This whole bit of drama really makes me glad I never invested time/energy in WordPress. It's like Real Housewives of Computer Nerds level of whining, and feels just as fake. Regardless of right/wrong, the whole thing has just turned into a 80s made for TV type of situation. There was a much better way at handling this, but somebody had access to social media and the wheels promptly fell off.
The title literally made me laugh out loud. What drama! What intrigue! Can't wait to see what happens next.<p>Honestly, I have no horse in the race, so to speak. I think the people responsible for Wordpress code still suck because they still, in 2024, want the software itself to be able to write to where the software itself lives and runs, which is just bananas. It violates the first two rules of anything and everything on the web that I learned in the '90s:<p>* do not allow writing to anywhere that's executable<p>* do not allow execution anywhere that's writable
This is just getting petty at this point. What kind of normal person or business operates this way - especially during an ongoing lawsuit.<p>I can't see how anybody who knows a bit about the situation would ever want to continue to be affiliated with Wordpress knowing this guy could go over the top at any moment.
To see the requirement for the non-affilation goto <a href="https://login.wordpress.org/" rel="nofollow">https://login.wordpress.org/</a><p>EDIT (to save having a 2nd post).
Looking at the HTML tags for the requirement it has the class "login-lawsuit", so guessing this is tried to the suit WPE are bringing against WordPress/Matt.<p>On one hand, I personally feel like Matt is trying to speed run burning all the goodwill of the wordpress project, on the other hand if you are being sued by an entity its pretty much recommended to cut ties with said entity and only deal with them via your lawyers so I can see why they would put in such a requirement.
For fun, I just tried to create an account and used WPEngine.com as my email domain.<p>I got the following error: "You cannot use that email address to signup. There are problems with them blocking some emails from WordPress. Please use another email provider."
Is there really nobody in the Wordpress.org organization who can provide a check on this kind of behavior? Or do they really collectively share this Matt character’s attitude toward professionalism?
I've been using WordPress non-stop since 2005. I even hoped to someday work for Automattic. I applied and got through the initial process, but with a young child and a full-time job, I couldn't make time for the laborious "trial" part of the interview, so my application was put on indefinite pause. It pains me to watch this unfolding series of unforced errors. I hope WordPress survives.
There’s a thread on X here with screenshots of the WordPress Slack, where Mullenweg seems deliberately vague when people ask him what counts as “affiliated in any way”. It seems like he wants to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about what can get you banned. People who have been asking him awkward questions in the Slack have started to get banned from there as well.<p><a href="https://x.com/javiercasares/status/1843963052183433331" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/javiercasares/status/1843963052183433331</a><p>This is shunning, which is literally one of the hallmarks of a cult. If you are associated in any way with a suppressive person (WP Engine), you now cannot be a member of the WordPress.org community. Members of the community have to decide whether to shun WP Engine or be excommunicated themselves. He’s trying to use the community as a weapon.<p>It also seems a fertile ground to claim tortious interference. He’s trying to sever relationships between WP Engine and everybody they interact with.
I'm generally behind open source companies wanting to stop commercial freeloaders, but putting this fight in front of your users seems unhinged.<p>They need to take a step back. Again, I think they probably do have a trademark case, and they can set whatever rules they like for accessing their plugin repo, but this drama isn't something users appreciate.
> Last week, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote.<p>Wow, that's telling. 8.4% of his company decided he was acting in enough bad faith to quit without another job lined up in this economy? And he takes it as a good sign? Wow...
Do you want antitrust investigations? Because this is how you get antitrust investigations.<p>Wordpress is nearly half of the Internet. There’s a pretty compelling argument that Matt is using his market power to prevent competition in violation of the Sherman act.
What is going on here? I understand that open source companies have a free rider problem, and will naturally take steps to deal with that, but some of the recent activities seem… strange.<p>I’m thinking part of the problem is that the software itself is GPL and so is it’s ecosystem, which means that the standard next step of changing the license (followed by an inevitable fork) is infeasible.
