WordPress Drama: From the Sidelines
eric.mann.blog
eric.mann.blog
Automattic cut off API access for users who hosted on WPE. Let that be very clear: Automattic's position is that you can install WordPress on any server and get updates and plugins, so long as it's not WPE's servers. This is Automattic trying to extract rent from the people hosting the servers and preinstalling the software.
There are many issues with how this was handled but this isn't one of them.
and WP.org isn't being targeted at all by WP Engine.
> The analogy with AWS doesn't work because with WP money doesn't change hands. WP Engine or their users aren't paying for the services provided by WordPress.org and these are services that cost money for continued hosting.
First of all, the analogy is very good imo.
Amazon in this case is WP.com, Windows would be WP.org. They are supposed to be completely separate legal entities. Now on to your "point"
> users aren't paying for the services
Neither are people hosting it on WP.com (Automattic).
Automattic is supposed to be a completely separate legal entity. Is Automattic (again wp.COM, not ORG) paying wp.ORG for this access to the wp.ORG theme/plugin API in a way that can be verified? Is this a requirement for everyone hosting WP now? What are the API rate costs and where do you pay?
> There are many issues with how this was handled but this isn't one of them.
Yes, this is absolutely one of them. Is wp.ORG and wp.COM the same company or not. Because either way, it smells like a 501c3 getting stripped.
And this issue of independence is separate, don't move the discussion...
Why is WP.org obligated to provide free services to WP Engine and their users? Why the entitlement?
If wp.org is part of the foundation, then they have a legally binding mission, and "acting in Automattic's strategic interests" is not in there. If they're not, then a8c is intentionally obfuscating their ownership of wp.org, thus placing the credibility and legal status of the foundation in jeopardy.
It is not.
> a8c is intentionally obfuscating their ownership of wp.org
Automattic (my employer) does not own WordPress.org
There is no obligation on WordPress.org's part to provide free services to WP Engine. WP Engine uses trademarks in misleading ways while WordPress.org has a license from WPF to use the trademark.
I really think your employer is lying to you about this. The Automattic CEO made an official WordPress.org announcement that the .org was taking action against WP Engine on September 25 in response to legal threats. WP Engine says - and neither Automattic nor WordPress.org have produced evidence to the contrary - that the only legal threat they've made was their public one to Automattic on September 23. This clearly implies to me that Mullenweg is operating WordPress.org as an extension of Automattic and its business interests, regardless of what official ownership records might say.
Think about the questions I asked about this.
Why did I ask for API PRICING if I think anyone is entitled to it for free?
Stop trying to move the goalposts yourself. I never once said they were "obligated to provide free services" I asked where the pricing info is, since they clearly don't want to provide it for free..... or else they are being used to further a commercial entities fight...
Reading comprehension is easy to use.
Your response ignores many things:
1. WP.org is supposedly NOT part of the foundation, but something of Matt/Automattic's generosity.
2. Despite this, solicits donations that seemingly go to the foundation.
3. Despite this, is hosted on the foundation's AS number.
4. WP.org may not be under obligation to provide services, but when it chooses to discontinue services to one independent for profit user of the open source software, but not to another ostensibly independent for profit user of the open source software that just so happens to be owned by the person donating the services, then there is a conflict.
5. When the open source software, which has a hard coded news feed source that is mostly written by said owner, and this is used to post articles disparaging that other company, directly to their customers, this is also a conflict.
And you're saying that they targeted one user specifically ... I say, where's the problem?
To make a proper analogy, if Google abused Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, shouldn't these non-profits have the power to ban one specific user from abusing their free services?
And yes, Automattic pays WP.org's bills. I would prefer independence ... maybe if more companies contributed, that would happen.
WordPress hard codes their own URLs in their software. They don't have published pricing. There's no criteria for who should have to pay unless they're WPE.
By the argument you're making, what makes it okay for anyone to run WordPress on a server without the host of that server paying a fee to WordPress? There's nothing that sets WPE apart from any other service out there that hosts WordPress except that Matt M decided he's on a crusade.
Why should WPE pay? They are hosting software on behalf of their users. It's (as far as we know) just stock WordPress. Should linode or Hetzner be forced to pay for their users to host WordPress on their servers? The only difference here is that WPE preinstalls WordPress for the user.
And to my point, the person who benefits is the end user, not WPE. WPE benefits in so far as their customers get to benefit from these services. But WPE isn't adding URLs to WordPress.org, that's what the software hard codes. So the truth is that yes, WordPress is trying to extract rent, because they gladly let anyone run their software on any server except WPE, and that's the case because they're demanding fees (which are completely arbitrary).
