It's very funny that Matt's original complaint was that WPEngine didn't contribute enough, and he has now banned them from contributing and stolen what they had previously provided
To add to that he is now violating their trademark by still using their name, branding and logo, all of which are registered trademarks. The copy you download still has all of these in.
Way to speed run wiping out trust in your product.
Any Wordpress plugin developer who relies on it for their livelihood should be EXTREMELY worried.
I don't disagree with that, but the comment I've replied to said they were stealing "what they had previously provided". The stuff "provided" was code shared under a GPL license.
Maybe it's a technicality, but the code is open source and you can do whatever you want it it, provided that you respect the GPL license.
There's a lot to criticise Matt for here, but you can't accuse him of stealing GPL code. Like, that's one of the points of that license.
Open source is open source. To my best knowledge I believe its stealing if you make use of resource an individual or group of people came together to develop and add minor adjustments to it and then put it up for sale. That's stealing.
But if you willingly able to contribute back to the community with between 20 - 40% of profit generated from the open source used, is and will be considered fair play.
Stealing involves acquiring something in an illegal way. Free in the context of open source code usually means infinitely available under its license. These two are incompatible - unless some illegal license shenanigans are at play.
Stealing doesn't imply anything. It is taking someone else's posession.
In the case of gpl software, copying, and posessing a copy, and redistributing a copy of the code itself is not theft. The license grants those actions explicitly.
But the fact that the license grants those particular rights does not mean there is no license, and violating that license is exactly theft, which is what Mullenweg has done.
For someone persuing this whole pogrom under the banner of championing open source and being a good community member and challenging others integrity, this is about as hipocrytical and low as you can go. It would be a joke if it wasn't a fact.
I would not admit in public that you think that since a license does not require money, that means it has no owner or copyright and that it's impossible to steal it. Or that laws are the only thing that defines right and wrong and stealing. Money is just one of many terms in any agreement or contract or license.
Do you think they were all of the sudden going to dramatically start contributing? I see this more as symbolically shutting them out. Nothing in this ongoing situation is about more than optics now
> Do you think they were all of the sudden going to dramatically start contributing?
It's possible if they had been approached in a calm, polite and constructive way, they might have.
After Matt stormed in, set the bridges on fire and started pissing on everything?
lol. lmao even
> Nothing in this ongoing situation is about more than optics now
You're not wrong there! And since you apparently created this account purely to respond to my post, what do you think these optics make you look like, Matt? Do you think they make you look good?
Last I checked Automattic is a privately held for profit company. One could argue that it’s a private equity too. Just using different words to twist a narrative.
This is not the same. Private equity extracts as an investment, Automattic is an ecosystem participant (that happens to be privately held) that actively contributes to the community. That doesn’t mean Matt hasn’t taken things too far (I leave that to be determined by civil courts and the Wordpress community, no dog in the fight myself), but there is a difference, and it is very important to clearly delineate who is receiving benefit for value realized economically.
They were, until the CEO started burning decades of goodwill. At this point I'm looking at what I should do to get off Automattic for my website, I'm legit scared plugin developers are going to get spooked.
I would argue that attempting to strong arm a competitor into paying for your open source product and then doing all of this when they won’t is way farther down the late stage capitalism road than most private equity companies.
That’s probably mostly because the private equity folks are just better at extracting money without causing an international scene. Matt’s ineptitude doesn’t make it categorically different, though.
I can understand the desire to prevent freeloading, but not agree with the methods to encourage better behavior. Economic systems are hard and imperfect.
not trying to be controversial, and I know some private investment firms are understandably not well regarded, but there are plenty you don’t hear about that are quite pleasant to work with
I sympathized with Wordpress a lot in the initial drama, but this is going downhill fast.
Blocking somebody's access to the plugin repository, not accepting their patches, and then 'releasing' your own 'secure' version is just abuse, period.
Yeah. I'm a long-time WP site developer. I actually really like Gutenberg (which a lot of critics seem to be suggesting is the first thing that should go in a fork). I'm broadly supportive of e.g. bringing WP-GraphQL and its developer in-house, of adding ACF-type functionality to the core, and even of working to persuade WP Engine to be slightly better citizens.
But I can't shake the feeling that to a lot of observers, this latest thing is going to look rather like a kidnapping. It's not right.
You say this like there's not much difference between the two, but there's a world of difference.
One is someone yanking a repo and breaking millions of builds across the world and the maintainers of npm stepping in to fix things (in a move that is still controversial, mind you).
The other is the maintainers of the WordPress plugin repository starting a self-described "nuclear war" with the plugin maintainers, banning them from the repo, publicly disclosing a security vulnerability in the plugin, then hijacking it to save the day.
One is a potentially misguided step to solve a real problem. What Matt is doing here is just cosplaying Syndrome from The Incredibles.
> One is someone yanking a repo and breaking millions of builds across the world and the maintainers of npm stepping in to fix things (in a move that is still controversial, mind you).
Thank you for stating the move is still controversial. The root issue people always forget was NOT left pad. It was kik. It was not npm’s to take away from the package maintainer and give to someone else. That was the abuse of trust that caused the maintainer to also yank left pad. I am not this maintainer. I don’t know this maintainer. However, if someone went to my email provider for example Gmail and said I can’t use kik at Gmail dot com anymore and this email address would be given to kik now, I would be furious.
Imagine if Toyota came to New York Times and said the New York Times can’t have a page like nytimes.com/toyota The lawyers at the times would tell them to pound sand and or see you in court.
NPM has never acknowledged its grave error of judgment. In fact, its website doubles down saying it stands by its decision.
