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Matt seems incapable of clearly separating his roles as:
Person involved with WP foundation
Person who is head of Automattic
Person who contributes/whatever to wordpress
This is highly dangerous from a legal/conflicts of interest perspective, and will result in problems for the Foundation, and the Community, and for Matt.
I don't support it because it's private equity grab or whatever, instead i don't support it because it's dangerous, arguably highly unethical, and appears like using your power against a competitor you don't like more than it looks like "trying to save the open source community from a private equity grab"
He could easily solve all of these things by recusing from actions the foundation considers against his company's competitors, etc.
That would be the clearly ethical thing to do. Instead he doubles down and appears to use all power available to him to stomp out a company that is the main competition for his business.
It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.
If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day.
Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.
If you choose to accept all comers, you get to accept all comers. If you decide to then boycott one specific group, particularly when it is a competitor of the person announcing the boycott, it may in fact be illegal.
This is easily solved by having principles ahead of time and adhering to them (IE we only serve people/companies meeting the following criteria). This did not happen here - instead they have applied a boycott to a specific group after the person involved threatened them as competitor.
Look up "concerted refusal to deal", etc.
Incorrect, you just made this up. I can individually ban people whenever I want, however I want, because I own the server and it's MY resources.
If I setup a free lemonade stand and you request 5,000 cups of lemonade, yes I can turn you away. And I will.
> instead they have applied a boycott
Incorrect, because your thinking is backwards. A boycott is a refusal to buy, not sell. There's no boycott here.
It's also not illegal, and that should be obvious. Not only is it not illegal, I don't even think its unethical.
You don't want to know, that's fine.
But to say "i just made it up" is beyond silly. I don't have an urge to make up anything to win internet points. If i did I'd be on reddit :)
I'm not gonna continue this since it's clear you aren't interested in actually learning anything as much as winning an argument. That's not interesting at all, and not what HN is for.
This is even true in a general case. I bet you've been to a cafe with a sign that says "we're allowed to turn away any customer blah blah blah". Well, they are. There's some limitations like protected classes but it's true.
You're not obligated to provide customers with a product if you don't have a contract stating that. This also applies to free services. I have a server, I can ban your IP if I want. Maybe I think you're using too many resources, or maybe I just think you're ugly.
There's absolutely zero anti-trust shenanigans here. Yes, they are a direct competitor HOWEVER - you are not obligated to provide free resources to your competition. I'm guessing we're talking on the order of hundreds of thousands of requests a day, that costs money.
They tried to come to an agreement but WPE seems to be under the impression they should get free server access without spending a dime. Wordpress said no, and here we are.
I'm just going to suggest you stop trying to play lawyer.
"You're 100% allowed to IP ban people individually. There's no law anywhere that says otherwise."
You are not allowed in all cases. There are plenty of laws that, applied, consider it unfair competition. I told you this already, perhaps look it up? When it comes to the government, it can be (in the US) a first amendment violation as well depending on circumstances. See recent supreme court cases.
If you want to know how things legally are, maybe listen to people who actually know what they are? Or do your own research, of course (lol), but if you do that, please bother to law and cases the parts that you think are making your arguments for you so that someone can help correct the parts that you get wrong.
I have no idea why so many people feel a strong urge to argue instead of learn.
I'm not arguing that they are obligated to provide free services. What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor. Also, this was without any announcement and clearly intent on interrupting the service for mostly unrelated third parties (namely WPEngines customers), just to hurt WPEngine.
As to them being hostile to negotiation, we don't know what happened behind close doors. But from the facts that were publicly presented, Matt wanted an amount of money, has (so far) not presented any reasonable legal basis for it and has overall been pretty emotional, so I do believe WPEngine when they claim that the demand was unreasonable and in bad faith on his side.
If this would have been a calm announcement that WP will cede any free hosting services to for-profit WordPress resellers, with a reasonable timeline for migration, he would have my full support. Maybe I could even get behind singling out WPEngine, if the case was solid. But the way this happens, Matt just looks like the bad guy.
> If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege.
But someone allows free passage on a toll bridge for everyone and suddenly decides to just deny your transport business specifically and publicly insult you, it looks a bit different. Especially if the owner of the bridge just happens to run a competitor for your business, things do look a bit fishy. I mean, fair enough, but this move was clearly intended for maximum damage and someone doing that does not at all look like the reasonable party, sorry.
Or, to rephrase:
They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.
Which, when you phrase it that way, not only sounds reasonable, it sounds obvious.
What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers. Using your free resources is expensive. Like, money expensive.
This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?
Get real. You would 100% do the same thing in that situation.
Well, I'm not really seeing the evidence for abuse, to be honest. They were using these resources like any other WP hoster.
> What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers.
As are Automattic, Pressable and many others.
> This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?
This is painting the case in a way that I don't see supported by the presented facts. Just to be clear:
If I provide a free API and Amazon suddenly starts using it, increasing my expenses by an order of magnitude, then yes, I'd block them immediately.
If, however, my API is used by millions of customers, advertised as free and some percentage of these requests are sent by Amazon-hosted versions of my software, the situation would be quite different. I understand the intention of not wanting to foot the bill of a competitor, but in that case it does not seem unreasonable at all to give prior notice, even if just for a few days.
The way you paint the situation implies that WPEngine was suddenly DDOS'ing the API and required an immediate, unannounced blockage. But, from the facts presented, this doesn't seem to be the case at all. Also, just to be clear, this blockage affected uninvolved third parties - if this was just affecting the company, I'd probably have no compassion for WPEngine. But technically they actually blocked people and companies who bought hosted WP from WPE and a little leniency would have been a _much_ better look for Automattic.
Also, just to be clear - this API was provided by the WordPress Foundation, which is not a competitor of WPE. Automattic is. This seems like a major conflict of interest.
I do get Matts motivation of not wanting to provide free services for a company he regards as really bad, but the way this was handled in terms of public communication, shaky legal accusations, actions with uncalled for immediacy and overall emotional language is just not a good look. This could have been and should have been handled much more professionally, at least in my opinion.