$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main
deb http://cdn-aws.deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates mainI know from personal experience that Canonical choose to run mirrors for some clouds, on those clouds, for example.
Well, far as I know, WP has always been a mess ;)
> Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project
Wasn't it forked from 2/cafelog? Anyway, Automattic is also holder of the .blog TLD so better don't mess with Matt I guess ..,
Disclosures: I worked for Six Apart (makers of MT) although my employment was a while after all this; and later I worked for Tumblr, but well before Automattic acquired them.
I found Matt’s stance a bit confusing in areas but admit it may just be too early in the morning for me to process.
Anything Matt says publicly should be viewed in contrast to the texts he was sending to WP Engine. It’s clear that his public spin on the situation didn’t match the dirty games he was playing with them via text and via actions with the WordPress services.
I think he’s getting a lot of benefit of the doubt from people who have seen his name across the Internet for years, but getting a peak behind the curtain at his texts really shattered any ideas I had about how trustworthy he is.
Claims that have been not at all in evidence this week. He's applying his "scorched earth nuclear approach" on his next door neighbor, forgetting a few things about nuclear warfare...
I once had someone strategically edit and delete some of their GitHub comments to make me look like an asshole (before GitHub showed you this). Their only motivation was "revenge" for denying a feature request (after which they got all pissy, I told him off, and then a few months later he edited things to make it look like I was being highly abrasive to random people).
What I'm trying to say is: I wouldn't be so quick to trust a one-sided limited set of screenshots from various conversations. Maybe Mullenweg is the "bad guy" here, I don't know, but even if he is that doesn't automatically mean WP Engine are the good guys, or that everything they say is spinless truth.
I'll also add that Mullenweg's communications and actions mostly come across as rash and without much thought. Certainly not polished spin.
I am/was a Matt fan but the texts strike me as clearly passive-aggressive and threatening and inappropriate. To me, anyway.
He's always portrayed this "kind monk" persona, but to see him attempt to maintain this persona while also spewing fairly poisonous rhetoric is really turning me off.
> I'll also add that Mullenweg's communications and actions mostly come across as rash and without much thought. Certainly not polished spin.
100% agree and it's surprising, given what I know about him. These incidents are making me wonder if Matt is having other stressors in his life right now. He just recently got back from a self-described sabbatical.
I agree. My point was that we only see the texts WP-Engine wants us to see, rather than the full conversation. For example something like this:
"Matt: Hi there! I'd like to discuss the possibility of WP-Engine contributing back more developers to the WordPress codebase; right now I feel you contribute back very little relative to your income, and we could really use some help on WordPress"
"WP-Engine: Fuck off you twat"
Would of course put Mullenweg's communications in a rather different light.
Or maybe Mullenweg really is just going off the rails. I don't know... But I'd be careful to judge too quickly without all the facts.
Whatever can be said about Mullenweg's communications, that Cease & Desist from WP-Engine also did not impress me and seemed more like a blogpost by their CEO rather than a legitimate legal complaint written by legal professionals.
I was literally mistaken once and thought that Wordpress was no longer open source.
In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com.
I will not comment on any legalities of course but the fact remains that WPEngine is not doing anything different than all the others for profit WordPress providers except 1 thing. Guess what that is ? They make more revenue than WordPress.com.
Yup, it's mentioned by others in this thread but I was also confused by this for a small period before doing further research early in the .COM beginning.
> If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic.
Obviously YOU know because YOU have worked with WordPress for over 10 years now.
They’ve had the Wordpress.org and .com distinction for a long time. You can’t miss it if you’re searching for Wordpress things online.
I don’t think you can blame a Wordpress hosting service for using WP in their name, given that doing so has respected the nature of the Wordpress/WP distinction that they’ve had going for years. Something is very off about this recent attack on WP Engine and the released text messages show that Mullenweg is not the noble guy he’s been portrayed as for years.
The “confused consumers” thing feels like a manufactured justification for whatever this spat is.
The company is called WPEngine, sure, but their tagline says "Most trusted WordPress platform". Their plans are named "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", etc. Are those products they're selling, or just descriptions? There's enough gray area there to attract a lawyer's attention, which Mullenweg is clearly using to his advantage.
Which I believe was their legal response. The problem is it should have stopped there.
I'm sure Matt's lawyers aren't very happy with him at the moment. Legally, it's usually not advantageous to retaliate so strongly and publicly. It greatly muddies the legal waters.
Really? I see extortion in those texts, not a legal lawsuit to enforce a trademark.
I mean, is this a legal and well crafted lawsuit? Or just extortion.
> Just called. Should I run these slides or not?
