471–480 of 717 posts
Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn’t follow what happened. The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me who know nothing about the case
Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on WordPress as a whole. WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging comments. In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP En…
That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg found out. Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.
Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with everything I have.
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The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a heavy heart.
"Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"
God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."
Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"
God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world, but even I cannot change public opinion."
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Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the most influential and richest people on the planet. But they won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a doubt against them.
I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.
Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn’t follow what happened. The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me who know nothing about the case
Long post, writing this for myself as well: The players - WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011; - WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010 with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director; - Automattic is a private company that owns and runs WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles Mullenweg; - WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that makes money by ho…
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The GPL, and WordPress's trademark policy, which up to a week ago stated " The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit."
That someone gives you the right to use their code doesn't mean they're required to be a free hosting provider for you.
I think it's obvious WPE wouldn't be in the clear with Matt even if they went and hosted a mirror/cache of the WP.org packages.
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Yeah, but according to the filing, Matt had Automattic transfer the ownership of the trademarks to the foundation, they had the foundation grant the exclusive licence back to Automattic. If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions, there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for both the ownership transfer and the licence grant agreement.
WordPress Foundation: Owns the trademark Automattic: Owns the commercial right to use and sell the license This is done because the WordPress Foundation is non-profit. The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a long time ago. You want to use the WordPress license? Then you'll have to buy it from Automattic.
Doesn't sound like. Most people are still confused.
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WPEngine has tons of developers working on the WordPress ecosystem. This contribution argument doesn't work with me. They're contributing plenty of hours into WordPress plugins that their competition also can use.
No they don't. They contribute 40 hours a week.
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Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-) Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
So in your opinion what's wrong with that code? To me it seems to be nicely documented and everything.
It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient.
Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time.
Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)
Edit: this guy said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827