If you told me Wordpress dot org would manage to outclown the clowns at npm, I would not believe you and yet here we are.
Assuming that other plugins depend on ACF (which I get the impression is a thing?), automattic can probably argue that the use throughout the code is for compatibility reasons. There's also probably interactions with the GPL licenses (if it's GPL v2 or later).
>LIVE/APPLICATION/Under Examination. The trademark application has been accepted by the Office (has met the minimum filing requirements) and that this application has been assigned to an examiner.
Good catch. Looks like it was filed just under a year ago, and hasn't been finalized yet. If it is approved, I think the original filing date is considered the registration date, so Matt's usage would (at that point) qualify as infringement. However, I am NAL.
I’m not AL either, but I’ve been close to a couple of trademark applications and even a court case - so that’s why I was curious. Looking through some of the attached PDF, I wonder if it was, or will be denied unless amended, because the words are just too common and/or the scope for the trademark is being cast too wide? The examiner apparently sent a notice to the applicant earlier this year, and there seems to be some sort of extension to the application in play. This may suggest, that unless amended, the current application won’t be granted?
My reading is that the examiner thought "advanced custom fields" was too generic. WPE had until Oct. 19 to file a response or ask for an extension, and they asked for an extension on Oct. 4.
For "ACF" however, the examiner didn't see a problem and it has been published in the Federal Register. It will be registered if no one files an opposition during the publication period.
You don't need to have a registered trademark to sue for trademark infringement; registration does make it easier to assert your trademark and can increase damage in a court case.
Fair. I think to an outsider "Advanced Custom Fields" does sound generic. But in the WordPress world it is the gold standard for which all other plugins are judged. If you look on Wordpress subreddit threads like this one [0] and search for "ACF", you'll see it's one of the most known, respected and relied upon. So in that sense the name is very valuable and distinct.
Whether or not that means it will be granted I have no idea. On one hand it's only known in WordPress circles. On the other hand, WordPress is said to account for over 40% of the web.
Agreed. I'm going all-in on Payload from here on out. Easier to declare custom post types than WordPress and without the need to explicitly disable any legacy cruft. I built my first app on it last Winter and it's only gotten better. v3 is incredibly easy to use, plus it's all TypeScript which is a huge plus for me personally...
But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone.
Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.
> But that's the problem. Wordpress is used for much much more. You can use it as a CMS, LMS, news platform, saas platform, and much more. You can literally customize it to the bone.
And that freedom is also its weakness. "When all you have is a hammer, ..." comes to mind.
I've had to rescue enough booking systems, LMS's, and SaaS platforms built on WordPress with terrible performance or 20% of features not working to think this is a terrible approach.
> Ghost is a good alternative to wordpress, only if you're using it for 2-3 specific usecases.
That's no bad thing. More specialised tools help with performance and UX for those tasks.
A fan blog that can get a lot of comments over a short span of time.
Any alternative must have a hosted option, I'm not playing admin for something that already takes up a lot of my time, as I said out of the goodness of my heart and wallet.
The best I can say for wordpress is that myself, other contributors and our commenters tolerate it, though quite often it leans towards hate it. I've yet to hear anyone say they love it hence the ask.
I am the last person in this world to malign Drupal, I have been contributing for twenty long, long years to it.
But no, Drupal is not an alternative to Wordpress. Perhaps ten years ago but even then barely. Now? That's like saying a Kenworth semi is an alternative to a motorcycle. Sure, you can get from A to B on either but beyond that, they are really different tools for different jobs.
Maybe the new "Drupal CMS" (nee Starshot) initiative will bring them into direct competition again. We will see.
Multilingual is built into Drupal and as far as I am aware, it's a plugin for Wordpress.
Complex permissions/access control is another area where Drupal is much stronger.
And overall, the more complex the requirements are , the more likely Drupal will be the answer. Wordpress leans very heavily towards "here, install this, it'll work, you can tweak it and that's about it". Drupal gives you a gigantic bucket of LEGO. In other words, although it's a bit of an exaggeration but not badly, with Wordpress you start from a working website and there's only so far you can walk from that point. With Drupal, you need to walk quite a bit in the first place to get a good website but there's just no end how far you can walk.
I Left wp development when gutenberg came out, it was clear that things would have turned for the worse.
Since then basically no new features only new bugs on an editor the majority didn't want and still doesn't.
Now this. It feels good to be right and see things turned even worse than expected but what a waste.
Wp could have improved so much and done so much more for entrepreneurs and startups.
Instead they are stuck in 2018
How can someone like Jeffrey Zeldman believe in the work they're doing when the company acts like this? I understand there are bills to pay and the job market is terrible. Do what you need to do to survive.
Does anyone want to play armchair internet psychologist with me to speculate as to Matt's thinking here?
My guess is that he was focused on these facts:
1) I own Wordpress
2) WPEngine is profiting from Wordpress and I'm not benefiting
3) This is unfair
And it was stuck in his mind like a thorn, irritating him whenever the thought arose, and never went away. Commercializing open source is hard for myriad reasons, but wordpress.com is actually rather profitable, and yet it still bothered him that he wasn't getting a cut.
Eventually, after many grumpy ruminations on it, the answer was obvious: "I deserve a cut of WPEngine's income, since they're using my software." No, this isn't how the license works, and there's no legal basis for it, but it felt right and fair.
This thought, irrational and deluded as it was, wedged in his psyche and fed into his deep loathing for WPEngine. All the subsequent actions follow from it, from the initial ultimatum to the various actions he's taking to fight his enemy.
This is an intensely personal and emotional fight for him, and everyone that disagrees is an enemy too. He's just asking for what's fair, and yet all these ignorant commenters on the internet can't see it.
