Why World War WordPress Will End with a Zombie Fork
darnell.day
darnell.day
I seriously doubt this. Even the majority of tech people are unaware of this dispute. And most businesses are too busy to care.
I still don't understand what the hell is going on and I see posts about it on HN every couple days. Who is the original wordpress and who is the fork. Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?
It’s more like dumb and dumber than good vs bad.
I am curious to see what many WP employees think of all this.
Also, the recent ACF business would show that WPE were being stewards of one of the backbone plugins of the ecosystem.
Demonstrably not true. Matt may not be happy with the amount of resource, but people associated with WPE make all sorts of contributions to the Wordpress community.
The Wordpress license does not require any contributions. If they wanted that to be forced they should have licensed accordingly. To demand payment to Matt's for-profit company and withhold access to the non-profit Wordpress.org is a shakedown akin to demanding protection money, full stop.
Instead, they licensed under Stallman's GPL2. Given his general ethos around freedom of software, I would honestly be curious to hear his thoughts on using trademark as a cudgel to arbitrarily prevent otherwise-permitted uses of GPL-licensed code.
[1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
Adjusting their product names sounds like a small change they could have made to avoid antagonising a close partner.
Running their own plug-in mirror infrastructure is something companies often do to reduce the risk from relying on a third party.
Similarly having some stake in the development of WordPress reduces risk of them being shut out if there is a license change that necessitates a fork.
Less about caving in on wishes as more that it's risky to choose both to rely on a third party and wind them up at the same time.
> Adjusting their product names sounds like a small change they could have made to avoid antagonising a close partner.
WP Engine updated everything that was potentially infringing two weeks ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ftg581/finally_...
Consensus seems to be that the Matt/Automattic is worse than WP Engine, if only through stupidity and hubris.
In real life bad guys mostly don't exist. It is fiction. In real life you have people with no power and people with power.
Yes, but at the same time not really. This is two corporates duking it out. They are behaving like soulless entities that only care about the money, like all corporates do. Yes, there are people behind those corporates determining how they behave - but there always is. For the most part those people are shielded by the corporate veil, and so most of the normal ethical boundaries humans exhibit when dealing with other humans aren't in evidence.
The highly entertaining drama aside, the fallout will likely be minor because it's open source. If it wasn't and one of these corporations are mortally wounded in the fight their proprietary code would die with them. But it's all available on github. If they die and the ecosystem is worth something, someone will reproduce the infrastructure, and all the customers need do it point their auto updates at a different domain name and renew a few credit cards.
In fact that is already happening. Automattic has taken over WPEngine's code. Looking at the from the system of ethics that open source has built up over time, it's a dick move. (WPEngine could do the same to Automattic of course, but Automattic owns wordpress.org so to be effective all the customers out there would have to change their auto update domain name to wpengine.com or something. That is unlikely to happen.) But these are corporates. PE firms specialise in dick moves.
Surely this behaviour isn't a surprise. What is slightly surprising is WPEngine didn't protect themselves using a contract with Automattic that stopped them from doing this. Only slightly, as I'm sure Automattic would never had agreed to the contract. I guess WPEngine could have distributed their plugins and different way. Maybe they will from now on.
The WordPress code is available to WPEngine. How are Mullenweg's actions damaging them?
WP Engine is a prominent hosting provider for WordPress, who also contribute several very popular plugins.
Automattic have sued WP Engine. Automattic have blocked WP Engine from updating any of their plugins, or anything else on wordpress.org. A vulnerability was found in a WP Engine plugin, and Automattic have taken it over (but are not doing any maintenance). Automattic's CEO went on a number of unhinged rants here and elsewhere.
But everyone is still able to publish their blogs, on both WordPress and WPEngine?
And both WordPress and WPEngine are able to fork each other's code and run separate platforms?
So long term fragmentation is the main danger?
Am I completely off the mark?
Maybe that's not what you meant. I have no dog in this fight. Just telling you why someone would assume you are expressing an opinion.
We are _actively_ making contingency plans. But our best estimate at this stage is that WPEngine will provide a suitable way to keep all our WPEngine sites running at least in the short and medium term, but we are also making disaster plans in case this all goes, as Matt intends, "nuclear".
