The ongoing feud between Wordpress and WP Engine is threatening open-source principles and good name
The ongoing feud between Wordpress and WP Engine is threatening open-source principles and good name
What a bizarre headline. No it's not. It's proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it's specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that's the problem.
Speaking of which,
Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine's monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic's WordPress servers and resources.
tbh, that's totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don't know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a "free tier" of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.
Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It's not some moral thing.
Everyone can save time and just read your synopsis. These are billionaires backed by huge investment funds fighting over service fees.
... WordPress had a good name?
... Required use of proprietary software causing a bunch of headaches and arguments... somehow makes FOSS less reputable?
Is this guy from another planet?
...
Oh. Oooohhhh.
This is connected to the Prime TumblrBrain Powertripper, the bastard king of the land of delusional manipulative narcissists.
Ah.
That explains perfectly why the discourse around it is utterly contradictory and nonsensical.
I’m confused. The article makes note that, “Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine's monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic's WordPress servers and resources.” But then goes on to note that David Hansson, “believes Mullenweg's actions do not honor the principles set by the GNU General Public License (GPL).”
It sounds to me that Mullenweg wants compensation for their server resources, not use of their Wordpress software — otherwise wouldn’t everybody who uses WordPress outside of wordpress.com be on the hook too?
If that is the case, how is it any different than RedHat charging for support services for their distribution of the Linux kernel and corresponding GNU software?
I feel like I’m missing something here.
Unless you fork the WordPress source code, it is hard coded to use Mullenweg's Automattic (his for-profit company) servers for plugin updates. This is not something you can tweak in a config somewhere.
So this isn't charging for support services. The open source WordPress is hard coded to be reliant on the for-profit Automattic servers, because Mullenweg has been mixing his non-profit and for-profit business shit.
This has not been a problem ever before. But instead of handling this in any way that might make sense, Mullenweg turned off the update servers for everyone with no notice when WPEngine rightfully responded incredulously to his sudden demand for 8% of their profit based off some weird claims about copyright that are invalid due to Mullenweg's own chosen license terms for WordPress.
He could set up free and paid tiers based off how much load on his servers people create. He could have the code adjusted to make the update server something that could be configured. He could engage the community to have a distributed volunteer network of update servers and reduce his server load by having his servers only provide proper update hashes to validate the updates were not tampered with.
But instead he's having a very very public tantrum with absurd negative impact to the community of people reliant on this open source software.
Thank you. That’s the part I was missing.
Can you use the WordPress software without the WordPress servers?
Not easily, honestly.
WordPress on its own is very bare bones, you're almost certainly going to want to install plugins, which by default can only be done from the builtin connection to WP servers.
WP without plugins doesn't even have basic things like gallery light boxes. Honestly it seems deliberate, since the easiest way to get a lot of basic features that should be in core is to install the automattic(the company that owns wordpress) jetpack extension, that also installs a bunch of data harvesting connections to their proprietary SaaS.
They have taken over the ACF plugin in the plugin store. In an intransparent manner. It is GPL licensed, but had a pro license and features sold. And still does have them on their publishers side.
A strength of the GPL is that the community can fork and take over projects.
At the same time, and this instance is such a case, on a centralized platform, projects can be taken over instead of be forked.
They developed and published a plugin. Now it's been taken over by someone else, on the primary distribution and discovery platform, and they have no control over it. Worse than that, the takeover now offers their sold functionalities for free now.
This makes the "open source but not free, but after two years true FOSS licensed" licenses look very useful if not necessary for businesses and developers that want to monetize. At the very least when they [have to] use centralized platforms.
The GPL doesn't allow you to use someone else's trademark. Though in this case it might be tricky for "WPEngine" to claim WordPress violated their trademark, and apparently WP has T&Cs that allow them to do it anyway.