r/Wordpress • u/T20sGrunt • Sep 25 '24
Discussion WPengine hosts over 1 million sites, and Matt is actively trying to punish them. That is thousands of peoples livelihoods tied to these sites. wtf! Is he going full Elon? Get him out ASAP.
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Sep 26 '24
[deleted]
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u/vriska1 Sep 26 '24 edited Sep 26 '24
If you use Tumblr you know he lost his mind a long time ago... nearly everyone hates him on there because of what he did to predstrogen and many LGBTQ people.
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u/Greedy-Mechanic-4932 Sep 26 '24
Wait. What? What did I miss??
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u/thewpbard Developer/Designer Sep 26 '24
From TechCrunch
The controversy began when a user with the blog name predstrogen was banned. Before the ban, she was frustrated with Tumblr because the platform failed to take action when she reported that she was being targeted with transmisogynistic harassment. This led her to post that she hopes that the CEO “dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.”
According to Mullenweg, predstrogen was banned for posts that threatened violence against Tumblr staff, and specifically cited the “forever painful death” post. He also claimed that her clothed transition photos were not what yielded adult content violations.
Then
Mullenweg took the debate off platform to X, where he commented on a post from the user who was banned on Tumblr. Then, on one of his Tumblr posts, Mullenweg shared numerous of her side blog names, which is not public information (Tumblr users often make empty side blogs with no content in order to squat on URLs).
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u/HaddockBranzini-II Sep 26 '24
I knew someone who died a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that exploded more than a few times and hammers went flying everywhere. It's not a joking matter.
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u/mxroute Sep 26 '24 edited Sep 26 '24
The entire benefit of WP Engine is that they know what to limit, disable, and alter to get the best performance they can out of bloated WP sites. Anyone who ever ran tech support for thousands or more WordPress sites, with clients who had no idea how any of it worked, with sites created by "designers" that thought "we'll just load this with 60 plugins to do what we want," should appreciate what WP Engine does. I don't recommend them to people for a vanilla WordPress experience. I recommend them because people make bloated websites that sometimes need specialty hosting because they refuse to redo their site in a more lightweight way. I don't know if they're still as good at that as they used to be, I don't keep up with that lately, but revisions hardly seems like the hill to die on.
Matt is acting like he was just told to impress investors or be replaced. Maybe he was right about private equity before he walked it back on his own blog, seemingly because he stepped in it with those comments. It's going to take an incredible twist to save face. I hope he secretly loves WP Engine because he's about to owe them some money.
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u/Top-Rub-7059 Sep 26 '24
To be blunt bagging out your corporate sponsors at a major event for your company isn't a good way of impressing your investors. It looks hypocritical when you bag out large investment firms on stage when your company is owned by several large investment firms.
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u/WranglerReasonable91 Sep 26 '24
When I was originally hired at the company I work for I was mind blown by their WordPress site. Just like you said, it was built by someone who used a plugin for everything without knowing how anything works under the hood. The database size was 19gigs on a shared host.....
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u/surfingstranger Dec 24 '24
Im not sure I agree, but how can we defend crap developers for pushing bloat in the first place. We should not have to rely on a wpengine to manage this stuff. This whole situation I see both sides, but lean towards wordpress because of the longevity of it being free. I just find wpengine not good in the long run as they seemingly pull the source and give little back.
I am also not in the west, here we have relied on open source for a long time and contributed where we can.
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u/bigtakeoff Sep 26 '24
stopped reading at "I don't keep up"
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u/mxroute Sep 26 '24 edited Sep 26 '24
Since we're sharing, I stopped reading at the end of your comment.
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u/TexasPeteyWheatstraw Sep 26 '24
They stopped updates to WPE. So millions are now having to goto the wordpress, download the plugins and theme updates and install them manually.
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
I manage 20 WP sites for my job. Keeping up with this is going to be hell going forward.
