Legal win
ma.tt
ma.tt
Taking legal advice now? Rhetorical question, more a statement: last time you were here, you didn't.
edit: For the uninitiated, page 24 is neat. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
> we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.
Based on https://us.wordcamp.org/2025/attendees/, https://us.wordcamp.org/2024/attendees/, and https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/attendees/
Looks like 2023 had 1,449 attendees, 2024 had 1,339, and 2025 had 884.
You can look at reviews of the event, people had a good time. International visitors have been down due to political and immigration issues outside of our control.
Being there on the ground, it did feel a little spread out, lots of pockets of people connecting, but the venue was pretty huge. We'll try to keep things tighter in Phoenix next year. The upcoming WordCamp in India looks like it will be double the size of any previous ones.
Tickets sold,
2025 - 1,200 - down 38%
2024 - 1,928 - down 10.5%
2023 - 2,149One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.
[1]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12276/how-to-...
—Connor MacLeod
I’ll just show myself out…
If I use Rust, my web site will be blazingly fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, and it can power performance-critical services that run on embedded devices and easily integrate with other languages. Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. And that's on top of how Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling. I can even use Rust to supercharge my JavaScript, one module at a time.
With PHP, you don't have to worry about compile-time bugs, because there is no compile time.
But everyone else who just want to put their small business website up that their marketing assistant can easily edit, will just pay someone on Upwork to pop up a WordPress site for them in a day or so, with everything they need included, so they can spend their time on value-added activities.
I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
In case Matt removes the link to the actual ruling from his post, and also simply for HN readers' convenience, here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/169/wpengine-i...
The court didn’t even find that there wasn’t extortion, just that you can’t privately sue over the kind of extortion claimed here. Which means California could actually still sue over it, just not WPEngine.
Amusingly, the court also refused to take judicial notice of several documents Automattic submitted because WPEngine said they were not authentic copies of the documents.
Overall this is emphatically not a win. They knocked out roughly no interesting claims, knocked out zero claims permanently (the one claim that can’t be amended could still be sued over by California, and they actually might because it’s California), and will have just made themselves work arguing the same claims again once amended.
They will still end up in trial in 2027 or 2028.
The only usefulness of this would have been as a delaying tactic but I don’t see how that benefits Automattic given the PR disaster they made of this
The whole thing has been quite entertaining as a disinterested party who has no stake in any of it. I’ve been considering putting a couple of sites back up that used to run on WP. I’m firmly in the static-site-generator camp if I decide to do so to reduce the cost of AI scraping, but our friend Matt sure gave me a reason to replace WP regardless.
Edit: forgot the link.
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-grants-partial-motion-t...
The only use case for WordPress is when you've very non-technical people needing to edit the site's content - a very common and natural situation since most are marketing sites - but even in that case I'd see if Wix could get the job done rather than rigging up a WordPress.
The judges do absolutely everything they can to keep these things moving or settle. They force people to mediation, they force people to reduce the claims to get rid of shitty claims, etc. Everything they can to get the vast majority of cases that shouldn't need a judge to resolve (which is most of them), out of court. This does slow things down.
To give you a sense of how good we are at that (surprisingly), only 1% of federal civil cases (IE this kind) actually reach trial. Only 0.7% reach a jury. It's not evenly distributed across claim types, but if we could push people to that state faster, you'd get some speedup. Not as much as you think. In federal district court, you will get pushed to mediation very very quickly in most cases.
They also have special programs to handle complex litigation, to handle multi-district litigation, etc. From a process standpoint, it's more efficient than i think people give it credit for.
Trials themselves are usually quick (a few weeks). But even that volume is immense.
In 2024, there were 347,991 new civil cases filed in federal district courts. Up 22% (ie crazytown) from the year before. In 2025, so far, it's back down again, but we'll see. A few years ago it was >500,000 new federal civil cases in a year.
There are 94 federal district courts in the US, and 677 federal district judges.
The average number of pending cases over the past 12 months, per judgeship, currently stands at 757.
Maybe they work slow?
Nope - they have, on average, terminated 866 cases each in the past year. So uh, terminated more than 16 cases a week. Each.
