• solomon42069@lemmy.world
    176·
    2 hours ago

    As a career WordPress developer, I fully support WordPress’s stance on this issue. It’s unreasonable for a company to siphon resources from a non-profit to fuel their own hosting business.

    For smaller companies, lacking the ability to manage their own updates or CI/CD processes is understandable. But WPEngine is a large organization—they have the resources and capacity to handle these issues in-house. They could have easily avoided this situation without turning it into a turf war.

    Edit: I see the WPEngine fans have arrived. Feel free to downvote, but that doesn’t make you right!

    • x1gma@lemmy.world
      83·
      2 hours ago

      You also don’t get to randomly change license terms because you’re having a childish meltdown because someone earns money with an open source product while according to the terms of the license of the said product.

      You also don’t steal code from a user of your platform and maliciously redirect to your fork.

      This is not about WPE vs Matt’s lack of brain cells. This is also not about hardlining on what’s open source or not. But Matt needs to lose this fight, not only because of his decisions, but because if he wins, he not only successfully burned down WordPress, but the open source ecosystem as a whole.

      If you publish something with a license that allows people to earn money without paying a share to you, don’t be butthurt if people won’t do that. And if you don’t want that - change the license properly and carry the consequences.

      • solomon42069@lemmy.world
        124·
        2 hours ago

        What on Earth are you on about? This has nothing to do with licensing. The issue is a business using another organization’s resources without paying for it, all while earning a profit for themselves.

        This isn’t about open source, personal attacks, or “brain cells.” It’s about fairness and the responsible use of resources. WPEngine is a profitable company that has the means to manage its own infrastructure instead of relying on WordPress.org’s updates system. If you’re going to run a business that depends on open-source software, there’s an expectation of contributing back or, at the very least, not exploiting the resources of a non-profit.

        So let’s focus on the actual problem: a large company exploiting a shared ecosystem to run a commercial service.

    • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 hour ago

      Do you know about how Android is open source, but Google has moved a bunch of important functionality to Google Services which makes Android less desirable without them?

      From my understanding it’s not nearly as bad as that with WordPress, but similar in that some functionality relies on non-open source stuff that this guy Matt and his company automatic control.

      He’s mad that competitor company WP Engine doesn’t contribute back to the project, so he’s making a lot of noise and making moves to limit their access.

    • Ab_intra@lemmy.worldEnglish
      161·
      5 hours ago

      Have the same question. It seems to be open source but if they wanted to they could make it closed source for sure…

      • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
        34·
        5 hours ago

        They cannot make WordPress closed source because it’s released under the GPL, which means that any closed implementation cannot use this code.

        With that said, the linked article is about access to wordpress.org, which is different from the source code of the project. I’m not entirely sure what this is about.

        • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          4 hours ago

          They can, but only if all contributors agree or their work is removed entirely, and only future releases (code released prior to that is still GPL).

      • auroz@lemmy.sdf.org
        18·
        5 hours ago

        I don’t know what the governance setup is like, but in theory the owners of the project can change the license to whatever they like at any time.

        The catch is that this doesn’t affect old versions, which remain available under the old license. So they could make WP closed-source or make the license more restrictive, but WP-engine or any portion of the community could make a fork and maintain the open source version from there. It wouldn’t have the features added by the mainline WP project since the license change (and they’d likely have to change the branding), but that’s about all that would be lost.

        Similar things have happened in the past: see OpenOffice becoming LibreOffice for example.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
        5·
        5 hours ago

        Nah wordpress would instantly die if it went closed source. So many businesses only function the way they do because wordpress is easily customizable.

        It would just get forked by some big webhosting company.

    • Dot.@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      7·
      4 hours ago

      Mainly, .org can block anyone from updating their software(if they are set as the update provider on your Wordpress distribution) and accessing their addons repo( which is very essential to how some websites work)

    • Optional@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      There’s a strong current of people who believe the WP fight with WPEngine is bad on this guy’s behalf. He’s megalomaniacal, he’s being a spoiled rich guy, stuff like that.

