WP Engine is not WordPress(wordpress.org)
wordpress.org
WP Engine is not WordPress
https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
174 comments
It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
This seems like a detail that could be covered in a few sentences in the post. In fact it seems central to his argument so it's weird that he didn't. Allegedly it's in the hour-long video, but that's asking a lot.
Some people, even smart ones, make the mistake of thinking people pay attention to an entire event like this.
Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.
Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.
Maybe Wordpress should consider a different license.
WordPress cannot relicense; it’s a fork of a GPL project originally (b2) and there is no copyright assignment, so you would need explicit permission from every contributor including the forked project’s.
Well, crap. Thanks for explaining.
Further clarification: the project can be relicensed under a compatible license. This approach would mean that new code is released under the new license, such as the AGPL, while the existing code remains under the GPL. It's a little complicated but quite doable.
You need to have a compelling backlog to continue developing down the road or someone can just fork it.
WP Engine might try forking it (as they are free to now) but they don't contribute that much to Wordpress as is.
It’s ultimately just going to make WP Engines life harder to not contribute back. Forks are a PITA.
Thanks for the context!
Are there some sources you (or someone with twitter account) could provide to this?
Gnarly...
Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then?
There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.
There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.
He owns a competitor, Wordpress.com.
That said, his point is valid. WPEngine is one of the most expensive hosts in the industry yet they meddle with the behavior of WP as well as the underlying PHP and web server and disable a lot of things. Anyone who would like to build a website on WPEngine is advised to read:
https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/
And that's just the stuff they admit to.
The revisions being pulled out are the most egregious I would say. Revisions are an insanely important feature for some publishers, we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.
Their 'long query governor' can be very frustrating and in my experience, contrary to this document it cannot be fully disabled.
All these restrictions have crept in over the last few years. WP Engine pulled the usual trick of finding ways to lock people in, and then reducing service to increase margins.
That said, his point is valid. WPEngine is one of the most expensive hosts in the industry yet they meddle with the behavior of WP as well as the underlying PHP and web server and disable a lot of things. Anyone who would like to build a website on WPEngine is advised to read:
https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/
And that's just the stuff they admit to.
The revisions being pulled out are the most egregious I would say. Revisions are an insanely important feature for some publishers, we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.
Their 'long query governor' can be very frustrating and in my experience, contrary to this document it cannot be fully disabled.
All these restrictions have crept in over the last few years. WP Engine pulled the usual trick of finding ways to lock people in, and then reducing service to increase margins.
He also owns WP VIP, which is much more expensive (and exclusive) than WP Engine.
WP Engine is popular because they hit a sweet spot of automation, capability, and price. That means some things are turned off or tuned. In my experience, WP Engine generally has made good choices there.
That said, they are choices that won’t be perfect for everyone.
> we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.
Then just move those sites to another host? Why would you bother fighting and paying for this? I have 3 Wordpress sites that are too complex for WP Engine and they are hosted elsewhere. And yes, it’s more expensive than WP Engine, but if a site is truly “enterprise” then the difference is not material.
WP Engine is popular because they hit a sweet spot of automation, capability, and price. That means some things are turned off or tuned. In my experience, WP Engine generally has made good choices there.
That said, they are choices that won’t be perfect for everyone.
> we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.
Then just move those sites to another host? Why would you bother fighting and paying for this? I have 3 Wordpress sites that are too complex for WP Engine and they are hosted elsewhere. And yes, it’s more expensive than WP Engine, but if a site is truly “enterprise” then the difference is not material.
> disable a lot of things
Like how wordpress.com disables stats unless you're on a premium tier? Or like how wordpress.com disables plugins entirely unless you're on another premium tier? That kind of disabling of things?
Like how wordpress.com disables stats unless you're on a premium tier? Or like how wordpress.com disables plugins entirely unless you're on another premium tier? That kind of disabling of things?