See here: https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/caseload-statist...
The number of district court judges is set by congress. It has been set at 677 for a long time. For the volume of cases that there are these days, it's not enough if you want them to go to trial in less than a few years.
If we ignore the deliberate abuse of things like binding arbitration, etc, it really does exist (as mediation does) to try to get people to stop wasting court time on things that don't need court.
Because while sure, you could always say "get more judges", it's very hard to say 500,000 new federal civil cases a year is not crazy. This is just federal district courts, too. State courts get 13-20 million new civil cases a year.
While plenty of lawyers play games, it's honestly mostly the clients. Lawyers just get all the blame.
> I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
Describes me as well.
I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.
WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
They're doing what AWS and the other hyperscalers have done. Making bank on other people's hard work because "pure" open source allows for third party commercialization without compensation. (Or even giving back, as is with WP Engine's case. IIRC, they're not a top contributor to the open source code.)
Shouldn't we be angry at the appropriators that take everything and give nothing back?
AWS is 99.999% closed source. They're taxing the industry and contributing to increased centralization. Much of what made the early web so exciting has been hoovered up by these open source thieves.
Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
Again - I think the community is attacking the wrong person here. Matt acted immaturely, but he's the one that put in the work. Not WP Engine.
When you publish something under an open source license, you entitle the rest of the world to use it to get rich. That's what the license says on the tin, what the licenses have always been advertised, etc. I have absolutely no problem with AWS or WPEngine using that entitlement, nor do I have any problem with any software engineer (or software engineering organization like AWS) choosing not to publish source code they didn't promise to. Even if I wasn't of this opinion though - I don't see how someone violating this supposed prohibition could possibly entitle Matt to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...
Edit: I know it's off topic to talk about flagging, but can we consider not flagging the comment this is in reply to? I think it's generated valuable discussion for people learning about this case... even though I strongly disagree with the author.
This is the same defense I see repeated for Amazon and Google, and they're two of the biggest destroyers.
Honestly OSI and their definition of "open" has been a scourge. Google and Amazon encourage this thinking because it benefits them.
You can have non-commercial "fair source" for customers that prevents vultures from stealing your hard work. That's ethical, yet it gets dunked on by OSI purists.
You can demand that profiteers be required to open source their entire stack. But these licenses are discouraged and underutilized.
But when this keeps keeps happening again and again and continues to be met with victims blaming -- I'm disgusted by the open source community's failure to be pragmatic and sustainable.
You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy. And so what did they take and take and never give themselves?
Open source has a problem.
And I only hear people complaining about shared source and other proprietary software licenses when the people using them claim they’re open source so that they can piggyback on that goodwill without actually participating. It’s perfectly fine if someone wants to release stuff under a closed license. They just don’t get to do that and then brag about their open source contributions.
I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about
Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
Difficult to get a purer example of a "user" than this.
There are things that are complex enough, and build an ecosystem on top of them. Producing a closed fork may split the ecosystem, and strangle the open branch if it. These things should use a copyleft license, or maybe dual strict copyleft + commercial license. Linux, Python, Postgres, Grafana, Nexcloud are good examples.
WordPress did it almost right, it uses GPL v2. But to force contributions from hosters, they should have used AGPL, which did not even exist at the time.
(Note, I'm not defending anything that MM has done, but you're allowed to change your license, even if users dont like it.)
I don't believe this is correct in this case; realistically, I don't think they can change it at all. As far as I can tell, the WordPress contribution process doesn't involve a CLA or CAA.
That means any license change for WordPress would require getting agreement from every single third-party contributor whose code is still present in the codebase; and/or, removing or rewriting code where the contributor (copyright holder) does not agree. In practical terms, that isn't going to be possible.
WordPress itself is also a fork, which further impacts the situation if any ancient b2/cafelog code is still present in the codebase.
The key point here is that without a CAA, third-party contributors still own the copyright to their code contributions; and without a CLA, the project owner has no legal authority to re-license that third-party code in ways which violate the contributors' license.
The "change it going forwards" thing generally only applies if a CLA or CAA was used; or if the previous license was a permissive one and the new license terms don't violate the old license terms in any way.
