I have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour.<p>Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.
So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that.<p>Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.
while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back, if Mullenweg were serious about gaining support from the community he would give a date for people to migrate their systems off of WPEngine before they blocked it.<p>this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's something not more critical than updating some plugins.<p>you also can't deny the obvious conflict of interest here where it feels like he's trying take a "competitor" down. sucks all around.
The statement at Wordpress.org reads like a very emotionally charged e-mail. While I am not in the know of the situation, it seems like a bit of terrible PR.<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/" rel="nofollow">https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/</a>
God the hubris of the Wordpress camp..<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/" rel="nofollow">https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/</a><p>> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.<p>Wordpress people have been rewriting content without asking for permission FOREVER, potentially breaking code embedded in content. They rewrite (or perhaps stopped by now, I've moved on) Wordpress to WordPress.
I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago<p><a href="https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/" rel="nofollow">https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/</a><p>and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.<p>Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.<p>All seems so sudden and disproportionate.
I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.
Has WP Engine actually done anything wrong? Wordpress is released under GPLv2 which allows modification and commercial use. I don't see the justification for Automattic demanding royalties.
Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting.<p>WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck?<p>The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now.<p>If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.
This behavior seems incredibly hostile, especially considering both companies have been around for over a decade. So, what changed? WP Engine got big? They've been that way for quite some time. My guess is that developments over the past eight years—such as the rise of static sites, JavaScript, and Node.js have likely led to a decline in market share and revenue for both WordPress and WP Engine (though I don’t have specific data to back this up). This is just bad business. Focusing on competitors is a distraction, and at this point, it feels like a personal feud for Matt. What are the motives? Money (unlikely Matt already is wealthy), seems like hubris.
Matt needs to calm down, talk to their lawyers and keep the ego in check<p>Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine.<p>Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store
Related announcement from Wordpress.org: <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/" rel="nofollow">https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/</a>
I thought this didn't affect me until tonight I had a call from a freelance client maybe 5 years ago call me.<p>Just spent the better part of 3 hours after work trying to help him out, what WordPress have done here is ridiculous. It feels like something more petty than a child. Mullenweg needs to grow up and realise that open source is open source. I've read through the cease and desist claims. It's Mullenweg's petty ego destroying an ecosystem of WPE users. So much for his high and mighty 'wordpress is the pinicle of user's experience'<p>Whatever his angle is, I just replaced Wordpress with a home rolled cms for my client. WordPress can die for all I care. The web would be safer for it.
[dupe] Discussion on official post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760</a>
Ugh! I manage a large number of sites on WPE for clients, and keeping them updated and secure via manual method is going to be a pain. I might as well spin up my servers and migrate away instead of waiting for things to settle.
WPEngine has been a supreme disappointment in the last year. Agency Partner Program is a bogus seduction tactic. The development instance you can have now is embarrassing when displaying progress to clients as they swear no caching exists when the instance is password-protected. I'm tired of WPEngine and love that this is happening. Been much happier with Kinsta.