WordPress retaliation impacts community
lwn.net
lwn.net
This is clearly not what an independent foundation with the interests of the open source project in mind looks like.
If this mess creates pressure to put more separation between the Foundation and Automattic, I think that can only be a good thing.
By comparison, the WordPress Foundation is just embarrassing. One of the biggest OSS projects in the world operating as a vanity project for Matt instead of being a stakeholder group, or doing much of anything.
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In my experience, they aren’t.
1. When your money's running low or your job feels shitty, or
2. Constantly whenever you think you can get a raise or a better job
There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.
WordPress is GPL because it is a fork of b2/cafelog:
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
All the projects doing that will soon discover that they were popular mostly because of the Open-Source licensing. Once that changes, the popularity, and goodwill go down, for the simple reason that trust gets breached and forks happen. Open-Source is essentially about the freedom to fork, and that's precisely what happens when governance fails.
Some of them will backtrack on that decision, but it will be too late; like ElasticSearch recently changing again to AGPL, except now the question is why would people choose it over the more trustworthy, open and secure OpenSearch.
There's nothing wrong with building proprietary software, but there is something wrong with pulling a bait-and-switch, betraying your community that invested in your product because of its Open-Source nature.
Matt surely knows that, and also, changing the license of WordPress is probably not possible due to them not having the full copyright. WordPress is not really theirs, despite all their contributions. Which is why this will not end well for Automattic.
Can Matt do that though? I don't _think_ WordPress has a copyright assignment agreement for contributors? So neither Matt nor Automattic nor wordpress.org nor The WordPress Foundation can choose to re-license future versions of the GPL2 or newer codebase without agreement from _all_ the contributors who retain the copyright in their part of the code.
This self-described war he’s going on is all about commercial trademarks, and other hosting companies having more commercial success than Automattic in the ecosystem while contributing fewer developers and less money to the project.
Now, he’s taken it to a very extreme extent, and I fully disagree with his approach, but the core issues (for him) have nothing to do with GPL and how the WP project is governed. Those has even the same for decades, and he’s not trying to change them.
He’s just being very self-destructed because it turns out the community has no interest in some kind of “war” that gets long term contributors locked out of the ecosystem. He was expecting more people to be on his side, and frankly now seems to be lashing out (by blocking people) when that didn’t happen
None of that means he’s trying to change the governance model or license.
I don't really buy that, there is no obligation for anyone to contribute to the project at all under the GPL license so he can feel whatever he want's about it but it's irrelevant.
Also as for the trademark issue, in an older version of their trademark stated "The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, meaning people may use as they see fit. "
You can't retroactively change it once you see other people making more money than you. That's not how trademarks work.
80% annual codebase churn (according to Theo) says otherwise
This isn't opinionated, this is theft.
If the project had been run like this since the beginning, it wouldn't be where it is today. Automattic is a rich company partially due to the community around WordPress, and the trust that community has had in the governance of the project.
What makes you think it broke someone’s website? AFAIK they just patched the security issue that wp engine team couldn’t patch because they were locked out from pushing to repo?
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-long...
People woke up to their website being updated to “Secure Custom Fields”, an alternative (or a fork) that's not fully compatible. Here's one such report from HN:
This is quite reminiscent of the Great GPL Themes Kerfuffle of 2009 [0], actually. Stakes are a lot higher now, of course.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/wordpress-and-thesis-go-to-battl...
People don't like being involved in drama, and as we saw with the Freenode debacle, when it starts up, the usual first reaction is to try to chart a path that lets them avoid the drama as much as possible. But when you demand that those people take sides, and pursue a scorched earth policy against those who don't take your side... the side that's going to be picked isn't your side. There's just too much risk to taking your side.
Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.
Sorry if this is your livelihood, folks, but I can’t do anything to actually help. So I’ll just enjoy the fireworks and try to apply any lessons learned to other OSS communities.
How can you sit back and watch the drama if you're a part of it?
do not like = have not prized in
drama = the idea that the free meal could walk off thr plate.
The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand?
There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it.
> Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive.
Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith.
> The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
Poor analogy. All the distros I’ve ever used are totally free.
Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well-established strategy in the open source world (e.g.Firefox and Ubuntu).
1- I don’t think that would hold any water against “WPE”
2- trademark needs to be defended (in the US at least) and you cannot let things slide for 5 years and then claim infringement.