Had a project I was a major contributor on relicensed to appease microsoft of all things and I just didn't care enough to do something about it besides tell the person they were an asshole.
If there was a way to make changes entirely free of consequence, everybody would be doing it.
This is better for users than the alternative. Since they're using open source software, they can always switch back if WordPress starts offering better services, or switch to some new company that can do it even better than either in the future.
It's a long set of stretches, actually. People are just using the idea to either side with Wordpress or not, without understanding what it is. It leads to the misinterpretation of what free software is about (which I don't need to explain, since no one is actually interested in it here).
For source-availible software, you do. Someone "stealing" your code is table-stakes, if that turns your stomach then open source licenses aren't for you. You can sell your software and enjoy all the same protections of copyright that FOSS benefits from, instead. Microsoft built an empire doing that.
It's no use crying over spilled milk if the software is freely licensed. There just isn't. If a paid competitor can do a better job, it will inevitably replace the free alternative - that's competition. When you try to use fatalist framing devices like "open source has a problem" you ignore all the developers happily coexisting with FOSS. The ones who don't complain, many of whom spend their whole lives never asking for anything but the right to contribute.
If that's a problem and you dislike your neighbors, you're the one who needs to find a new neighborhood.
I don't understand what open source purism even is.
You pick a license for your software, and now you're mad because people are making money off of it. Then why even go with an open source license?
Do what Bill Gates did tell people to pay up for using Microsoft software, because Microsoft software isn't open source.
What are you crying about?
I believe GP is referring to the behavior of users, not the developer. That is, an increasingly large segment of the industry refuses to touch software using non-OSI-approved licenses. Open source purists view non-OSI "source available" licenses with the same disdain as fully proprietary closed-source software.
In turn, this situation makes it extremely hard for independent-minded developers to form businesses for any software that doesn't lend itself well to SaaS. Massive companies can afford to release things as FOSS, but smaller/bootstrapped businesses effectively cannot.
Compare this to a few decades ago: the industry used to be less dogmatic regarding licenses, and there were a lot more smaller independent software vendors.
Sure, it's nice that you can read the code, maybe workaround certain bugs, or audit it for security. But, crucially, if the company decides to change their terms ask for much more money, or just refuse to do business with you, or goes out of business, you're in just as bad a situation as if you were buying Oracle software. You will have to replace them with new software, you won't have a choice to continue development or find a new vendor to support it for you.
People and companies don't want to pay for software. That's what makes it hard to form a business around selling software.
If your software is actually free, then it is easier to get people to use it, but that doesn't help you form a business.
A few decades ago, people and businesses also didn't like to pay for software, but saw fewer actually free options available.
The key point here is that "source available" software is still gratis, and yet the open source purists shun it -- often quite vocally, even if the software doesn't claim to be "open source".
This means if you're launching an independent software business, and you choose licensing terms that protect your own interests (such as Fair Source), the vocal ill-will from open source purists could be very harmful to the viability of your business. But if you choose FOSS instead, then larger companies will eat your lunch. I believe this is what was meant upthread regarding "open source purism only benefits the leeches".
And lately some purists have been moving the goalposts even more. Just a few days ago, I saw a comment on here where someone claimed AGPL is "open-washing" if a CLA is required for contributions. That's especially ridiculous, since there's literally no other way to sustainably develop AGPL software directly supported by business revenue. (Without a CLA or CAA on external code contributions, a creator of AGPL software cannot legally host their own SaaS.)
This status quo only helps big tech incumbents. And given how ageist tech companies can be, it's depressing to see so many programmers espouse this type of licensing puritanism. This will only serve to prevent them from launching their own businesses in the future, once they're too old to be hired by the big layoff-happy tech companies benefiting from this licensing in the first place.
What do you mean? Anyone can run AGPL software, either the creator, a contributor, or anyone else, as long as they abide by the terms of the license. You are absolutely allowed to ask for money for an AGPL service, the only restriction is that you must make the source code available under the AGPL for anyone who pays to use the software.
