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_...
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.
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.
Consensus seems to be that the Matt/Automattic is worse than WP Engine, if only through stupidity and hubris.