I hate to speculate, especially from a distance. But I do wonder:
- Why now? What snapped? Clearly WPE didn't go to "billions" over night. So why go nuclear now?
- Doesn't he have a close and immediate circle of advisors and confidants? Are they speaking to him and he's not listen? Or has he locked himself in a room so to speak and is completely unapproachable? Either way, not good.
- Is he trying to force WPE to fork WP and then maintain their own version? Does he believe they can't do it? What if WPE's hosting peers unite and abandon what is effectively Automattic's version?
Am I the only one who can't imagine a good outcome from all this?
> Am I the only one who can't imagine a good outcome from all this?
Here's a possible good outcome.
1. The board fires Matt, stops chasing windmills, and settles with WP Engine. I'm kind of surprised they haven't done so already - it's all downhill from here. He's either lying to them, not listening, or they're drinking the Kool Aid.
2. Matt steps down from the WordPress Foundation and transfers ownership of wordpress.org to them. He takes his hundreds of millions of dollars and does something else.
3. The new CEO apologizes to the community and establishes public processes for removing extensions and such. Checks and balances are added.
4. The WordPress Foundation's new director orders a house clearing. Many hosting providers and developers are invited to join the board. It's no longer an instrument of Matt's will, but represents the community.
The first step will probably happen at some point.
The second step could happen, but seems unlikely. I think there's a significant chance Matt would go on a rampage if he was fired. He clearly thinks of WordPress as his personal property. If he retains control of the foundation, there's nothing to stop him from continuing his crusade there. He's certainly got the funds to do so.
The third step is effectively required if he's fired. It's even mentioned in the 48 Laws of Power.
I don't think this outcome is particularly likely, but it could happen. People do sometimes win the lottery.
I can see those, but I don't imagine there's even a fair chance of them happening.
In my mind, shortly after the WordCamp US things should have leveled out. Someone should have pulled Matt aside and said, "OK, you vented. Pissed all over The Community who showed up, but you vented. Let's get this back on the rails..."
It's possible that was said. But Matt's listening skills aren't good and lately have gotten worse. To me, the long this stays off the rails the less likely it is to get back on the rails.
Someday this is going to be an HBR case study on how not to ensure your legacy. There should also be an HBR case study for Gutenberg, "How not to roll out a product."
CEOs can get away with a lot if they're successful; Elon Musk is a good example. That only goes so far, though. If he wins the trademark lawsuit, he can probably do whatever he wants. If he loses, there's a shareholder lawsuit, or he continues escalating then at some point he'll be removed. One can only hope.
Yeah, Musk and others come to mind. But WP is supposed to OSS. Musk didn't build his empire on the backs of volunteers. Musk has built multiple successful ventures. Matt has step in it once.
In the context OSS Matt's behaviour is deplorable. His insistence on digging a deeper and deeper hole is freightening.
It's digital self-emmolation. It's professional suicide.
> The board fires Matt, stops chasing windmills, and settles with WP Engine
The board is Matt and a PE firm Managing Partner, appointed by Matt. The third board member m (also appointed by Matt) doesn’t seem to have been active in any way shape or form in several years.
I agree that the Wordpress Foundation will remain under his control. The Automattic board (https://automattic.com/board/), however, has four other members, so it's possible they'll remove him. They can't all be true believers in his Delenda est WP Engine agenda. One can only hope.
You'd need to see the cap table and articles of incorporation to know if the board has any power. Salesforce invested $300m in the D round and doesn't have a seat, for example. Phil Black and maybe Toni Schneider's seats might be protected, but Matt could have the voting power to replace the other two at will.
Current drama aside, good for him if that's the case. Very few founders maintain absolute control past a Series C.
Yes, good for him if the wholly speculative scenario I described is true. What's going on with Matt and WordPress will have zero impact on other founders.
So you're saying no other investor(s) - which btw Matt / Automattic has - anywhere are going to be concerned about what leverage they have if the founder goes sideways?
That's naive at best.
Plenty of investors are already asking "Can I get f*ked like this?" And going forward investors will be sure not to be exposed unnecessarily.
Zero impact? That's silly. Investors what high returns and lowest possible risk. Matt has made single founder with too much control high risk.
Yes, this has f*ked other investment-seeking founders. Full stop.
No, it hasn't. I'm a founder. I have investors. Nobody serious is asking these questions, for reasons that make perfect sense when you're familiar with the mechanics of venture investing and corporate governance.
I won't say nobody is asking questions at all, because "investor" is a loosey-goosey term and there are plenty of people writing small checks who call themselves investors. But those people never had leverage anyway. Investors get preferred shares with no voting rights (or even information rights!). The only ones who have any power are round leads, whose board seats are enshrined in the company's articles of incorporation.
If -- and again, it's a big if -- Matt, after raising a billion dollars across many funding rounds, still controls a majority of the voting shares and board seats, it's because Automattic was already so successful that he's been able to dictate terms every step of the way. This is stupendously rare. It's not a situation that applies to other startups, or that investors are measurably worried about.
I imagine a near future result will be WPE maintaining a fork of WordPress and the plugin repo, with WP demanding plugin authors disclaim any association with WPE.
It's not new, Matt has been trying to reach an agreement for years.[1] To be fair, he has done everything he can for the health of the ecosystem for all these years.
WP Engine leech off the WordPress brand from head to toe. Literally, from trademark to infrastructure, while Automattic covers the bill for the most part.
Of course, legally, WPE doesn't have to contribute beyond its mouth but if we are going down that route then also Automattic doesn't have to put up with funding WPE operation anymore.
