FRESH

Hacker News

Home

WordPress.org bans WP Engine

554 points by openplatypus

by philsquared_

16 subcomments

The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities.
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.

by iambateman

1 subcomments

This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.

by lolinder

3 subcomments

Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

by munbun

4 subcomments

Let’s call this what it is:
Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business.
But a service disruption like this is bad strategy.
WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over.
Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider.
And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.

by nijave

0 subcomment

I have a hard time being sympathetic for Matt given what I've read so far. The C&D WPR sent shows plenty of quotes about Matt threatening to talk poorly about WPE unless they pay up.
If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them.
From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/
Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...

by wfjackson3

0 subcomment

This is one of the worst attempts to handle a corporate dispute that I have ever seen. Forget all of the he said he said arguments for a second and see what a random person who decided to use WordPress will see.
If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress.
I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.

by dang

3 subcomments

Related. Others?
Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments)
WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments)
Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments)
Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments)
WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)

by Communitivity

4 subcomments

My empathy is with Automatic on this one, but I still think it's the wrong move.
"Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin
If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks.
However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.

by FlamingMoe

0 subcomment

IMO the craziest revelation in this whole ordeal is that Matt personally owns WordPress.org. I have worked with WP for close to a decade and I was always under the impression that it was owned by the nonprofit foundation.
So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.

by jeswin

14 subcomments

If like Matt says, they contribute little back to Wordpress then I am with Automattic on this. If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid.
Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.

by tomphoolery

1 subcomments

This went from "hey you guys shouldn't use WP Engine because it's not Real WordPress" to "WP Engine is violating trademarks and isn't welcome in the WordPress community anymore" really f'in quick!

by wg0

5 subcomments

Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo and now WordPress - it seems that Open source is as good and only good when you and only you can sell it. The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort, does things better than you to market/host/package your open source project, the moment things to start to fall apart.
None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
EDIT: typos

by trebor

1 subcomments

I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem.
But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.
Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.
Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.

by dcchambers

1 subcomments

I understand why Matt is frustrated and I sympathize with the situation, but I don't think his approach is going to win him any public favor nor have a long term positive payout.

by robjwells

1 subcomments

Here's Matt Mullenweg's post on Wordpress.org announcing this: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578

by chx

1 subcomments

This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control?
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.

by runako

0 subcomment

No dog in this fight, but
1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com.
2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.

by Raed667

2 subcomments

TBH i don't mind this, open-source means you can use the code, but you're not entitled to infra and services.

by mastazi

1 subcomments

The community should fork Wordpress so that is no longer controlled by Automattic, thus eliminating the conflict of interest. They would have to pick a different name, such as LibrePress (just like LibreOffice vs OpenOffice), in order to avoid copyright or trademark claims by Automattic.

by stock_toaster

0 subcomment

Interview with Matt Mullenweg about his side in all this a little bit ago:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM

by silverliver

1 subcomments

From an operational standpoint, this is completely WP Engine's fault. You should not depend on other people's services, doubly so if they're public and free, when your big as Wordpress Engine is. Wordpress is completely within its rights, morally or otherwise, to block free access to its services.
The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.

by vouaobrasil

1 subcomments

I've used Wordpress self-hosted for a long time and this seems like a non-issue. WPEngine can use the Wordpress codebase but why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? I say this is a good thing.

by progmetaldev

1 subcomments

Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content).
Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.

by pier25

0 subcomment

It's weird Matt would generate all this drama. By not allowing WP Engine to use the plugin ecosystem he is first and foremost damaging the actual WP users hosting there. Probably millions of users.

by itsdrewmiller

0 subcomment

I’m a little surprised WPE didn’t have some kind of contingency plan for this in place already, even if it was just to handle a Wordpress.org outage.

by ModestoBorn

1 subcomments

I'm a WordPress (WP) developer and avid user of WP Engine. I just tested some of my WordPress sites hosted on WP Engine and can confirm that it's currently not possible to take some actions that pull data from https://wordpress.org/, such as not updating WP plugins or installing new WP plugins.
I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage:
[quote]
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software.
...
People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
[/quote]
After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software.
Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core.
I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.

by openplatypus

1 subcomments

Likely the aftermath of https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...

by joshstrange

0 subcomment

This is _so_ rich coming from Wordpress who offers a bastardized version of Wordpress themselves on Wordpress.com
I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.

by nailer

1 subcomments

> Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous
Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.

by rty32

4 subcomments

Somewhat off-topic: WordPress has proven that there is still a market for WordPress-style CRM and managed solution even in 2024. Why hasn't a strong, open source competitor emerged over the years? Because if there is an alternative, this article would be much less relevant, and the events may not have happened in the first place. Is it because CRM, especially the dynamic kind, is no longer cool, and developers are not interested in this area any more?

by tiffanyh

1 subcomments

Slight OT: I thought WordPress.com migrated away from using “WordPress” nearly a decade ago (to a custom nodejs app)
https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...

by kotaKat

0 subcomment

Matt's really out here with the cars covered in hammers that explode more than a few times and hammers went flying everywhere.