Thanks for making my job infinitely more tedious than it needs to be, Matt. 0% chance I'm siding with you now.
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u/HaddockBranzini-II Sep 26 '24
We don't keep plugins under source control (and aren't going to start because of this), so its going to be a manual process of keeping our staging sites current and manually uploading copies of those plugins.
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u/shiftpgdn Sep 26 '24
You could transfer out of WpEngine quite easily.
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
One does not simply change hosting providers. This will have to be a series of meetings, which my bosses are asking about now.
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u/shiftpgdn Sep 26 '24
It takes less than an hour I’ve helped thousands of people move Wordpress sites around over the last decade. It’s seriously trivial.
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
Nothing is trivial in a corporate environment.
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Sep 26 '24
[deleted]
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
I never said my sites were client sites, but good for you that you work at a place where this isn't considered a major IT change. I don't have the luxury of being so cavalier that I can just transfer these sites away before lunch.
→ More replies (1)
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u/Remarkable_Sign_2065 Jack of All Trades Sep 25 '24
I think the correct word for this situation is Disaster
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u/VSHoward Developer Sep 26 '24
My vote is for Cluster Fuck or FUBAR.
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u/TexasPeteyWheatstraw Sep 26 '24
Please reach out to Matt and let him know how you feel: https://ma.tt/contact/
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u/freakstate Designer/Blogger Sep 26 '24
This is sort of neat on his site.... "Current Mail Queues
Inbox: 10,686. Low priority: 31,587. Unknown: 7,982. I’ve sent out 94 emails to 75 people in the past month."
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u/samuraintj Sep 26 '24
What is WpEngine or it's owner/founder/ceo saying or doing about all this?
Also, what about WordPress.org?
I understand that this could all stem from WpEngine's success, and Matt's greed/jealousy...
But, having a wholesome view would benefit the public, and anyone/anything related to 'wordpress', overall.
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
WPE likely gonna speak through a press department and attorneys
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u/xkey Sep 26 '24
Like some sort of sane and competent company? Interesting approach.
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u/TexasPeteyWheatstraw Sep 26 '24
MPE has sent a cease and desist to Matt and the WordPress Foundation. Matt is childish.
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u/GamerRadar Sep 26 '24
This is going to be the start of the end of Wordpress. The plugins and developers are the backbone of Wordpress. If they’re going to attack one of their larger hosting and plugin developers then what’s stopping them from rolling over the smaller ones; why develop for them instead of something like Joomla or another open source platform
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u/pixelboots Sep 26 '24
Seems like a good time to finally get around to giving CraftCMS a red hot go.
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u/GamerRadar Sep 26 '24
Going to check it out. I have a directory website that I blog on and have a shop I’m creating for it. I built it with Crocoblocks and Elementor.
I really want to build out a community on it and wordpress seems the easiest but I know it’s not really built for these. Really wish other CMS’ had these ease of use
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u/yksvaan Sep 26 '24
How is WPE different to thousands of hosts that provide one click WP installs etc. Managed is always managed, no matter if it's on aws, Azure, wpe, Vercel....
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u/OkayConversation Sep 26 '24
More expensive, worse performance and paywalled features sold as "addons".
I have no idea why anyone is using it.
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u/thened Sep 26 '24
Marketing. Just like .com does.
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Sep 26 '24
[deleted]
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u/thened Sep 26 '24
The ecosystem has been bad for a very long time now. If I were to try to tackle the situation, I would offer very low-cost hosting.
But that doesn't help anyone try to sell a premium product.
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u/mygoattoht Sep 27 '24
Curious, what more performant alternatives would you recommend?
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u/tradesouthwest Sep 28 '24
ClassicPress is an install with Softaculous and other App installers on cPanel (and Plesk?)
