- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free
- companies under $b have to pay $x
- companies under $c have to pay $y
Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)
If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.
It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.
> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server
Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.
WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.
How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL
GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.
Either you are a free license or not.
If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.
What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.
In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.
In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.
It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.
I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?
You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.
Unless you accidentally end up doing business with an asshole. Matt is definitely making himself look like a danger to do business with—maybe WP Engine just successfully baited him into acting against his community and killing trust and he's not actually as unhinged as he sounds here... but few people would be willing to bet money on that.
That's the point, they weren't doing business.
They were issuing presumably hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not offering a penny. You will get banned for that on absolutely any service. Any of them, GPL or not.
There's 8 billion people on this planet, from hundreds of different cultures. Everyone has different intuitions, different values, different cultural expectations.
I'm not saying the rules have to be hard rules or anything. But if you can't even articulate the basic shape of the rules, then it's really 100% on you when people don't follow the magic ideas in your head.
I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.
I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.
If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.
What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.
This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
It seems like that is not really up to me.
When Matt Mullenweg gets up one morning and does not like my commercial product for WP, he might think of me as an asshole and will try to extort money from my business or just ruin it just like he did here.
Hard rules might be fine to take care of things like these.
it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.
It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.
It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
For example Sony sold more than 100 million units of PS4 and made billions of dollars from it and how much they contributed to the open source projects they've used in PS4? Take a look at OSS projects used in PS4: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/
Did they contribute anything? Did they contribute 100% enough or just 20% or 30%?
If the software is open sourced and if license allows you to do anything with it then you are indeed free to do anything with it including selling products which include OSS.
2. There is obviously a difference between "selling products that include OSS" and "selling OSS 1:1". It's not like Sony's firmware/dashboard is maintained by "OpenGamingConsoleDashboard" and they are selling a 95% repackage of that to their end users (also ignoring the hardware). This pertains to the software maintenance logistics layer and not the licensing layer. Sure, both in the Sony and WPEngine cases they are in the clear on the licensing, but that doesn't make for sustainable development of the underlying software. I'd also wager that if the OSS projects used in the PS4 would drum up enough of a social media stink, they'd have decent chances of getting some compensation (e.g. the TLDraw maintainers did that quite a few times successfully).
Ultimately it's a matter of common sense. Sure, if I leave out my "take one" bowl on Halloween and someone takes it all, there's no rules against that. But next year I might be more cautious and hand out the candy myself - now what?
If you've built a business off taking all my candy and reselling it, you're fucked! If you had just been less greedy and taken, say, 10 instead of the whole bowl I might not have cared.
I'm this case, the license explicitly allows everyone to use the software for free. I don't understand your candy analogies. If you're not OK with people using your software for free, use a commercial license (or a dual licensing model, or one of a hundred possible solutions other than a free license).
Has absolutely 0 to do with open source. The software was, and is, GPL.
This is about using free web APIs. Yes you will get banned for that, on absolutely any service. Don't believe me? Try it out.
Hell they're one of the only 2 companies that let you compile android with their firmware for their phones. They even have instructions on their site.
This is whatabouttism, but damn, they don't deserve this kinda talk.
Example: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/0abe05aeac29d997...
I just used Sony as an example to tinker what is the definition of contributing enough that Matt Mullenweg was talking about:https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/#:~:text=(To%20....)
I don't have anything against Sony.
We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.
It's this kind of blurring of lines between Automattic and the foundation that has people very very concerned here.
Also, if open source companies wouldn't do it, some open source projects would never reach any kind of maturity if the company creating such project faces the competition who just live off the work of the original team who don't contribute back to the project.
Since they offer competing services in the first place.
Sure WP also has some freemium model, but I do not consider that shady.
Have you seen the Automattic CEO talk (link to YT in other comment in this thread). I dont think he's in shady business: he's releasing loads of source code under the GPL!
Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*OVEEYB4H...
WordPress is a GPL project.
services (like the plugin registry, but there are many more) cannot be GPL. they are served by someone and that someone pays for hosting/bandwidth/etc and that someone is free to stop providing that service (to one party or all together).
WPE is essentially DDOSing WP for free. Obviously that shit doesn't fly. Either pay up or get your own server and host your own shit.
If any one of us was hosting a FREE service and some corporation came around and hit us with hundreds of thousands of requests, we too would demand money or ban them. Any one of us. So I really, truly, don't understand why we're all sitting here having this conversation.
The real competitor in Automattics portfolio is Pressable. Who are currently running a poaching campaign on their frontpage.
"WordPress hosting" is a relatively new option on WordPress.com. Pressable is a more advanced WordPress hosting provider, built by Automattic.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
Personally I also don’t like that the .org suddenly becomes weaponized. If this can be done to WPE, it can be done to anyone else really.
It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.
> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?
I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.
So yeah, is WPE in the right to not give back?
At the heart of this is the same song of making money and the idea of fairness. I honestly don’t know the groundrules here.
The law, I have no idea in what direction this is going to go!
This question here goes straight to the heart of things.