With a CLA on third-party contributions, the project creator can still operate an enhanced SaaS without that massive problem. And revenue from the business can then support sustainable development of the project as a whole.
fwiw, I have recently seen at least two "Show HN" posts where the author was running an enhanced paid SaaS on their AGPL project, which accepted many contributions without a CLA, but did not offer the enhanced SaaS codebase to users. That's a clear copyright violation and any of those contributors can sue the project creator if they wish; this is what I meant by "cannot legally host their own SaaS" although in retrospect I should have clarified the scenario.
This is not at all clear on the face of it. For example, RedHat has succeeded as a company for a very long time (ultimately getting themselves bought out by IBM for a very good price) by just selling support for Linux and other open source packages, even though anyone could just run CentOS and get the exact same code for most of this duration.
The point of the GPL and AGPL is to not allow any company to have a monopoly on code that users run - including the company that built that code in the first place. Subverting it with a CLA and first party proprietary extensions is a direct strike at its core purpose. I doubt you'll find many people willing to sign a CLA whose explicit goal is to prevent the main purpose of the AGPL.
Perhaps you can list some other examples of successful businesses who offer their core product under AGPL without a CLA?
As far as I've ever seen, when AGPL software is built by a business, a CLA is used.
To quote Heather Meeker: "In privately funded business, AGPL is almost always used as part of a dual licensing strategy [...] Vendors almost always use a contribution license (CLA) for contributions from the community." https://heathermeeker.com/2023/10/13/agpl-in-the-light-of-da...
Your business is unlikely to get revenue from these customers, so your business shouldn't feel an obligation to satisfy them.
With B2B software using the popular model of "paid hosted SaaS + libre self-host", you can definitely get revenue from companies who happen to employ some open source purists. Ditto with the model of "libre self-host with paid technical support". But all of this is much harder with a non-OSI license, since the open source purists will protest, regardless of whether or not the company is even running the self-host version.
Software adoption also tends to follow network effects, so having any contingent of vocal people complaining about license choice is bad news for a business.
They are already angry enough that they had to consider AGPL as open source because it meets all their criteria.
* Start a smear campaign
* block people from wordpress.org unless they ticked a loyalty checkbox stating they weren't affiliated with wpengine
* Take over and null Advanced Custom Fields, a WPengine plugin
* Block wpengine from wordpress.org, which is baked into wordpress, refuse to name a price for access, refuse to allow development of any alternate plugin hosting system
* Ban wordpress.org accounts of anyone who spoke up in favour of wpengine
* Start specific campaigns to poach wpengine clients
* start a website listing the staging urls of all wpengine customers and cite which ones left wpengine
I'm sure I've forgotten some things. The deal with extortion is you may have a legal ability to request money you are not legally entitled to. You may have a legal ability to take certain actions. But what is often not legal is threatening to take certain otherwise legal actions UNLESS you are paid money you are not legally entitled to.
The extortion claim was dismissed as the judge found there's no civil extortion tort under California law. California prosecutors haven't seen fit to file charges, so no formal proceeding.
But you're being rather blithe in your description.
But WP Engine was equally shitty (even if it's "legal" - OSI purism has no sense of justice) to steal his company's lunch, from their decades of hard work, and contribute absolutely nothing back.
Again, it reeks of the same foul behavior we see from the hyperscalers.
If you call me names, you’re misbehaving and should be called out for it. If I retaliate by knocking over your fence and spraypainting your cat, you get to sue me even though you were the one who behaved poorly, but legally, to start with.
TL;DR Matt claims WPE acted unethically, which is shameful. WPE claims Matt tried to ruin their business, in ways they say are illegal.
By the letter of the law, WPE is squeaky clean. But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
ACF was so important to the ecosystem that Automattic felt the need to grab it after they kicked out the maintainers. Doesn't that go against the story that WPEngine was contributing nothing?
> They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
> I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
Speak for yourself. Other people have different values and therefore interpretations of what's "moral" or "just".
If you want to make the argument that the only use of open source that's moral is one in which the user contributes back, that's fine. But I think you'll find yourself in a minority.
