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WP Engine is not WordPress

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Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#41

Post by bastawhiz »

addicted wrote: post #36
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revi…

> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.

Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#43

Post by sgammon »

sgammon wrote: post #8
sgammon wrote: post #6

> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.

You can also just turn it on by emailing support...

Are my downvoters here drafting posts that have greater than 5 revisions? Or?

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#44

Post by clankyclanker »

coliveira wrote: post #28
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of mana…

> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.

That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction.

As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#45

Post by softwaredoug »

addicted wrote: post #36
bastawhiz wrote: post #33

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then? There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless…

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards. The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument. The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can. The “default setting” is an example of this behavior. Also, calling turning off all historical revi…

Matt Mullenweg, author of this post, is CEO of Automattic, a for profit company with valuation in the billions. Largely raised from private capital

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#46

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of mana…

> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.

The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#47

Post by walterfreedom »

toxican wrote: post #21

I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well: 1. Dead-simple staging environments 2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack,…

Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#48

Post by pdntspa »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of mana…

> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does

Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.

Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#49

Post by dbg31415 »

WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed.

The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.

Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

#50

Post by softwaredoug »

What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.
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