Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market. Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones. Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal?...
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market.
Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones.
Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal? Apache vs Nginx?
Who is going to pop up and suddenly step into WP's shoes, and do the mile walk?
This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I...
This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I attended Wordcamps, I made connections with members of the community, and I was very quick to defend WP against a lot of the flak it gets in the larger web development community. The WP Community is fantastic. Just a ton of people dying to to help each other out, share knowledge, and build something awesome together.
To see something I care deeply about (even now, YEARS removed from it being relevant to my career) thrown into chaos by some dork is infuriating. Just the fact that he made moves to fuck over large, innocent swaths of the development community by restricting access to the theme/plugin repos is mind-boggling to me. It's not the fault of any developer that chose WPEngine that he has some made-up beef with them. They chose WPEngine (or Flywheel) because they offer a lot of dead-simple features that most generic web hosts don't. They chose WPEngine because it was the better product. And whether or not WPEngine should or shouldn't be contributing more to the community is incredibly irrelevant because at the end of the day Matt is hurting DEVELOPERS way more than he's hurting WPEngine.
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes...
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes WordPress.org?) Even the whole sock puppetting a 501c to help attack a competitor of your for-profit is suspect on its own, never mind the implications of the intermingled assets/power.
Automattic is also running a sale on Pressable, their direct competitor to WP Engine. (Wordpress.com does compete too, but Pressable is apparently a newer offering that is aiming more at WP Engine's customers.) There's a big banner at the top that says "Looking to switch from WP Engine?" and links to a page offering to buy out your WP Engine contract.
It's really not a good look.
Extra layer: WordPress is itself a fork of an older blog platform called b2.
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
Any chance you have a link to the vod? I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally...
Any chance you have a link to the vod?
I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally handing proof of financial damages to the lawyers on a silver platter. I don’t get how he thinks any of this is okay.
From that, a writeup to Github with a bullet point summary of everything going on, including links to relevant posts and the like. I hadn't heard about any of this until this thread, and that...
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective. He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called...
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective.
He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called “Core Wordpress” is confusing consumers. If AWS sold a plan called “Core Postgres”, nobody would think that it was somehow official Postgres foundation sponsored hosting. It just means it’s the central Wordpress features. This would be like Amazon suing all the object storage companies for having “s3 apis”.
He also claims that the Wordpress trademark is free to use if they give back to the community without any details of what that means. Basically if he feels like it’s okay to use their trademark, you are allowed to. But if he doesn’t like you, you don’t get the trademark. I am not a lawyer, but I am almost positive that isn’t how trademark law works.
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But...
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But yeah his inability to articulate that...
Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market.
Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones.
Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal? Apache vs Nginx?
Who is going to pop up and suddenly step into WP's shoes, and do the mile walk?
This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I attended Wordcamps, I made connections with members of the community, and I was very quick to defend WP against a lot of the flak it gets in the larger web development community. The WP Community is fantastic. Just a ton of people dying to to help each other out, share knowledge, and build something awesome together.
To see something I care deeply about (even now, YEARS removed from it being relevant to my career) thrown into chaos by some dork is infuriating. Just the fact that he made moves to fuck over large, innocent swaths of the development community by restricting access to the theme/plugin repos is mind-boggling to me. It's not the fault of any developer that chose WPEngine that he has some made-up beef with them. They chose WPEngine (or Flywheel) because they offer a lot of dead-simple features that most generic web hosts don't. They chose WPEngine because it was the better product. And whether or not WPEngine should or shouldn't be contributing more to the community is incredibly irrelevant because at the end of the day Matt is hurting DEVELOPERS way more than he's hurting WPEngine.
What a fucking tool.
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes WordPress.org?) Even the whole sock puppetting a 501c to help attack a competitor of your for-profit is suspect on its own, never mind the implications of the intermingled assets/power.
Automattic is also running a sale on Pressable, their direct competitor to WP Engine. (Wordpress.com does compete too, but Pressable is apparently a newer offering that is aiming more at WP Engine's customers.) There's a big banner at the top that says "Looking to switch from WP Engine?" and links to a page offering to buy out your WP Engine contract.
It's really not a good look.
Extra layer: WordPress is itself a fork of an older blog platform called b2.
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
Any chance you have a link to the vod?
I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally handing proof of financial damages to the lawyers on a silver platter. I don’t get how he thinks any of this is okay.
Bluesky post with twitch link!
From that, a writeup to Github with a bullet point summary of everything going on, including links to relevant posts and the like. I hadn't heard about any of this until this thread, and that writeup seems like it'll be updated with relevant news.
Primeagen actually interviewed Matt about this. I haven't watched the video yet though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective.
He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called “Core Wordpress” is confusing consumers. If AWS sold a plan called “Core Postgres”, nobody would think that it was somehow official Postgres foundation sponsored hosting. It just means it’s the central Wordpress features. This would be like Amazon suing all the object storage companies for having “s3 apis”.
He also claims that the Wordpress trademark is free to use if they give back to the community without any details of what that means. Basically if he feels like it’s okay to use their trademark, you are allowed to. But if he doesn’t like you, you don’t get the trademark. I am not a lawyer, but I am almost positive that isn’t how trademark law works.
This is a grown man throwing a hissy fit.
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But yeah his inability to articulate that...