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Comment by brokentone | Hacker News Reader

Agree on the motivation, and you see this with Automattic/Wordpress. They haven't touched or accepted tickets into commenting or ORM in quite some time, because they've "fixed" it as they think it should be in outside projects (http://www.intensedebate.com/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/). While these are "free" (for now), they're closed source so that they can do as they wish with them. The great majority of WP commenting code is 3-5 years old, and they keep deferring this DB ticket (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21663) despite the drivers they use (mysql_*) being deprecated in modern versions of PHP.

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Actually, Automattic is completely separate to WordPress as a project. While some of the commit team are Automattic employees, most aren't (at least of the active ones; there's a few that work mostly on Automattic internal projects).

Automattic themselves contribute a hell of a lot of time and effort back to WordPress. There's tonnes of plugins that they've contributed back (http://profiles.wordpress.org/automattic), they often test patches that might break things (with the scale of WP.com meaning they do break, and quickly), and they employ people to work full-time on WordPress. Automattic is pretty much the worst example of a company that doesn't contribute back.

As for the ticket you mention above, that has been deferred because we're still working on the specifics on how to handle that in a backwards compatible manner. This is being handled in a plugin at the moment, with hopes for integration later: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-db-driver/

(If there are any specific tickets you want to point to that haven't been accepted, please let me know and I'll re-review them for you. Intense Debate is not an excuse for the built-in commenting sucking, especially since ID is basically dead.)

I believe the point was that WP is lagging behind the times. A developer that works with modern frameworks and looks at the WP codebase will quickly ask themselves "Why"...

There is always a "backwards compatible" argument that pops up, but the solution is simple: persons that dont want to upgrade from their 2002 PHP installation can use legacy WP. Everyone that wants a new WP site can just do so using modern server software.

> There is always a "backwards compatible" argument that pops up, but the solution is simple: persons that dont want to upgrade from their 2002 PHP installation can use legacy WP.

We tried a long-term support branch. It doesn't work with WP's development process, and it's a lot of extra effort. It's not too hard to maintain backwards compatibility on the other hand.

This means that legacy has to continue to be maintained for security issues. See Rails 2.3 (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/06/17/if-your-business-uses-ra...)

Correct. But the quicker you stop working with legacy code, the quicker the cutoff can be.

Even automotive manufacturers have to supply parts for cars they manufactured for X number of years after the final production. I hope new 2014 cars don't include parts from the 1940's era for "compatability" reasons.

I hope they do. There is an obscene amount of integral parts in automobiles that are made out of poorly formed plastics. Not only do a higher number of parts fail, the manufactures making replacements often follow the same flawed construction.

No 1940s vehicles didn't come with ABS, front and side panel air bags. But linkage in the suspension was at least metal, and wasn't known to fatigue every five years. If I were so inclined I could bring my hick mechanic in here and he would have volumes of corner cuts to cite that have resulted in unnecessary deaths over the years.

Some advancements have been great but overall legacy parts don't engulf vehicles in flames. Hodge-podge workarounds do[1].

[1] http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/.f0e40ac

How exactly is HyperDB closed source?! It's in the public wordpress.org plugin repository.

SVN repository: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/hyperdb/

SVN changelog: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/hyperdb/

Yes, it's not on Github (which is a shame), but that's a long way away from being closed source.

All plugins hosted on WordPress.org are GPLv2+ if not otherwise specified (see #2 on http://wordpress.org/plugins/about/guidelines/ ).

GPLv2 requires that a copy of the license is distributed "with every copy of the program". [0]

[0]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#Wh...

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