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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#131

Post by amanaplanacanal »

primitivesuave wrote: post #19
kmeisthax wrote: post #18

> Mullenweg had also asked Automattic employees to pick a side, shortly after banning WP Engine from WordPress.org. He wrote on October 3 that Automattic had extended an ""Alignment Offer"" to its employees. The company provided a buyout package of $30,000 or six months of salary (whichever was higher) to employees who wanted to leave because they disagreed with Mullenweg's actions. Employees who accepted the buyout…

It's called freedom of association, a foundational principle of capitalism and free markets.

Within limits. Because it also allows all sorts discrimination against folks that as a society we have decided not to allow. The question then becomes where to draw the line, not allegiance to the principle at all cost.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#132

Post by spiderfarmer »

e40 wrote: post #129
spiderfarmer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress. > Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”. That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.…

This is precisely what Red Hat did, right?

Red Hat still includes the Linux kernel. Android would be a better example of an actual fork.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#133

Post by kergonath »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #122
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? Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress. > Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”. That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.…

The context is getting a bit murky, so let’s start with this:

> That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.

That was your second point, and I don’t disagree with it.

Now, for the rest of your post.

> Those aren't forks.

I am not sure what point you are making here. Forking has nothing to do with either ripping off anyone or trademarks. The possibility to fork software is a fundamental principle of free software. As in, you cannot have free software that cannot be forked. If you don’t want people to fork it, don’t make it free.

Wordpress itself is a rebranded fork of b2, and nobody has any issue with that.

> Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.

If you fork a project you cannot use someone else’s IP, so you have to rebrand if the project name is a trademark. AFAIK, the Android kernels are forks and don’t use the Linux trademark, for example. Rebranding does not make forking any easier or harder, it’s completely orthogonal.

You mean that it would be difficult because they would need to pay developers to maintain the fork, right? This is true, but it has nothing to do with ripping off anyone. Matt is not embarrassing himself because forking would be complicated. His message is clear, and you wrote it yourself: “they profit off Wordpress' brand for free”. Which is dishonest and misleading.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#134

Post by Gud »

immibis wrote: post #124
MichaelZuo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They CAN, but capital interests ARE. Speculation: labour interests care about making enough money to get by, while capital interests care about making maximum money and are therefore insatiable.

What makes you think most labour are interested in “getting by”?

In my experience, they aren’t.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#135

Post by CodeWriter23 »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #62
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #41

@WPEngine - fork Wordpress, rebrand yourself and the code. Setup a plugin / update hub like Wordpress.org and provide a pathway for your customers and devs to migrate. I recognize this is non-trivial. Ending an abusive relationship usually is.

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.

He’s not going to step down. And if his beef (as stated) is companies making money with WordPress without contributing back, where’s the line? The top page builders like Divi and Elementor all do the same with their cloud offerings. Does he sue them next, simply for using the word “WordPress” to indicate compatibility in their marketing materials? Who wants to invest time and money simply to have Matt steal your work on a whim.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming Matt’s scope is limited to WPEngine; the kind of personality that acts in this way will do the same to anyone.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#136

Post by cdaringe »

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.

I wanted to learn more about your vision, how you operate, etc, so i clicked your about link:

> There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or create this page.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#137

Post by FireBeyond »

fbnlsr wrote: post #85
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…

I'm probably wrong here, but my tinfoil hat take is that Matt has seen how well Taylor Otwell is doing with Laravel and he wants a piece of that cake. Granted they're doing pretty good with wordpress.com hosting, but they'd have so much more money if they licenced plugins and features the way Laravel does.

That might be part of it, though I think the more pressing boat anchor around Automattic's neck is the money pit that Tumblr is, for what seems like very little return.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#138

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors

I expect that even Matt is aware that that is not an unreasonable assumption. Purportedly, via Bullenweg, an email went out yesterday re another offer, and it included this, from Matt:

> You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

I mean that would have to be a first. "We're offering voluntary resignations with these benefits" followed by "and I promise we'll actually offer those benefits" - shows you how low trust seems to be at Automattic.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#139

Post by weinzierl »

Sebb767 wrote: post #110
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.

That's what I meant with "Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you."

Hoping for free publicity by letting your trademark defense slip was never a good idea. The rules might have seemed reasonable but they were asking for trouble from the get go.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#140

Post by Brian_K_White »

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…

Wordpress can't actually use another license because... Wordpress is itself a fork of gpl software.

It just gets better and better the more you learn about this guy.

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