I hope people take this chance to look elsewhere and stop using WP. Its code base is madness and people are only willing to work with it because some plugins keep it alive.
I have no horse in this race, my site is powered by Kirby CMS due to my preference for simplicity and security.<p>Wordpress seems like the dying Emperor in 40k where the daily sacrifice of thousands of psykers (developers) is the only thing sustaining its life.<p>If this drama craters the developer base then Wordpress might collapse under its own weight.
“WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it"<p>Does anyone know what the context about this is? What did WP-Engine change which Matt disliked?<p>As I understand they were disabling page revision history (but would enable it if you asked) and only because they had some other proprietary to wp-engine method of versioning and rollbacks but this seems like a massive overreaction to that.
Matt really wants to dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole, huh?<p>There’s still something entertaining to this for sure, but it also hurts so much. Wordpress used to be a respectable project, Automattic a respectable company and Matt a respectable person. Maybe it was too good to last.<p>The only way any of this (already serve) damage can somewhat be undone is Matt stepping back (as a sudden change of mind seems unlikely). Please don’t keep making it worse.
Looks like the word "denounce" is not used in the right sense here, at least based on what I know, and on a quick google, although it may have another meaning that matches what was intended by the writer of the article.<p><a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/denounce" rel="nofollow">https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/denounce</a>
What. The. Hell.<p>Just to get this straight. If you are in the business of creating websites for clients, and most of them are hosted on Wordpress.com, but a few are hosted on WPEngine, you are now forced to no longer use Wordpress.org and can't participate in the community?<p>Our company website is hosted on WPEngine, and has been there for years because we don't really touch it much. I literally log in once a year or so. The idea that because of this, I am <i>barred</i> from logging in to Wordpress.org is <i>offensive</i> and <i>disgusting</i>.<p>I really don't have much of a dog in this fight, I'm a lightweight customer of WPEngine but barely interact with it so don't care much. All I know is - I'll never, ever agree to work with Wordpress again.
So what happens if you are not affiliated when you log in while also clicking the "remember me" option, but later become affiliated? Seems like there's a loophole available for those inclined in being subversive
Is anyone working on a Wordpress clone? I've always hated the wordpress codebase and especially the react editor. I think a successful clone would be API equivalent so existing plugins can be used.
Ridiculously petty. I genuinely wonder how the fuck Matt and Automattics lawyers are gonna argue him out of this shit, because this is pretty much just giving free arguments to your opposition when it comes to arguing that Automattic is self-dealing.
Decades ago Automattic was shopping around for webhosting space and talked to the company I worked at. I feel like I dodged a bullet long ago with this.
Is this login mechanism also used for publishing plugin updates? Does that mean the plugins can no longer distribute security updates on the .org repository unless they declare no affiliation with WP Engine?
But why is this all blowing up now ?<p>Private equity (SilverLake) bought WP Engine in 2018 and presumably the company has not been paying a trademark licensing fee far longer.<p>[1] <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/" rel="nofollow">https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/</a>
This is a great test to see if there is an actual WordPress open source contributor community beyond Automattic.<p>If no viable fork of WordPress arises out of this drama then it just goes to show that it is actually a product fully controlled by Automattic and WordPress.com and everyone else involved is just spineless with no real power or contribution.<p>When a single identity can dictate terms of an open source product with no genuine conversation or compromise, then it may as well be a closed source commercial product.
> “WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it,<p>That just reads like petty tyrantry to me. Stop me if I'm wrong here but isn't wordpress itself just some PHP on top of a database? The value that he's gatekeeping here is actually the contributions of _other open source developers_?<p>Stop me if I'm wrong but isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?
what a bunch of freaking babies. very glad i never invested heavily in that ecosystem.<p>how to get me never to recommend or use your software or services ever again, 101<p>get fucked, wordpress