I'm tired of people justifying WPE attitude and behavior by saying "legally, they don't have to contribute", well let's talk legal, everything happening to them is within those same lines too. Why are you complaining if it's legal?
This is one of those "fuck around and find out" situation. Matt just run out of fucks to give, and decided it's better to teach the bully a lesson even if it comes at a cost.
You're citing Matt but Matt has been proven to be untrustworthy. For example, his claim of many year long negotiations includes a claim that he had delivered a term sheet to WP Engine in May, but that claim was disproven by himself, no such term sheet was delivered. Additionally, the contributions that he counts from WP Engine are only those included in the "Five for the Future" program which Matt administrates. The actual contributions of WP Engine to the ecosystem include millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship, plugin development (WPGraphQL, ACF) and more.
Read the lawsuit filed by WP Engine. No such negotiations existed. Matt has been arguing with WP Engine in his head. You may believe WP Engine's contributions to WordPress are disproportionately small for their size but make that argument on the basis of accurate information, not the fiction from Matt.
Nobody likes WP Engine but Matt's lying has been so problematic that it is impossible to take his side unless you believe that integrity is optional.
> millions of dollars per year on event sponsorship
Are you for real? Event sponsorship is part of the marketing budget. They're there to promote their company among competitors. It's a universal business expense.
> plugin development ACF
ACF is their own asset
I mentioned this in my comment, they don't contribute significantly beyond their mouth. What you came with are just the receipts for what I said.
And Automattic's control over WordPress is part of their "marketing" budget. Let's not forget how valuable the exclusive commercial license for the WordPress trademark is to Automattic, their ability to use the WordPress.com domain has huge commercial value to them. I have no doubt that WP Engine would pay tens of millions of dollars per year for the exclusive commercial license to the WordPress trademark which is tens of millions that could be funnelled to the WordPress Foundation, which is tens of millions more than Automattic spend. Ask yourself how Matt justifies Automattic spending millions of dollars per year on hosting WordPress.org and millions of dollars on the 100+ staff Automattic have working on WordPress.org.
We can't pick and choose which contributions are valid and which aren't. WP Engine spend money on the development of WPGraphQL a free plugin, WP Engine spend money on the development of Advanced Custom Fields which they release for free for millions of WordPress sites to use... of course they're not doing that out of some altruistic moral crusade, of course it's a clear calculus about the benefit to their bottom line, but that doesn't change that they're contributing.
The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg: you're playing into Matt's absurd narrative that the only valid contribution is one that is made to something under Matt's control.
I think WP Engine are Private Equity leeches, I have zero doubt about that, I wish that they were to contribute more but that's the deal with Open Source software, that's what we choose to allow by releasing Open Source software. The moral obligation we have when we use Open Source software is to respect the license, Matt had the choice about the license to release WordPress under, he made the choice for it to be GPL.
dhh is more eloquent and authoritative than I, read these if you need further convincing:
> Let's not forget how valuable the exclusive commercial license for the WordPress trademark is to Automattic, their ability to use the WordPress.com domain has huge commercial value to them.
In the discussion for this post alone, we have commenters with no idea that WordPress can be self-hosted, or that dot com has a free plan.
That's skimming the top for how confused a non-HN-reading layperson could be at the whole project.
> The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg
And? It is the backbone that powers their entire business. You're acting like they're being asked to contribute to something they don't use. That should be the bare minimum. Even business wise it make sense to contribute to it and help make it better. It's absurd we're even having this discussion.
You're also inconsistent. You claim something is fine because it's legal (the license doesn't ask for more as a condition) but you condemn the other party reaction on a different grounds? I thought everything you can get away with, legally, is OK. Matt has barely scratched the surface of what's within his power to do in response.
WP Engine are a Private Equity owned for-profit corporation who exist solely to hoover up as much revenue as possible, consequence be damned, that's Private Equity. Matt Mullenweg is an individual who professes to be an open-source software for-the-greater-good moral crusader. I hold them to very different standards. Matt has to behave according to his professed principles otherwise they're not his principles, they're just a mask.
I release Open Source software under a permissive license: if I leverage my control over that software to harm the consumers of my software that I believe are taking without giving, then I am far worse than a leech.
Regarding "WordPress Core": if WordPress Core is all that matters, why are plugins fundamental to WordPress? Why do millions of WordPress websites use Advanced Custom Fields?
You've repeated a bunch of Matt's lies, either you're uninformed or not impartial. The latter cannot be addressed, the former can. Read more, speak less.
Everyone should be held to the same standards. If my professed principle was to be evil, then would you judge me negatively if I acted good?
I release software under a permissive license too. But I understand the only reason I'm able to do it, is because companies like Google and Mozilla believe in supporting people like me. There's this unwritten rule that the most successful people in our society should be philanthropic, because they're the only ones who can. However nothing formally requires this.
It's similar to how a company might officially give you unlimited vacation days. Imagine if one person tests that rule, and makes every day a vacation day. It would probably take years before someone tries that, but once someone actually does, the rules are going to quickly change for everyone and you might end up with a lot less freedom than before.
WPEngine has certainly tested the limits of the open source gift economy and the way Automattic is reacting isn't helping either. It's a sad thing to witness.
I don't think WPEngine is a fox. I think it's more like a factory farm moves in next door and sells your customers eggs at a lower price, because it keeps more hens cramped in metal cages. So eventually your family farm has to close its hen house and all your hens end up at the factory farm.
Matt isn't being held to a higher standard, he's being held to a different standard, a standard he chose.
WP Engine is a company that chose to build a business around a piece of software released under a license that permits their commercialisation of the software.