This is not correct. I just created this free site on WordPress.com and the stats work as expected:
https://imgur.com/a/UtvUUPq
https://imgur.com/a/UtvUUPq
I have a self-hosted Wordpress site. There are no stats, but there are revisions.
Automattic's own managed WordPress platform severely restricts features all the way up to the top plan. I guess it's okay for them to do it.
edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.
edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.
I think you need to give more context.
I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement.
It really depends on context.
I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement.
It really depends on context.
I think they are referring to WordPress.com.
[deleted]
If this is their worst complaint about one of WPs biggest hosts then he isn’t doing too badly.
I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it.
WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the broken addons on upgrades are in a league of their own. They’ve probably done more to help the platform than hinder it.
I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it.
WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the broken addons on upgrades are in a league of their own. They’ve probably done more to help the platform than hinder it.
Didn't Jason Cohen sell to private equity?
Highly recommend reading his smartbear blogs.
Highly recommend reading his smartbear blogs.
Wasn’t Automattic’s last round led by BlackRock?
Matt is mad that WP Engine is profiting without contributing much back. This "it's not WordPress" seems like a fig leaf on top of that concern.
It's his right to feel like that, but it's also WP Engine's right under the WordPress source's license to do what they're doing.
As a devil's advocate sort of thing...
For no reason I can give you the finger, scream obscenities at you, and there are no legal ramifications.
Was I wrong?
The legal side is not the end all.
Otherwise, why is anyone complaining about Meta's data mining? About the cost of epipens?
For no reason I can give you the finger, scream obscenities at you, and there are no legal ramifications.
Was I wrong?
The legal side is not the end all.
Otherwise, why is anyone complaining about Meta's data mining? About the cost of epipens?
The cost of epipens affects someone's ability to not die. Whether WP Engine contributes back to WordPress enough does not.
In fact, Mullenweg says WP Engine does contribute back, but not enough, and tries to justify it by saying they've "hacked up" WordPress. The latter statement has no legs to stand on (at least without real evidence). How much is enough? Should WP Engine be fixing bugs that don't affect their customers? Exerting influence by throwing contributors at wordpress to make upstream improvements that benefit WP Engine customers? I suspect if WP Engine did what Mullenweg is indirectly demanding, we'd get a "no not like that!" post.
In fact, Mullenweg says WP Engine does contribute back, but not enough, and tries to justify it by saying they've "hacked up" WordPress. The latter statement has no legs to stand on (at least without real evidence). How much is enough? Should WP Engine be fixing bugs that don't affect their customers? Exerting influence by throwing contributors at wordpress to make upstream improvements that benefit WP Engine customers? I suspect if WP Engine did what Mullenweg is indirectly demanding, we'd get a "no not like that!" post.
The cost of epipens affects someone's ability to not die. Whether WP Engine contributes back to WordPress enough does not.
My example also cited two non-life threatening issues, and discussed legal vs morality.
You have not addressed this point, so I'll be more direct about it. Doing something legal doesn't make it OK. In fact doing something legal does not imply right or wrong.
My example also cited two non-life threatening issues, and discussed legal vs morality.
You have not addressed this point, so I'll be more direct about it. Doing something legal doesn't make it OK. In fact doing something legal does not imply right or wrong.
Matt is moving the goalposts of what he’s considering “contribution.”
WP Engine has been the top sponsor of all WordCamps for years.
WP Engine has been the top sponsor of all WordCamps for years.
The linked video offers the full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
(Relevant section starting around 10:14)
I think he’s using this as one prominent example of overall harm to the space.
(Relevant section starting around 10:14)
I think he’s using this as one prominent example of overall harm to the space.
[deleted]
Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards.
The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument.
The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.
The “default setting” is an example of this behavior.
Also, calling turning off all historical revision data as just “changing a default setting” in a content management system is disingenuous to say the least.
The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument.
The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.
The “default setting” is an example of this behavior.
