> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?

It’s more like dumb and dumber than good vs bad.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/10/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-dra...

> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?

Yes, but at the same time not really. This is two corporates duking it out. They are behaving like soulless entities that only care about the money, like all corporates do. Yes, there are people behind those corporates determining how they behave - but there always is. For the most part those people are shielded by the corporate veil, and so most of the normal ethical boundaries humans exhibit when dealing with other humans aren't in evidence.

The highly entertaining drama aside, the fallout will likely be minor because it's open source. If it wasn't and one of these corporations are mortally wounded in the fight their proprietary code would die with them. But it's all available on github. If they die and the ecosystem is worth something, someone will reproduce the infrastructure, and all the customers need do it point their auto updates at a different domain name and renew a few credit cards.

In fact that is already happening. Automattic has taken over WPEngine's code. Looking at the from the system of ethics that open source has built up over time, it's a dick move. (WPEngine could do the same to Automattic of course, but Automattic owns wordpress.org so to be effective all the customers out there would have to change their auto update domain name to wpengine.com or something. That is unlikely to happen.) But these are corporates. PE firms specialise in dick moves.

Surely this behaviour isn't a surprise. What is slightly surprising is WPEngine didn't protect themselves using a contract with Automattic that stopped them from doing this. Only slightly, as I'm sure Automattic would never had agreed to the contract. I guess WPEngine could have distributed their plugins and different way. Maybe they will from now on.

> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this

In real life bad guys mostly don't exist. It is fiction. In real life you have people with no power and people with power.

On one side is a big corporation that doesn’t give back very much to the open source community on which it profits. On the other side is an executive who will do everything in his power end the aforementioned abuse, including his nonprofit directing money into his for-profit, and even destroying the entire software ecosystem and individual developer’s livelihoods.

Consensus seems to be that the Matt/Automattic is worse than WP Engine, if only through stupidity and hubris.

We've had 3 queries so far out of about two dozen clients on WP/WPEngine.

We are _actively_ making contingency plans. But our best estimate at this stage is that WPEngine will provide a suitable way to keep all our WPEngine sites running at least in the short and medium term, but we are also making disaster plans in case this all goes, as Matt intends, "nuclear".

Matt keeps talking about how he's doing this "for the WordPress Community", but as I commented elsewhere:

So far as I can tell, when Matt talks about "the WordPress Community", he means:

  - Matt
  - the people who didn't quit Automattic last week
  - _maybe_ the WP core developers who don't work at Automattic, so long as they keep their criticisms to themselves

Why are you worried? I am struggling to understand why anyone cares. I am not a WordPress user though.

The WordPress code is available to WPEngine. How are Mullenweg's actions damaging them?

And companies like WHM/cPanel and Plesk - who provide 1 click Wordpress installs for a huge number of otherwise non-Wordpress specialist web hosting companies.

I'd guess a _huge_ part of WordPress's "customer acquisition" comes from small businesses who started out on cheap shared hosting for their email/dns/website using cPanel or Plesk (or similar). That's clearly a big market, given how much Wix and SquareSpace spend advertising for it.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn cPanel had as many WordPress using customers as WPEngine - and it's now owned by PE as well.

> A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.

I suspect a WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service? Perhaps a having them all fund a non-profit Mozilla like foundation (well, Mozilla circa 2015, before they decided to become and AI and Ad company who's apparent goal is to attract more and more sketchy grifting C level execs and make them rich).

How would wordpress.org go after those in this scenario? The original trademark claim seems a bit far fetched in order those other hosting providers (are they using wordpress trademark and branding in marketing?). If they are, how much impact would it do to them if they stopped?

Amazon has a product they call Amazon lightsail. The only trademark issue I can identify is that they use the wordpress logo, which is fairly simple to remove if wordpress decide that it is no longer allowed. Do anyone else see something there that could be a trademark issue?

"WP Engine would want to make sure that it's customers are well taken care of and have a solid web hosting experience."

This is certainly one of their goals, if only to prevent or reduce churn.

But WP Engine is now owned by Silver Lake, a private equity firm, they no doubt have aggressive growth and profitability targets. Anything that injects confusion into their branding or increases costs is counter to their goals

The real question is the 8% "contribution" that WP is asking for cheaper than other alternatives. The lawsuits are cheaper if they win, but a dead loss if they don't.

I mean more of a new core that is non-php, non-wordpress that can leverage these ancillary things at the perimiter via something like this.

So method calls to `wp_get_archives` would still work, but that would be redirected under the hood to a cleaner arch on something like Python, or Golang, or Rust, or whatever.

All of your arguments go out the window when the foundation disappears. That’s what is happening now. Wordpress isn’t good in and of itself. It’s good due to the community of developers working on it, and likewise the plugins they have painstakingly created (despite the terrible programming environment)

That’s gone now.

Hey, they have a new logo !

Does that mean they merge the actual code from upstream? If they do that, I wouldn't call that a fork. I'd call it a mirror. I'm not exactly sure how that provides any of the benefits the author suggests.

Do they look at the changelog of upstream and have engineers re-implement the same things only with original code? That seems like a significant waste of resources just to try to duplicate someone else's efforts.

Are there any examples of people doing this and getting away with it?

There are words for what can happen if you copy source code you don't have a licence to and use it commercially, but they aren't "avoid legal complications".

Payload 3 (currently beta) doesn't look bad, but a site still needs some work from somebody who can at least somewhat code, and it's not just installing wordpress, generatepress and ACF.

Same for Directus.

But again, not a 1-to-1 WP replacement.

I think any sort of headless CMS or at least one with a decoupled presentation layer would work well these days. directus, webflow etc.

More like billions of dollars. Automattic themselves supposedly have half a billion in revenue — the entire pie is much bigger than that.

Certainly with that attitude! People these days truly have no imagination. Incredibly depressing. It's very difficult to have any hope for computation while we have to beg misanthropic morons for money.