In any case, that’s not what happened. The trademark aspect was clearly an afterthought and is not the central point of the dispute.
But this is about the money and jealousy about how WP Engine is making a ton of money Without adding more developers to contribute.
Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.
> Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.
> The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
Why would that be better?
> That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.
That was your second point, and I don’t disagree with it.
Now, for the rest of your post.
> Those aren't forks.
I am not sure what point you are making here. Forking has nothing to do with either ripping off anyone or trademarks. The possibility to fork software is a fundamental principle of free software. As in, you cannot have free software that cannot be forked. If you don’t want people to fork it, don’t make it free.
Wordpress itself is a rebranded fork of b2, and nobody has any issue with that.
> Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.
If you fork a project you cannot use someone else’s IP, so you have to rebrand if the project name is a trademark. AFAIK, the Android kernels are forks and don’t use the Linux trademark, for example. Rebranding does not make forking any easier or harder, it’s completely orthogonal.
You mean that it would be difficult because they would need to pay developers to maintain the fork, right? This is true, but it has nothing to do with ripping off anyone. Matt is not embarrassing himself because forking would be complicated. His message is clear, and you wrote it yourself: “they profit off Wordpress' brand for free”. Which is dishonest and misleading.
WPEngine are profiting off of the service they provide, which is hosting software, which happens to be Wordpress.
Wordpress can't say anything about contributing to wordpress core when Wordpress the supposedly seperate foundation in fact only serves the purposes of Automattic, and inhibits or rejects prs that Matt and Automattic don't want, ie anything that works against their paid addons and services. No one should volunteer 5 minutes of their time to wordpress untill wordpress is actually a community-serving project rather than just a Matt-serving product.
Same goes for the plugin updates. They can't cry that anyone else is using them as a free distribution service when they actively work to keep it that way themselves.
I specifically said it would not be easy. But as the difficulty factors go, WPEngine is in the best position to pull it off. They have an existing customer base, probably many of whom are concerned that their websites may be "updated" in undesirable ways. And for those unaware, the magical appearance of SCF in their install(s) will let them know. Beyond the pale IMO, messing with my website in a surprise way like that... Giving these folks a clean off-ramp is a no brainer, and they may well be able to charge extra for the peace of mind.
It's an easy idea to test. Do you actually work at a startup?
And you are overplaying the branding thing a bit IMO. I sit down the hall from a team of five guys that crank out a new brand in about 2-3 days. All the time. And their work is pretty damn good. And I mean all of it, graphics, brand names, websites and product renders. Videos do take longer.
It just gets better and better the more you learn about this guy.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming Matt’s scope is limited to WPEngine; the kind of personality that acts in this way will do the same to anyone.
To be completely honest, after seeing everything that has transpired, I would be worried that the offer is just a lie, a way to out the detractors. I’m wondering if that’s the reason less than 10% accepted the first offer.
However, I do think a fair amount of automattic employees do not want to leave since their benefits seem actually really nice. Not many companies provide constant pay regardless of your cost of living, so I commend them for that. It could be impossible to find an equivalent job for non US employees, so 6 months pay for leaving in this market is hardly worth it, unless like you said you had plans to do it anyway.
I expect that even Matt is aware that that is not an unreasonable assumption. Purportedly, via Bullenweg, an email went out yesterday re another offer, and it included this, from Matt:
> You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
I mean that would have to be a first. "We're offering voluntary resignations with these benefits" followed by "and I promise we'll actually offer those benefits" - shows you how low trust seems to be at Automattic.
If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify being a billion dollar whatever and unable to capture, to applying for the recent trademarks around "Wordpress Managed" and such show me that's how he views it in the end. You are using "Wordpress" software, so he should of course get a cut of that.
So many companies in the ecosystem have "WP" or "Wordpress Managed/Wordpress Hosting" as their tagline and have been for over the past decade. WPEngine is just the biggest target and the first in line. I have no soft spot for PE, but both can be bad in this case. I feel like Automattic is willing to burn the community to the ground or fracture it as long as they get their cut or become the the biggest player.
"Capturing value" I suppose.
Can you link to what you're referring?
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale ...
Yep, real respectful.
I don't even understand the point of the post, other than to shit on the other guy. It doesn't advance any debate or raise any questions.
