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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software.

Calling out Matt and Automattic for their abusive behavior is addressing the systemic issue of for-profit corporations exploitatively abusing open source software.

We're talking about a company that released GPL software, waited a decade for another company to build their entire business around said GPL software, and then came at them with threats of going to "nuclear war" (their words) with them if they didn't agree to extremely exploitative terms on top of the GPL licensing under which the software was released.

That is the affront to Free Software that's happening here. WP Engine may or may not be a good company, but it is Matt who has given up on freedom. If you lure people in with a promise of Free Software and then hold a gun to their head when they take you up on it, you are the bad guy.

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Matt being a poor steward of gpl is by definition not a systemic issue … unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors?

The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss.

I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/wp and then there’s this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.

> unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors?

I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage.

> this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.

I'll never understand this complaint about not giving back. I can understand if they're asking for free support and coercing you into saying yes, but that's rarely the concern, the concern is always "giving back".

If you release it under GPL, then companies are obliged to abide by the GPL and release their modifications, nothing more or less. If you release it under a less restrictive license then they have no obligations at all, and you presumably chose that license specifically because it made the software easier to use in enterprises.

If giving back matters so very much then you're not really interested in Free Software and you should put those requirements in the license. But you don't get to piggyback on the FOSS movement and then complain when people use your software freely to compete with your for profit.

As for the trend of the bait and switch. That’s a fair point. But u can always fork and move on. And even then would you say that’s more of an issue or occurs more frequently then corps not contributing back at all?

Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?

As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.

We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.

The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.

> so much bad faith

This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.

Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.

If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.

The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.

When a user uses some open source software, there is no negative happening. They are not accumulating some debt that should be repaid by "contributing back." If they make a million dollars on it, that makes no difference to the project. Agreeing to a license and then following that license is not "bad faith."

The only damage being done when someone makes money using open source software, is to the ambitions and ego of a developer who imagined that "open source" meant "give me your contributions so I can build an empire." Fortunately, open source is for the benefit of all of us. Nobody owes them fiefs.

WPE literally spends several hundred thousand dollars a year contributing to WP events. And then they get banned from those events while the WP Foundation keeps the checks.

What absolute leeches they are.

Hundreds of thousands on events is nothing. The fact that this is the most repeated example of them contributing to WordPress just proves the point that they don't actually do much. Their entire business is based around wrapping WP and reselling it. That they can manage to spend a few hundred K's on what is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events) is not surprising. Now, how much do they contribute to the actual WordPress codebase?

(And I'm saying this as someone who dislikes WordPress in general, in the sense that I'm not a super invested Automattic user or something. It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim)

> It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim

WPEngine are adults, they can (and are) taking care of themselves.

But sorry, if you start using your position as CEO of Automattic, and President of WPF to:

- push rants forcibly into the dashboards of your for-profit offering's commercial competitors

- lock users of a competitor out of a whole raft of functionality because of your beef with their provider

- break users sites in the name of effectively hostage-taking a plugin

Then what else are you but a "bad maintainer"?

> as a leach [sic]

Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor. That's easily described as leeching.

> is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events)

Well, given that at these recent events they've given money, been banned from attending and had all references to their name removed, I think their contributions are valid.

Also "that doesn't count, it's just marketing", yes, marketing dollars that they are contributing to the community to make the cost to the rest of the community in hosting events less. You sound like Matt here, "Well, yes, they contribute, but not in the way I tell them to, and in the amount I tell them to, so it's not reallllly a contribution."

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