WordPress.org bans WP Engine
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.
even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.
the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
Straight from the Wordpress trademark page that was just recently changed to talk shit about a competitor:
this is going to be just as flimsy of a defense as “mikerowesoft”
I am already running out of popcorn.
Of course not. They will (if it goes that far) point out that their use of WP is explicitly in line with the trademark holder's public guidance on that exact point.
You can't tell everybody that it's fine to use wording like that and then sue them when they do it.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Now it's been updated to say this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
It's pretty clear that WP Engine has been in compliance with the old trademark policy and that the new one is acknowledging that they don't have legal standing to demand anything about the WP abbreviation (not least because they waited so long to complain about the usage) so they're instead inserting a petulant and childish slight.
http://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpressf...
Essential Wordpress
Core Wordpress
Enterprise Wordpress
WP Engine is explicitly not doing that.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GYPsyoSbwAACO7X?format=jpg&name=...
https://www.godaddy.com/en-ph/hosting/wordpress-hosting
Or a recent hosting provider I interacted with in a 3rd world country:
https://client.absolutehosting.co.za/store/wordpress-hosting
Come now, this seems to be a huge abuse of "trademark" of a term. Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move. I'm gonna start adding it to my list... OpenAI, Mozilla Foundation, Wordpress.
Edit. Side note:
I looked up the Linux trademark usage guidelines. Looks like half the internet is infringing on this one too if you squint. So maybe this all boils down to a case of "Don't be a jerk" that some entities adhere to when it comes to protecting their trademark, whilst others like Automattic use it to bully competitors.
I get the "ick" factor here, but there doesn't really seem to be a better alternative. If "OpenSourceWare" isn't trademarked by non-profit "OpenSourceSoft", the options are either a) no trademark, and it's a free-for-all where the biggest marketing budget and SEO teams get the biggest return on mindshare and search results or b) Oracle gets the trademark and nobody else is allowed to use it.
Look at it this way - WordPress is the #1 platform for websites. It is a free, Open-source, and huge asset to the community. Are you going to shit on the guys who made it and gave it away because you have some sympathy for some overpriced, hosting company?
If the Wordpress team disappeared, it would be a tragedy. If WP Engine disappeared it would be nothing.
>For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy.
Which links to this page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark
Free and open source software does not, and has never, required giving up trademark rights. I think the GPLv3 is even explicit about this.
In the Windows case it's fair use of the trademark because you're reselling something you previously bought. That's not applicable here.
WordPress is open source software, but a hosting service has a variety of characteristics unrelated to the nominal software. Besides, WP Engine are disabling key features of the product: of course that's misleading.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.
In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".
Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.
They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.
I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).
Sounds like they might have a not-great ip lawyer.
Your don't have to claim WP to claim it's being marketed as an abbreviation for your trademark, within your market.
I'm not saying it's a winning argument, but better than whatever the legal framing/ posturing of 'WP isn't our TM' is. Bad PR, if not bad legal take.
>>>we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. Try using “wp” instead, or another variation...
Don't condone confusing ip policy if you don't want to end up with confusing product names, especially in a resurgence of 'the domain name is the product' of unlimited tlds.
Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.
I honestly wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries. From what I can tell, it's essentially the non-profit acting on commands from the for-profit.
Basically the equivalent in my mind to a "in-kind donation".
There is also the fact that WP Engine sponsored a WordPress Foundation event and then was kicked out of it because of this dispute. The WordPress foundation accepted 75k knowing what WP Engine was doing and then didn't honour the deal.
They're represented by Perkins Coie. Who, even as someone from the EU who doesn't do any legal stuff, I have heard of and know are very good. I think they'll be kind of loving this mess. Because even though this is a mess, they're going to get paid to deal with the mess.
How? There's exactly zero dollars of donations from Automattic in the Wordpress Foundation financials. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
(It would be quite defensible for Automattic to claim they're donating many millions in-kind every year, but they don't seem to be doing it.)
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Essentially laundering money through the 501c3 to try and negate taxes. In this case actual money never changed hands, but what is the financial value of cutting off your competitor from the theme/plugin repo?...
Not an insignificant amount.
There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.
Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.
Am I off?
there is a level of actions that are so bad that intent doesnt actually matter anymore. i would say matt has crossed that line here.
Not the best interview IMO since prime didn't have much time to prepare questions / topics, and so he is very much "firing from the hip" but you'll get to hear matt go into detail about this topic.
It's all in the GPL under "no warranty" and the license is attached to the WP source.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?
And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?