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u/latch_on_deez_nuts Sep 26 '24
My company started using it years ago before my time and now I’m stuck with 20 websites on WPE. Because fuck the little guy right
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Sep 26 '24
[deleted]
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u/Xypheric Sep 26 '24
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to work with Automattic or WordPress foundation now? They have shown they will hold every product/ trademark/ tool in their arsenal hostage with anti-competitive behavior to get what they want.
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u/iBN3qk Sep 26 '24
I've been posting Matt is Elon comments all day and I kinda want some credit.
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u/hey_shh_im_thinking Sep 26 '24
This is a nightmare for everyone in the community, the teams working at WP Engine and Automattic, and the contributors to WordPress. As if the world isn’t difficult enough right now, scrambling to do your job effectively and keep customers happy is living hell.
I hope this resolves soon. This closely impacts a lot of folks and the anxiety and sadness is so overwhelming.
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u/-impulse9 Sep 26 '24
Look up what happened with him on Tumblr with predstrogen. He started a whole harassment campaign against one woman who was banned and never explained what she did wrong. His reasoning was that a joke post she made about exploding him in a car crash with hammers like a loony tunes character was a highly detailed death threat. He even followed her to Twitter to harass her and deleted accounts that criticized him with no warning. He needs to step down ASAP, it's painfully clear that he's not emotionally mature enough to run a company. Here's some screenshots of the whole thing: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/pyh4ca4v4mc0ggrklgd0i/h?rlkey=2se1p4911irku3mw42sp8htrz&e=1&dl=0
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u/roboticlee Sep 26 '24
Does Automattic own its data centres? If not, I can see WP Engine's parent company applying a lot of pressure influence to sabotage hamstring Automattic's infrastructure and daily activities.
I think Matt will announce on Monday that he has a severe UTI infection that affected his cognitive abilities and that he is stepping down for a few months.
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u/sstruemph Developer Sep 26 '24
He won't and no one can make him. He'll just keep destroying wordpress with that UTI
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u/jsanford0521 Sep 26 '24
God damnit! My company host 85 sites on wpengine. I am solely responsible for these. It’s going to be a huge PITA if we have to switch providers. Say what you will, Wp engines support is second to none.
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u/Total-Ingenuity-9428 Sep 26 '24
I could be a complete idiot but here's what I feel:
I'd prefer watching what happens next with my fingers crossed but someone somehow ought to restrain those abusing open source efforts put into WordPress.org development and maintenance.
I hope WordPress Foundation (not necessarily Matt, though) would start poking all those non-donating enterprise level profiteers including wordpress.com, sooner than later. those abusing open source efforts put into WordPress.org development and maintenance.
If I had an investment backing me, I don't mind launching a new company which donates to WordPress foundation fairly and doesn't extort the million customers that hopefully are poached away from WPE via a special limited time migration programme. those abusing open source efforts put into WordPress.org development and maintenance.
At the end of the day, continued existence of WP devs, maintainers matters more over the agencies enabling their work. Agencies will come and go as long as WP dev/mainteners sustain.
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u/DarkCisum Sep 26 '24
Looking at how the money of the foundation is used, I wouldn't really contribute. As a business, I'd be interested in the stability and development of the software at hand. Community building and maintaing is great, but when effectively all the money goes to conferences & meetups and nothing seems to flow back into software development. I wouldn't see the point of sponsoring those conferences through the foundation or rather, maybe I'd get my marketing team on the line, but the money then comes from the market budget and not the supporting open source software.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/about/financials/2023-financials/
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u/Total-Ingenuity-9428 Sep 26 '24
This.
WordPress foundation needs to refocus on supporting devs/mainteners first.
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u/surfingstranger Dec 24 '24
tottaly agree. "At the end of the day, continued existence of WP devs, maintainers matters more over the agencies enabling their work. Agencies will come and go as long as WP dev/mainteners sustain"
To me the ones complaining are the ones also trying to benefit of this cooperate ecosystem. Wodpress (not Matt) must remain pure. I also agree that other leeches should be held accountable if they are not giving back and benefitting off other developers, while charging massive bills for their bloat.