Absolutely nothing besides:
- contributions, bug and security fixes to the core codebase
- the creation of multiple plugins which were free to use (though some had a premium offering)
- the contribution of at a minimum several hundred thousand dollars a year on event and other sponsorship, including for events they were banned from attending, had all mention removed (and in one case, Matt stood on a stage and spat venom at them for 45 minutes).
"Absolutely nothing" indeed.
The last time I encountered someone making these points, they had a financial bias. Is that true for you?
My sympathies would lie, say, with a small development team, with minimal third-party contributors, for whom donations would make a massive difference in their ability to focus on their passion project, being stiffed by the AWS's of the world without as much as a corporate sponsorship of the project. Or even a small startup who sees a large behemoth supplant their ability to drive revenue via hosting.
My sympathies do not apply to $7.5B companies. At that scale, if your core product is open source and you're not continuing to innovate (including on business models beyond mere hosting) to stay ahead of competitors who are using your product the way the entire contributor community (not just you as the creator!) licensed it to them, there's no moral high ground.
This mentality drives me bonkers. If you don't want other people doing what they want with open source code, then don't open source it, at least not under a permissive license.
People are upset with Matt (though not necessarily the commenters you were replying to - TBH I thought it weird you posted your comment implying they were "attacking" Matt when they were simply pointing out the actual reality of the court ruling) because he wants to have his cake and eat it to: he wants to get all the benefits of open source (i.e. faster adoption and ecosystem creation) but then thinks he can be arbiter of some rules he made up in his head about "how much" someone who makes money off WordPress needs to give back.
Some engineers seem stuck to the idea that if they choose a permissive license, people will still contribute back for some idea of "community" or "goodwill" - while really the license itself is the declaration of expected behavior.
By choosing a license, you're explicitly setting how you intend that code to be used - if you want don't /really/ want other people to monetize your work with no feedback, for example, that is what the license is for. If you don't want people to "leech" on your work, then choose one of the (many) licenses that disallows that.
I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."
My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.
Definitely. And not only companies; even Debian rejected some packages because the upstream owners added restrictive "desires" on top of the actual licenses.
If you don't want people to use your product to build their own services without paying things back, use the AGPL rather than the GPL. If you don't want people to compete with you altogether or redistribute your work, don't use an open source license.
It's honestly kinda amusing that Matt and Automattic are behaving this way, given how many third party WordPress plugin and theme developers make the exact same mistake.
Wordpress became as successful as it did because of the open-source license.
If you were starting a website of your own using a tool just like this, and it wasn’t up on GitHub with a fully open source license, would you use it or look for an alternative that met those criteria?
Wordpress extracted significant value from the open-source license itself (and probably wouldn’t exist today without it). I’m not sure they realise that.
There are even commercial WP competitors with highly superior product like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. And you know what? They make fraction of what Automattic does. The strategy to offer free product and then make money on addons and hosting is clearly superior. But let's no mistake WP is for Automattic more like open-source freemium NOT some ideologically pure charity.
For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
[1] Taken from the complaint https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
On WordPress.com, you can pay for hosting plans, some of which give access to plugins and themes, but you also have free hosting without.
Elsewhere, you pay for hosting; there's generally no free option. Then you get plugins and themes included with that.
In the end, to use WordPress with plugins and themes, you pay some amount to the company that hosts it for you.
Disclaimer: I work for Automattic, but the opinions here are my own.
We've invested a ton in products like WordPress Studio, which let you run unlimited local copies of WordPress with however many plugins, themes, etc you want.
Then from 2017 until apparently the last couple months, you had to upgrade past the Free, Personal and Premium plans to the $25/mo Business plan in order to install plugins.
Now it looks like its just your free tier can't do it - I suppose that's fine. 20 years of providing a bastardized simulacra of wordpress was long enough!
All other hosts have always provided full-fledged wordpress with plugin installation with all plans
But, of course you knew all of that and were just trying to misdirect people, yet again. I now fully expect some half-truth pedantic response about a technicality about dates, plan names, or a niche host who also provides a simulacra.
Maybe you think Coca-cola should taste a certain way, and want to sell that to consumers, but without commercial rights to the trademark you can't do that under the Coca-cola brand, you have to call it something else.
