this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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As a career WordPress developer, I fully support WordPress’s stance on this issue. It’s unreasonable for a company to siphon resources from a non-profit to fuel their own hosting business.
For smaller companies, lacking the ability to manage their own updates or CI/CD processes is understandable. But WPEngine is a large organization—they have the resources and capacity to handle these issues in-house. They could have easily avoided this situation without turning it into a turf war.
Edit: I see the WPEngine fans have arrived. Feel free to downvote, but that doesn’t make you right!
While WP Engine is in the wrong ethically, it doesn't make what Matt is doing right.
The issue is that Matt is showing that he can impose any rules he wants on anyone who he doesn't agree with. It's an authoritarian behavior that concerns everyone, not just WP Engine.
More importantly, it is petty and childish behavior as seen in his posts. How can anyone trust a man-child like that with an important piece of infrastructure.
He did all of this during the last day of a conference.
So rather than inspiring the WordPress community to push forward and do good things, he spent an hour just antagonizing and shaming companies that literally sponsored the conference.
This is like when Elon Musk cursed out advertisers on Twitter.
Sponsoring a conference is just buying an ad, not actually supporting anything
You also don't get to randomly change license terms because you're having a childish meltdown because someone earns money with an open source product while according to the terms of the license of the said product.
You also don't steal code from a user of your platform and maliciously redirect to your fork.
This is not about WPE vs Matt's lack of brain cells. This is also not about hardlining on what's open source or not. But Matt needs to lose this fight, not only because of his decisions, but because if he wins, he not only successfully burned down WordPress, but the open source ecosystem as a whole.
If you publish something with a license that allows people to earn money without paying a share to you, don't be butthurt if people won't do that. And if you don't want that - change the license properly and carry the consequences.
What on Earth are you on about? This has nothing to do with licensing. The issue is a business using another organization’s resources without paying for it, all while earning a profit for themselves.
This isn't about open source, personal attacks, or "brain cells." It’s about fairness and the responsible use of resources. WPEngine is a profitable company that has the means to manage its own infrastructure instead of relying on WordPress.org’s updates system. If you're going to run a business that depends on open-source software, there’s an expectation of contributing back or, at the very least, not exploiting the resources of a non-profit.
So let’s focus on the actual problem: a large company exploiting a shared ecosystem to run a commercial service.
From what I gathered, it is absolutely a question of licensing.
Wordpress is gpl so anybody can host it and provide hosting for others. WPEngine does make money like that and that seemed to rub matt the wrong way.
So he requested more involvement from wpe, claiming they do none (factually false). Then they started trying to extort wpe using trademark as an excuse (even changing the trademark page to reflect their new stance), while also smearing them on the official channels of the project. I'm also skipping the childish behavior of blocking anybody that could be related to wpe from interacting on the official wp.org site, then using this self inflicted wound to say one of WPE plugin is insecure (because they couldn't publish the update) and doing an hostile takeover of it.
WPE is totally within their rights to use the wp software without giving a cent back to Matt. If WP wanted payment for the infrastructure they provide on the .org site, they can change the rules to require commercial entities to pay for it (which they totally could do, but that would hurt the other players in the ecosystem). If they had a (real) trademark issue it would have been resolved under closed doors by lawyers.
No, there are no expectations of contributing. It would be worded in the license otherwise (the only expectation of giving back in the gpl is that you publish the changes you did to your users). And WordPress.org is not the non profit but is run by the for-profit company that Matt is the CEO of.
Like automatic is doing with wordpress? Don't they profit from other devs/companies publishing plugins for them to use on their platform? (Actually not opposed to that, that's the game of open source, but it's a bit hypocritical to only cry when it doesn't serve them).
Edit: From your original comment:
Yes, then why did Matt turn this into a turf war? He totally expected the community to take his side and turned it into a shit slinging show for all of us to enjoy.
You do realize, mullenberg is also owner of automattic? A large WordPress hosting provider just like wpengine?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/20/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/
He has some points, mullenberg, but the fact that he's one of three really only active heads of WordPress.org and ceo of automattic, which has wpengine as its direct competitor, just tastes foul.
Sorry, but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's absolutely and only a licensing issue, and as a user of open source software you are obligated to do what the license states. WordPress is licensed under GPL, which explicitly allows software being run for any purposes, explicitly including commercial purposes. The giving back part would come into play if WPE would use WordPress as part of their own software - which they don't.
WPE did what the license, and therefore Matt and Automattic allowed them to. Matt decided to try and literally extort money from them, before going on his fully fledged meltdown.
Whether WPEs business model is morally questionable is irrelevant. They did play by the rules. Matt did not.
And the situation is not new, as far as I remember redis was the last big player in that situation. But they also did play by the rules, they changed their license starting from a given version, made big hosters that made money by redis-as-a-service pay for using redis, and took the L like grown ups by losing their FOSS community and having valkey as a hard fork and direct competitor now. No drama, no meltdowns, no shit storms and no lawyers involved.
That's how I see it exactly. Matt, as one of few people in the world with the voice and reach to do so, is trying to protect and help support the WordPress ecosystem.
Let's not forget to follow the money, obviously WPE and Silver lake are going to do everything in their power to make him, and by association, anything he's a part of, look like the bad guy.
Didn't wordpress sell their stake in wp engine to silver lake?
Seems weird to get upset about it now
No need for WPE to do anything for him to look like the bad guy imho
Reasonable. I do disagree with the ACF redirect, but not cloning it. That was a dumb move. Also, could have been an open letter to the community or something, not the quick (seemingly) retaliatory moves
The ACF takeover is the cherry on top for me. Fork it all you want, but to force users to upgrade to your version looks bad on them. That's literally a supply chain attack and they have shown to be willing to do whatever they want to their users.
You're right, but matt is still doing this because he's a turd who saw musk'd antics and went "me too!!"
If this was just a battle about a big company going after open-source branding, it's pretty easy to see the sides. But this is a guy who ripped into a competitor (which btw, has sponsored MANY WordPress conferences and provided tooling/fund for things outside of WordPress core) and fractured the community significantly.
Honestly I don't GAF about WPengine. But Matt makes money off of WordPress too. And his actions led to 1/10 of his company quitting.
I'm pissed that as a open-source developer, Matt has pulled the non-profit open-source project into this mess, when he owns a FOR-PROFIT company that would benefit from WPEngine failing.
Matt needs to step down. WordPress as a open-source project needs to be in the hands of people who want to drive the mission forward in a non-sleazy way.