edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.
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.
Also there has been issues for years when trying to move away and transfer __your__ domain to another provider.
You can, just not on the free plan, or the two cheapest paid plans.
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?
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.
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.
WP Engine has been the top sponsor of all WordCamps for years.
(Relevant section starting around 10:14)
I think he’s using this as one prominent example of overall harm to the space.
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.
Highly recommend reading his smartbear blogs.
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.
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?
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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So, again, I'm asking for that one competitor that's 30% better than Google.
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.
Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.