Here is the current iteration of that post from Matt:
"I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake."
he can link to his original post and put the clarification alongside if that's the case. i can change my mind if his actions show he's trying to do "right", but that takes time. for me, it's very important to know that he was even capable of writing the original post.
Just taking a page out of the app store playbooks. I guess Matt hasn't been keeping up with courts starting to rule against those stores.
Matt behaving like a PE fund, or any standard Big Tech company. In other words, enshittification as usual.
I worked in the WP space for many years and in that time have participated maybe twice in the actual WordPress OSS project: once to submit a patch to remove the “final” keyword from the Post class (lots of support from others that wanted this, and ultimately DoA because no one at the core level supported this) and once for some small thing that was relevant to my work at the time.
The hostility and difficulty in having a reasonable discussion, along with using SVN fwiw, made contributing feel like a chore. I had hopes of being a regular contributor and helping to enhance and extend a project I genuinely enjoyed working with, and nothing about how the core team operated made me feel welcomed.
It indicates that building a community not prone to self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos is a hard task even if its individual members are smart people.
Politics seems to be harder than tech to pull off right.
My prior is that if anything, self-destructive conflicts over bruised egos are more likely if the individual members are smart people. At least for certain values of "smart".
> Javier Casares shared that his account was deactivated after he asked a series of questions in a Slack thread started by Colin Stewart.
And here, referring to Terence Eden:
> He later reported on Mastodon that his account was deactivated.
Another thing – with that headline, I was hoping for some more info on how it impacts community like how many migrated away from WordPress or even a change in market share. However I'm not sure where that's available on a daily or weekly basis.
Edit: here's one that does a report once a month. Not sure how accurate it is: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
Although, that said, I anticipate an eventual purge of all WP related accounts for users involved in Lèse-majesté.
Regarding usage, I wouldn't expect to see an immediate decline. It takes a long time to plan a migration, as users of ReiserFS found out.
Beyond that, which sides would move? Those owned by people who were invested in WordPress. Honestly, that’s probably not a super massive share of the websites. The random small businesses and individual people might not ever hear about this drama. It would take a while for new projects to stop getting built with WordPress.
So we won’t see that impact over the course of a couple weeks. Maybe several years.
But the community is way more about contributing to the core project (there are many hundreds of contributors in each release). With plenty of high profile ones leaving, it’s gonna be a blow to the project if good people don’t or can’t step up.
Oh, I wish, because the discussion about, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains will have to be had and it cannot be separated from the open-source profits discussion.[1]
In my opinion some take aways from this should be:
1. As users we should do better avoiding unilateral dependencies. Specifically, every central repository we are using for free is a risk. Be it wordpress.org, npm or crates.io.[2]
2. As open-source author, decide if your project is a charity or not. Expect people to be angry, when you change your mind, even if the law is on your side.
3. Defend your trademarks vigorously from day one. Being lenient in the hope of free brand awareness will bite you.
[1] I am a bit disappointed that LWN, which I hold in high regard, recognized this, but still decided to ride the drama train. LWN I am used to better things from you.
[2] Java's convention of using domains in package names was ugly, inconvenient and did not solve the problem completely (see the issues around javax and sun packages), but it gave us a far better chance to avoid a dangerous dependency.
EDIT: I am tempted to add a fourth point, even if it is not 100% applicable to the case:
4. Don't expect people to understand open source licensing. Neither the authors who decided on a license in the first place, nor corporate lawyers - especially corporate lawyers.
As far as I see, he did defend his trademark - he just had some very reasonable rules under which you could use it (like saying that you're hosting WordPress).
He then walked back on those rules to attack WPEngine for his personal vendetta.
Hoping for free publicity by letting your trademark defense slip was never a good idea. The rules might have seemed reasonable but they were asking for trouble from the get go.
That is a special kind of logic. Also forking a plugin and replacing the original in the repo - that smells bad, even if it is "legal".
WooCommerce should become the steward, fork Wordpress, simplify it, and Wordpress should be their freemium offering. Wordpress is a funnel to WooCommerce.
It's the other way around my dude. Woocommerce is owned by Matt...
Why fight in public when you can just commoditize your dependant competitor?
Doing as you said is much smarter, but maybe takes a bit longer. My guess is Matt was reaching for some way to "hit them back" quickly.
It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.
In the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo that Matt's weaponised in his tantrum? I'd be surprised if it's as high as 1%
I wouldn't dare to say that other companies don't want to contribute, I do wonder what was and is going on. Outside Gutenberg, there is hardly any change in WordPess.
