Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
WP Engine is no different from the million hostings that auto-install WordPress and “abuse” their resources.
Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"
I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?
How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
Is it their right? Sure. I don’t think you’d be here defending them though.
Google, Amazon, you name it do this infinite times a day with crawlers.
If you build a business on taking resources from some public source, on a large scale, you could very well be out of a business at any time. This has been the case for a long, long time. And nobody seems to take issue with it.
I imagine if this was the real issue, then WPEngine could probably sort out some fair solution to not use more than their fair share. I dont know much about this ecosystem but surely a caching proxy is not hard to setup.
However reading between the lines, it sounds like the real issue is that WPEngine is more succesful which is making other players jealous, who are using their control over other parts of the ecosystem to give WPEngine the middle finger. In such a case its not really about resourse usage.
They were asked to contribute back, either in cash or in people hours and they refused.
free software gives 4 freedoms. none of them say about contributing back. they only talk about freedom of source code.
same for OSI approved licenses. they are either permissive, MIT aka, do whatever you want or like AGPL provide source code but none that i can think of forces downstream users to contribute back to main.
..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org.
This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software.
SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management.
I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.
If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability).
In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off.
Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested.
Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good.
Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away.
But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person.
Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal.
Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block.
> But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they?
Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.
Right, discrimination based on protected classes is illegal.
Discrimination based on other needs is not illegal, and is in fact how all businesses work. They discriminate based on income, based on how you're dressed, based on how nice you are.
> This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws.
Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level. Sorry, in my opinion it's not even close to comparable.
If Amazon was your competitor and they also issued hundreds of thousands of requests to one of your FREE APIs would you foot the bill? Fat chance, right? That's what we're talking about here.
Sure, the debate is because its not really believable that that was happening, and sounds like a pretense.
> If Amazon was your competitor
That's the core dispute though. WPEngine is not a competitor of word press foundation. It is a competitor of automattic. For word press foundation to treat competitors to automattic as competitors to themselves seems highly unethical and possibly a violation of fiduciary duty.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.