Matt is an individual who chose to release software under a license that permits companies to build a business around the software and has then chosen to initiate a "nuclear war" against one of those companies who is complying with the license he chose to release the software under because they are not contributing to the software in a way that he deems acceptable.
They're fundamentally different actors in fundamentally different positions. WP Engine has behaved exactly as one would expect from the start. Matt has behaved in a way that suggests he has lost his damn mind, doing everything in his power to harm a business that is complying with the license he chose.
I don't disagree with the idea that WP Engine should contribute more, I don't disagree that Private Equity is harmful to Open Source, but I fundamentally disagree with Matt's weaponisation of Open Source to make a point. There is a lot of great prior thinking on this subject[1], Matt has many options, he is making the choice to behave in this way, it is not a foregone conclusion.
Our discussion isn't going to lead anywhere, but we can revisit it in a month when Matt's downward spiral has resulted in the inevitable. Perhaps, at that point, you'll reflect on whether Matt's behaviour was worth supporting.
You don't see the non-premium version of ACF as contributing? I'm curious, why not?
WPE has other employees dedicated to WP and The Community. I'm not defending WPE but just because they don't contribute in a way MM wants doesn't mean they don't contribute. Suggesting they're not contributing is disingenuous.
Matt is not a dictator. Oh wait, scratch that.
p.s. Matt should be careful what he wishes for. If WPE or anyone contributes they're going to want a voice, a seat at the table. Is Matt willing to share control? If the answer is no, then that is the root problem here.
So if I go successfully make a feature addition to ie Kubernetes, or the Linux kernel, and it is exclusively motivated by furthering my business needs instead of altruism, but happens to incidentally benefit others too - do you consider that a "contribution" under your mental model? If not, what's the distinction?
> make a feature addition to ie Kubernetes, or the Linux kernel
In your example, you're contributing to other people projects so yes it would be contribution right of the bat. That's completely different than the case with ACF.
And WPEngine does not own Wordpress or its ecosystem, right? So that's also "other people's projects" if they produce something of value to its ends users?
> if they produce something of value to its ends users?
No, that's would be their value proposition or what every company on earth have been doing since inception, filling a gap in the market.
You seem to be claiming that their mere existence in the ecosystem would be a contribution, even if they were closed source. They would be providing value and attracting users in a butterfly effect style. Sure, that help and have a positive impact but is it a contribution to an open source project and the ecosystem?
My model is fairly simple, you can't claim credit for something if you did it involuntarily or with a different intention or it happened as n-level side effect of what you are trying to do.
And what makes Automattic's contributions any different? They "steer" the product to their benefit and sell that as what's good for them is good for all.
That's rubbish.
It's not contributing to "the cause" when the features you add are solely for your own benefit. Not that self-serving is wrong. But to sell it as benevolent red lines any decent bullshit detector.
Matt defined the license. Now he regrets that and he wants a cut. Nuttin wrong with that. But to sell it otherwise is shite. We're not that stupid.
- And the list goes on: contributing and sponsoring many projects and developers that everyone using the web benefited from, including you and billions of people (not counting wordpress's impact)
Please educate yourself before spreading FUD about people who made great contributions constantly to the open web, the entire industry, and promoted open source on every chance they got.
You left out Matt & Co partnering with privacy-crusher Google, and other "f*k the users this partnership is good for Automattic and my pockets" deals and decisions. And what about his anti-accessibility transgressions (with Gutenberg).
Matt championing himself as benevolent and using OSS as a shield is BS. No one is expecting him - or anyone - to be perfect. But he and his hypocrisy has jumped the shark.
There are well-established legal processes for resolving issues like trademark infringement. This dispute could have, and should have, been resolved without involving… literally everyone.
This sounds like dictator speak. "Tolerated" by who? The community embraced them, it's matt and his private-equity-associated, for-profit corporation that didn't like their success.
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
Why should we place a cutoff? We can discuss his behavior as of late, as well: Matt saw a successful corporation using wordpress, just like his own, and demanded that they give his own for-profit corporation a large chunk of their revenue. When they declined his request, matt started fabricating all these gripes about private equity and contribution level.
It's quite telling that we don't see matt attacking less successful companies which do the same thing as WPEngine, much less putting forth the same pretexts for it.
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
> saw a successful corporation using wordpress, just like his own
That's hilarious because Matt and Automattic actually invested in WP Engine, supported them in many ways ever since their inception and helped them be more successful and reach this level.
Your entire argument about "jealous of success" falls apart if you look only few months back. He wanted them to succeed for years and years, even after private equity, he still saw them as partners.
None of that makes the "entire argument fall apart". Sounds like he regrets doing that.
The argument that matt is doing this for the community, though, totally falls apart when we see that he is actively harming community members, and the argument that he's doing it for open source totally falls apart when we see that he tried to extort WPEngine for money into his own pocket before contriving the aforementioned pretexts.
Why just WPEngine? It seems because they're successful and he's jealous of their money (hence demanding they give it to him, and not the community).
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
Yes, it is. He demanded WPEngine pay 8% of revenues to Automattic. Not to the community. To Automattic: matt's private, for-profit corporation. The one matt runs along with a private equity friend of his. The one matt likely owns much of, too. The one matt named after himself.
Also, please stop ignoring the questions posed to you:
Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
I answered what I can but here let me put your mind at rest:
> Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?
Am I sitting on some regulatory board? What this got to do with me? if I had to propose anything it'd be form a board from all major contributors to solve this conflict and reach a resolution
> "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
No, Matt supported and invested in them for years, before you and "the community" even heard about them. He was the one there from the very beginning.