It has to do with you calling WP Engine a "hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress" for turning off post revisions, which are an extremely minor part of WordPress (and could be turned back on upon request).
All while - rather than "reserv[ing] custom code at the higher-priced plans" (which is yet another baffling lie) - for the first 12+ years, custom code and plugins (the core of Wordpress and open-source) were completely unavailable[0]. And then for another 8 years it was only available on $25+ plans.
So, I reiterate: WP dot com is/was the most hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WP anywhere.
But, apparently by your logic, when you cheat the IRS via self-dealing and lie to the entire WordPress community about relinquishing control over WP, only to secretly take it back in the same day, that gives you the right to sell RC Cola as Coca Cola - causing endless confusion to newcomers about what Wordpress really is. It was "WordPress with an asterisk" [1] as you yourself recently put it - except there was never any asterisk anywhere, and especially so til 2017.
You're really not good at this Matt. You should get off the internet.
p.s. Lest you claim, like you have so many times when faced with criticism, that I am a paid shill for WP Engine: No one should use either of your services.
[0]: https://wordpress.com/blog/2017/08/07/wordpress-com-business...
Unfortunately, though, people are really wont to loop the open source sustainability question into everything, even if it's only tangential (in that the WordPress situation is related to it in general, though it has little to do with the actual case here IMO.) Thus, like a broken MP3, I feel obliged to point out that not everyone universally agrees that we need to "defend" open source in this way.
Open source and free software are ultimately movements whose primary concerns are the rights of the users of the code with open/free licensing, not the developers; except of course by virtue of developers themselves being users. I think this is getting lost or perhaps intentionally ignored simply because people want the model of monetizing free/open source software by selling it as a service to work and be sustainable. Philosophically, open source doesn't care if it's fair what WP Engine did or how Matt can make a living, and this is definitely both for better or worse, but trying to alter these characteristics will result in something that is less universally applicable than open source, so I think it's moot. (Of course, the most philosophically suitable response to SaaS is AGPL, but again, AGPL is mostly concerned about the rights of users, not the rights of developers.)
I totally can see how the sustainability issue is a huge problem, but if there's absolutely no way to make open source software more sustainable in the long term without changing it into essentially a different movement, then we're just going to need something else (i.e. Fair Source.) However, even if open source proves unsustainable for some models of software, it clearly can do great for other software, so it's probably here to stay, plus we still have many avenues we can go down to improve matters (I think that government funding for open source is brilliant, and it has shown some promising results already IMO.)
I say all of this as someone who would definitely love to be able to just work on open source full time... but I want it to really be open source.
To me, its not right that if you follow this open source license legal contract that there's then an additional, arbitrary set of restrictions that you must also follow.
If you don't want companies from making money from your own source project, don't license it in a way that lets them. It's really not that hard.
> Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
IIRC Manifest v2 was never a part of WebKit. Chrome introduced it in it's browser after they 'took webkit'. Google has continued to contribute to Webkit (and Blink), and is a good example of open source development.
If they are not releasing their sources, because of inappropriate licences, then that's what licenses like AGPL are there for.
I've got much less of a problem with AWS making money than I do with Canonical replacing GPL code with knock offs designed to cut the community out of code sharing.
Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
In that ecosystem everybody depends on everybody. It is also shared open competitive market. But importantly more people use WP the better for everyone.
When you start to throw your weight around thinking you should be getting more because it's all your doing... you will upset the balance. People will call you out. Because they want and need the ecosystem to stay open.
For example think about PHP itself... should they be upset and also want more? The creators of PHP didn't become millionares quite the oposite. Why aren't they entitled to some of the pie? Or Linux? Or what about the guy that cofounded Wordpress but never was invited to be part of Automattic?
Also, Matt gave them permission to do what they're doing.
Also, Matt did to someone before him (that nobody remembers including me), what WP Engine did to Matt. So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on here - if WP Engine is bad, Matt is bad.
There are two different group of engineers on two different end of political belief and spectrum ( political here might not be the right word ). Unfortunately there hasn't been a healthy debate on HN about this since 2013 / 2014.