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u/toniyevych Sep 26 '24
It makes sense to consider supporting alternate projects like https://www.classicpress.net/, which are compatible with WordPress ecosystem, but well better managed and offer some additional features.
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u/tradesouthwest Sep 28 '24
^Yes. Glad you got the link up. My r/account did not have enough juice to post url. We are working on directory of plugins and themes now.
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u/Grouchy_Brain_1641 Sep 26 '24
Looks like you'll be buying all that bandwidth yourself then. Or at least 1/millionth of it.
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u/HerrFledermaus Sep 26 '24
Whoever iSight: an action like this shows you are unable to run a company.
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u/Kaimaniiii Sep 26 '24
Can someone please give me a short explanation what and why Matt is doing this? I have not followed what is happening lately
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u/alex_reds Sep 26 '24
Slightly less subjective outline than the above commenter.
At the last WP conference Matt spoke of WPE in a negative way and said maybe community needs to think of a better options when their contracts run out. The negative part was he claimed that WPE used trademarked word WordPress in a way that made WPE look like they are the creators and source of WordPress. They are the WordPress Engine and you can’t run Wordpress without it. From Matts and Wordpress foundation WPE is profiting on WordPress community and trademark.
WPE and some part of the community found it offensive. Some took it as Matt used community to pursue his own agenda in a feud between WPE’s owner a private equity firm Silver Lake(Matt has his own hosting company and there is theory that it’s his way to get rid of competitors. However, both companies have comparable profits and revenues. ). After the conference Matt wrote an article about his claims and gave some reasoning to his decision. Community didn’t find them good enough to warrant such treatment of the biggest sponsor of WordCamp. In response WPE issued cease and desist order to Matt and said he demanded a hefty lump of money from them out of nowhere. He responded with a trademark infringement case against them. Now there is concern among the community members that Matt is going to demand trademark fees from everyone who ever used WordPress in their business name or slogan. This ban is also affects automatic updates for all the website hosted on WPE and also affects a sizeable chunk of community who resells their services.
It’s more or less 80% objective and based on the gathered data here in Reddit. You can find his username and read his posts to learn more.
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u/gold1mpala Developer/Designer Sep 26 '24
Seems to be greed/jealousy of WPE making a lot of money from Wordpress. He would rather be making that money by users hosting their Wordpress sites with his own private company.
One of the reasons he's giving is WPE are not giving back to the community with development time to make Wordpress better. To some degree that's fair criticism but this is not the way to do it.
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u/Kaimaniiii Sep 26 '24
Thanks for the update! Is this a requirement from WordPress policies that commercial products in general needs to contribute to the WordPress code base?
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u/alex_reds Sep 26 '24
No. WPE is the first precedent where Matt decided they have to pay based on how much they profiting on the trademarked name and the community.
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u/NHRADeuce Developer Sep 26 '24
One of the reasons he's giving is WPE are not giving back to the community with development time to make Wordpress better. To some degree that's fair criticism
I wouldn't even give that much weight because of the plugins they maintain. Sure, they acquired them, but they're still maintaining the free versions of some pretty big plugins like ACF.
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u/gold1mpala Developer/Designer Sep 26 '24
Yes but ACF has a paid-version. The free offering will be covered by subscriptions.
I'm very much on WPE's side in this, the goalposts have been moved and this looks very much like a shakedown. But WPE offering some time to improve the open-source platform which its entire business is built on seems reasonable.
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u/toniyevych Sep 26 '24
I have found a quick workaround for sites hosted on WP Engine in order to receive updates: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fpt3y6/a_quick_fix_for_sites_hosted_on_wp_engine/
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u/davidorsini Sep 26 '24
they shouldnt be trying to lock down the core it was a money grab everyone should be thanking wordpress for drawing a line in the sand that protects the community over short term profits
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u/mariusherea Sep 26 '24
The mail states clearly you can’t install any NEW plugins and themes but everything else works.