Also, calling turning off all historical revision data as just “changing a default setting” in a content management system is disingenuous to say the least.
Matt Mullenweg, author of this post, is CEO of Automattic, a for profit company with valuation in the billions. Largely raised from private capital
> The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.
Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?
Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?
Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.
Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress.
Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire.
If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire.
If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
> "It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete."
This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best.
And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else.
You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)
This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best.
And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else.
You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)
> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.
> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.
It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.
> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.
> how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
The tracking javascript, if you have it enabled, undoubtedly looks at the links on the search results page you clicked. If you search, go to the first result, and immediately bounce back to the page and try the second result, the first result gets down-ranked.
The tracking javascript, if you have it enabled, undoubtedly looks at the links on the search results page you clicked. If you search, go to the first result, and immediately bounce back to the page and try the second result, the first result gets down-ranked.
> how could [Google] know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.
They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.
Kagi is better at searching internationally or maybe nationally, but local search is still dominated by Google. Looking for bars, restaurants, corner shops, grocerers and such is Google territory in my experience.
We must live in a different world because for me, Bing's results have always been completely unusable. As a consequence, DuckDuckGo's results as well, although I understand that it must work for certain types of users located in certain countries; otherwise I can't understand how anyone would use it.
I just logged into Kagi, and searched for “restaurants”. Kagi can see my country because their UI says so, yet it gave me “top 10 restaurants in Groningen Province” (Netherlands), as the first result and the second result was “top 10 restaurants in Barcelona”. And I don't live in the Netherlands or Spain.
I also searched for a programming question, an issue I recently had, with the query “slick breaks binary compatibility”. Google gave me fresh discussions describing the issue, whereas Kagi gave me a GitHub issue from 2021 that described issues with the previous major version.
I did not cherry-pick these searches.
---
Speaking of, Kagi doesn't have their own index, they just use Bing's API, enhanced with results from other sources, much like what DuckDuckGo does; and like DDG they tend to be disingenuous about it.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
What in the world are people paying for is a complete mystery to me, but YMMV.
---
So, again, I'm asking for that one competitor that's 30% better than Google.
I just logged into Kagi, and searched for “restaurants”. Kagi can see my country because their UI says so, yet it gave me “top 10 restaurants in Groningen Province” (Netherlands), as the first result and the second result was “top 10 restaurants in Barcelona”. And I don't live in the Netherlands or Spain.
I also searched for a programming question, an issue I recently had, with the query “slick breaks binary compatibility”. Google gave me fresh discussions describing the issue, whereas Kagi gave me a GitHub issue from 2021 that described issues with the previous major version.
I did not cherry-pick these searches.
---
Speaking of, Kagi doesn't have their own index, they just use Bing's API, enhanced with results from other sources, much like what DuckDuckGo does; and like DDG they tend to be disingenuous about it.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
What in the world are people paying for is a complete mystery to me, but YMMV.
---
So, again, I'm asking for that one competitor that's 30% better than Google.
Conversely, I often find Google's local focus to be counter-productive when I want to search for the most relevant sources in the world (for physical things) or on the internet (for virtual things) and Google insists on giving me local examples of the physical thing or local providers of the virtual thing, neither of which I have interest in.
Better in what way? Better at not abusing your identity and private information to make bank arbitraging a monopolized ad market they own both sides of?
In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.
To be honest forget being better, if there's a Google competitor even on-par with Google, I'd switch to that immediately and never use Google or any of their services again.
Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
[deleted]
[deleted]
> private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can
Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit?
Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software?
Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself?
My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.
Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit?
Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software?
Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself?
My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.
A more accurate title would have not claimed its not WordPress, but moreso emphasized that WP Engine does not provide historic record of your blog posts by default, which every other WP host does, because its how WordPress was designed. Weird title, feels misleading.
Agreed this is a shocking amount of cognitive dissonance.
The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/
For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!
For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!
A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times.
“But when I go to Wordpress.com…”
SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress.
