491–500 of 717 posts
If there's a solid legal argument from either side, let dispassionate legal teams deal with it in a dignified manner.
As someone who defaults to wordpress as the bedrock of new projects, this instability is a massive turn off.
I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort…
There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
HN has reached a point where if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you will be treated worse than if you were simply doing bad stuff by default. WPEngine is not some mom and pop shop. The courts will decide whether WPEngine or Automattic is in the wrong here. But Automattic's contribution to Wordpress and the ecosystem simply dwarf WPEngine. Now for their crime of being champions of Open Source they wi…
you didn't read the filing and it shows
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Complaints usually are, yes. I'm not a lawyer, but each one I've read has been a bit over the top and it feels like they're written as much for public consumption as they are for the judge. Maybe it's with the jury in mind?
The jury doesn't usually read the complaint. However, a lot of the words you see as dramatic have specific legal meanings. In this case "relied on promises" is in the language of the tort he is suing over. I don't think the "true champion" sentence has a specific meaning, but it is definitely written to imply that WPE enhanced the value of the WordPress brand.
I don't think it's just legal language—I've read plenty of court opinions too, some dramatic, some not. Complaints seem particular prone to the dramatic.
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Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP Engine's conduct. However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites. To be entirely blunt it's all damage contr…
> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
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No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years as a professional software engineer), at least the portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are lack of data normalization (and not in a performance optimizing way), template includes that depend directly on order of inclusion and variables in other templates, very little code isolation, and PH…
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If the parent poster is secretly Linus Torvalds, do you walk away in shame because he HAS done a project with better engineering? Or are the criticisms, perhaps, objectively valid or invalid, and worth engaging with regardless of the merits of the person making the criticisms?
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> According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. They could have give a warning 20 months ago that this may happen and then this would not be a thing.
Yea, WPE should have done that.
This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome, whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it. It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few extra dollars. He knew going in that this would…
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No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years as a professional software engineer), at least the portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are lack of data normalization (and not in a performance optimizing way), template includes that depend directly on order of inclusion and variables in other templates, very little code isolation, and PH…
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For years, wordpress stored user session data in 'wp_options'. Moderately trafficked sites needed to come up with regular purging hacks to 'clean' their wp_options table. Why? Session data is not an 'option', it's... session data. Make a database table called 'wp_sessions'. Transient 'cached' data also... in 'wp_options'. This was not an example of 'good engineering'.
This is just one of many examples of suboptimal tech decisions. Some have been mitigated, updated or otherwise 'fixed' over the years, so they may not be relevant any longer. It's a very popular and widely used platform despite some poor development and engineering choices, and perhaps even in some cases because of these poor choices, but that doesn't make them good engineering.
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The entire thing makes money and serves the purposes of people using it even for free. It's a well-engineered product whether you want to accept it or not. Unlike more than half of the tech world that's unprofitable and is just a fart in the wind of tech memory.
No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years as a professional software engineer), at least the portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are lack of data normalization (and not in a performance optimizing way), template includes that depend directly on order of inclusion and variables in other templates, very little code isolation, and PH…
Although I think the exception there is security (and yes I know many will say clean and well engineered code is secure code). Security has to be solid or it will impact too many people negatively.