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The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

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Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#161

Post by mthoms »

shprd wrote: post #144
chiefalchemist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to speculate, especially from a distance. But I do wonder: - Why now? What snapped? Clearly WPE didn't go to "billions" over night. So why go nuclear now? - Doesn't he have a close and immediate circle of advisors and confidants? Are they speaking to him and he's not listen? Or has he locked himself in a room so to speak and is completely unapproachable? Either way, not good. - Is he trying to force WPE to for…

It's not new, Matt has been trying to reach an agreement for years.[1] To be fair, he has done everything he can for the health of the ecosystem for all these years. WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part. Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that r…

There are well-established legal processes for resolving issues like trademark infringement. This dispute could have, and should have, been resolved without involving… literally everyone.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#162

Post by thih9 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #102
luuurker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] and stolen [...] I'm not happy with the mess and Matt's behaviour, but you can't steal free code.

Where in the world, how the hell did you get the idea that stealing free code isn't stealing?

Stealing involves acquiring something in an illegal way. Free in the context of open source code usually means infinitely available under its license. These two are incompatible - unless some illegal license shenanigans are at play.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#164

Post by viraptor »

Scaevolus wrote: post #65

Does anyone want to play armchair internet psychologist with me to speculate as to Matt's thinking here? My guess is that he was focused on these facts: 1) I own Wordpress 2) WPEngine is profiting from Wordpress and I'm not benefiting 3) This is unfair And it was stuck in his mind like a thorn, irritating him whenever the thought arose, and never went away. Commercializing open source is hard for myriad reasons, but…

> play armchair internet psychologist with me

Guess: Matt is not well. You can find others making more specific guesses, but we don't need to make that public.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#165

Post by shprd »

aimazon wrote: post #160
shprd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new, Matt has been trying to reach an agreement for years.[1] To be fair, he has done everything he can for the health of the ecosystem for all these years. WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part. Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that r…

You're citing Matt but Matt has been proven to be untrustworthy. For example, his claim of many year long negotiations includes a claim that he had delivered a term sheet to WP Engine in May, but that claim was disproven by himself, no such term sheet was delivered. Additionally, the contributions that he counts from WP Engine are only those included in the "Five for the Future" program which Matt administrates. The…

> millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship

Are you for real? Event sponsorship is part of the marketing budget. They're there to promote their company among competitors. It's a universal business expense.

> plugin development ACF

ACF is their own asset

I mentioned this in my comment, they don't contribute significantly beyond their mouth. What you came with are just the receipts for what I said.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#166

Post by porker »

shash7 wrote: post #104
consumer451 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghost.org seems pretty cool.

Ghost is good for blogging and newsletters. But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone. Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.

> But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone.

And that freedom is also its weakness. "When all you have is a hammer, ..." comes to mind.

I've had to rescue enough booking systems, LMS's, and SaaS platforms built on WordPress with terrible performance or 20% of features not working to think this is a terrible approach.

> Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.

That's no bad thing. More specialised tools help with performance and UX for those tasks.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#167

Post by mardifoufs »

maxloh wrote: post #155
mardifoufs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing started because WP Engine does not want to put resources into WordPress development. It's not some sort of disagreement about design or development, it's about the work itself. If WP Engine has to create a fork and dump millions, they would basically lose. As they have built a business model around not contributing even to the already well developed WordPress codebase. So I can't imagine how going bey…

No. Matt want 8% revenue directly straight into Automattic's account.

That became a thing because he felt like they didn't contribute to WordPress. Like, that's the entire reason behind that (very weird imo) request for a royalty.

I'm not sure if it's true, but there were talks about WPEngine devs basically not being allocated any dev time on WordPress anymore (whereas Automattic devs spend tens of hours a week on the actual OSS project). That was one of the catalyst behind the whole drama where Matt called them out basically on stage during a conference talk. Which was just before (or at the same time) as he started talking about the royalty.

Now, again Matt's behavior has been super weird since he basically failed at articulating his position well, and his PR has been catastrophic.