This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves
“But when I go to Wordpress.com…”
SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress.
This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves
And github != git, which we're still wrestling with over a decade in to its life. Yet, for some people 'github===git' so that just compounds the issue.
I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.
And leave huge chunk of brand recognition money on the table while having to spend copious amounts of it to build another brand?
If me or you were in the same position we would do the exact same.
If me or you were in the same position we would do the exact same.
You just turned off the capital_p_dangit filter!
WordPress ;)
WordPress ;)
I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops".
Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.
It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.
It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable.
How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.
How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.
People are a blend of attitudes with regard to this. You will encounter many people who are incensed that the software they wrote and gave away for free is being sold as part of a product and making someone else lots of money.
You will find these folks want two things; One to generously give away something of value for others to use, and two for nobody to make any money off the thing they gave away.
When people who feel that way find out their software is being sold or otherwise enriching a third party, they feel like their effort has been "stolen."
You will find these folks want two things; One to generously give away something of value for others to use, and two for nobody to make any money off the thing they gave away.
When people who feel that way find out their software is being sold or otherwise enriching a third party, they feel like their effort has been "stolen."
try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch
sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::
note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::
note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
You're being disingenuous.
There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed:
1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now.
2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches.
All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor.
There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed:
1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now.
2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches.
All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor.
There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
- me: solo dev or small team
- you: microsoft, mongo, redis
i agree with both your examples being bad. for #2, they required one-sided CLAs while "open source". the alternative to signing the CLA was to fork, which is rarely well-received by the community, ie the same basic issue i raised
FLOSS is great in that it can facilitate collaboration and adoption, but at the expense of greatly limiting the business models. and even then context still matters - eg there's big difference between the kernel with 1000s of independent contributors, and mongo with one party holding CLA rights to the entire codebase (FLOSS in name only, i'd argue)
- for me, what's ultimately important is that people are free and that people that do good work are rewarded
- software licenses are just a tool to help us get there
- non-FLOSS might enable much of that same good while scaling to more business models and software
- they might ultimately be good for society, but getting the details right is hard
- i'm no longer actively working on my own stuff, but my attempt was: https://github.com/db4j/pupl
- note: if i was doing this today, the core limit would be much higherMy thoughts were posted in Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 but the TL;DR is that writing code adds value, and that value will be realized by people who take it for free, even if you don't want them to. From my perspective (not saying its the right one, just one that I've reasoned to) that is theft.
That’s about as much theft as me baking cookies, putting them on the street with a sign „free to take“ and people eating them is theft. Who would expect other people to add cookies and call everyone else thieves? You open source license doesn’t say „you can use it if you contribute“, it says „everyone can use it (as long as they attribute or fulfill some other requirement). How is that theft? You can’t be a thieve if you take something someone else is handing out for free voluntarily.
To use your metaphor, let's say you baked a batch of cookies and put them on the street with "free to take", and then later when you noticed they were all gone and went to your local coffee shop, in their case it had "fresh baked cookies $5 each" and you saw that it was the same cookies you had put out earlier.
Does that feel like theft to you?
Does that feel like theft to you?
That’s not exactly what’s happening though, because they aren’t selling Wordpress, they are selling Wordpress hosting.
To align the analogy more closely to the Wordpress situation:
I put out leaflets with cake recipes which I give everyone for free. And then BakingCorp comes along, takes my recipe and sells the actual cookies they baked with my recipe in their store.
The difference is that they aren’t just selling what I made and gave out for free, they are providing an actual service based on my contribution.
And also, Wordpress copies don’t run out, so even selling the cookies for $5 wouldn’t exactly be immoral, because I would still give out infinite free cookies. If Wordpress engine just sold copies of Wordpress, people would just get it for free.
To align the analogy more closely to the Wordpress situation:
I put out leaflets with cake recipes which I give everyone for free. And then BakingCorp comes along, takes my recipe and sells the actual cookies they baked with my recipe in their store.
