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What the heck is going on with WordPress?

paolo.blog

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Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#21

Post by nl »

bawolff wrote: post #5

Wow this sounds so entitled. The more i read posts from the pro-automattic side, the more it sounds WPEngine is in the right. Yes its nice if people contribute back. It is however optional. Not just in the well-technically sense, but in the broader moral sense. If you give something away for free, wait for someone to build a business around it, and then say, well actually its not free, there are strings: that is unet…

But access to the autoupdates infrastructure isn't part of that deal.

If wp-engine want to change customers for access to that it's not unreasonable to expect a contribution.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#22

Post by CtrlAltDelete51 »

CtrlAltDelete51 wrote: post #12

I'm not involved in the WordPress ecosystem, but am an outsider looking in. I don't have all of the facts and am not a lawyer, so this is just my 2 cents. Quoting the referenced article: 1. Contributing to WordPress So here’s my question: what do you think of a company that, with close to half a billion dollars in revenue, and more than a thousand staff, barely contributes the equivalent of one full-time employee to…

As some additional bit of data to interpret the way you will... I just found a Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fol35p/wordpres...) thread that found several additional Trademark filings by the WordPress Foundation in July for the terms "Managed WordPress" and "Hosted WordPress".

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#23

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

nl wrote: post #21
bawolff wrote: post #5

Wow this sounds so entitled. The more i read posts from the pro-automattic side, the more it sounds WPEngine is in the right. Yes its nice if people contribute back. It is however optional. Not just in the well-technically sense, but in the broader moral sense. If you give something away for free, wait for someone to build a business around it, and then say, well actually its not free, there are strings: that is unet…

But access to the autoupdates infrastructure isn't part of that deal. If wp-engine want to change customers for access to that it's not unreasonable to expect a contribution.

People are conflating two things.

One is contributing back, which is not required by any license and second is rate limits

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#25

Post by elwebmaster »

I am an outsider to WordPress ecosystem but what really annoys me is that even here on HN people can’t tell the difference between OpenSource software and using another’s services without authorization. They can’t tell the difference between “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”. I am utterly disappointed by that and wish the community will educate itself. Surely releasing the software under open source license does not give commercial entities the right to leach off of the foundation’s infrastructure in perpetuity. That being said, certainly Matt could have taken a different approach. Just that he sounds like a nice guy and didn’t do it. The right thing to do would be to put a statement in the terms of service saying “by accessing Wordpress.org for commercial purposes through automated means you agree to the charge of $1000/MB downloaded using your IP address”. Then sends multi-billion dollar invoices to WPEngine like Oracle would do. File lawsuits. Replace the updates and plugins when requested through WPEngine IPs with ones showing a “Cease and Desist” notice and notifying end users that access to their site is denied due to outstanding invoice of their hosting provider. Boom. Checkmate.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#26

Post by wintermute2001 »

How is this even a discussion?

There is no requirement for companies like WP Engine to contribute to Wordpress. Zero. Mullenweg and his side admit as much.

And let's be real -- it's about the money. How many times have Mullenweg and co mentioned WPE's revenue in a discussion that's ostensibly about open source contributions? Otherwise, the Automattic rhetoric would be structured around "if WP Engine just contributes x hours a year of work then we'd drop the dispute." But we all know that's not true.

It's just sour grapes from Automattic, which is getting beaten by a competitor.

Until there's some legal obligation for WPE to contribute back to Wordpress, this is all nonsense.

This is making Automattic look thin-skinned and inept. They're going to lose a lot of credibility with their partners, if they haven't already. Anyone who actually watched Matt's talk knows it was disastrous. Someone in his circle needs to intervene and get him to drop this awkward, ill-advised and ultimately ineffective strategy.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#27

Post by bdcravens »

dredmorbius wrote: post #24
bdcravens wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No names were called.

They were by implication.

Well, that's stretching the HN guidelines even if that were the case. Drawing a conclusion that an author may be biased based on their employment is far from an ad hominem.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#28

Post by philsquared_ »

I think what some are failing to realize is that many businesses are only now finding out that they are one step away from losing access to their websites. Before this wp engine vs Matt spat many of us genuinely thought that wordpress was a community project and not something that one individual could pull access to on a whim. They wrongfully assumed they had ownership of their website. That they held the cards. This is an eye opener for many of us. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong. I know for a fact that I wont let my company grow too big before moving away from wordpress and I am sure there are many more like me. Wordpress is not what I thought it was. That is ok. I just have more information to make better decisions now.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#29

Post by lsaferite »

elwebmaster wrote: post #25

I am an outsider to WordPress ecosystem but what really annoys me is that even here on HN people can’t tell the difference between OpenSource software and using another’s services without authorization. They can’t tell the difference between “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”. I am utterly disappointed by that and wish the community will educate itself. Surely releasing the software under open source license d…

Just to be clear, WordPress has the update servers hard coded. If they wanted you to use a different server, making it easily configurable by an end user would seem like the first step before cutting of access to a whole swath of IP addresses.

Re: What the heck is going on with WordPress?

#30

Post by sharphall »

nl wrote: post #21
bawolff wrote: post #5

Wow this sounds so entitled. The more i read posts from the pro-automattic side, the more it sounds WPEngine is in the right. Yes its nice if people contribute back. It is however optional. Not just in the well-technically sense, but in the broader moral sense. If you give something away for free, wait for someone to build a business around it, and then say, well actually its not free, there are strings: that is unet…

But access to the autoupdates infrastructure isn't part of that deal. If wp-engine want to change customers for access to that it's not unreasonable to expect a contribution.

Reposting something I posted in another thread but I think it's more relevant to this comment:

Would it be a good or bad look for the Fedora project if they went after a popular and commercially ruthless hosting provider offering "Fedora Hosting" for trademark infringement, while cutting off repo and update access to that provider specifically, unless they paid up some % of revenue?

Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.

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