Wordpress Drama

[Forsaken]

Anyone else paying attention to the current Wordpress (Matt Mullenweg) and his vendetta against WP Engine?

Here's an article about it: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/26/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/

It's to the point that Wordpress.org is actively blocking customers who use WP Engine from using the main repo for plugin and themes.

 

[Russ]

Matt's blog has been quite an interesting read as well:

Matt Mullenweg

Unlucky in Cards

ma.tt

 

[Forsaken]

Matt's blog has been quite an interesting read as well:

Matt Mullenweg

Unlucky in Cards

ma.tt

Interesting is one way to put it lol...

This isn't the first time Matt has thrown tantrums and gone off the deep end on something, and I honestly hope he is removed as he has been problematic for decades now, it's just usually not as big and public as this has been.

I've seen some crazy FOSS vs private equity in the past, but this is literally one of the few cases of blatant extortion lmao.

 

[Digital Doctor]

He said Automattic has been trying to broker a trademark licensing deal for a long time, but WP Engine’s only response has been to “string us along.”

Automattic makes a strong point here.

 

[Taylor J]

Automattic makes a strong point here.

When they don't own a trademark on "WP" they really don't make a strong point at all.

 

[Digital Doctor]

When they don't own a trademark on "WP" they really don't make a strong point at all.

Sure you can make a lot of these arguments. but Wordpress makes the rules for their software, so blocking WP Engine is legit. Users suffer.

Ultimately WP Engine needs to contribute money to Wordpress.

 

[Chris D]

Ultimately WP Engine needs to contribute money to Wordpress.

lol no they don't

WP Engine haven't done anything wrong and until last week they were explicitly saying that "WP is not covered by the WordPress trademarks". Allegedly the "WP" prefix has been causing confusion, yet, I've never been confused by this, I've never witnessed anyone being confused by this. So far the only person who has been confused by this by all accounts is Matt Mullenweg's mother.

 

[Digital Doctor]

WP" prefix has been causing confusion, yet, I've never been confused by this

Matt M thinks it is confusing. I agree.

 

[Chris D]

It isn't confusing. Their trademark is WordPress. If it was an official WordPress service, they'd have called it WordPress Engine or something else. As it happens, their official hosted service is WordPress.com. Which has ironically caused so much confusion that it apparently warrants its own documentation:

What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

WordPress vs. WordPress.com People are often confused about the differences between WordPress and WordPress.com. WordPress is the free, Open Source web publishing software project, owned by no one individual or company. WordPress.com is a hosted blogging service run by a company called...

wordpress.org

 

[duderuud]

When they don't own a trademark on "WP" they really don't make a strong point at all.

Agreed. If they wanted no confusion he should have trademarked WP and registered the domain wp.com

 

[Forsaken]

Sure you can make a lot of these arguments. but Wordpress makes the rules for their software, so blocking WP Engine is legit. Users suffer.

Ultimately WP Engine needs to contribute money to Wordpress.

This is not how open-source works, as there is no mandatory requirement for financial contribution. More over, Wordpress is targeting a specific service (an industry leader, but not even the largest) but is also ignoring other similar entities that have also not contributed.

Even if Wordpress makes the rules for how Wordpress.org is used, it is going to be very difficult fight for them to justify blocking every user of WP Engine from being able to use the official repo, and repeatedly preventing any attempts to bypass that ban (which is not illegal, as they have not actively been told they cannot use the repo). All this after Matt has done what could be considered commercial extortion and corporate blackmail.

The only real argument that Wordpress has against WP Engine is potentially the use of 'Wordpress' (the best wordpress host) or in the names of their service plans. WP Engine could literally fork Wordpress, and there is nothing that Wordpress could do to stop them as long as they adhere to the GPL license.

 

[Mendalla]

I have seen the stories coming in through IT news sources I follow and it's not pretty. Glad I don't use Wordpress in any form right now so can happily ignore the mess.

 

[eva2000]

Being discussed on my forums too

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WPEngine is ranked 30th for total hours contributed https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=hours

WP Engine Must Win – Pre-Thought Listen

journal.rmccue.io

Matt is trying to make same argument that CentOS did about blocking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux source access. The code is free but the infrastructure CentOS provides isn't. So Matt said WPEngine can spin up their own infrastructure to access code etc.

Nice read at https://www.briancoords.com/misconceptions-about-matt-open-source-and-contributions/

 

[Forsaken]

Being discussed on my forums too

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WPEngine is ranked 30th for total hours contributed https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=hours

WP Engine Must Win – Pre-Thought Listen

journal.rmccue.io

Matt is trying to make same argument that CentOS did about blocking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux source access. The code is free but the infrastructure CentOS provides isn't. So Matt said WPEngine can spin up their own infrastructure to access code etc.

Nice read at https://www.briancoords.com/misconceptions-about-matt-open-source-and-contributions/

If Wordpress were just changing how they were handling trademark, or requesting more contributions from everyone over a certain amount that would be one thing, but the fact that it is very much targeted towards WP Engine currently is what makes the situation weird.

WP Engine isn't even the largest host, and they are one of the largest in way of contributions. Namecheap is not even listed as a contributor, but they're much larger than most of the hosts on the list excluding GoDaddy.

 

[vbresults]

lol no they don't

WP Engine haven't done anything wrong and until last week they were explicitly saying that "WP is not covered by the WordPress trademarks". Allegedly the "WP" prefix has been causing confusion, yet, I've never been confused by this, I've never witnessed anyone being confused by this. So far the only person who has been confused by this by all accounts is Matt Mullenweg's mother.

Mullenweg has been playing a game of chess with the WP Engine team. He realized how completely outclassed he was, threw a tantrum, then kicked over the table and declared "I'm the man of this house".

OpenAI was initially formed as a non-profit. Then, it was a non-profit controlled by a separate for-profit entity. Then, the non-profit lost control and is giving equity to Sam Altman. Maybe this is Mullenweg's bid to do the same.

 

[Suzanne O]

Sounds like some soap opera that is utter garbage.

 

[frm]

C&Ds to XF to rename all the bridging add ons next

"XFtoWP - XenForo to WordPress integration"

...if this were just about "WP" usage.

Something tells me it's more of a personal vendetta or that the for-profit part of WordPress wants more profit by kicking out other big players and scooping up their user base.

 

[javakhir]

used once & never will use this **** again! better learn some coding instead of reading all this WP ****. the same with Drupal.
open source are old, I still surprised, why people are still using them, it's not 2004 year now.
by looking at wp codenames changes, he defenitely suffers with ultimate unknown illness that human never faced yet.

the hardest seo is a porn websites, need ages to make success on this niche, so all those top websites are not using WP.
while WP loads 1 page in 2 seconds, another engine loads upto 76 pages in the same 2 seconds, but never mind!

 

[eva2000]

Further escalation from Matt

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Matt just said on the stream that he has now disabled the WPE dev account on wordpress.org, so they are now blocked from access/deploying code to their plugins, like ACF.

 

[Paul B]

What's that argument always posted here about one man band developers?