WP.org is a 501(c)3 organization. Ostensibly, it has absolutely nothing to do with Automattic. Reality... appears to be somewhat different.
If there were compensation due, it would not be to Automattic.
WP.org has a board of directors, not a dictator. Ostensibly, Matt is the Chairman. Why would he be due compensation?
The fact that such questions even arise shows just how ... murky ... Matt/WP.org/WP.com/Automattic's interactions are.
Chromium is Open Source, but Google is not required to allow Add On store access (even if they tolerate it from chromium forks).
Some clarity would be nice.
* https://thephp.foundation/ one of three platinum level sponsors
* MySQL doesn't take sponsorships afaict
* https://mariadb.org/about/#stakeholders one of several silver sponsors of MariaDB
* https://x.com/SlexAxton/status/1839091643338862828 "I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor"However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.
The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.
This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.
Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.
I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.
However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.
Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.
(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)
My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.
Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.
WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!
Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business
They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.
Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.
This situation is not going to kill WP Engine.
If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...
I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.
Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
>It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
If you check Wordpress' Youtube channel, they uploaded the Q&A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine.
I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it.
>at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core.
Matt gave an interview to about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM and although he sounded very unprepared and showed no receipts, none of what he says sounds unreasonable.
A key point on the interview is that Matt has been trying to get WP Engine to contribute for years and they kept delaying on him. People called this "extortion," but in my view it's a way an open source project found to get a corporation that profits from open source to contribute. There is a "world-famous" trademark, and to use it you need to pay or contribute dev hours. He says various hosts had the same deal, and because he never had a problem with any of the other hosts, he ended up being "naive" and let WP Engine delay and delay for years because he didn't think they would just never agree to it. In the screenshots in the cease and desist by WP Engine you can even see messages from Matt including one where it sounds like WP Engine is telling him to set up a meeting next week instead of talking about it in the Q&A, to which he responds (paraphrased) "if you're saying next week you're saying no." Even up to the last minute he still tried to get an agreement, sending a photo of the audience, and got no favorable answer.
Ignoring the trademark violation allegations, and the whole "revisions" thing that some may think sounds ridiculous, there was a part he mentions Woocommerce has a Stripe code that gives part of the revenue to WP org, and WP Engine hacked the code to give the attribution to WP Engine, which means the money that would go to WP org (com?) goes to WP Engine. I think this is technically legal because it's GPL, but it doesn't look good if you're diverting millions of dollars that would go to WP org to yourself.
From what I've seen, it really feels like Matt tried everything he could to get a commercial entity to contribute to an open source project and now he's getting the blame because their customers are getting affected by it. It doesn't help that many who use Wordpress do not understand the separation between Wordpress, the source code (that WP Engine can still use), and the CDN that provides automatic updates (which WP Engine got banned from). The millions of WP Engine users using te CDN were costing WP org money that can now be invested in a different way. I've seen some even say a court could issue an injunction to force WP org to provide the updates for free. The "free ice cream" analogy Matt uses in the interview is really apt here.
If this goes to court I suppose allegations will start getting receipts behind them and we'll have a clearer view of what happened. To me, based on Matt's allegations, WP Engine is not being targeted for being a competitor like some say, but they have been given an exceptionally favorable treatment that was unjust to the other Wordpress hosts who were agreeing to pay for the trademark, and all of this was just WP org making things fair again.
In fact, Matt even says that if they do agree to contribute 8% of their revenue in cash or dev hours, they will get unbanned. I'm not sure if they will capitulate, but just the fact it isn't just "money" but "dev hours is okay" sounds to me that this isn't about money.
Revenue is a red herring. It is not an appropriate measure to determine if and how much one should contribute to an open source project.
Instead, we should measure the need to contribute by the burden one places on the project.
Do you request features or bug fixes? Contribute appropriately.
Do you request support? Contribute appropriately.
Do you simply copy, install, and run the existing software? No need to contribute.
If you prefer the capricious nature of the politics of social shaming instead of the rules based system of laws and courts, I guess that is being consistent even if the actual process is very inconsistent and unpredictable.
If not, then it’s not clear to me how you’re taking a philosophical stance about open source if you’re demanding payment. Those ideas don’t work together.
Where does the GPL state this requirement? It doesn't.
If WordPress doesn't like this, they should have licenced their software under the AGPL or some other licence with stronger copylefting.
Plenty of large commercial entities use BSD licenced software and make a fortune off the software, with little given in return. Take FreeBSD and the significant commercial operations it drives. They never whinge. Because that's the choice they made, and they stick to their principles.
Taking away access to those servers is one thing, doing it without warning putting millions of sites at risk is another.
WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.
First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.
They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.
Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.
If you write OS and put it out there for the world to use, you should be doing it because you want to _give_ to the world. you should not expect _anything_ in return. the is the essences of giving, to not expect something back.
if Matt wants WPEngine to require a contribution to WordPRess, then he should relicense it under a license that requires this or close the code and charge subscriptions.
what he is doing is giving a bad name the OS community in general. this is not how you act.
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.