Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry(wpenginestatus.com) |
Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry(wpenginestatus.com) |
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.
I am only looking at this from the outside but given that Wordpress.org (not the wordpress hosting company wordpress.com) is involved here, it's clear that this dispute involves the Wordpress project itself and not just the commercial Automattic entity/Matt Mullenweg.
Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.
this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's something not more critical than updating some plugins.
you also can't deny the obvious conflict of interest here where it feels like he's trying take a "competitor" down. sucks all around.
To my understanding this isn't even particularly true - WPEngine have contributed significantly to events/sponsorships and with their own open source contributions. Matt's demand was allegedly instead for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic".
https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.
Wordpress people have been rewriting content without asking for permission FOREVER, potentially breaking code embedded in content. They rewrite (or perhaps stopped by now, I've moved on) Wordpress to WordPress.
If I was a hosting service I would have that noise off by default too.
https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/
and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.
Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.
All seems so sudden and disproportionate.
WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?
Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.
1. Fork and cherry-pick from upstream, don't accept contributions from outside. They need minimal changes.
2. Fork and maintain their fork independently, try to get community contributors too.
Using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks outside of fair use is not.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
and
> a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
To me it looks like a conflict of interests that Matt's using his role as the director of the non-profit to try to make a competitor pay his for-profit business (which it's worth disclosing that you are an employee of, edit: now disclosed) tens of millions of dollars.
Particuarly since WP Engine do already seem to contribute to the WordPress project/community/non-profit side, through events/sponsorships/open-source contributions. Even WordPress.org states "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" under their "Five for the Future" program[1].
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...
WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck?
The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now.
If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.
I don't know the exact details about it, but that solves the bottleneck. Once pages are flattened they do not have to call the database again.
There's also a flat-file CMS called FlatPress, but I was not able to reliably determine if it's a fork or not.
Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine.
Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store
... means, "this seems more important to Matt than it does to me" and "he should just accept it shouldn't matter to him any more than it does to me".
Which, when paraphrased, explains why the comment tends to further provoke those who are passionate about something dear to them.
Often it's dear, and they are uncalm, because it came from them or is part of them in some way. That's the anti-calm appealed to by "think of the children", an inciting phrase. We're to recognize that our creations are worth our care.
Put another way: not all indignation is unrighteous.
Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place!
----
[0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues.
I wonder what it means.
That said, as a WP admin of a tiny commercial website, I find it distressing that someone else can influence the functionalities of my Website. I already didn't install Jetpack because I dislike the intrusiveness and, frankly, the spying by Autommatic which is enabled by this plugin on our revenues and commercial transactions. All this points toward a direction that is not pleasant.
Just spent the better part of 3 hours after work trying to help him out, what WordPress have done here is ridiculous. It feels like something more petty than a child. Mullenweg needs to grow up and realise that open source is open source. I've read through the cease and desist claims. It's Mullenweg's petty ego destroying an ecosystem of WPE users. So much for his high and mighty 'wordpress is the pinicle of user's experience'
Whatever his angle is, I just replaced Wordpress with a home rolled cms for my client. WordPress can die for all I care. The web would be safer for it.
Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.
> What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.
If you read the full (pretty short) statement, it comes of as something written at the end of a bad day with a lot of petty and vindictive emotion behind it all. Regardless of the actual issues, which I know no more of than the statement on the website.
Matt is being unreasonable and petty here. Posts once published, they are rarely edited.
Matt just bursted because of envy. He's used to be pampered with attention.
I'm occasionally forced to work with Wordpress, so I'm not an expert or anything, but that's my impression as well. Wordpress was designed for publishing articles but people want to use it as a foundation for building highly dynamic websites.
The paradox of these highly dynamic WP websites is that people usually try to build that way because they don't have the development expertise to make a custom solution, so they need lots of plugins to achieve what they want, but those plugins are often built to such poor quality and security standards that they really need to be reviewed before use, but to review them you need developer expertise.
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell.
According to WP Engine:
> Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/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.
and
> Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
The problem is not the "WP" in their name but their specific usage of "WordPress" and "WooCommerce" on their website and marketing. You don't have to literally use the trademarked in your brand name for infringement. Legal threshold, AFAIK, is around 15% of the people thinking you are officially related to the owner or the licensees of the trademark.
https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-...
I also updated my bio here to reflect the product I am working for belongs to Automattic. Previously, it only mentioned the product which not everyone has to know belongs to Automattic.
I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute.
To at least partially back up my claim linked for the latter, WP Engine is part of WordPress.org's "Five for the Future" program, stating "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" and listing developers they sponsor: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...
Their own open-source projects can be found on GitHub, like FaustJS: https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs
The primary events they sponsor are, to my understanding, WordCamps and DE{CODE}.
(I also do not really have a stake in this, but as an open source developer trying to launch a product it’s really easy for me to sympathize with WP.org/.com)
Any insights there?
Not trying to come across as interrogating or particularly concerned with the answer, but the whole thing is a curiosity.
WP Engine was listed as sponsor for WordCamp Europe 2024[0], which was in June, and ran DE{CODE} back in March. So they seem at least relatively recent on events.