As far as I am aware, the WP.org”s (or is it the foundation?) actions are distasteful, but they are allowed to ban whomever they like.
Well certainly.
> and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
In this case that kind of sensitive information absolutely wouldn't be able to be redacted (successfully) because those conversations would be entirely germane.
Not directly, but they can enter it as evidence into the lawsuit, in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it. Absolutely parties try to get embarrassing information exposed to the media in this way. They only can do that if it is plausibly relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit-but internal conversations in which executives are attacking the company suing them very likely are.
Motions to seal evidence are routinely granted by courts in civil matters. Parties can try to get embarrassing information entered into the public record, but they have to convince a judge, and that’s often an uphill battle. Courts don’t like to be used as a tool for private parties to air the others’ dirty laundry.
But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.
It’s not clear to me that WordPress.org has done that. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask WP Engine to pay WordPress.org some kind of fair compensation for the infrastructure demands they induce.
That gets into a pretty.sticky situation real quick.
The fundamental question is: is the non profit going outside the boundary of its status?
I’m not fully convinced that’s the case even in the context of the for profit disagreements with its competitor.
If Automattic is an infrastructure vendor (in a technical sense at least) to WordPress.org, it’s still reasonable that Automattic doesn’t want to just give its competitors free infrastructure.
I own a hosting business that’s heavily built upon WordPress and even I — at a scale immensely smaller than WP Engine - CDN some of my critical plugins and themes myself. (For a lot of reasons.)
WP Engine is absolutely massive. The load they put on systems that they consume from isn’t trivial. Asking for remuneration from a competitor that is using your services, according to their means, isn’t anticompetitive.
The WP ecosystem needs mirrors anyway, but at this point I think it needs outright alternate repos, not under control of a8c in any way. This could be an attractive proposition to plugin/theme devs, because in this case, MM has been poisoning his own well for some time now (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511). What are the odds that MM will accept a patch to WP core that allows alternate plugin/theme stores?
At the rate things are going though, a hard fork of the GPL'd core is looking more attractive every day. It just needs a catchy name. ClassicPress is already out there, but ... meh. How about FreePress?
I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.
Wpengine doesn’t contribute to the core as much as they promised, and prohibits their employees to do so.
This is not how open source has or is supposed to work.
Doesn't really have anything to do with open source though. Haven't seen anything about matt/wordpress.org/Automattic trying to prevent them from using open source code.
Conclusion: This isn't about OSS, it's about money (and power).
Shamelessly, MM has dug himself a hole. If X is any indication, going forward there are few in the community who will trust him. A leader who isn't trusted is no leaser at all. Evidently he realizes this and is stuck doubling down on stupid. Rinse and repeat.
If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
I feel like this is a half empty half full kind of situation. Some people might think like you but others might view it as probably the most memorable keynote in Wordpress history (because if all the drama).
Automattic sent the cease and desist to WP Engine.
This is a remarkably bad plan from a legal perspective.
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/automattic/
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/
1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.
2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.
3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.
I think the fact those boundaries have been crossed will be a massive legal issue for WordPress.org and Automattic since they'll have problems proving they're two separate entities and they will have been using that as a charity as a tax write-off. What is the penalty for tax evasion where you create a fake charity to write tax off of? It's prison, right?
Also it seems wordpress.org kept their resources open to WPEngine until WPEngine sued wordpress.org[1] (not wordpress.com according to the blog post).
So if wordpress.org is getting sued, why would they keep their resources open to the litigant?
It feels confusing to me. The word "the" makes me explicitly think this is Wordpress themselves. They are "the" experts. WP Engine makes it pretty clear they are Wordpress. It is front and center. It has a different meaning than "Host your WordPress site with WordPress experts".
All that happened is that WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic. WordPress.org misrepresenting the situation is not a good look.
WPEngine sent a cease and desist letter addressed to, and targetting only, Matt Mullenweg and his for profit company Automattic. WPEngine are explicitly not targeting wordpress.org in the letter. You can read it here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Side note: wp.org is indeed mentioned a couple times in the letter but only when referencing Matt's blog post on the site, the trademark rules, and some technical information around the revisions feature. The "demands" part of the letter address Matt and Automattic exclusively.
Matt knows that an attack on dot org would rally everyone to his side, which is why he is repeating this lie over and over. He is trying to use the community as shield.
This is also (IMHO) why he shut off access to dot org. He wants WPEngine to be seen taking some sort of action against the community.
Matt is constantly shifting between "Matt from Automattic" and "Matt from the WP Foundation" wherever it suits him. It's sickening. He needs to be removed from the foundation immediately.