Matt keeps talking about how he's doing this "for the WordPress Community", but as I commented elsewhere:
So far as I can tell, when Matt talks about "the WordPress Community", he means:
- Matt
- the people who didn't quit Automattic last week
- _maybe_ the WP core developers who don't work at Automattic, so long as they keep their criticisms to themselves
I work at a hosting company and we have received zero questions, and we have a fair larger number of clients who sites are built on wordpress. In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
> In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
Is that true if Matt/Automattic win against WPEngine, and he starts using that as precident and starts demanding 8% of revenue as his standard shakedown on anybody who's used the "WordPress" trademark to generate revenue?
Is that client of yours a web developing company that focus on wordpress in their marketing?
They have a quite technical marketing team (well, two people) who run the WP site, which they're quite aware of how often plugin and partner theme upgrades show up. The call was basically "So what's going to happen with WordPress and plugins? Are we going to be able to rely on updates and future security for the website?" She wasn't worried that they were gonna get caught up in a trademark problem, but that the trademark "war" would kill off WordPress core development, and/or the future development and bug/security fixes of the plugins they rely on. A reasonably valid fear, and one that I certainly don't dismiss out of hand.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g3rwwm/you_aske...
https://hackaday.com/2016/10/01/arduino-vs-arduino-arduino-w...
Matt has explained that that language was actually addressing allegations that WP Engine forked the WooCommerce Stripe extension and replacing attribution. For whatever Matt's explanations are worth these days.
The language of the term sheet certainly could have been read as preventing them from forking WordPress as well, so it's possible that was an ulterior motive.
If the answer is yes, then I expect to see a fork happen quickly. That may be the only way (or best way) for them to keep some degree of control over their system.
This is certainly one of their goals, if only to prevent or reduce churn.
But WP Engine is now owned by Silver Lake, a private equity firm, they no doubt have aggressive growth and profitability targets. Anything that injects confusion into their branding or increases costs is counter to their goals
The real question is the 8% "contribution" that WP is asking for cheaper than other alternatives. The lawsuits are cheaper if they win, but a dead loss if they don't.
- GoDaddy
- Amazon (AWS)
- Bluehost
- Dreamhost
and about a thousand smaller hosts, all of whom would be very unhappy to suddenly have to pay 8% of revenue to Automattic.
A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.
I'd guess a _huge_ part of WordPress's "customer acquisition" comes from small businesses who started out on cheap shared hosting for their email/dns/website using cPanel or Plesk (or similar). That's clearly a big market, given how much Wix and SquareSpace spend advertising for it.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn cPanel had as many WordPress using customers as WPEngine - and it's now owned by PE as well.
> A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.
I suspect a WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service? Perhaps a having them all fund a non-profit Mozilla like foundation (well, Mozilla circa 2015, before they decided to become and AI and Ad company who's apparent goal is to attract more and more sketchy grifting C level execs and make them rich).
I would bet that WPE is not nearly the largest WP host by # of sites. Bluehost, for ex, is claiming millions of WP sites.
> WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service
Exactly this. And folks working in the broader ecosystem (themes, plugins, retailers of the above, potentially contract WP developers as they also have to use trademarked terms in marketing) also have an incentive to work with such a fork.
MariaDB is a solid example of a community fork taking root when the corporate owner became perceived as being unstable.
Amazon has a product they call Amazon lightsail. The only trademark issue I can identify is that they use the wordpress logo, which is fairly simple to remove if wordpress decide that it is no longer allowed. Do anyone else see something there that could be a trademark issue?
GoDaddy has a menu item for "WordPress hosting," which is exactly what got WPE into trouble. Namecheap has "WordPress" in its navbar.
Beyond hosting, the theme retailers (like Themeforest) could find themselves in the crosshairs. The plugin developers.
Anybody who uses "WordPress" in their marketing. If you sell an add-on for WordPress, you probably need to say "WordPress" somewhere in your collateral, and this may mean you own Automattic a percentage of your revenue.
The problem is nobody knows, because the proposed rules are unwritten. Working in the WordPress ecosystem just had an unquantifiable amount of platform risk added, where there was effectively none at the beginning of the year.
Under US law, trademarks can be used by other companies under fair use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_(U.S._trademark_law)
It'll ultimately be up to the courts to decide what the extent of this fair use is.