> Am I sitting on some regulatory board? What this got to do with me
Well, I asked a simple question: Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? What do you think? Should he?
> if I had to propose anything it'd be form a board from all major contributors to solve this conflict
Ignoring for a moment that matt is banning contributors, rather than caring what they want: What about what the wordpress community wants? They are the most important and most numerous stakeholders here.
> No, Matt not only embraced them, he supported and invested in them for years, before you and "the community" even heard about them. He was the one there from the very beginning.
No, the community has embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community and to Automattic's success. So who specifically are you speaking of, who merely "tolerated" WPEngine?
> It's quite telling that we don't see matt attacking less successful companies which do the same thing as WPEngine, much less putting forth the same pretexts for it.
If he succeeds with WP Engine, then he'll probably shake down other companies in the future.
Some folks on this list spewing out misinformation, perhaps because of personal interests in WPE. Matt has done more than any of us to create and preserve an amazing open-source ecosystem that we all benefit from. Can you imagine what it would be like if WPE controlled WP?
The claims in WPE's lawsuit, as you'll see, are not facts.
You sound like those armchair communists who feel they need to agree with Stalin because he was a communist too. You know, a person doing evil things for the right reasons is still doing evil things.
You got the wrong idea. What I care about is open source and fight back against those encouraging to take without contributing. Yes you don't have to give back, the same way you don't have to be nice, but promoting that you intentionally commit NOT to contribute and wear that badge proudly is stupid and harmful.
I don't care about specific individual or technology since I don't use WordPress and I'm not in that business to begin with but these discussions are spreading the wrong message and values.
Please make sure you're contributing to the discussion in the future, not just attacking people based on your limited view.
If WP Engine is reading, fork WordPress now. Call it FreshPress. Put $25M into it, team up with other hosts, abandon the editor everyone hates, and relicense it to GPLv3 so Matt can’t have any of it. (Note that WordPress’s license specifically says GPLv2 or later.) Maybe support Composer like sane modern PHP projects. Maybe put the most important plugins like Woo into core and make it an all-in-one Squarespace competitor.
Once it’s ahead, legal, and Matt can’t borrow; then he’ll realize his bluff has been called. Make WordPress the new B2.
The whole thing started because WP Engine does not want to put resources into WordPress development. It's not some sort of disagreement about design or development, it's about the work itself.
If WP Engine has to create a fork and dump millions, they would basically lose. As they have built a business model around not contributing even to the already well developed WordPress codebase. So I can't imagine how going beyond that and forking the entire thing would work, unless they just mirror upstream.
I don't think Matt would mind if WP Engine did just that because he's arguing that they are using WordPress without giving back anything in return, so if they just did their thing outside of WordPress that would be exactly what he wants.
That became a thing because he felt like they didn't contribute to WordPress. Like, that's the entire reason behind that (very weird imo) request for a royalty.
I'm not sure if it's true, but there were talks about WPEngine devs basically not being allocated any dev time on WordPress anymore (whereas Automattic devs spend tens of hours a week on the actual OSS project). That was one of the catalyst behind the whole drama where Matt called them out basically on stage during a conference talk. Which was just before (or at the same time) as he started talking about the royalty.
Now, again Matt's behavior has been super weird since he basically failed at articulating his position well, and his PR has been catastrophic.
But the fact is WPEngine still does not contribue to WordPress. That is their right, but everything matt has been doing is also "legal" and within his (and his company's) rights.
> That became a thing because he felt like they didn't contribute to WordPress. Like, that's the entire reason behind that (very weird imo) request for a royalty.
I think it's the other way around: the (false) claims about WPEngine not contributing became a thing because they refused his demands to direct 8% of their revenue into matt's private-equity-backed pockets.
It would make no sense otherwise: "you aren't contributing to the community, so contribute to my for-profit corporation instead"? If matt really cared about the community*, wouldn't the appropriate demand be for WPEngine to contribute 8% to the community, instead of to matt?
*: yes, I recognize that, in reality, matt's repeated actions harming the community in service of himself have made clear that he cares more about himself than the community.
Hmmm, so is WPengine actually contributing to WordPress? Everything I've seen seem to indicate very little development work. But maybe I'm misinformed.
Also, the community (in terms of development) is basically automattic and... that's it. That's the whole problem! But again, I completely agree that the royalty request was extremely weird especially considering the supposed separation between WordPress.org & Automattic
Yes, WPEngine is contributing to the wordpress community, but that's beside the point, since WPEngine's contributions to the community only came up when WPEngine refused matt's shakedown demand to transfer money into matt's pockets. Weirder still, matt banned WPEngine from contributing to the community on wordpressdotorg, then took some of WPEngine's community contributions and claimed them as their own.
> Also, the community (in terms of development) is basically automattic and... that's it.
It's interesting that you felt the need to qualify "community", limiting it to "in terms of development". The community is the sum total of all users of, and contributors to, the wordpress ecosystem. Matt has harmed millions of community members with his actions, and the community is telling him to knock it off, for the good of the community.
No, I think it's much more interesting that you keep focusing on the community part, as if paying some token amounts for marketing stuff (sponsoring conferences, events) is similar to pouring tons of engineering work into the product. It almost sounds like "paying in exposure".
I'd hardly consider ACF to be described as such, but: "paying some token that amounts for marketing stuff" according to whose descriptions of their community contributions?
There's another thing WPEngine would do with that decision though, and that's ruin Matt/Automattic/wordpress.org in the court case (look at who WPE retained as councel, this is not going to be a quick/cheap litigation), and then crush them in the WP hosting market (which arguably they're already doing, which is why Matt's losing his mind).
