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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g3rwwm/you_aske...
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.