And in other parts of the business, there is a strong desire to “fix it in core,” so if WordPress.com wants easier site building for customers, well hey, send devs to help build full site editing in WordPress.
I think a vast majority of software should be open source, but I also don’t think these sorts of businesses are the best way to achieve that goal. There just ends up being too much conflict between the need to run a business and the needs of the open source project and community. They can end up downright hostile, as in this case.
I personally think the best funding model is companies who have a software need that is outside their core business to pay for their employees to work on the open source software, either full time or as part of their duties. It aligns the development of the software with the needs of the people using the software.
If a company wants more of their own needs to be addressed in the development, they can contribute more developer time to work on those things.
You are also free to fund the development effort yourself as an individual by contributing, if you want to drive development in a certain way you think is best.
The "giving back" angle is just smokescreen for wanting to charge more rent IMO.
That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this.
Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation.
https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's.
As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.
But putting its merits to the side, people firstly love drama and love sharing their opinions about contentious situations. And secondly, hopefully there are lessons to be learned for other OSS projects and other founders about how NOT to handle this kind of situation.
But the Wordpress community produces. I suppose that’s the trick. They’ll produce afterwards as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5fn36/uhhh_wha...
Whether you agree with the megathread-only policy or not, they never behaved as if they were doing anything but trying to keep the sub clean and not totally overridden by Matt controversy posts which is normal on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g29dhm/petition...
And they did apologize for it, I think.
Also, megathreads are what you do when you want a topic to die on a subreddit. Especially now where pinned threads even have less visibility. Their obviously bad faith poll after ending their "no moderation experiment" after not even two days (while announcing it for a week), also speaks a different language.
Probably slightly biased summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1g4pr8f/wor...
Yes, I'm sure some reddit users went too far in DMs (it's reddit...), but ultimately,
- the moderators of the subreddit clearly wanted to suppress that topic.
- one (the remaining one) works for Matt, and thinks the whole thing is a nothingburger (https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwvs5z/comment/...)
- the creator of the subreddit still seemed completely pro-Matt and also friendly with him
That said, bluesix seemed like a very helpful mod, so, still not great to see them delete their account. And also, some users are for sure in it just for the blood.
The obvious move on moderation side would've been to allow big news around that "drama" to have their own threads, to remove duplicates and have random opinion tweets, blog posts & influencer's thoughts in the megathread / a pinned comment on each of the "big news'" threads.
This is what most mods who wouldn't want to suppress the topic but keep the sub somewhat clean would've done. For some reason, that wasn't even up for discussion.
It was either a "we go on strike and stop moderating" (which ended quickly when it didn't result in the chaos they anticipated), megathread or complete ban of the topic for them.
And we will have to agree to disagree I guess. Here's how I would summarize some parts of it:
- The moderators didn't want to completely censor or remove good faith threads, they just wanted to contain it within megathreads. this is normal on reddit. I disagreed with this and thought it would be better to have some threads on front page but limit the number.
- The users had wild accusations and conspiracy theories (https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g4ahoq/is_that_...)
- The mods didn't make an attempt to censor r/wpdrama from being talked about, they redirected users to it
- The users were fundamentally angry and accusatory from the get go which made it even more difficult to come up with solutions
- This is not how I remember old reddit nor the old internet. Back then we would have a civil disucssion with the mods about what things should be allowed or not allowed.
Hot take: it should be illegal to do these "agree with me or take a silver parachute" deals. This is the CEO blatantly forcing their political views on their workers and purging anyone who has a different opinion and wants to speak it.
And yes, just for completeness sake (and because he's tangentially involved in the Matt drama), that includes DHH's "no politics" rule at 37signals, which (if my fuzzy memory is correct) was also enforced by a similar "agree or parachute" deal. Yes, "no politics" is political, it's stopping the music after claiming a seat in musical chairs.
It's asymmetric, but laws should generally be in favor of the employees, because the employers already have most of the power on their side.
There's nothing stopping an employee from simply continuing to disagree with the company direction and also not accepting the offer. In this case, employment goes along as usual and you can continue to disagree with the direction. With proper workplace laws, a company couldn't fire you in this instance, even if you vocally disagree with what is happening.
When an unreasonable choice is attempted to be forced onto you, sometimes the best approach is to ignore it and continue on as usual.