My concern is why does Matt care all of a sudden? The timing is … suspicious. Especially with the trademark dispute — this feels like Matt trying to shore up a defense or something.
60 karma · joined June 18, 2023
Quoting the referenced article:
1. Contributing to WordPress
So here’s my question: what do you think of a company that, with close to half a billion dollars in revenue, and more than a thousand staff, barely contributes the equivalent of one full-time employee to the project on which it has built the entirety of its value?
My opinion of this doesn't matter. What I would like to know is this: Are all companies that profit from WordPress being held to the same standard, or is this specifically measured against WP-Engine for some particular reason? Either way, I don't believe this is relevant as its opinion, and as the author themselves state, there is no actual obligation to contribute.
2. Trademark confusion
This is why the confusion that WordPress.com may generate and the one that other company generates are not one and the same.
According to WebArchive, this was a policy change made on September 24th -- the same day that all of this kicked off.
Original Text: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress...:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
When in doubt about your use of the WordPress or WordCamp name or logo, please contact the Foundation for clarification.
New Text: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
If you would like to use the WordPress trademark commercially, please contact Automattic, they have the exclusive license. Their only sub-licensee is Newfold.
For non-commercial use, you can contact us here at the Foundation.
Ignoring the out-of-place dig at WP Engine in the new text, there was a clear language change and as an outsider, it seems as though there was no notice communicated or given -- but, there is no obligation to do so.
It originally stated "you are free to use it in any way you see fit" and WP Engine did so. While the author of the text is welcome to make the change as necessary, the text also explicitly states that "WP" is not covered my trademark and the new language makes a request. I haven't seen any prior public communication or notice about such a change -- that doesn't help the perception from the Wordpress Foundation.
3. Access to WordPress.org
Here’s a company benefiting from a free resource they are not entitled to. That actually charges their customers for that free service ($3/month to activate auto-updates, something that is free on WordPress), and when they lose access to the free resource, blames others.
Why are they not entitled to benefit from an opensource project so long as they are abiding by the license? If the Wordpress Foundation has an issue with this, they should have chosen an license that applied the appropriate restrictions. They lost access because the Wordpress Foundation blocked their access without prior communication and in a, seemingly, unprecedented manner.
While not referenced in the article, I have seen claims made that WP Engine places a disproportionate load on the Wordpress infrastructure. I think it would be fair to ask them to contribute or run their own mirrors, but I haven't seen any evidence to support that such a conversation took place prior to restricting access.
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As I mentioned, I'm not a lawyer, but I think the only actual footing that Automattic has here is potentially around the Trademark policy, of which it is only "WordPress", NOT "WP". Could WP Engine maybe rework some wording on their website or something? Sure. If there was a disagreement, it should have been handled in court, not in the way its currently being handled.
I don't think either party is morally in the clear -- but legally, that doesn't matter. I do think Automattic and the WordPress Foundation (both run by Matt Mullenweg) are approaching solving this problem in possibly the worst way possible and seem surprised about the negative response that they are getting.
I do think there seems to be an obvious conflict of interest between Automattic and the WordPress Foundation -- The WordPress Foundation seems to be punishing WP Engine for a legal dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. I suspect that this is due to a lack of Governance structure around the WordPress Foundation that other large opensource foundations have -- even moreso based on the public postings of members of the WordPress community that have been blindsided by the actions the WordPress Foundation have taken seemingly without any kind of discussion or communication within the Foundation.
The support experience described matches all of my experiences with CF support over the years.
puts on tin foil hat and looks around nervously
Combine it with the stories I hear about Sales, the numerous other PR fumbles already mentioned in this thread, and the months I’ve personally waited (while on a paid plan!) for ticket responses only to get cookie cutter responses is, quite frankly, embarrassing.
CloudFlare puts in a good front, and their products seem decent, but they really have questionable business practices that should make anyone think twice before using them.
I use TripIt as the foundation for all of mine.
I’ve explored running @Edge for performance gains and overall improved user experiences, but always have struggled with services like this (or fly.io or even just running my own VMs) and their data center locations.
Looking at your integrations page, for example, you call out PlanetScale so il use that as an example to illustrate my challenge. Koyeb has a region in SFO. PlanetScale’s closest region is in Oregon. For a database connection, that’s a lot of latency which likely undermines the performance gains of running a service at edge (at least in my use cases).
I’ve evaluated just rolling my own database replication for Edge and it’s not a huge deal but often finding information about data center providers to try and pair data with the compute can be challenging.
So the queries I’d like to pose: Are you able to provide Speedtest endpoints or data center information for collocating other resources near each deployed Koyeb region? Do you plan to offer lower level access to compute to address this kind of use case? Is there another implementation angle to this I am missing?
The value I found is being able to do multi-region read replicas with no compute overhead for lower traffic geos.
I like the idea of PS and have toyed around with the idea of migrating to it but there are some glaring issues I don’t want to deal with:
- no native way to export backups and avoid vendor lock in (or pay for the row reads to generate regular backups)
- contradictory cost model. Their pricing page reads “Every time a query retrieves a row from the database, it is counted as a row read. Every time a row is written to the database, it is counted as a row written.” while their docs state “Rows read is a measure of the work that the database engine does, not a measure of the number of rows returned. Every row read from a table during execution adds to the rows read count, regardless of how many rows are returned.”
Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.
[1] https://gmplib.org/list-archives/gmp-devel/2023-June/006169....
In before “it’s just one guy”: there are a thousand ways to solve this that are not expensive or complicated.
Should the offending party have been a better consumer? Yes.
Is it fair to entirely blame the user versus implementing additional caches and safeguards to make it an annoyance and not the end of the world emergency GMP is making it out to be? Definitely not.