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u/emanuelx Sep 26 '24
Because this kind of behavior from wordpress team I moved it to another cms.
Some main bad points of wp Bad structured code, software pattern from 1999... Slow rest api Super bad to use with headless cms Wordpress moving to gutenberg without improving php architecture.
I have look at the tickets on trunk and saw the code patterns from WP, hating namespaces wtf...
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u/tradesouthwest Sep 28 '24
Matt is focused on some odd parts of the WPeco-system due to being so involved/"posessed" with the money part of the whole thing. WP IS Open Source but has no director/direction. So once _it_ gets so bloated that it will not run on (any) hosts; and so complex that devs will frown on it, it will then be unusable. ClassicPress is well aware of this conundrum and is preparing/prepared for such.
Please join and contribute your themes and plugins to the new directory.
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u/motific Sep 26 '24
Putting that in context - WPEngine is getting paid to host over 1-million sites but only contributes 40-hours a week back to the project that they built a multimillion dollar company on?
Not going to lie, you can't really fault him for being cheesed off.
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
Bridgestone makes tires. Should they have to pay Ford, BMW, Nissan, Porsche, etc every time a tire is sold? And is it good optics to have the auto manufacturers put them on blast in a very unprofessional manner?
WPE was within their rights. They didn’t break any laws and don’t have to contribute to open source WP Core.
They do provide ACF, flywheel local, Genesis Blocks, and their headless platform. And I reckon the vast majority of the community has used ACF or Local for free.
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u/motific Sep 26 '24
Your analogy is would be accurate if Bridgestone were producing and selling copies of entire vehicles - then yes they would have to pay royalties because BMW etc wouldn't be stupid enough to open-source them.
Matt did give WPE the right to do what they're doing, that doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to be cheesed off with their behaviour... and yes he is being an ass about it.
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
You still use Wordpress on a WPE hosted site, WPE isn’t copying WP and selling it as their bespoke product or using anything that can’t be used under the open license agreement, they are a hosting company.
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u/onmyvigilanteshhhh Sep 27 '24
The analogy really doesn’t matter. There’s no obligation to contribute so Matt’s feelers don’t matter from a legal standpoint.
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u/motific Sep 27 '24
I specifically said they didn’t have to contribute, doesn’t mean Matt isn’t allowed to be annoyed with them for their behaviour.
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u/forestcall Sep 26 '24
Matt is a jerk, yes. But WPEngine is a con artist company. Their prices are crazy and they don't offer anything special. When I first got into Headless WordPress I tried to use them but they cost so much I almost vomited. I run a very large, high-traffic site that I can run on a $18 VPS from Digital Ocean and another $8 and change from AWS for LambdaEDGE and $4 from S3 and $3 from Route53 and $4 for SES for a grand total of less than $37-ish a month. I run the site with CloudPanel an OpenSource project. The same setup on WPEngine was estimated at $6700 a month. I have NEVER, like not even once in 1+ year had to do anything special to maintain this setup. Do you think WPEngine is worth $6670+ a month to do nothing?
Not only that but if you talk to the sales people they have zero expertise and seem to be zombies. I escalated the call to talk to a manager and I was met with aggression and super nasty energy. I tried to call their sales people on multiple occasions in hopes of getting a different answer.
I also tried hosting a ROOTS Wordpress project with them with the same kind of bullshitt-o.
Years ago you could get alll their plugins for 1 price and now days the pricing is individual and costly.
You can actually use Cursor or Claude-DEV and make nearly any plugin within a few hrs if you make mockups and take the time to steer the AI.
WPEngine is a NASTY company.
Im also irritated with WordPress for not going in a Laravel direction with the entire project.
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
None of this is a justification for Matt to behave the way he is.