Open Source so that VS Codium exists but Codium can't access MS's extension store.
They will try to move towards enterprise infrastructure with v7 but will probably fail as their (third party) devs are not that good.
I’ve actually seen a lot of PHP code for Wordpress, wrote some, and the only way to get it right today is to make use of a GPT, cause their (WP’s) internals are so many and so weird and inconsistent sometimes.
I wonder are you very young? People were saying this a decade, even 15 years, ago
I think they’ve succeeded by staying stable with minimal large changes for 20 years and maintaining strong backward compatibility. Meanwhile the rest of the web chases the latest technology cycles, where everything needs to be redone every 5 years because there’s a new way to do things.
The developers who make WordPress understand and are pretty empathetic to their audience / user base, and don’t expect them to put in much work to install and maintain their website.
Other technologies seem to almost intentionally create backwards compatibilities in order to set user expectations that, yes you need to put in work to continue use our framework.
No chance this is personal.
The claims (trademark violation, no contributing anything back) seem pretty sensible and borne out in practice.
WordPress is an open source project stewarded by a foundation that set rules for its use. If you don't follow them there are consequences. As simple as that, really.
These rules (paying a license or contributing back) seem sensible too.
Normalizing people leeching off the work of other doesn't seem like a good approach.
Some people might disagree with the philosophy — perfectly fine! They can write their own blog engine and release it in a permissive open-source license and make copyrights freely available to anyone. This is a blog engine, not exactly antitrust material.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
> WordPress’s GPL code
Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...
The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.
Beyond that, Matt absolutely has beef with modifications that WP Engine has made to the free software, going so far as to say that these modifications mean that what they're offering is "not WordPress". Never mind that WordPress.com is likewise a bastardized modification—that's okay because it's "us" doing the modifying!
> This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
This kind of attitude is incompatible with the premise of Free Software, which places a strong emphasis on encouraging reuse and modification to suit user needs.
In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.
In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).
The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.
The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".
I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.
In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.
That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.
To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.
There is space for that, but it's not open source or free software, and the project should use a license that reflects that.
If anything, it is the indoctrination in Free Software that led many young people to believe that proprietary software is immoral. Coupled with zero-interest rates, this led to companies founded without sustainable business models. The companies making it work are usually doing so by selling products and services where the OSS parts are complementary and not the main product being sold, and it's a good thing they do.
I'd say that the doctrine part doesn't help at all.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"
> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
> [I hope] that the CEO dies a forever painful death involving a car […]
Full quote. This is ridiculous, and to me looks more than a little tongue in cheek.
Hoping for people's death isn't good, but this isn't a threat. It's an expression of frustration, and people think these things, and sometimes say them out loud. And there's a huge power imbalance here.
Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business.
But a service disruption like this is bad strategy.
WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over.
Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider.
And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.
My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is.
Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks.
It's about money.
All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days.
In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself.
But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately.
He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction.
To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.
As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way.
Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted.
I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation.
Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.
My thoughts are to the devs with clients on these platforms; they are going to take the heat for all the problems in place of the real disrupter.
WordPress has become so tacky and this drama is exacerbating the problem. I don't see a bright future for WordPress, unfortunately.
It’s based on Python/Django and has an excellent developer and user experience. They pay a lot of attention to detail, including a block-based content editor, similar to Gutenberg, and first class accessibility support.
If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them.
From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/
Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...
If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress.
I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.
"Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin
If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks.
However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.
This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it...
Isn't this more about infrastructure (wordpress.org)? All plugins are still downloadable and able to install via SFTP.
But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.
1. Creates an official policy that states the level of usage of the public WordPress services/resources which constitutes requiring a business relationship with the Foundation (e.g. N terabytes transferred per month)
2. Attach a dollar amount.
3. Inform WP-Engine that they're in violation of this new policy and they have N days to comply or their access will be terminated (where N is at least 90 but ideally 180/360).
Matt's recent interview with the Primeagen suggests that while "discussions" with WP-Engine go back years, he couldn't give a straight answer for whether other services may be vulnerable to the same retribution WP-Engine faced, specifically and quantifiably why WP-Engine received retribution while other entities don't, and if specific prior notice of the actions Automattic took was given to WP-Engine. Instead, it was vibey: A bunch of "well, they use a lot, server resources, our trademark, yeah other entities use a lot too, but those other entities give back, stuff, to the community, WP-Engine gives back some stuff, but not enough." Prime tried to get more out of him multiple times but it just ended with him saying "I'm sorry, I'm sick and really tired".
