this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
245 points (96.2% liked)
People Twitter
5270 readers
677 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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!
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.
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.