Matt's extortion attempt is because WPEngine is generating a lot of revenue and is valuable enough for PE to notice. He figured he had a decent chance of blackmailing them out of 8% of their revenue to the tune of around 10mil a year. Matt's a deluded and entitled tech nerd cosplaying a mafia mobster. And WPEngine did not blink.
Perhaps; but WP Engine can argue from necessity following Matt’s actions, as well as just saying: After what Matt has done, who gives a darn what he thinks?
GPLv3 code can’t go into a GPLv2 project - but “GPLv2 or later” licensed code can go into a GPLv3 project.
The main reason is that Matt wouldn’t be able to freeload without relicensing WordPress - which would be a massive headache for him and his partners to go through; and the reason would be patently and embarrassingly obvious.
The goal I described earlier is not to make a WordPress clone that just happens to be free of Matt. There’s plenty of low hanging, long ignored gripes and opportunities for improvement. Offer a better, Matt-free product, and you’ll win.
Yes, the GPL in general has been upheld in court. The gist is that the GPL is the only thing giving anyone any right at all to distribute code licensed under it. If you don’t follow its terms, you no longer have that permission.
The question isn’t whether the GPL can restrict you from doing something. It’s just that in the absence of the GPL, you fall back to the default legal rights where you’re not allowed to make copies of that code.
This is all good, but I think packaging Woo into core is not a good idea. WordPress is so large; I don't know how the plugin community will react to a fork. It is going to cause a lot of problems.
Lol, surely they will deliver - nah, they will fork core, mirror plugins and themes repos and do absolutely minuscule minimal effort to keep it secure / bacport some changes from main WP line to keep it compatible with most of the plugins and that's all.
If cutting off some Wordpress users from plugin upgrades just because some beef between matt and wpengine didn't make you realize that's the train you are on, nothing will.
The point of my comment was that it would really hurt, coming to these seemingly obvious conclusions after your friends or coworkers had already bailed. I just assume the severance offer is no longer in effect.
You can hand a thoughtfully build WP site over to a non technical client, and they can work out or learn how to do 90% of the publishing and updating they need to do, or easily find staff or contractors with lots of WordPress experience to do it for them.
The "43% of the entire web" statistic is a really really good reason to recommend WP for that reason.
There is obviously not a single competing CMS/blog-platform that has anything like as many experiences users. Where by "users" I mean people who are familiar with or even experts on publishing content using it.
That's the real "WordPress Community", the people using it on a day to day basis to get their jobs/hobbies/responsibilities done. That's the "WordPress Community" that makes it "the right thing" for agencies and contractors and IT departments to recommend WordPress.
Up until 2 weeks ago, I regularly recommended WordPress. In spite of it's flaws.
Agree. I hate Wordpress, but I still recommend it and run a bunch of sites on it. It's very easy to get up and running. It's has two decades of support. A ton of plugins, and people will moan about Gutenberg, but it's actually a good thing, IMO.
I'm running dozens of WP sites on a single $3/mo Hetzner box without trouble.
Why on earth is Matt’s nosebleed on this? Making fun of peoples medical issues is tasteless, and makes me wonder about the motivation behind the rest of the page.
Agreed. For context, Matt posted the following on the original video:
> Around 20 minutes in, my nose started bleeding, which sometimes happens when I travel too much. Prior to this interview, I was on 30+ hour flights returning from Durban, where I was on safari, to Houston. I'm sorry for not noticing it happening; it's very embarrassing.
They are making a not-subtle insinuation that he’s engaging in stimulant drug abuse.
How that relates to an executive engaged in sudden extremely aggressive and over the top and highly personal scorched earth attack campaign over what appear to be fairly routine open source community squabbles is left as an exercise for the reader.
The inclusion of the nosebleed is not to make fun of Matt, it is to highlight something relevant to the medical issues that people have speculated about. The motivation is to bring to light Matt's wide-ranging exploits in one place, given it is abnormal for someone involved in high-profile litigation to spend their time arguing on Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and live streams.
People are signaling to you that this particular thing crosses a line. You'd do well to heed that and take that part out. Speculating on his health / insinuating things undermines the points you're trying to make.
Matt doesn't appear to have a problem with the website ("It actually is an excellent website"[1]). Please create a Pull Request with any changes you think necessary.
In the context of man off the rails, wrecking careers and reputations, etc. the nose bleed is a possible signal. It's not something to be ignored, again based on the context.
Frankly, it would explain a lot. Cause as it is, it's baffling.
I would consider that it's relevant in case he has been insufflating anything that would explain his erratic behavior. That said, as someone in recovery, it is still not something to make fun of. He does clearly need medical help whether that be for drugs, mania or whatever it is he has going on.
The "traveling too much" is exactly the same kind of BS I would have said in my addiction. Is he referring to air pressure? Because that would happen on the plane, not hours later.
I’ve seen a bunch of people in addiction recovery, and Matt’s erratic self destructive aggressive behaviour seems very familiar. Nosebleeds too. It’s probably just a coincidence, but…
He's never really been a good person or savvy in general and IMO people put him on pedestal before recently. This is the guy who bought tumblr and hasn't done anything of merit with it after all.
Not saying turning it back into a porn platform would have been the best move in the long-term but I think it would have at least made more sense than whatever he's done with it since acquiring it.
After reading it, the first thing I did was to make sure that I and all WP sites I have access to had automatic updates disabled. This always seemed like a good policy to me, as it is such a massive attack vector. After all, some popular
plugin developed by someone in Nebraska (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/) might be hijacked at some point. WP did the stupidest thing ever by hijacking ACF.