      Personally I don’t see it, but I may not know enough about it. But I see this as a part of that conversation. Someone’s arguing that fighting with a private corporate business whose model depends on exploiting the software they have no intention of supporting is outrageous and he’s Gone Too Far.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      262·
      4 hours ago

      He can’t. Mullenweg is just having a really bad, prolonged meltdown over a hosting company making (morally questionable, but legally clear) money and threatening to burn it all down.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        1 hour ago

        It’s kinda funny because although I enjoy selfhosting, I wasn’t going to self-host wordpress until I saw how ridiculous the prices are through Wordpress.com for any actual functionality. I’ve got a decent VPS and have paid for a couple of key (to me) “premium” 3rd-party plugins and it’s still costing far less than it would have hosting it all through Wordpress.com. Their pricing seems frankly astronomical to me (or did when I was making my decision.)

        I did dig up this article which has helped me to understand the situation a bit better FWIW: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-wordpress-org-wp-engine

        • Evotech@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 hour ago

          What’s your use case for WordPress? Anything you couldn’t just make in a short amount of time?

          • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            49 minutes ago

            Although I am a geeky techy, I’m not a web developer, so I’m sure there are other ways to do what I do that would be easier for someone who was. I just have a basic blog and newsletter with signups, and an audience far, far smaller than the number of characters in this comment. :D (That’s OK though, I’m on an intentional slow growth curve.)

            I don’t even go out of my way to drive people to it because in some ways I’m still deciding what I want to do with the space. The “premium” plugins I pay for are to help handle spambots and signups/newsletter stuff. (and there are free plugins to help with those if I really needed to stay free) Wordpress.com sends me “30% off ACT NOW” emails every so often for their hosted packages and it doesn’t even come close to competing. They want you to pony up $$ to get access to any worthwhile plugins at all from what I can tell, and I’m too much of a dyed in the wool Linuxy “you aren’t going to tell me what I can and can’t do” kind of guy to have any tolerance for that.

            Edit: Just looked again now - $300/year to reach a tier that allows use of plugins. Nah.

            • Evotech@lemmy.world
              21·
              47 minutes ago

              Idk, with ai I made a static html site in about an hour today that looks somewhat decent. Just to play around a bit with Cursor / claude.ai. Hosted on cloudflare pages (free). pipeline from GitHub.

              I’m not a developer either, but was fun. I can add more to it later.

              Figured I don’t really want or need comments anyway So no need for a database or spambot detection :p

    • FMT99@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 hours ago

      As far as I have been able to tell, it doesn’t. If you have your own infra it doesn’t affect you at all.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
        2·
        4 hours ago

        Even self hosting, thenplug ins directory and updates etc seem to be where they have stopped wp engine access. It is still open for other websites but could be cut off if they chose.

        From what ive read, manual upload of a plugin still works, so its just removing convenience and auto update. I doubt its long before a fork or plug in offers identicsl functionality.

        • taladar@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          3 hours ago

          This is also about WP Engine access to upload their plugins and support their users on the centralized forums,…

      • CabbageRelish@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        56 minutes ago

        Mullenweg has been blocking WP Engine hosting’s access to .org resources, and even stripping them of access to plugins they distribute there. Not the biggest fan of WP Engine from what I saw in their Advanced Custom Fields plugin buyout (they messed with the existing licensing and focused on monetizing the crap out of it), but things aren’t alright in the WP universe.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        I specified org because that’s what’s in OP, but honestly my comment is the same either way. :D

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      31·
      4 hours ago

      Where do you get your updates from? Theoretically they could change the license for newer versions or switched to a paid model or any number of things. Your only choice would be a fork or nothing, the latter which would suck if there’s a security hole. As others have mentioned look what happen with OpenOffice

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 hour ago

        Your only choice would be a fork or nothing,

        I’ve been down this road before, that doesn’t really scare me. Something this big, there will be a good fork if that happens.

        Happily using LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice for like a decade now, and there’s also a reason I’ve got Jellyfin instead of Emby running on the server in the basement.

        Still, good point, I was trying to figure out how his current, immediate meltdown was related to self-hosting generically, and it sounds like it’s not.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 hours ago

        What happened with OpenOffice? iirc Oracle bought them then made it open source and abandoned it, so it became LibreOffice, still free and awesome.

  • lily33@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 hours ago

    As someone who has no knowledge of the ecosystem: Why would people who self-host wordpress care about access to wordpress.org? Isn’t the point of self-hostung to use your own infrastructure?