The difference is that they aren’t just selling what I made and gave out for free, they are providing an actual service based on my contribution.
And also, Wordpress copies don’t run out, so even selling the cookies for $5 wouldn’t exactly be immoral, because I would still give out infinite free cookies. If Wordpress engine just sold copies of Wordpress, people would just get it for free.
The cookie example has implied social expectations with the intent of doing nice for individuals of the community.
A similar example: someone is moving out and puts a huge pile of furniture and assorted stuff on their front lawn with a sign that says "free to take", and some thrift store notices it and scoops it all, quickly. The giver is delighted, because he didn't want it to be slowly picked at piecemeal -- he just wanted it all gone. He doesn't care if the thrift store profited $10,000 off of sales.
Free software is something that benefits individual developers (like individual neighbors) and big businesses alike. Unlike cookies, if a company slurps it all up, it doesn't mean the kid next door doesn't get a cookie. It's digital, so you just make copies. Everyone om noms. Nobody has to feel guilty for taking a cookie, or a thousand cookies.
So I urge OSS developers: if you have some expectation of an ethos of giving back, either embed it into the license as a requirement, or a non-requirement footnote, or be up front of it in the project charter. Don't make assumptions that everyone interprets things the way you do, because it will inevitably be wrong as these OSS stories show time and time again.
I'm still just getting familiar with this WordPress situation and haven't watched the video yet, but in general for cases like these, it just makes the OSS author appear immature, maladjusted, like they're throwing a tantrum because somebody took them up on their offer of generosity, and now they have some sort of envy/jealousy over someone not living up to their end of the bargain that they never agreed to. It often seems backwards, dumb, reactionary, flailing, vindictive and so on, in ways that jeopardize the tantrum-maker's reputation. I don't know all the particulars of this case yet and while I have used WordPress.org (self-hosted and 3rd party host), I'm not deep into the ecosystem or a fanboy of anybody, so I'm reserving judgment but so far I am leaning towards this being yet another over emotional tantrum that was not well thought out or executed, that misses its target and is probably a PR problem.
So enough about how bad it looks. What should the target be?
OSS should be about generosity, voluntarism, and constructiveness, IMO. So the target should be about establishing societal norms about how much companies should be contributing, (to the extent it even makes sense). But you can't do what appears to be borderline extortion (according to people here) for $40 million dollars annually, with abuse of position (RSS feed), and then expect to be taken seriously as a good faith actor in what is a high-minded plea about having a more generous ethical society. It may be a way to draw attention to the topic and rekindle discussion, but it also starts the discussion on a sour note. There has got to be a better way to do this than for OSS authors to expend themselves like a grenade.
A similar example: someone is moving out and puts a huge pile of furniture and assorted stuff on their front lawn with a sign that says "free to take", and some thrift store notices it and scoops it all, quickly. The giver is delighted, because he didn't want it to be slowly picked at piecemeal -- he just wanted it all gone. He doesn't care if the thrift store profited $10,000 off of sales.
Free software is something that benefits individual developers (like individual neighbors) and big businesses alike. Unlike cookies, if a company slurps it all up, it doesn't mean the kid next door doesn't get a cookie. It's digital, so you just make copies. Everyone om noms. Nobody has to feel guilty for taking a cookie, or a thousand cookies.
So I urge OSS developers: if you have some expectation of an ethos of giving back, either embed it into the license as a requirement, or a non-requirement footnote, or be up front of it in the project charter. Don't make assumptions that everyone interprets things the way you do, because it will inevitably be wrong as these OSS stories show time and time again.