That's the unquantifiable platform risk that has been added.
From what I see it seems a fairly common practice that companies get explicit trademark permissions if they are an official retailer, official supplier, have employees that is official trained, or has some other direct relationship with the trademark holder. Companies without such permissions have to rely on fair use rules. Retailers and webshops generally also list what product or brands that they sell without being in conflict with trademark.
So method calls to `wp_get_archives` would still work, but that would be redirected under the hood to a cleaner arch on something like Python, or Golang, or Rust, or whatever.
Said no-one using WP for their website ever.
To a first approximation, about zero people/companies have a problem they need solved which boils down to "I need a replacement for WordPress using a significantly more modern and better architected codebase."
By far the most common problem people are solving by using Wordpress is "I need to be able to fix website errors/typos without calling up a web development agency and waiting 2 weeks and paying $1000, and I need to be able update my homepage or add new pages which then fit into the menus and site navigation easily". Second most common problem they're solving is "I need a website which is easy and affordable to employ or contract experience people to edit and manage it for me".
Not a single WPEngine or wordpress.com customer has ever chosen or rejected them because they asked themselves "Is this run on a mess of legacy early 2000s vintage PHP and badly designed MySQL databases, or does the backend run beautifully architected and formatted Rust/Haskel/Go?"
Ask yourself: why did WP engine come into existence?
Perhaps? Maybe I'm older than I look... I've never specialised in WP, but my earliest WP work was on 2.5 back in 2008-ish after I jumped ship from a gruelling (and failing) startup. I was doing mostly WP sites at an agency during 2010-2013 almost all using cPanel shared hosting. In 2014 I moved to a place using Wordpress on Plesk shared hosting which had several really bad downtimes and performance problems, and searching my email the first WPEngine invoice came when I migrated a bunch of those sites to WPE in 2015. I've been happily using and recommending them ever since. Sure there are lots of people with more year's experience, but I've got a good 15 years or so, and I think that means my opinions are at least based in the real world.
WPEngine came into existence, at least from my point of view, because there was so much _bad_ Wordpress hosting available at the time.
My experience with 7 years of shared cPanel/Plex hosting on random ISPs or some generalised everything-to-everybody domain registry, domain registrar, web hosting company, SEO consultants, internet security snake oil salesmen like GoDaddy or Dreamhost, compared to specialist WP hosting with WPEngine - has been night and day. Where I work now, we happily refer clients looking for $5/month web hosting away to a few sole trader web devs we respect who handle those sorts of customers, and anyone who doesn't bat an eyelid at WPEngine's prices (plus our markup) gets hosted there with all the performance, uptime, and value add benefits they bring to the table.
I'm sure other people have different experiences. IU;m sure there are other dedicated WordPress hosting companies out there these days who are as good or better than WPEngine at least for some use cases. I'm sure there are other companies with as good or nearly as good offerings for less money than WPEngine. For me though, they are absolutely worth the extra cost for all the value add they bring alongside WP core and wordpress.org repos - except for people looking for lowest possible cost and are prepared to accept worse performance and less good hosting tools.
"Someone" needs a CMS that's able to be securely, performantly, and professionally managed by hosting companies, and that is as easy for small and medium businesses to use and as easy to find experienced staff and agencies to help run.
We do not recommend as use WordPress because of it's "solid architecture" or "isolation/sandboxing" or it's FE Dev buzzword de jour use of "exciting" "new" technology.
We recommend it because the Widget Factory owner can probably get one of his grandkids or niece/nephews to act as website editor for him, or the piano teacher can get one of their students to help out with their website in return for discounted lessons, or the online store owner can easily employ someone with WordPress admin experience to get themselves off eBay/Marketplace and onto their own website. Or the lawyer/plumber/accountant/whoever's office manager or "that young staff member who's good with computers" can run Wordpress - perhaps with assistance of their existing outside IT consultants to install/manage it and perhaps setup/customise it initially.
None of those people care about whether it's written in Rust, or uses WASM, or is dockerized and autoscaling. Their #1 problem is "can I quickly update my website if I find an error or if I have to put an important message to my customers on my homepage?" #2 is "can I easily learn how to do simple edits to my site, and can I easily find employees can work with it, and can I finb contractors/agencies who'll be able to help with more complex changes/updated?" and somewhere down below #1 is "is my site at least reasonably secure from being hacked, and if it is hacked can I get it restored/repaired rapidly".