0 subcomment

by bitbasher

0 subcomment

ThePrimeagen did an interview with Matt regarding his response and demands.
He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best.
He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do").
He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.

by simonjgreen

2 subcomments

What does Wordpress.com contribute upstream to THEIR dependencies I wonder…

by giorgioz

0 subcomment

Wordpress.org should change it's license like Mongo did to protect itself from Amazon. The license should allow free hosting for indiduals and organiation bt for profit hosting should pay something. It's okay for third party hosting to pay a fee to help maintaining the original open source software.

0 subcomment

by hadad

0 subcomment

Bad leadership from Wordpress.org , you cannot bans company that use modified version of Wordpress and promote using that name ( choice of plugins installed and feature example maximum history ), your company also dosing that ( limit plugin installed on Wordpress.com/Automatic ).

by erikthiart

0 subcomment

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt

by kapitanjakc

0 subcomment

As a developer, I'll take this opportunity and ask my clients to move away from WordPress.

by low_tech_punk

1 subcomments

Really saddened by the FOSS landscape. Docker, Terraform, Redis, and now Wordpress. Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, the sheer drama and rug pulls make it feel like the beginning of an end to open source as a viable business model.

by nargella

0 subcomment

Not this specifically, but I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Redis, elastic, openai, wordpress. Each came to realize that the open source benefit has a glaring issue with their corporate interests.

by sfmike

0 subcomment

Emphasizes that build on another platform even one that claims a healthy ethos and open source you can be cutoff and left to die in the cold.

by throwbmw

0 subcomment

Related:
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

by phplovesong

0 subcomment

Wordpress, the thing keeping PHP alive!

0 subcomment

by linotype

0 subcomment

Sounds like people should start migrating off of WordPress altogether. See: Elastic and Redis.

by raoulw

0 subcomment

This is all very problemattic.

0 subcomment

by stock_toaster

0 subcomment

Seems very similar to AWS and Elastic, Mongodb, etc.

0 subcomment

by rado

0 subcomment

Always found it interesting that the core WP lacks CDN support, caching, multilingual etc out of the box and leverages the paid WP.com, while using open source contributions.

0 subcomment

by dbg31415

0 subcomment

Oh nerds, stop fighting.
This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?

by immibis

0 subcomment

Big lawsuit against Automattic incoming. Which WPEngine will easily win. Given that Automattic is clearly desperate for funds it will probably bankrupt them.

by ActualHacker

0 subcomment

I'm long on this backfiring
Petty, and befitting
WP is trash, always has been
WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand

by surfingdino

0 subcomment

I have a feeling the gap of opportunity has just opened for an alternative to WordPress.
Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend?
PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.

by fakedang

0 subcomment

I don't see how this is WordPress' fight to win, given that WP Engine has the backing and resources of private equity (not to mention, while also being in the right). This is like David coming up against Goliath, except Goliath isn't stupid and wore armor and a helmet.

by ahmedfromtunis

4 subcomments

I don't use any their products, so I don't have any community insider insights, but based on what I've read so far, it seems like WordPress did the right thing.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.

by jaggs

4 subcomments

[flagged]

by urbandw311er

2 subcomments

[flagged]

by nektro

0 subcomment

seems pretty clearcut in favor of Automattic

by MOARDONGZPLZ

0 subcomment

I’ve been following this closely. Not to be a scaremonger, but after Matt Mullenweg’s last post on WP Engine, the underlying financier Silver Lake started doing opposition research on MM trying to undermine him. I view this as a pretty scummy tactic, but not unexpected from a PE firm trying to squeeze as much profit out of whatever it is investing in.
That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760

by system2

0 subcomment

I don't care who's right or wrong; I’m just glad WP Engine is finally facing some consequences. Their treatment of clients is appalling—lying through their teeth, charging absurd prices, and offering abysmal support. My company lost many clients because of them.