1. They will scrape the entire WordPress.org plugin registry (people are already circulating scrapers around Mastodon)
2. They will open their own separate plugin registry, with blackjack and hookers
3. They will update their mu-plugin to hook the WordPress autoupdater and point it to their own infrastructure on every site they host
They can do this because WordPress is GPL and so are all the plugins. GPL can't be revoked unless you fuck up a source release, which is genuinely hard to do in PHP. And WordPress is GPLv2+, meaning GPLv3 with its way more lenient revocation terms are available.
I assume at some point Automattic will insist that scraping WordPress.org is now illegal or something, and then every plugin author will have to go through an annoying process of claiming their WP Engine Plugin Registry entries and updating everything in two places, fracturing the community because of the FOSS world's most petty trademark fight.
With a lot of people not coming back to update all add-ons in multiple places so just a mess.
Fast forward this mess makes for a worse customer experience and people ditch WordPress for better CMSs.
Companies can't use proprietary software without the risk of being banned or refused a licence renewal either.
Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments)
WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments)
Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments)
Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments)
WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)
(Disclaimer: my submission and post. I am a WordPress core committer and built the REST API for it.)
Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid.
Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.
Since they offer competing services in the first place.
Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*OVEEYB4H...
WordPress is a GPL project.
services (like the plugin registry, but there are many more) cannot be GPL. they are served by someone and that someone pays for hosting/bandwidth/etc and that someone is free to stop providing that service (to one party or all together).
WPE is essentially DDOSing WP for free. Obviously that shit doesn't fly. Either pay up or get your own server and host your own shit.
If any one of us was hosting a FREE service and some corporation came around and hit us with hundreds of thousands of requests, we too would demand money or ban them. Any one of us. So I really, truly, don't understand why we're all sitting here having this conversation.
The real competitor in Automattics portfolio is Pressable. Who are currently running a poaching campaign on their frontpage.
"WordPress hosting" is a relatively new option on WordPress.com. Pressable is a more advanced WordPress hosting provider, built by Automattic.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
Personally I also don’t like that the .org suddenly becomes weaponized. If this can be done to WPE, it can be done to anyone else really.
Sure WP also has some freemium model, but I do not consider that shady.
Have you seen the Automattic CEO talk (link to YT in other comment in this thread). I dont think he's in shady business: he's releasing loads of source code under the GPL!
It's this kind of blurring of lines between Automattic and the foundation that has people very very concerned here.
Also, if open source companies wouldn't do it, some open source projects would never reach any kind of maturity if the company creating such project faces the competition who just live off the work of the original team who don't contribute back to the project.
It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.
> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?
I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.
So yeah, is WPE in the right to not give back?
At the heart of this is the same song of making money and the idea of fairness. I honestly don’t know the groundrules here.
The law, I have no idea in what direction this is going to go!
This question here goes straight to the heart of things.
WP.org is a 501(c)3 organization. Ostensibly, it has absolutely nothing to do with Automattic. Reality... appears to be somewhat different.
If there were compensation due, it would not be to Automattic.
WP.org has a board of directors, not a dictator. Ostensibly, Matt is the Chairman. Why would he be due compensation?
The fact that such questions even arise shows just how ... murky ... Matt/WP.org/WP.com/Automattic's interactions are.
- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free
- companies under $b have to pay $x
- companies under $c have to pay $y
Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)
If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.
It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.
> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server
Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.
WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.
How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL
GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.
Either you are a free license or not.
If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.
In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.
In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.
What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.
It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.
I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?
You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.
Unless you accidentally end up doing business with an asshole. Matt is definitely making himself look like a danger to do business with—maybe WP Engine just successfully baited him into acting against his community and killing trust and he's not actually as unhinged as he sounds here... but few people would be willing to bet money on that.
That's the point, they weren't doing business.
They were issuing presumably hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not offering a penny. You will get banned for that on absolutely any service. Any of them, GPL or not.
There's 8 billion people on this planet, from hundreds of different cultures. Everyone has different intuitions, different values, different cultural expectations.
I'm not saying the rules have to be hard rules or anything. But if you can't even articulate the basic shape of the rules, then it's really 100% on you when people don't follow the magic ideas in your head.
I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.
I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.
If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.
What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.
This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
It seems like that is not really up to me.
When Matt Mullenweg gets up one morning and does not like my commercial product for WP, he might think of me as an asshole and will try to extort money from my business or just ruin it just like he did here.
Hard rules might be fine to take care of things like these.
it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.