WP is the villain now because they can inject unknown, unvetted code into my site (if I had enabled automatic updates). While I find ACF's code abhorrent, at least it has a proven track record of working and not crashing my site. Someone who just took over the plugin does not enjoy the same trust from me.
I don’t have the right background/expertise to dig deeper into a different way of looking at this, but am still hoping that some writer will analyze this as a kind of asymmetrical warfare.
Because looking at it that way, might open different analysis than most of what I’ve seen so far.
A lot of the comments seem to call out Matt (right or wrong). But that’s the easy thing to do.
No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software.
There is a social contract that people should contribute back, and while it’s largely unenforceable, as it should be, when it’s happening on a systemic level something has to be done. And we are all complicit if we don’t at least say that much and spare some good will towards the guy actively in that fight at least superficially
> No one dares address the systemic issue of for profit corporations exploitatively (ab)using open source software.
Calling out Matt and Automattic for their abusive behavior is addressing the systemic issue of for-profit corporations exploitatively abusing open source software.
We're talking about a company that released GPL software, waited a decade for another company to build their entire business around said GPL software, and then came at them with threats of going to "nuclear war" (their words) with them if they didn't agree to extremely exploitative terms on top of the GPL licensing under which the software was released.
That is the affront to Free Software that's happening here. WP Engine may or may not be a good company, but it is Matt who has given up on freedom. If you lure people in with a promise of Free Software and then hold a gun to their head when they take you up on it, you are the bad guy.
Matt being a poor steward of gpl is by definition not a systemic issue … unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors?
The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss.
I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/wp and then there’s this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
> unless ur claim is that many people in positions like him do what he does which is in turn caused by invariant factors?
I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage.
> this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
I'll never understand this complaint about not giving back. I can understand if they're asking for free support and coercing you into saying yes, but that's rarely the concern, the concern is always "giving back".
If you release it under GPL, then companies are obliged to abide by the GPL and release their modifications, nothing more or less. If you release it under a less restrictive license then they have no obligations at all, and you presumably chose that license specifically because it made the software easier to use in enterprises.
If giving back matters so very much then you're not really interested in Free Software and you should put those requirements in the license. But you don't get to piggyback on the FOSS movement and then complain when people use your software freely to compete with your for profit.
As for the trend of the bait and switch. That’s a fair point. But u can always fork and move on. And even then would you say that’s more of an issue or occurs more frequently then corps not contributing back at all?
Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?
As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.
We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.
The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.
This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.
Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.
If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.
The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.
When a user uses some open source software, there is no negative happening. They are not accumulating some debt that should be repaid by "contributing back." If they make a million dollars on it, that makes no difference to the project. Agreeing to a license and then following that license is not "bad faith."
The only damage being done when someone makes money using open source software, is to the ambitions and ego of a developer who imagined that "open source" meant "give me your contributions so I can build an empire." Fortunately, open source is for the benefit of all of us. Nobody owes them fiefs.
WPE literally spends several hundred thousand dollars a year contributing to WP events. And then they get banned from those events while the WP Foundation keeps the checks.
Hundreds of thousands on events is nothing. The fact that this is the most repeated example of them contributing to WordPress just proves the point that they don't actually do much. Their entire business is based around wrapping WP and reselling it. That they can manage to spend a few hundred K's on what is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events) is not surprising. Now, how much do they contribute to the actual WordPress codebase?
(And I'm saying this as someone who dislikes WordPress in general, in the sense that I'm not a super invested Automattic user or something. It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim)
> It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim
WPEngine are adults, they can (and are) taking care of themselves.
But sorry, if you start using your position as CEO of Automattic, and President of WPF to:
- push rants forcibly into the dashboards of your for-profit offering's commercial competitors
- lock users of a competitor out of a whole raft of functionality because of your beef with their provider
- break users sites in the name of effectively hostage-taking a plugin
Then what else are you but a "bad maintainer"?
> as a leach [sic]
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor. That's easily described as leeching.
> is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events)
Well, given that at these recent events they've given money, been banned from attending and had all references to their name removed, I think their contributions are valid.
Also "that doesn't count, it's just marketing", yes, marketing dollars that they are contributing to the community to make the cost to the rest of the community in hosting events less. You sound like Matt here, "Well, yes, they contribute, but not in the way I tell them to, and in the amount I tell them to, so it's not reallllly a contribution."
I don't understand, many people built software on top of Linux, and Torvalds doesn't do crusades against organisations that build on top of it, make money from it and don't contribute anything back to Linux. How is this situation different?
> There is a social contract that people should contribute back
No there isn't. The author gets to decide the contract, not you or anyone else.
I am the one who decides how to license my software. If I don't want to require my users to contribute, I don't have to. If I wanted to include such an obligation, I would have.
You don't get to hold users of my projects to unwritten, made-up obligations. You don't get to bully people online who aren't following your imaginary rules. My users and I have a contract. We both agreed to it. You don't get to step in between us and alter the agreement we made. How dare you.
The assertion that users must contribute to open source projects despite the license, is an attack on users, developers, and a just and free society. Developers must be able to license their software how they see fit. You want to take that freedom away from me, in the pursuit of hurting people you don't like.
Agreed. I’ve released software under GPL, MIT, and Apache2 at different times and for different reasons. No one owes me a thing other than what those licenses say they do. Morally, if someone gets rich off my code, it’d be awfully nice if they send some love and cash my way. That would be nice and honorable. They’re not obligated to, though.
I’m with DHH. The license is the license. The moment there’s unwritten obligations, the movement will implode - simply because unwritten obligations are always up to interpretation. Don’t like the status quo? Use a different license. This is especially true of WordPress, considering it’s an unlicensed fork of an earlier project itself.
