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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#101

Post by MichaelZuo »

Sharlin wrote: post #57
slg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of Reddit cracking down on 3rd party apps or Twitter changing that policy and a whole lot more once Musk took over. The problem isn't necessarily the actions or policies in a vacuum. There are legitimate benefits to these approaches. The problem is it feels like these communities were built up around certain practices and there was no reason to expect those practices to change. So when there is a big ch…

I guess the moral of the story is that everything must be assumed to be bait-and-switch in the presence of capital interests.

Why can’t other interests, such as labour interests, also bait-and-switch?

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#102

Post by MichaelZuo »

stefanfisk wrote: post #96
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It really messed a lot of things up, editing my blog used to be seamless and after it took multiple seconds to even load the editor.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#103

Post by anon7000 »

ookblah wrote: post #2

Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes. If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify bein…

Yeah the DHH post is an example or projection… Automattic is hosting a lot of WordPress sites but not making anywhere near as much money as the WP Engines and Go Daddy’s of the ecosystem. (And yet automattic contributes the most to the project.) So it’s definitely a point of frustration to the business.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#104

Post by danieljacksonno »

usaphp wrote: post #67
bad_user wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially, I was taking the side of WP.org and Automattic; however, I changed my mind completely once they took over the “Advanced Custom Fields” plugin, and replaced it with another plugin that broke people's websites. So Matt weaponized the WP package repository, and stole the users of a well-maintained package, making WP site admins work over the weekend to fix the breakage. This isn't opinionated, this is theft.…

> replaced it with another plugin that broke people's websites What makes you think it broke someone’s website? AFAIK they just patched the security issue that wp engine team couldn’t patch because they were locked out from pushing to repo?

They turned off all pro features

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#105

Post by anon7000 »

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…

Because it’s one of the most prolific OSS projects on the web, and hosts more than 40% of websites (and that number was growing until a year or two ago)? It was pretty sensible when it was created compared to other CMSes of the day! So “never sensible” is probably an exaggeration, if even massive, massive sites like nasa.gov are using it.

But putting its merits to the side, people firstly love drama and love sharing their opinions about contentious situations. And secondly, hopefully there are lessons to be learned for other OSS projects and other founders about how NOT to handle this kind of situation.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#106

Post by anon7000 »

benatkin wrote: post #26

Nice detailed article. However, in these two places it doesn't seem clear that it was just the Slack account that was deactivated. Here: > Javier Casares shared that his account was deactivated after he asked a series of questions in a Slack thread started by Colin Stewart. And here, referring to Terence Eden: > He later reported on Mastodon that his account was deactivated. Another thing – with that headline, I was…

I mean. It’s too early to say. If we’re talking raw traffic — the high profile enterprise sites have long term contracts. And it’s VERY hard to migrate hosting providers, let alone entire CMSes. So it will take a long period of enterprises not wanting to buy into WordPress for the traffic to die down.

Beyond that, which sides would move? Those owned by people who were invested in WordPress. Honestly, that’s probably not a super massive share of the websites. The random small businesses and individual people might not ever hear about this drama. It would take a while for new projects to stop getting built with WordPress.

So we won’t see that impact over the course of a couple weeks. Maybe several years.

But the community is way more about contributing to the core project (there are many hundreds of contributors in each release). With plenty of high profile ones leaving, it’s gonna be a blow to the project if good people don’t or can’t step up.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#107

Post by eastbound »

inglor_cz wrote: post #53
nubinetwork wrote: post #51

This has gone on for far too long... while I don't use a paid/managed WP on my personal blog, I'm seriously considering dumping WP entirely and writing my own CMS for my personal blog.

I can't do that, given that I run an e-shop with a card payment system etc. on Wordpress/WooCommerce. The ecosystem of plugins is just too damn useful.

Feels like WooCommerce should buy WPEngine and sell blackjack and h…

WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#108

Post by anon7000 »

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 mean, it’s a lot. Certainly the majority of regular contributors. Probably 80-100ish full time employees working solely on WordPress OSS projects. (Some in community roles, executive director, tech leads, devs, designers, etc.) There are certainly other regular contributors (Yoast sponsors a couple people to work full time), and lots of volunteers. But without question, Automattic spends a lot of developer time on WP.

And in other parts of the business, there is a strong desire to “fix it in core,” so if WordPress.com wants easier site building for customers, well hey, send devs to help build full site editing in WordPress.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#109

Post by anon7000 »

serial_dev wrote: post #11
bullenweg wrote: post #3

Rumors are that another round of voluntary layoffs are coming to Automattic today. I am optimistic for the future of WordPress because it looks less and less likely to involve Matt. Matt has created the ideal conditions for a fork to succeed: WordPress (the software) is a fixture of the internet, it is never going away no matter how much Matt sabotages it but Matt's control over it is not a foregone conclusion given…

I have been thinking about the alignment offer that Automattic has offered its employees. It’s hard for me to imagine any scenario at any company where I would not take the money and go. Six months of salary is a lot of money for just simply walking away. To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if…

Don’t worry, there is a signed contract in place!

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#110

Post by Sebb767 »

weinzierl wrote: post #66

"That is deeply unfortunate, because the questions about sustainability of open-source projects, and who profits from them versus who produces them, are in need of addressing. Instead of having that conversation, Mullenweg has put questions about governance, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains at the forefront." Oh, I wish, because the discussion about, centralized software distribution, and…

> 3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you.

As far as I see, he did defend his trademark - he just had some very reasonable rules under which you could use it (like saying that you're hosting WordPress).

He then walked back on those rules to attack WPEngine for his personal vendetta.

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