It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.
It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.
For example Sony sold more than 100 million units of PS4 and made billions of dollars from it and how much they contributed to the open source projects they've used in PS4? Take a look at OSS projects used in PS4: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/
Did they contribute anything? Did they contribute 100% enough or just 20% or 30%?
If the software is open sourced and if license allows you to do anything with it then you are indeed free to do anything with it including selling products which include OSS.
2. There is obviously a difference between "selling products that include OSS" and "selling OSS 1:1". It's not like Sony's firmware/dashboard is maintained by "OpenGamingConsoleDashboard" and they are selling a 95% repackage of that to their end users (also ignoring the hardware). This pertains to the software maintenance logistics layer and not the licensing layer. Sure, both in the Sony and WPEngine cases they are in the clear on the licensing, but that doesn't make for sustainable development of the underlying software. I'd also wager that if the OSS projects used in the PS4 would drum up enough of a social media stink, they'd have decent chances of getting some compensation (e.g. the TLDraw maintainers did that quite a few times successfully).
Ultimately it's a matter of common sense. Sure, if I leave out my "take one" bowl on Halloween and someone takes it all, there's no rules against that. But next year I might be more cautious and hand out the candy myself - now what?
If you've built a business off taking all my candy and reselling it, you're fucked! If you had just been less greedy and taken, say, 10 instead of the whole bowl I might not have cared.
I'm this case, the license explicitly allows everyone to use the software for free. I don't understand your candy analogies. If you're not OK with people using your software for free, use a commercial license (or a dual licensing model, or one of a hundred possible solutions other than a free license).
Has absolutely 0 to do with open source. The software was, and is, GPL.
This is about using free web APIs. Yes you will get banned for that, on absolutely any service. Don't believe me? Try it out.
Hell they're one of the only 2 companies that let you compile android with their firmware for their phones. They even have instructions on their site.
This is whatabouttism, but damn, they don't deserve this kinda talk.
Example: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/0abe05aeac29d997...
I just used Sony as an example to tinker what is the definition of contributing enough that Matt Mullenweg was talking about:https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/#:~:text=(To%20....)
I don't have anything against Sony.
Chromium is Open Source, but Google is not required to allow Add On store access (even if they tolerate it from chromium forks).
Some clarity would be nice.
* https://thephp.foundation/ one of three platinum level sponsors
* MySQL doesn't take sponsorships afaict
* https://mariadb.org/about/#stakeholders one of several silver sponsors of MariaDB
* https://x.com/SlexAxton/status/1839091643338862828 "I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor"However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.
The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.
This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.
Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.
I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.
However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.
Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.
(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)
Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business
This situation is not going to kill WP Engine.
They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.
Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.
If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...
I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.
Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
>It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
If you check Wordpress' Youtube channel, they uploaded the Q&A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine.
I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it.
>at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core.
Matt gave an interview to about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM and although he sounded very unprepared and showed no receipts, none of what he says sounds unreasonable.
A key point on the interview is that Matt has been trying to get WP Engine to contribute for years and they kept delaying on him. People called this "extortion," but in my view it's a way an open source project found to get a corporation that profits from open source to contribute. There is a "world-famous" trademark, and to use it you need to pay or contribute dev hours. He says various hosts had the same deal, and because he never had a problem with any of the other hosts, he ended up being "naive" and let WP Engine delay and delay for years because he didn't think they would just never agree to it. In the screenshots in the cease and desist by WP Engine you can even see messages from Matt including one where it sounds like WP Engine is telling him to set up a meeting next week instead of talking about it in the Q&A, to which he responds (paraphrased) "if you're saying next week you're saying no." Even up to the last minute he still tried to get an agreement, sending a photo of the audience, and got no favorable answer.
Ignoring the trademark violation allegations, and the whole "revisions" thing that some may think sounds ridiculous, there was a part he mentions Woocommerce has a Stripe code that gives part of the revenue to WP org, and WP Engine hacked the code to give the attribution to WP Engine, which means the money that would go to WP org (com?) goes to WP Engine. I think this is technically legal because it's GPL, but it doesn't look good if you're diverting millions of dollars that would go to WP org to yourself.
From what I've seen, it really feels like Matt tried everything he could to get a commercial entity to contribute to an open source project and now he's getting the blame because their customers are getting affected by it. It doesn't help that many who use Wordpress do not understand the separation between Wordpress, the source code (that WP Engine can still use), and the CDN that provides automatic updates (which WP Engine got banned from). The millions of WP Engine users using te CDN were costing WP org money that can now be invested in a different way. I've seen some even say a court could issue an injunction to force WP org to provide the updates for free. The "free ice cream" analogy Matt uses in the interview is really apt here.
