post #8

On the off-chance that Matt is doing the irresponsible thing here and still getting involved in social media discussions on this topic: People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth…

> People don't like being involved in drama, Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.

How is it weird that people who do not like being involved in drama do things where they are not involved in the drama.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#94

Post by anilakar »

u8_friedrich wrote: post #90

Why do we care so much about Wordpress? Wordpress has always been a swamp, why are we now all suddenly pretending like it’s this glamorous thing Matt is destroying? How did we get here? It has never been a user friendly or sensible way to host a god damn website…

It's one of the few services I actively refuse to host because of security issues. You either run a Wordpress hosting company or buy a managed instance from one.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#95

Post by silverliver »

kergonath wrote: post #68
spiderfarmer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? > There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it.

Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well-established strategy in the open source world (e.g.Firefox and Ubuntu).

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#96

Post by stefanfisk »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #36
dovin wrote: post #4

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one m…

> Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project 80% annual codebase churn (according to Theo) says otherwise

Since they started their crazy Gutenberg project things have certainly not been slow moving and stable…

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#97

Post by Ennea »

labster wrote: post #37
crabmusket wrote: post #29

I hope that one positive outcome of this whole debacle will be people realising that the Wordpress Foundation board is apparently three Matt Mullenwegs in a trenchcoat: https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/09/24/who-is-on-t... (I exaggerate, slightly.) This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like. If this mess creates pressure to put more se…

I’m the president of an internet nonprofit (miraheze.org) and we have five active directors with an annual budget of ~$10k. We have elections for community appointed directors as well. This stuff is not hard. By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.

Oh heck, Miraheze spotted in the wild. Thank you for the work you do, it's invaluable.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#98

Post by aitchnyu »

pixxel wrote: post #79
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.

The Linux copyright holders did pursue companies using Linux in the name, and distros were one exception.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#100

Post by anon7000 »

bigiain wrote: post #82
bilekas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.

> changing the license in a next version Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.

There is no chance the license changes. Matt has been a very, very vocal supporter of GPL.

This self-described war he’s going on is all about commercial trademarks, and other hosting companies having more commercial success than Automattic in the ecosystem while contributing fewer developers and less money to the project.

Now, he’s taken it to a very extreme extent, and I fully disagree with his approach, but the core issues (for him) have nothing to do with GPL and how the WP project is governed. Those has even the same for decades, and he’s not trying to change them.

He’s just being very self-destructed because it turns out the community has no interest in some kind of “war” that gets long term contributors locked out of the ecosystem. He was expecting more people to be on his side, and frankly now seems to be lashing out (by blocking people) when that didn’t happen

None of that means he’s trying to change the governance model or license.

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