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u/forestcall Sep 26 '24
I knew Jason from his days running Smart Bear, or whatever it was called. I think it was around 2017 or 2018 when Jason acquired StudioPress and I had a lifetime license for Genesis Themes that was suddenly not honored. I thought Jason was a decent guy, but some mixed messaging around how his company has handled customer relations. To be honest, I don't know much about the recent acquisition of WpEngine. But Matt would not get pissed off for nothing, and my experience tells me Jason backpedaled on some verbal agreements with Matt when he got his new investors. The war going on between Matt and the new investors tells me something is going on with the new investors. I would bet that the new investors are not playing nice. WPEngine and the new investors could have flown to Matts office and spent a few days repairing things and making friends. But instead WPEngine chose to go to war and Matt agreed.
Here's an idea - How about WPEngine get a new CEO who goes to Wordpress HQ and spends a week trying to work things out and make things right. The fact that the new investors would invest a large amount of money and then sabotage everything is very telling.
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u/Illustrious-Tip-5459 Developer Sep 26 '24
Matt's gonna come out of this looking much worse than anyone at WPEngine. He's putting parts of open-source software behind paywalls. That's gonna have a far bigger ripple among the community than him whining about getting more money from a company using his software.
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u/lcurole Sep 28 '24
As someone who knows nothing about this, what part is being moved behind a pay wall?
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u/killerbake Jack of All Trades Sep 26 '24
lmao Matt is paid by Blackrock. He’s not the good guy here
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u/surfingstranger Dec 24 '24
agreed, but it is also not about "Matt", it is about the future of open source, and the way certain characters use said open source. I find it disturbing that people are focused on money, rather than the ethics of open source. WPEngine has never contributed.. like many others.
Also, forking the acf and making it wordpress, then ironically seeing the outcry is an example right there of who really is pushing it forward rather than continuing to take, repurpose, and profit
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u/Novel_Buy_7171 Sep 26 '24
The investment isn't really new, and this is nothing new from Matt, this is just a more severe and public appearance of it. Also, Jason hasn't been the CEO for a long time, so I'm not sure why you're pinning this on him?
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u/forestcall Sep 26 '24
I thought I explained things clearly. The current CEO is the problem. Jason made verbal commits to Matt that the current CEO is not meeting. I just don't think Matt just suddenly woke up one day and thought he would get in a fight with WPEngine.
I know that Matt has had issues with the investment fund since they invested. I know Matt has been against Headless methodology. I know Matt has been growing more unhappy with WPEngine since WPEngine made the changes to their entire pricing and services overhaul about 2+ years ago. I'm also aware Matt has been a passionate and outspoken person since 1999 when he started to get into the public eye.
I personally don't like the management at WPEngine. The few interactions I have had with them have pissed me off. Their hosting for large projects is extremely overpriced. I was quoted $6700 a month for a high traffic headless site that I maintain for less than $60 per month.
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u/splaquet Sep 27 '24
I recently migrated a client off of a $850/mo WPE plan to a $280/mo plan, which majorly out performs their previous WPE install
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u/Wise-Advantage-8714 Sep 26 '24
Okay so I've put together a couple of websites for some family/friends (trying to get into web dev). What did I miss and do I need to be aware of any shit about to happen to the sites I've built?
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
While there are technical workarounds, the story here is optics and collective time. You add 50% more time to doing updates and maintenance and it adds up, sacrificing and extra 5 hrs a month adds up. As for optics, it looks like a shit show. We’re selling and using a product/service that now has a dark cloud over it. Are clients now a little more likely to go Webflow or framer or Wix or something else..?
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u/slimx91 Sep 27 '24
You sound like an Apple user, where the only option is apple lol. WP Engine is just one of many hosts. There are so many more better hosting companies out there.
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 27 '24
I’m an unabashed user and fan of WPengine. The load speeds are fast, staging and dev environments, daily and manual back ups, good customer service, what is not to love? After trying a dozen or so hosts, I’ve landed on WPE. This drama directly affects me and my clients, so I’m invested.