I'm still just getting familiar with this WordPress situation and haven't watched the video yet, but in general for cases like these, it just makes the OSS author appear immature, maladjusted, like they're throwing a tantrum because somebody took them up on their offer of generosity, and now they have some sort of envy/jealousy over someone not living up to their end of the bargain that they never agreed to. It often seems backwards, dumb, reactionary, flailing, vindictive and so on, in ways that jeopardize the tantrum-maker's reputation. I don't know all the particulars of this case yet and while I have used WordPress.org (self-hosted and 3rd party host), I'm not deep into the ecosystem or a fanboy of anybody, so I'm reserving judgment but so far I am leaning towards this being yet another over emotional tantrum that was not well thought out or executed, that misses its target and is probably a PR problem.
So enough about how bad it looks. What should the target be?
OSS should be about generosity, voluntarism, and constructiveness, IMO. So the target should be about establishing societal norms about how much companies should be contributing, (to the extent it even makes sense). But you can't do what appears to be borderline extortion (according to people here) for $40 million dollars annually, with abuse of position (RSS feed), and then expect to be taken seriously as a good faith actor in what is a high-minded plea about having a more generous ethical society. It may be a way to draw attention to the topic and rekindle discussion, but it also starts the discussion on a sour note. There has got to be a better way to do this than for OSS authors to expend themselves like a grenade.
Counterpoint for this. How may of the packages in your node_modules folder have you contributed even an issue to, never mind a patch? Do you even know what packages are in there?
Does that not make you or your company a thief?
If your argument is you don't use JS/node then answer the same question about your languages package manager / standard library / compiler etc.
Does that not make you or your company a thief?
If your argument is you don't use JS/node then answer the same question about your languages package manager / standard library / compiler etc.
Agreed.
> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.
It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.
The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.
The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does
Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.
Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.
Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable
Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction.
As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
Obviously many people will use open source without contributing. The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs, let you know about them, and maybe even try to fix them, especially if they also become or are reliant on the software. They might even want improvements to make it work for them and again work on them if they have a need for it. If a software is good and/or mature enough it doesn't need to be open source in the first place and doesn't need contributions. Wordpress has sort of reached that mature place where it is already 'good enough' but you can't now un-open source it.
> The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs
As I see it, that's part of the OSI's revisionist history they want you to believe. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" phrase was coined by Eric Raymond and _named_ after Linus, without it having been "the point" of why Linus chose to release Linux with the license he used.
I don't know if it was intended at the time, but it's an idea that's widely been used to sell value-extracive behaviour to businesses. The worst example in my opinion being project that rug pull the users/contributors when the close the permissiveness of the license after having built their project/product taking full advantage of those "many eyes". Yes I'm looking at you Mongo and Hashicorp...
As I see it, that's part of the OSI's revisionist history they want you to believe. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" phrase was coined by Eric Raymond and _named_ after Linus, without it having been "the point" of why Linus chose to release Linux with the license he used.
I don't know if it was intended at the time, but it's an idea that's widely been used to sell value-extracive behaviour to businesses. The worst example in my opinion being project that rug pull the users/contributors when the close the permissiveness of the license after having built their project/product taking full advantage of those "many eyes". Yes I'm looking at you Mongo and Hashicorp...
I still recall back in the day <wavey lines> before the OSI decided to politicise (and perhaps even value-extract) the term "open source", there were still a heaps of people doing groundbreakingly useful coding and giving it all away.
Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself.
Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it.
License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead.
While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too.
It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise.
So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.
Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself.
Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it.
License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead.
While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too.
It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise.
So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.
> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft.
Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.
Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.
I posted it on Mastodon https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783
I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art".
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion.
I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
The key difference is that holiday decorations aren't as fungible as $100 bills. People can (and do) steal stuff out of peoples yards (and packages on their porches) and then resell that stuff for cash. The reality is that people with poor morality/integrity will always see self enrichment at the expense of others.
As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.
As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.
The gist I get reading all the commentary is:
a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite
b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path?
Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.
a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite
b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path?
Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.
> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system
I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.
I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.
Not to mention I'm skeptical the majority of WPEngine sites are blogs, particularly with prices starting at $240 a year.
Rather they're company marketing sites. That's certainly what I used WPEngine for, and the service was well made, particularly their ability to test WP updates in staging.