If this goes to court I suppose allegations will start getting receipts behind them and we'll have a clearer view of what happened. To me, based on Matt's allegations, WP Engine is not being targeted for being a competitor like some say, but they have been given an exceptionally favorable treatment that was unjust to the other Wordpress hosts who were agreeing to pay for the trademark, and all of this was just WP org making things fair again.
In fact, Matt even says that if they do agree to contribute 8% of their revenue in cash or dev hours, they will get unbanned. I'm not sure if they will capitulate, but just the fact it isn't just "money" but "dev hours is okay" sounds to me that this isn't about money.
My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.
Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.
WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!
Revenue is a red herring. It is not an appropriate measure to determine if and how much one should contribute to an open source project.
Instead, we should measure the need to contribute by the burden one places on the project.
Do you request features or bug fixes? Contribute appropriately.
Do you request support? Contribute appropriately.
Do you simply copy, install, and run the existing software? No need to contribute.
If you prefer the capricious nature of the politics of social shaming instead of the rules based system of laws and courts, I guess that is being consistent even if the actual process is very inconsistent and unpredictable.
If not, then it’s not clear to me how you’re taking a philosophical stance about open source if you’re demanding payment. Those ideas don’t work together.
Where does the GPL state this requirement? It doesn't.
If WordPress doesn't like this, they should have licenced their software under the AGPL or some other licence with stronger copylefting.
Plenty of large commercial entities use BSD licenced software and make a fortune off the software, with little given in return. Take FreeBSD and the significant commercial operations it drives. They never whinge. Because that's the choice they made, and they stick to their principles.
Taking away access to those servers is one thing, doing it without warning putting millions of sites at risk is another.
WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.
First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.
They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.
Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.
If you write OS and put it out there for the world to use, you should be doing it because you want to _give_ to the world. you should not expect _anything_ in return. the is the essences of giving, to not expect something back.
if Matt wants WPEngine to require a contribution to WordPRess, then he should relicense it under a license that requires this or close the code and charge subscriptions.
what he is doing is giving a bad name the OS community in general. this is not how you act.
So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.
None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
EDIT: typos
We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on.
This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
I help out with Godot sometimes and it’s far more welcoming and low friction.
There’s a pretty standard way of fighting those out.
Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
The solution is to ask Company B to pay up (in cash or resources), and not be leeching.
Then don't make an open source product.
What you can't do is try to earn the goodwill that comes with open source, but also expect the profitability of a proprietary product.
If you want to sell software then sell software.
That’s why this action by Matt is ridiculous. WP Engine has grown the overall WP market through good product development and investment. That has produced positive effects for the many companies and people who make their money developing and supporting WP sites for clients.
Could be because of that missing part of "sharing together" replaced with "taking and not giving back anything in return"
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos...
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai...
Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.
There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution.
That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project.
Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.
WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.
If there are issues then Matt would do well to clearly articulate the problem.
But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.
Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.
Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.
But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …
If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.
We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog.
Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text.
Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem.
Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why.
The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.
There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578
There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this.
Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project.
Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest.
Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
Horrid look.
Akismet was (is?!) bundled with every fresh WP installation. That is a product by Automattic, so why is it bundled with the Open Source "product"? It's an unfair competitive advantage over every other company/person that provides a plugin for that. Nobody cared or was just feared to pick up that fight.
Drawing the line at WPEngine seems random, too. There are so many bigger or smaller competitors in that space, it's just somewhat random to pick them out and complain that they don't give back.
Lousy move.
The claims were made in an official letter to Automattic that included proof in the form of screenshots, and that was written by a legal professional[1]. I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.
The various disbarred folks from Trump’s 2020 legal team serve as a pretty effective counter example.
If we use the word “astronomical” to represent a percentage of profits, what word do we use to describe the profits?
> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
— https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/cease_de...
At some point, every bad behaviour in a software ecosystem affects other parties and even if his personal role does cause a conflict of interest all the things mentioned seems to point to a party that doesn't respect the ecosystem.
Reminds me of the whole Elastic search vs Amazon stuff that seems to have mellowed down now. https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...
Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
That's pretty much what happened here. I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Anyone is still free to use the source, but the services they provide are not free.
> Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service. Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
It's a good analogy. AWS does it a lot, but it does so with open source projects that do not have much paid services. Reading from the article, Automattic provides many services (possibly paid, in some freemium model).