> Is next week a negotiation on the % or it happening at all? I am not going to be able to walk it back
> I know that this is the nuclear option, it sets us down a specific path
“Essential Blog Hosting Service using a Commonly Used Open Source Software That We Cannot Name”?
>"In other words, individuals are not compelled by trademark law to use "absurd turns of phrase" simply to avoid trademark liability."
Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week.
I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally.
[1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me.
Whatever perceived sins WPE is accused of, that trumps them all. Extremely fishy and unprofessional.
The free software world still has no good answer to the free rider problem. This is the same problem with AWS/ElasticSearch
But the idea of an enforceable trademark right to stop people from accurately describing their derivative services is another thing where people often don’t want to hear the clear answer. Companies typically go much further than what’s actually required to avoid infringement, because frustrating the open source community you depend on isn’t worth the relatively modest benefits. The Wordpress dynamic is different, because their mark is already licensed to a commercial vendor and already causes routine confusion in that context.
Next, one of the author's arguments is that WP Engine doesn't stop others as advertising itself as the "Wordpress Engine". Sure, but this same parallel can be drawn towards Wordpress.org itself. The homepage of Wordpress.org SCREAMS open-source. But, is it really though? It is an ecosystem around a centralised (plugin) repository controlled by one person/entity. That's not truly open source. Today WP Engine is blocked because they upset the overlords. Tomorrow, it could be anyone of us.
Also, the whole argument made on the official blog post was WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source? In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points.
If Wordpress is truly open source and if Matt's concerns are really around the spirit of open source, the fair thing that he/his company should have done is released the whole source code that powers the entire Wordpress.com eco-system including their backend systems on how they handle billing and scale. But, you know what? That will never happen, because that is their competitive advantage.
As someone who handles multi-million visitor sites on Wordpress, I can tell you this - the whole Wordpress eco-system thrives because the code is bad and it just won't scale - both performance wise and development wise as your content grows. The entire competitive advantage of Wordpress.com is actually masking this bad code and scaling difficulty behind a pretty interface. I would love to see them open source that. Of course, that won't happen.
This is just one entity abusing another with their power. I am in no way supporting WP Engine (they seem sleazy and I would never host any of my client sites with them). But, there are plenty of people they could have gone after - how about Kinsta? They do the same thing.
This was just a personal attack. You simply can't sugar-coat that.
It says "We passionately stand for WordPress, giving back, and DE&I". With about 40/week on half a billion in revenue that doesn't strike me as "passionate", or even worth proudly advertising on a home page.
All of this is what I would like to call "open washing": build an entire business on $open_platform, contribute back the minimum amount you need to fix your own problems, and then proudly declare what a bunch of altruistic good guys you are.
Lots can be said about 1) and 2) in itself, which has been discussed on HN frequently in the past and I don't want to repeat all of that so I won't offer my opinion here (which is long and nuanced in itself). But the whole "proudly advertise what a bunch of good guys we are" really rubs me the wrong way. It's just open washing: pretending to care when you don't.
Overall it kind of reminds me how some people put "Open Source contributions to $FAMOUS_PROJECT" on their CV. And then I go and check it's four PRs from 6 years ago, two of which are typo fixes and the other two are bugfixes. These are real contributions, yes. I don't want to disparage them. But at the same time: highlighting them as "Open Source contributions to $FAMOUS_PROJECT" is not really accurate or appropriate. This kind of stuff is basically an insta-reject when I'm reviewing CVs (which, unfortunately, is far more common than I'd like).
Ok, let's leave the plugin argument aside, why are we brushing over the fact that Automattic is a competitor to WP Engine and Wordpress.org is the open source project which has nothing to do with either of them (business wise), for Matt to use the open source platform to settle his feud with a competitor is downright a low blow. That's an abuse of his power over the project which is supposedly "open source". Is it really open source if a for-profit entity comes in and turn the lights off for another for-profit entity, without consulting other contributors of the said project, simply for using the project in the same spirit in which it is intended to be used?
If I understand the situation correctly, Automattic has a commercial license for the WordPress trademark, while WP Engine does not.
> Is it really open source if
I am not even remotely a lawyer, but my understanding is the answer is a strict and emphatic "yes". Open source is about the copyright license, which is a license to use, transmit, and modify the software. WordPress uses a recognized open source license.
Everything in the ecosystem, such as a plugin registry, is completely separate to the notion of whether or not the core software is open source.
There are valid criticisms of the behavior here, but "is it really open source if ..." is not one of them.