Rather they're company marketing sites. That's certainly what I used WPEngine for, and the service was well made, particularly their ability to test WP updates in staging.
The revision system is not (not is it claimed to be) a sacred principle of life, morality, or society at large. It's a core tenet of WordPress.
According to whom? I’ve developed and run Wordpress sites for nearly 15 years and never enabled revisions on a single one.
This whole line of thinking—one person defining the “core tenet” or whatever—seems directly contrary to the ethos of open source. If Matt doesn’t think people should be able to turn off revisions, he should put that in the license. Otherwise, users can do what they want and open source leaders should celebrate that.
This whole line of thinking—one person defining the “core tenet” or whatever—seems directly contrary to the ethos of open source. If Matt doesn’t think people should be able to turn off revisions, he should put that in the license. Otherwise, users can do what they want and open source leaders should celebrate that.
Isn’t it even just a setting they changed? From my understanding they didn’t even change the code, they just changed the setting from the default.
You can also just turn it on by emailing support...
Are my downvoters here drafting posts that have greater than 5 revisions? Or?
You can turn on an extremely limited version. Did you read the post?
I did read the post, yes. Why does everyone keep asking everyone that?
Because they don't read the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.
Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.
We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company)
My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.
My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.
I hear you for marketing. On journalism side it is helpful - depends on editorial workflow which varies from org to org.
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not?
This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging.
The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period.
As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.
And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not?
This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging.
The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period.
As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.
It's pretty bizarre to claim that WP Engine is causing confusion here when the real confusion is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
Is it honestly that confusing? One has a download button and one lets you sign up. Anyone knowing who to set up that zip file knows the difference.
What you could argue is that Automattic is gatekeeping the best features to the .com and using it as a manager/trojanhorse for the .org version.
What you could argue is that Automattic is gatekeeping the best features to the .com and using it as a manager/trojanhorse for the .org version.
WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed.
The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.
The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.
I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs.
Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved.
But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.
Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved.
But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.
You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.
Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line.
Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?
If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering.
Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.
The post and your comment are missing the argument for why it’s immoral though. Is taking an open source server project and offering paid hosting based on it immoral? Is it only immoral because they changed a setting from the default?
Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?
Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?
This isn't the WP.org folks. This is Matt Mullenweg. Whether this is representative of the open source project is uncertain.
His case for WP engine being immoral was even flimsier.
WordPress itself was forked from b2 which is GPL, and now Automattic is worth billions of dollars. Ironic, isn't it, when they accuse WP Engine of the very same behavior they had exhibited?
It’s probably worth mentioning that WP Engine author the _Local_ app https://localwp.com/ which is far and away the best tool to build WP sites errr on your local machine. Then just upload to WP Engine and your are live. This valuable innovation is fueling the growth of WP Engine and makes this a bit of a honey trap.
Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…
Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…
I hosted on WP Engine for many, many years and everything got slower, including their control panel.
I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too.
WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.
I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too.
WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.
It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.
I can only speak as someone who has done enough web dev to feel like every CMS is designed to get in the way and extract money.
Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.
Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.
What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.
This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it.
I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine.
I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with.
Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.
I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine.
I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with.
Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.
It's a little telling that 1) Matt has nobody around him to say hey maybe don't post that on our corporate site without context and 2) if he does nobody pointed that this reads like another millionaire hissy fit because someone is doing something they don't want them do and they're used to getting their ways with no resistance.
I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well:
1. Dead-simple staging environments
2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.
3. Dead-simple backup/restore features
4. Simplified cache-management
And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.
I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.
1. Dead-simple staging environments
2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.
3. Dead-simple backup/restore features
4. Simplified cache-management
And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.
I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.
Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.
One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!
It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul...
>> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."
>> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."
[deleted]
Amazed that this got to the point where an official post was deemed necessary.
WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine.
It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform.
What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want?
The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?
It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform.