I'd welcome if some projects manage to get AWS to give back. They do way too little if you ask me.
> I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Yes. Giving back could be a deal that involves money.
So WordPress code is FOSS, so you can theoretically change the code, except when you change the line that will keep revisions to cut your costs, if you do that he will yell at you.
WordPress' repository is free as in beer, you can download all you want without paying. Heck, even WP code is setup so it downloads from there by default. Except when you happen to host in a company that has a very specific set of issues (alleged trademark issues + profits over a particular threshold + not giving back to community; other companies who have only one of those issues but not all of them are fine), then he'll block you.
The main issue here is the lack of a clear contract of what you can or cannot do. Seems like he is just figuring out the rules along the way. This gives to external observers the impression that the whole thing is unreliable.
Not too long ago you would pay for disks containing open source software.
Using the org website to make a nasty post slandering WPE. Spreading it via the built-in news metabox on every WordPress dashboard. The org's plugin repository to block WPE's domains/IPs specifically.
That's a single person wielding power in his domain, maybe all legal, but the org should be making decisions as a group and community.
I’m really interested to see how this plays out.
Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhib...
But as you'll read, there is so much murkiness to this that a mud bath would be positively transparent. The .org is not the foundation, but the foundation says that it pays for the .org, the .org is not the foundation but lives on the foundation's AS.
I doubt much if anything will happen, but all this seems to be doing to me is shining a light on how the distinction between Matt, Automattic, WP.org, WPF, and WP.com all vary depending on Matt's needs, wants and priorities on any given day.
Apart from that - major turbulences in the WP and in general CMS world could be a positive thing. Maybe it's time for a new player in the space. Wordpress absolute dominance for basically decades kind of sucks air out of the space for competitors, there are some like Ghost and others but they are barely crawling compared to WP market share. Apart from that even fork within WP itself wouldn't necessary be a bad thing - some decisions and direction of the WP itself are questionable looking from developer standpoint like bringing to life insanely complicated React-based toolkit as WP editor building block, archaic conventions in the PHP codebase, lack of standardized patterns and guidelines for plugins creation and many more.
Personally I would love to have PHP-based CMS, built either based on Symphony or Laravel with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and resonable market share.
1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com.
2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.
WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed.
But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims.
Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.
But this does not mean W.ORG has to keep providing these free services to you and your customers, and it does not mean you are free to use trademarks in a misleading way.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
Someone who is in the market for Wordpress hosting is almost certainly aware they have Wordpress and that they need hosting for it. Wordpress is a nominative use to refer to the entity, and Core is an adjective which in context means central.
Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself? That would be the standard. Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis.
Yes.
"Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis."
Wordpress.com has a license to use the Wordpress trademark. I don't believe we should be comparing Wordpress.com to WP Engine here.
So yeah, from my perspective there's a real case for confusion of marks here.
I have no opinion about the drama one way or the other, just providing a datum.
Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.
They are not entitled to them, but Wordpress has previously decided to offer those services. Wordpress donors most probably expected that these services will continue to be provided to anyone.
The controversial part is that now they apparently establish a policy that Matt Mullenweg (the owner of for-profit Wordpress.com) can arbitrarily ban competitors in case he doesn't like them.
I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
Instead, people are encouraged to donate to the Foundation, which helps with the development of WordPress the software and organizes things like WordCamps.
The blurb on the donation page reads:
> Money raised by the WordPress Foundation will be used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs.
“Supported software projects” is a link that leads to a page that lists these software projects:
- WordPress
- WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes
- bbPress
- BuddyPress
It sure looks like the WordPress infra and plugins are supported by the donations from the WordPress.org footer link. If the money is going elsewhere, where is it going?
%rwhois V-1.5:003eff:00 rwhois.singlehop.com (by Network Solutions, Inc. V-1.5.9.5)
network:Class-Name:network
network:ID:ORG-SINGL-8.198-143-164-0/24
network:Auth-Area:198.143.128.0/18
network:IP-Network:198.143.164.0/24 network:Street-Address:660 4TH ST # 119
network:City:SAN FRANCISCO
network:State:CA
network:Postal-Code:94107
network:Country-Code:US
network:Tech-Contact;I:NETWO1546-ARIN
network:Admin-Contact;I:NETWO1546-ARIN
network:Abuse-Contact;I:ABUSE2492-ARIN
network:Created:20171214
network:Updated:20171214And, quick side note, no one from Automattic or WordPress Foundation would ever misspell WordPress!
What about all of these: "user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase" – are all of those services provided by WordPress.org without funding from WordPress foundation?
