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Comment by Donzo | Hacker News Reader

They are not acquiring the company that maintains the open source CMS known as WordPress, which is also estimated to power 24% of websites on the Internet.

They are developing free, probably open source, plugins and themes for WordPress. Also they stated that they will help develop the supported AMP plugin.

That's great. Google will make it much better. It needs help right now.

I just don't understand why people are snubbing and thumbing their noses at Google for contributing their world-class resources to making free, open source software better.

Sure, their interests align with getting a foothold in this ecosystem, but I don't think their play is to poison WordPress.

Not that your wrong for being suspicious of their motives in general. They have broken some pretty cool stuff.

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I have reservations since I spent about 4 years doing backend PHP development, and IIRC when I thought of applying at Google I found that they actively block PHP for in-house projects. WP internals being PHP... I think you get the idea. Who's to say after they have established a foothold they won't push to run WP on the v8 engine and write out PHP, a language they're actively hostile to?

I've never done any WP development, but my understanding is that WP core/internals are essentially OK, but plugins have gaping security holes. I think internals are messy because WP shares the PHP philosophy of avoiding major breaking changes but their front end tooling is probably less mature (because Jesus webpack, 4 major versions in as many years, wtf)

Anyway, I hope we have reason to be optimistic here, but it looks like the beginning of something awful

> WP internals being PHP... I think you get the idea. Who's to say after they have established a foothold they won't push to run WP on the v8 engine and write out PHP, a language they're actively hostile to?

The thing is that there would be no point in doing so (which, admittedly, hasn't stopped Google before).

Right now Google needs WordPress. Without WordPress, where is Google going to place ad spots? Facebook? And WordPress has PHP as a massive underestimated advantage - every Tom, Dick and Harry can spend 5 minutes to install WordPress on a $5 a month shared-hosting plan, something no Ruby/Rust/Go/Java/C++/Node/Erlang/Fashionable-Language-Of-The-Week can do.

With respect, your comment is not particularly well-informed concerning either PHP or WordPress. WP is not written in PHP in any modern sense of that term. They got suckered into maintaining backwards compatibility with an API written before PHP had support for classes. The codebase is entirely procedural, and cannot be modernized. WP internals are frozen in time in 2001, and WP development does not resemble modern PHP development, which has reasonably good tooling.

So, the good thing is that Google will not push WP to run on an alternate language, because the entire value of the project is its API compatibility. That's also the bad thing.

Because contributing world-class resources to projects outside their ecosystem was sometimes the first step of how they and other companies acquired, ran into the ground, then shuttered otherwise successful businesses. This comment is not an attack against in you in any way, shape, or form, but an honest reply to your question.

It's ok. I appreciate your position and your reply, as well as your desire to defend good things.

I think it's important to note here that WordPress is a project, not a business or a company. I don't think Google is trying to break a community supported product that powers 24% of the web. Sure, build better doors and windows to their products. I don't see that as a bad thing. I happen to like Google, as do a large number of Internet publishers. Many of us will appreciate these efforts.

Can you give concrete examples of Google doing this? (acquiring a company just to shut it down, not using its technology)

Bufferbox is close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BufferBox . However, I did not say "acquiring a company just to shut it down, not using its technology" I said "ran into the ground".

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