What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want?
The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?
Says the company with a competing product
I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress
The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it.
A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement
The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it.
A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement
I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanilla WordPresses... and while the WordPress people may not like it, ain't nothing wrong with it.
> while the WordPress people may not like it
hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/
always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!
hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/
always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!
And this post is on WordPress.org
See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/
See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/
Did you read the post? They have no problem with other Wordpress hosts and are calling out WP Engine specifically. They even suggest switching to literally any other WP host that isn't WP Engine.
You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing.
Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.
Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.
WordPress makes those features disable-able themselves, nobody has "chopped up" anything here.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);
That's it.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);
That's it.
They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like
Disabling a feature isnt chopping anything up. Im specifically commenting on this statement you made.
Disabling a feature isnt chopping anything up. Im specifically commenting on this statement you made.
I'm using the author's definition of chopping up.
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
This has the same energy as a spat between two Mastodon instances. Did he make any effort to work this out with them in private? I'd think he would mention that if he did.
Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.
Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.
Why is the .org mouth speaking with the .com's words?
This is nothing more than commercially focused.
This is nothing more than commercially focused.
Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that.
This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success.
Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well.
WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.
This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success.
Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well.
WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.
He didn't choose to keep it open source. He has no choice unless he tracks down all the contributors back to B2 and gets them to assign copyright. This would be the most controversial thing he's done so far and likely lead to a fork. That's the point of a license like GPL.
I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages.
Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default.
So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value.
TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing.
Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.
Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default.
So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value.
TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing.
Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.
> I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages.
And if you could say "Keep revisions for 30 days" and/or "Keep the last 10 revisions for every post". Why that hasn't been implemented...
And if you could say "Keep revisions for 30 days" and/or "Keep the last 10 revisions for every post". Why that hasn't been implemented...
Indeed :)! It's not well thought feature. Also WordPress.com limits to 25 revisions, for exactly the same issue. https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/
tbf I dislike revisions in the forever space as a default and would prefer if they are off. If revisions can expire by default that is fine tough. I have no idea how Wordpress handles it. But most of the time you should backup your hosting data anyway , especially Wordpress, because updates will break stuff and these revisions are useless for that.
Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress.
Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone."
If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.
Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone."
If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.
They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine.
That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.
That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.
Wow. I was right. https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
IYKYK I guess.
IYKYK I guess.
[deleted]
WP Engine is so incredibly overpriced.
Using .org blog to attack an Automattic rival is unacceptable. Matt must resign from WP leadership and focus on his business — and post this nonsense over there.
In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.
Curious why the post has two hyperlinks to the WP Engine domain, and additionally without rel="nofollow", if they despise them so much. Isn't that WordPress essentially passing SEO link juice to WP Engine?
[deleted]
[deleted]
Isn’t this what trademarks are for?
I don't think you read the article
If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes:
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
The author's argument is that calling WP Engine's causing confusion. If so, wouldn't they be suing instead of blogging?
But it is WordPress, Mullenweg hasn't shown that it's anything other than stock WordPress with a setting turned off.
That whole post boils down to Mark & co(s) not having the necessary protections for their product, so they’re left with nothing to do but cry “foul” as a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work.
(A)GPL provides no protection here.
Polyform NonCommercial however does protect against this, because WP Engine would have to pay for the privilege of re-sale.
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
See also the closely aligned Fair Source:
https://fair.io
(A)GPL provides no protection here.
Polyform NonCommercial however does protect against this, because WP Engine would have to pay for the privilege of re-sale.
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
See also the closely aligned Fair Source:
https://fair.io
> a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work
I would argue that releasing your code as open source already is the consent, and you can’t really revoke the consent later (make the license more strict when you already released it). They might not like it now but I wouldn’t call it non-consensually.
I would argue that releasing your code as open source already is the consent, and you can’t really revoke the consent later (make the license more strict when you already released it). They might not like it now but I wouldn’t call it non-consensually.