That of course doesn't mean they're above criticism or anything, but you also can't really ignore that an enormous chunk of development is funded by Automattic (i.e. WordPress.com). In return of doing all this work, they get quite a lot of power over the project. That's kind of how it works everywhere: when I was a scout leader the people who were there every weekend, spent a lot of time on admin stuff, etc. etc. had more "power" than the people who would occasionally show up and help out.
Or to put it in another way: if you contribute a few useful PRs to one of my projects, and then you proceed to be a dick to me (or others) then I'll ban you. Even if that's outside of the GitHub repo (like, say, Hacker News) because at some point I'll be "fuck that person". Yes, your contributions were useful. But also: I did 90% of the work here, and your ten PRs are not on the same level.
It might be different if you (or WP-Engine) had spent roughly the same amount of time, or at least roughly on the same order of magnitude. But that's not the case here – the gap is huge.
So I do hold them to different standards, because one put their money where their mouth is, and the other didn't.
All of that said, I'm not sure if Mullenweg's actions are all that wise. But also: I don't have all the details, so I find it difficult to judge.
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[1]: As an aside, I don't know how they actually measure this or how accurate these numbers are. But I haven't seen anyone – including WP-Engine – dispute them, so I will assume they're reasonably accurate.
What makes them sleazy? I have yet to see anything substantive to suggest WP Engine is acting any differently than any other managed service provider.
It's been pretty clear for a long time that WP engine was founded to be a maximally profitable business model to fill in the security/reliability gap, with the founder identifying this as why he went into the business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw
(note he doesn't mention Open Source there or extraction of value - he's just rightfuly pointing out good fundamentals of business for bootstrapped developers). He mentions how $50 or $100 a month is much better than $5 or $10 a month - and that leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you realise WP Engine still charges that today, a little.
Where this comes to the sleazy part is that: A) WP Engine has kept prices the same or increased over the years B) But WordPress has became more secure and a lot of what WP Engine used to uniquely do they no longer do C) WP Engine contributes significantly more to sponsoring conferences seats, and PR spend, then actual contributions
I think the combination of these things is what actually drove Matt to make his move: A) Awareness that the original founder made WP Engine to maximize profit; which Matt naturally feels relatively deprived of as a competitor B) The behavior of sponsoring conferences, but not giving back in WP Engine C) Rumors of suppression/avoiding working on Wordpress Core by WP Engine managemnet, which Matt seems to have genuinely been taken by (perhaps a few true WP engineers did reach out - no evidence that I've seen) D) That WP Engine having a "big bad investor" would get people on his side, as that they were blurring the line a little. E) A perception of, or increasingly urgent actual cashflow issues at his company making him think that the longer he put it off, the weaker he will be. F) His own blindness to the obvious hypocrisy with Wordpress.com / Wordpress.org.
Matt making threats and essentially extorting WP Engine is entirely wrong. This said, I understand why he did took some action. I'm not sure what I would have done.
It’s literally my go-to example of why the MVC design pattern is so good for web development. There is basically no view/controller separation - you can change core behavior of the backend in a template.
In the real world, nobody gives a darn about your code quality. Zero interest. It just needs to work, keep working, and that’s it.
I assure you probably >90% of code in deployment right now doesn’t even have CI/CD.
According to whom? It is open source in the measure that you're allowed to fork and redistribute your modified version. That satisfies the open source definition. If those plugins are open source themselves WPE can set up their own repository and point to it. If it's not, well, they decided to bet on something that could be taken off their hands at any moment.
You may say that this goes against the open source spirit, but that's a different thing. Wordpress is, by any reasonable measure, Open Source.
> WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source?
Sure, but...
> In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points.
No. The difference is Automattic owns Worpdpress' copyright, WP Engine doesn't. Also, does Automattic claim they provide a 100% open source Wordpress experience?
Let's be clear: I'm not defending WP's actions here (I think what they did is just plain dumb), and I don't have a horse in this race, but here we're conflating what would be ideal (everything is FOSS, Automattic releases everything they do and they compete only on service) with the reality that Automattic is a business and it pursues its own interest. Maybe they're pursuing it in a way that in the end will do them and the ecosystem more harm than good, but what they're doing is just business, and has nothing to do with the definition of open source.
WordPress has no CLA. The copyright is collectively held by all contributors. WordPress is also a fork of b2.
> I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine’s fault and responsibility to fix.
Users are impacted because the update mechanism was pulled out from under them with no advanced warning, that's not WP Engine's fault.
I think a lot of people are giving Wordpress.com (the hosting business) the credibility and respect that they normally give to open source projects, but that credibility should be going to Wordpress.org. The way Mullenweg is trying to blur the lines between .org and .com as convenient for his business purposes is the most confusing thing about this argument.