But the fact is WPEngine still does not contribue to WordPress. That is their right, but everything matt has been doing is also "legal" and within his (and his company's) rights.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#168

Post by shprd »

mthoms wrote: post #161
shprd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new, Matt has been trying to reach an agreement for years.[1] To be fair, he has done everything he can for the health of the ecosystem for all these years. WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part. Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that r…

There are well-established legal processes for resolving issues like trademark infringement. This dispute could have, and should have, been resolved without involving… literally everyone.

> There are well-established legal processes for resolving issues like trademark infringement.

Exactly, if that was the only thing WPE has leeched we wouldn't be here. They were tolerated for years but they kept digging more and more.

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#169

Post by _fjg8 »

shprd wrote: post #165
aimazon wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're citing Matt but Matt has been proven to be untrustworthy. For example, his claim of many year long negotiations includes a claim that he had delivered a term sheet to WP Engine in May, but that claim was disproven by himself, no such term sheet was delivered. Additionally, the contributions that he counts from WP Engine are only those included in the "Five for the Future" program which Matt administrates. The…

> millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship Are you for real? Event sponsorship is part of the marketing budget. They're there to promote their company among competitors. It's a universal business expense. > plugin development ACF ACF is their own asset I mentioned this in my comment, they don't contribute significantly beyond their mouth. What you came with are just the receipts for what I said.

And Automattic's control over WordPress is part of their "marketing" budget. Let's not forget how valuable the exclusive commercial license for the WordPress trademark is to Automattic, their ability to use the WordPress.com domain has huge commercial value to them. I have no doubt that WP Engine would pay tens of millions of dollars per year for the exclusive commercial license to the WordPress trademark which is tens of millions that could be funnelled to the WordPress Foundation, which is tens of millions more than Automattic spend. Ask yourself how Matt justifies Automattic spending millions of dollars per year on hosting WordPress.org and millions of dollars on the 100+ staff Automattic have working on WordPress.org.

We can't pick and choose which contributions are valid and which aren't. WP Engine spend money on the development of WPGraphQL a free plugin, WP Engine spend money on the development of Advanced Custom Fields which they release for free for millions of WordPress sites to use... of course they're not doing that out of some altruistic moral crusade, of course it's a clear calculus about the benefit to their bottom line, but that doesn't change that they're contributing.

The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg: you're playing into Matt's absurd narrative that the only valid contribution is one that is made to something under Matt's control.

I think WP Engine are Private Equity leeches, I have zero doubt about that, I wish that they were to contribute more but that's the deal with Open Source software, that's what we choose to allow by releasing Open Source software. The moral obligation we have when we use Open Source software is to respect the license, Matt had the choice about the license to release WordPress under, he made the choice for it to be GPL.

dhh is more eloquent and authoritative than I, read these if you need further convincing:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-di...

https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-...

Re: The ACF plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress.org

#170

Post by shprd »

_fjg8 wrote: post #169
shprd wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship Are you for real? Event sponsorship is part of the marketing budget. They're there to promote their company among competitors. It's a universal business expense. > plugin development ACF ACF is their own asset I mentioned this in my comment, they don't contribute significantly beyond their mouth. What you came with are just the receipts for what I said.

And Automattic's control over WordPress is part of their "marketing" budget. Let's not forget how valuable the exclusive commercial license for the WordPress trademark is to Automattic, their ability to use the WordPress.com domain has huge commercial value to them. I have no doubt that WP Engine would pay tens of millions of dollars per year for the exclusive commercial license to the WordPress trademark which is te…

> The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg

And? It is the backbone that powers their entire business. You're acting like they're being asked to contribute to something they don't use. That should be the bare minimum. Even business wise it make sense to contribute to it and help make it better. It's absurd we're even having this discussion.

You're also inconsistent. You claim something is fine because it's legal (the license doesn't ask for more as a condition) but you condemn the other party reaction on a different grounds? I thought everything you can get away with, legally, is OK. Matt has barely scratched the surface of what's within his power to do in response.

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