this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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I'd like to preface this with the fact that I do donate time, money, and on occasion PRs to open source projects.
But frankly, I don't believe anyone has any obligation to donate to an open source project.
I also don't think anyone has any obligation to give 8% of their revenue to a project that's completely under the control of a man that ALSO runs a commercial entity extracting money from the same project.
And I REALLY don't think you have any obligation to give a guy worth $400 million one damn cent for using his GPL-ed software.
It's not like he's going to take the money and give it to the people in the community developing it, it's going to go into his business - and thus right into his pockets.
This is just CEO corpo greed, and frankly, screw Matt. He has enough, and if his business is falling over because he got greedy and got into bed with VC and bought a failed social media network, well, that's his problem and not everyone who uses Wordpress'.
I completely agree that individuals have no responsibility to contribute, and thank you for your own contributions. But I completely disagree that a company like WP Engine should get a free pass. I see this as a paradox of tolerance and someone is willing to lose face and money over it. He didn't get to $400m by hording, he got there by creating and sharing WordPress and promoting a community that is supposed to lift us all up
I'm not saying they shouldn't contribute; I'm saying there's no universe in where you should be forced to give 8% (or any amount of) of your revenue to another business as a tithe to be allowed to use GPL software.
It's the method of extraction I'm disagreeing with here, not that they shouldn't contribute to what their business runs on.
And yes, technically it's the Trademark we're discussing rather than the software, but, ultimately, not being able to use the name of the thing is the same impact from a business perspective. Especially because Matt made sure that only Matt has a license to use the name and Matt is the only one who can decide if Matt should allow someone else to use it, also.
It'd be like Linus saying that Canonical can't use the Linux trademark, and then going on an unhinged rant in public about how it's theft that they're using his trademark.
Sadly, Matt is busy lighting that community on fire because he thinks he's owed something for a business (which he also used to own a major portion of, for the extra lols) using GPLed software, which is also something I, in general, disagree with: the whole point of free software is that it's free. If you want to get rich, make some proprietary software that everyone must use.
The hilarious thing here is that WordPress is, itself, a fork of GPLed software. Not saying he didn't spend an enormous amount of time and resources on improving it, but B2 is the reason it's under GPL (since Matt would probably have picked a different license, if he could have.)
Bunch of great points, thanks. Funny you mention Linus, I'm pretty sure he's done that a bunch. First thing that comes to mind is the "f*** you Nvidia" on stage 😂 in the grand scheme of things I just hope this blows over quickly, takes power away from all the ceos and companies involved. I don't see anyone benefitting from this in the short or long term, especially the users.
I really don't want WordPress to suffer, I feel like it's one of the last pillars standing against a bland sea of identical social media profiles. Given enough time, completely unchecked, I see WP Engine moving heavily towards enshitification like that, and I think Matt wants to avoid that too? 🙏
Linus is a character, but he's not the kind of character that'd have this kind of public breakdown and start demanding everyone pay him. Which is good, considering that he's also the shepherd of a shocking amount of hard and soft power since the world has decided to mostly run on his little kernel.
I'll disclaim this by saying I hhhhaaaaaate Wordpress, but that's mostly because it's an insecure buggy mess that has made most of my 25 years in IT an absolute chore every time it gets anywhere near me, lol. (And I think Wordpress in general is as bland as a bucket of warm wallpaper paste, and we should bring back MySpace, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)
I think the ultimate end here is going to be that we have a hard fork, and the commercial providers will just fuck off with the code and go make NewPress or something. It'll still be GPL and thus open, so there's a limited amount of enshittification you can do there, but this whole thing kind of covers why I've always been leery of projects that have someone who owns IP rights in it, and also owns the primary commercial provider of hosted services of said product without there being a proper firewall between the two organizations.
That's two VERY opposing sets of interests, and it's far too easy to, well, do what he's doing now and regardless of if he's right or wrong, he's still going to torch a ton of trust in wordpress-the-software since the people who actually use it are not going to give half a shit why they couldn't update a plugin or whatever and got hacked, they're going to (rightfully, in my opinion) go 'fucking wordpress!' and move to something less open, like Wix or Squarespace.
What? There's nothing wrong with a group of people who make a Foss product also hosting that product for a fee.
Unless they intentionally sabatogue documentation and make it hard to self-host like Discource. But WordPress is doing things right here.
There is when you're actively sabotaging the other company trying to use the open source thing you wrote.
Which is what's happening here: Wordpress started out with blocking WPEngine's access to plugins on wordpress.org, which fine, Matt runs it so he can do so. But that's clearly a conflict of interests that he has the unilateral ability to block anyone's access because of a business dispute.
Then he moved on to adding a checkbox that requires you to swear you're not related to WPengine in any way to access wordpress.org as well as banning people that asked any questions on the developer slack, which again, is fine, but it's clearly indicating that Matt has some conflicts he's unwilling to resolve.
Then he forked the most popular wordpress plugin (which is the property of WPEngine) which again, is fine. What WASN'T fine is he redirected the ACF url on wordpress.org to his fork. That's, again, a clear sign he's conflicted as hell and taking actions that are utterly absolutely unaccptable.
If he had just made it a 404, or whatever, then cool. But to just silently give you a different piece of software? He can fuck off with that nonsense.
That's the problem here: he's doing lame-brained nonsense because he believes the opensource side and the business side are both his (because he's structured it so they are) and is actively, and aggressively, doing shit to screw with people he doesn't like because they're a threat to his business.
Not remotely acceptable, and he needs to be slapped down so hard he ends up being six inches shorter.
Makes sense to me to redirect to the official Foss fork.
Its not property of anyone. Its foss software. You can't own an idea or code.