We ends up with big tech getting the hate, it doesn't matter what they do anymore. And no one is even willing to defend them going against the vocal HN comment's majority. Since WP Engine isn't big, the leaching hurt doesn't count. And of course Matt acted immaturely, which doesn't buy him much vote. It is forever more like a popularity contest.
We have seen the pendulum swinging back in the past 2 - 3 years. Where HN give credit to big tech even if they dont agree with them. ( I was surprised when someone on HN wrote something good about Meta ).
If there is anything we have learned or should have learned over the past 10 - 20 years. It is better to have a healthy disagreement written or spoken out, rather than being one sided on the topic and silent on another.
The main problem with Big Tech is that they're all criminals, they increasingly break the law at vast scale and the legal system seems incapable of doing anything about it. The issue of primary concern with them is a matter of law and society, namely are we a society of laws? Or one where the powerful merely purchase the justice system they want to have?
With WPE vs Matt, WPE has broken no laws as far as I know, and if Matt has, he probably isn't powerful enough to subvert the justice system to his will.
That they didn’t is pure lies and FUD from Matt who retreats back to the position that it “Wasn’t enough”…
Only the extortion (1030(a)(7)) CFAA claim was dismissed, and it was dismissed with leave to amend.
This isn't uncommon in proceedings like this.
It is sad how his reputation is.
It's also not implemented yet: the initial release of the FAIR package manager is aimed at the package distribution parts, both mirroring the themes/plugins on wordpress.org and using W3C DIDs on BlueSky's PLC server as an indirection in front of raw URLs for hand-curated packages not hosted on .org, such as the FAIR client and server plugins themselves.
My own role in FAIR is a lot simpler, and it's maintaining AspireCloud, the project from AspirePress (now a working group of FAIR) that implements enough of api.wordpress.org to enable a searchable mirror of all its downloadable assets. AC is usable on its own without the FAIR ecosystem, but also makes up a good chunk of it while things are getting bootstrapped. So while I have a pretty good grasp of the planned architecture, I'm still not the best person to give the details. There's a public Slack server on https://chat.fair.pm which is still the best place to go for answers, and discussion boards on Github for less synchronous discussion (though the problem with GH is there's so many repos it's hard to find the right one).
I wouldn't touch Wordpress.com, ever, although I still use wordpress the software and am happy to see movement in decentralizing the plugin and core repos.
I removed/converted my last Wordpress site (commercial and otherwise) last month.
If you have an infrastructure, stability is a good selling point.
For those who still need word press, I recommend checking out the roots.io open source collective, they have done great work bringing modern PHP development practices into WP projects. Bedrock and Sage are a great starting point to any project.
As our company thinks about a new website vendor, WordPress is off the table because of the nonsense.
How would anyone even know where it’s hosted?
I get the guy pissed off some php devs but I’m sure as hell not hosting that shit myself, marketing team content can be their problem.
And I say this as somebody who thinks that the block editor is... fine. I use it in a hybrid style, using ACF to create blocks that behave and perform natively but don't require directly using all the stupid build tool cruft.
That's actually very cool. In most runtimes the "core" built-ins and standard libraries are immutable. You'd have to recompile them with your changes to get the same effect. Not so with PHP. A footgun, but in this case a useful one.
https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-6.3.1-no-c...
There’s also a Composer package:
There are 11 claims in WPE's complaint, three were dismissed, and as I understand it, only one of them decisively. Matt wants to spin it as good news, good for him. He's still potentially getting taken to the cleaners if he doesn't settle.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117192124/http://wpblogger....
one of his responses to DHH when the WPE thing went down:
> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
One of his first posts on the topic: https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/
A collection of crazy quotes and events, biased towards the other perspective: https://mullenweg.wtf/
Edit: and HN commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
Not for a paywall, of course: personal blog he hosts. Due to editing in the past.
"Win" or, said another way, "The bullshit I started is seeing an end". Whatever works for you, buddy.
This gets more complicated when multiple companies are selling services for the same open source software, because you want all of them to be able to say what their services are for, but you don't want one of them to tarnish the reputation of the software itself. But as long as all the companies are actually selling services for the same software, like in the case of WPEngine and the other company here, consumers are better served and informed if both call it WordPress.