As far as I am aware, this is correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#WordPress_Foundati...
I asked how WordPress.org is funded and will get details on that but I can tell you WordPress.org is not part of the foundation.
Open source project and the WordPress trademark are owned the WordPress Foundation. WordPress.org has a license to use the name from the Foundation, as does Automattic.
> Matt Mullenweg, the director of the WordPress Foundation, has been directly involved in the creation of, or coordination of volunteers around, a number of WordPress projects that espouse the core philosophy
I'll admit this might sound confusing. Foundation came years after some of these projects were already established.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/contact/
says "a violation of our domain policy." and links to wordpress.org, why would their domain policy be on a site that isn't theirs?
And then wordpress.org says "For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark", how can wordpress.org say "our" if the foundation owns the WordPress trademark and .org is not run by the foundation?
> Projects page of the Foundation (https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/) does not say those projects belong to the Foundation. It states:
But their site does say that money raised will be "used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs." and links to the projects page that contains wordpress.org... but you said it isn't funded by the donations from the foundation
Wordpress.org which is directly controlled by Matt Mullenweg
Automattic (ie wordpress.com) whose CEO is Matt Mullenweg
and The WordPress Foundation which is run by (checks notes) Matt Mullenweg
Yet you seem to think we should treat all three of those entities (Matts?) as separate and independant
The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.
I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.
wordpress.com locks people in, making it hard to later migrate to the open source version of WordPress.
Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.
(Nice username, btw!)
I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations).
I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).
I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage:
[quote]
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software.
...
People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
[/quote]
After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software.
Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core.
I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.
It’s like a person who uses ad block saying they won’t watch YouTube if google breaks the ad blocking. That is exactly what they want, you have negative value.
Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.
$log = $HTTP_POST_VARS["log"];
<..>
$user_login=$log;
<..>
SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM $tableusers WHERE user_login = '$user_login' AND MD5(user_pass) = '$password'
Some quality 2003 code :)
They got a lot of ideas from Drupal, Tumbler, SquareSpace, Ghost, Headless CMSes, etc.
https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...
Matt's team are upset because they only make tens of millions, whereas purportedly, WP-engine makes hundreds of millions. Matt gives back much more than WP-engine.
All their clients are businesses also making money through their WordPress-hosted websites.
I don't think there is a problem with open source and viability. It is raining money.
It's simply an in-house fight over inequities in giving back to the open source pot of gold.
Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend?
PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.
This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?
Petty, and befitting
WP is trash, always has been
WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand
He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best.
He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do").
He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.
Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?
I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"
How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
WP Engine is no different from the million hostings that auto-install WordPress and “abuse” their resources.
Google, Amazon, you name it do this infinite times a day with crawlers.
If you build a business on taking resources from some public source, on a large scale, you could very well be out of a business at any time. This has been the case for a long, long time. And nobody seems to take issue with it.
Is it their right? Sure. I don’t think you’d be here defending them though.
free software gives 4 freedoms. none of them say about contributing back. they only talk about freedom of source code.
same for OSI approved licenses. they are either permissive, MIT aka, do whatever you want or like AGPL provide source code but none that i can think of forces downstream users to contribute back to main.
..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org.
This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software.
SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management.
I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.
If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability).
In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off.
Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested.
Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good.
Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away.
But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person.
Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal.
Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block.
> But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they?
Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.
Right, discrimination based on protected classes is illegal.
Discrimination based on other needs is not illegal, and is in fact how all businesses work. They discriminate based on income, based on how you're dressed, based on how nice you are.
> This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws.
Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level. Sorry, in my opinion it's not even close to comparable.
If Amazon was your competitor and they also issued hundreds of thousands of requests to one of your FREE APIs would you foot the bill? Fat chance, right? That's what we're talking about here.
Sure, the debate is because its not really believable that that was happening, and sounds like a pretense.
> If Amazon was your competitor
That's the core dispute though. WPEngine is not a competitor of word press foundation. It is a competitor of automattic. For word press foundation to treat competitors to automattic as competitors to themselves seems highly unethical and possibly a violation of fiduciary duty.
I imagine if this was the real issue, then WPEngine could probably sort out some fair solution to not use more than their fair share. I dont know much about this ecosystem but surely a caching proxy is not hard to setup.
However reading between the lines, it sounds like the real issue is that WPEngine is more succesful which is making other players jealous, who are using their control over other parts of the ecosystem to give WPEngine the middle finger. In such a case its not really about resourse usage.
They were asked to contribute back, either in cash or in people hours and they refused.
That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.