There are dozens or hundreds of "better technology choices" that WordPress these days. It's really hard to find a "better business choice" for a lot of projects though.
That’s gone now.
Having said that, it seems that many people (me included) have been assuming things about "the WordPress Foundation" that are not true. It apparently is _not_ the steward of the wordpress.org repository of 3rd party themes and plugins the "community of developers" painstakingly created, and that have made WordPress "good" for so many different people. As far as I can tell, "the foundation" does whatever it does on a tax filing declared budget of around $22,000 (so, not much?) - and it exists mostly as a non profit "owner" of some trademarks that it immediately exclusively and irrevocably licensed for commercial use back to Automattic the same day they got given them.
I'm pretty sure "the foundation" could have disappeared anytime in the last decade, or could remain to exist for another decade or two to come, and either way wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. It's not the foundation that's gone, it's the trust in the Wordpress core development leadership, the trust in the wordpress.org theme/plugin leadership, and the trust that the WordPress trademark is safe to use in perfectly normal and legal ways without the treat of being extorted if you start making too much money.
So maybe someone will fork the repository? But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
Can you though? And if so, for how much longer?
Matt is already not letting developers log into wordpress.org without disclaiming any relationship with WPEngine. He is 100% going to demand the same from people mirroring that repo as soon as he thinks of it.
> But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
CloudFlare offered to do that for free. Matt said "Fuck you! I'm destroying WordPress instead, for the communiteeeeeeee!"
Do they look at the changelog of upstream and have engineers re-implement the same things only with original code? That seems like a significant waste of resources just to try to duplicate someone else's efforts.
> Do they look at the changelog of upstream and have engineers re-implement the same things only with original code
No, but they may selectively ignore features or changes that might have caused the fork in the first place.
I'd argue that what WPEngine sells (rents?) is perhaps closer to a "distro" in the Redhat/Ubuntu/Arch/whatever sense.
They use WordPress core the way Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel. They use the GPL themes/plugins the way they use all the gnu utils. They use paid/pro plugins and themes like Ubuntu uses restricted and multiverse repos. If they feel the need, they can customise the kernel/core within the restrictions and obligations of the GPL however they choose to.
And WPEngine then wrap WordPress core in a whole bunch of what they and their customers consider "value add". Easy and automated backup/restore, one click dev/staging versions of the site and the ability to promote those into production when desired, automated provisioning and renewal of ssl certs, curated plugin backlists, monitoring and affected customer notifications of security updates across 3rd party plugin/themes as well as core, platform level WordPress specific optimisation, managed OS and web server and database security patching and updates. And like RedHat, they provide a "single neck to tread on" when something goes badly wrong: a support department that's both experienced and capable of solving pretty much any WP disaster 24x7, with a platform that can quickly and easily use to provide the needed help, and a pre existing business/financial relationship so both sides of that disaster and recovery are at least partially coincident it'll be charged and paid fairly and promptly.
For every single one of our WP clients, all that value add is totally worth the price jump from $5/month on GoDaddy et al. to $25/month of WPEngine. And for us, WPEngine has a better offering for what we value than wordpress.com.
There are words for what can happen if you copy source code you don't have a licence to and use it commercially, but they aren't "avoid legal complications".
Given the complexity and importance of UI in the project, LO may be the better example.
Same for Directus.
But again, not a 1-to-1 WP replacement.
_That_ is WordPress's "killer feature".
And its why my best guess at the long term outcome here involves a smoking crater where Matt's reputation and Automattic/wordpress.com/WordPress Foundation/wprdpress.org used to be, and either a similarly "Mutually Assured Destruction" crater where WPEngine once was, or perhaps a decimated-by-legal-bills hollow shell of what it is now.
And something like ClassicPress or AspirePress or other forks to "soak up" the huge existing talent pool of people who know how to run websites using something close enough to what WordPress used to be, and the thousands for hundreds of thousands of theme/plugin developers and Wordpress specialist developers/agencies/contractors choosing to hitch their professional lives to one or all of the emergent forks.
And for millions of website owners to shake their heads again at how annoying but essential IT nerds and their stupid drama are for them to run their business/website...