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Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

wpenginestatus.com

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Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#31

Post by JPLeRouzic »

prox wrote: post #4
_morgs_ wrote: post #2

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.

Something I wonder, is it possible to have 3rd party plugin registries, so unconnected to .org ?

As far as I know, you can still download a plugin, install it in the plugin folder, and possibly restart WordPress, but it's a bit more risky. Installing a plugin via the admin interface is much more comfortable.

That said, as a WP admin of a tiny commercial website, I find it distressing that someone else can influence the functionalities of my Website. I already didn't install Jetpack because I dislike the intrusiveness and, frankly, the spying by Autommatic which is enabled by this plugin on our revenues and commercial transactions. All this points toward a direction that is not pleasant.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#32

Post by timkq »

yellow_lead wrote: post #22

So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that. Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.

His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#33

Post by pooper »

timkq wrote: post #27
robjwells wrote: post #13

I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.

This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).

The question still stands though. Why does wp engine get to infringe on WordPress trademark AND get access to server resources for free?

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#34

Post by Ukv »

ookblah wrote: post #14

while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back, if Mullenweg were serious about gaining support from the community he would give a date for people to migrate their systems off of WPEngine before they blocked it. this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's somethi…

> while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back

To my understanding this isn't even particularly true - WPEngine have contributed significantly to events/sponsorships and with their own open source contributions. Matt's demand was allegedly instead for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic".

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#35

Post by notpushkin »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #11
mappu wrote: post #8

This spat is embarrassing for both companies.

What do you mean by both? What should have WPEngine done differently?

Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.)

Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#36

Post by mylastattempt »

monkey_monkey wrote: post #30
mylastattempt wrote: post #24

The statement at Wordpress.org reads like a very emotionally charged e-mail. While I am not in the know of the situation, it seems like a bit of terrible PR. https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

The statement isn't at wordpress.com

Need more coffee, edited!

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#37

Post by genmon »

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago

https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/

and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.

Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.

All seems so sudden and disproportionate.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#38

Post by yellow_lead »

timkq wrote: post #32
yellow_lead wrote: post #22

So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that. Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.

His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.

Yep, it sounds like he is jealous/envious that they are making more off of WordPress hosting than Automattic. WordPress being open source makes this even more ridiculous, because he's complaining about modifications to open source software.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#39

Post by bilekas »

timkq wrote: post #27
robjwells wrote: post #13

I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.

This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).

Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#40

Post by elashri »

Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting.

WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck?

The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now.

If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.

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