Consider that WP Engine's business model revolves around WordPress being a problematic platform for their customers in one way or another. They support sites that would otherwise need to be replaced if it were to continue being scaled. This keeps those customers, the whales, in the WordPress ecosystem.
Plugin and theme developers, digital marketing agencies, and independent web developers continue to put food on the table because of a market that otherwise wouldn't exist. This is healthy for the ecosystem.
Conversely, Matt used that market, the users, as leverage against WP Engine. He caused a deep loss of trust in WordPress as a platform for any serious business. He acted in spite of the community.
I don't think WP Engine is particularly "good", but they don't weaponize users for business goals under the guise of altruism.
This is very much like Amazon and other hyperscalers making managed versions of Elasticsearch and Redis and cutting them out of the value chain entirely.
This is only going to result in less open source, more copyleft, "equitable source" / "source available", etc.
While you have every right to do what you're doing, it's ripping off the source of the people that put in the decades of hard work.
Matt should have conducted himself better in this, but his anger and frustration are palpable. You grifted his work (with his, in retrospect stupid, permission).
Maybe the time for permissive open source licenses is over. Big players and third parties come in and eat up all the value, leaving the original engineers and teams and companies out to dry.
And these are the consequences and indeed the intentions of open source. There's no "ripping off", this is what Open Source licenses permit. If contributors didn't want this to be possible, they shouldn't have licensed their software this way.
(Of course, WordPress itself is a fork of a GPL project, so didn't have the option, and you could equally say it's "ripping off" that project. But we don't. Because it's open source. And that's how it works.)
Not copyleft enough. The AGPL didn't exist at the time.
> If contributors didn't want this to be possible, they shouldn't have licensed their software this way.
Victim blaming.
It's becoming very clear that you should no longer license your hard work like this, or vultures like Amazon or WPE pick off all the value you created.
Sorry for our collective mistake. It's a hard lesson to learn for Matt and co., but the rest of the internet is learning not to enable this.
You'll probably get away with doing this to WordPress, but we're not going to license stuff in a way that permits having value ripped off the top. Especially when it's not given back.
The database startups have gotten the memo. Nobody's licensing without intense restrictions on this kind of behavior.
Besides Matt and maybe those who work for him, what other contributors are complaining?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#History
Your pro-Matt stance seems really strained with this argument
But you’re essentially claiming that no one can offer any kind of managed platform built on open source tools without contributing to them. No one should profit off of, say, Linux, by selling you access to a Linux VM. No one should profit off of git by providing a managed git repository. No one should profit off of react by using it for their money-making website.
That would be absurd. WP Engine is by no means close to the equivalent of an AWS in the WordPress world. There are thousands of WP hosts, few of which actively contribute much back to WP. But that’s frankly just how OSS works, and everyone knows that’s the case. No one is starting OSS projects expecting ever user to contribute back.
And by the way, I’m a developer who contributed to WordPress quite a bit. Automattic is not being “left out to dry” by companies selling WordPress hosting without contributing back. In fact, it (used to be) one of the most valuable companies in the space, precisely because it has influence over 40% of websites in a way WP Engine doesn’t.
All Matt did was poison the ecosystem with a rug pull. The best you can do as an OSS leader is encourage other companies to contribute with things like Five for the Future. Beyond that, you don’t have recourse.
WP Engine would only be a truly toxic player if they had high or undue expectations from the OSS project in the form of large numbers of bug reports, feature requests, or complaints. As a WordPress contributor, I never saw that to be the case. All they did was sell web hosting the same way thousands of other companies do in the ecosystem.
Matt has no obligation to make some other company's customers happy. Even less so when that company has refused to work with WordPress despite basing their entire business around its success.
WP Engine has always been a bit scummy. Their name does attempt to make them sound like they are the official WordPress hosting service. This all could have been avoided if they agreed to WordPress' licensing agreement, but now they've both gone into scorched-Earth mode and will both decline.
This story isn't about them it's about their customers who chose to use their service and how Matt chose to make them collateral damage. That choice has consequences which is what this is.
No, that's completely backwards.
WP Engine is ungrateful and generally kind of shit, but they did nothing that WordPress didn't allow. WordPress acted needlessly aggressive and conflated the business side of their operation with the non-profit side of their operation, which is why WP Engine has a legal basis to sue them over in the first place. WordPress has gathered a lot of good will for being open source and having a non-profit that maintains tooling, but if they don't respect the freedoms that made them popular, they're going to lose out in the end.
I don't have a horse in this race and I'd have to back WordPress if I had to make a decision, but neither party in this conflict is the good guy here.
All of that said, the true vultures here are the lawyers and companies organising the class action lawsuit. All of the customers they "represent" are doing it for a quick buck, and the lawyers are more than willing to blow up Automaticc and WordPress to get their pay day even if it means WordPress will no longer be maintained by anyone. Whatever side you're on, winning this class action lawsuit means everybody but the lawyers lose.
You are aware (well, maybe you're not, because the WPF certainly has never announced it) that this would be ... difficult, because the same day the WPF was granted ownership over the WP "entity", it granted an exclusive, irrevocable, universal sole commercial license to Automattic.
If they’ve been making so much money off of WordPress for so long, they should have either 1. entered into a formal agreement with the project’s maintainers or 2. forked the project and maintained it themselves.
Instead they’ve been reselling someone else’s work and when they objected sued the maintainers… a bold strategy to say the least.