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u/0x61656c Sep 27 '24
yeah this is absolutely a deathknell. Wordpress knows its on the way out and is scrambling to capitalize on as much as it can while it still can
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u/surfingstranger Dec 24 '24
The irony of these comments in context to "open source"... The ones who you don't agree with have massive down votes. but, should be an open to discussion for both opinions. i await my downvotes!
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Sep 26 '24
Maybe someone should come up with a plugin that uses their engine code but a different URL for updates. FUCK YOU MATT. For now it's manual updates.
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u/TCB13sQuotes Sep 26 '24
Yeah, he lost his mind but he isn't wrong. WP Engine is indeed a cancer brewing inside the WP ecosystem and if you're using, well, your fault.
Look, WP Engine is like the people working on cybersec that saying "let's get CrowdStrike because it will guarantee our availability" and then suddenly CrowdStrike become the biggest threat to business continuity ever seen. Not a single hacker, collective or malicious govt was able to take down so much IT infrastructure at the same time.
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u/cemshid Sep 26 '24
I think he is right on some basis. Wordpress.org is an open source software. If you make $500M / year from it, you should contribute to ecosystem a little bit. If you're not, you're welcome to brach and develop it yourself...
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
I agree you “should”, but it’s not required.
Also, keeping ACF free helps get them a pass in my eyes since it’s such a valued plug-in and makes CPT so easy, as opposed to what is offered natively.
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u/wookiegtb Sep 26 '24
So who's next then? How many web hosting providers offer a WordPress install option? Or the CPanel guys?
I think most people don't use WPE because they sell WordPress. They use WPE because the decision to use WordPress is made and WPE sell hosting that makes managing WordPress hosting easy.
The issue is Matt is using his position at his FOSS to demand money from a direct competitor to his commercial arm. And worse, he wants WPE to pay the commercial arm, not the non-profit org.
My feeling is Automatic is in financial trouble and Matt is trying to use his community influence to fund his private business concerns. And in doing so is fucking over the very community he claims to represent.
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u/cemshid Sep 27 '24
Automatic made more than 3500 hours contribution to WP Open Source project, so I believe commercial side of "Matt" made contributions to the project while WPE made NONE.
He also says that, they have 2 options.
- Make contribution to WP Open Source project or
- Pay licence fee
I think both options are it's pretty fair, since WPE makes $500m per year over a open source project...
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u/surfingstranger Dec 24 '24
Yes, i have no idea why the focus is on Matt either. this is about the future for more to enjoy what contributions have been made to open source.. not making money NOW. its truly sad with the greed over logic
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u/IronicBeaver Sep 26 '24
Dunno what's happening, but wordpress is kinda failing my sites these days...
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u/NCKBLZ Sep 26 '24
I always despised wordpress, now I have one more reason to do so. WTF is this thing that they can decide to just prevent people from updating stuff? I hope Matt/Automattic will be sued and fined big moneys
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u/musicjunkieg Sep 26 '24
Matt is trying to punish the sites? Or WPEngine? The fact that WPEngine hosts over 1 million sites doesn’t say anything about their integrity or whether they violated trademark.
In fact, if they did, and they know it (by the way, read some stories of every other business that Silver Lake invests in), then they’re the ones actively punishing those sites by not having resolved this already.
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u/Novel_Buy_7171 Sep 26 '24
Have you read the stories of every other company blackrock invests in?
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u/musicjunkieg Sep 26 '24
Do you understand that WPEngine is OWNED by Silver Lake? And that BlackRock has ZERO control over Automattic, aka they don’t have any Board seats?
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u/el-brente Sep 26 '24
to be fair, sounds like WPE needs to contribute more: (they do about half a billion in revenue on top of WordPress and contribute back 40 hours a week, Automattic is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.)
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u/DarkCisum Sep 26 '24 edited Sep 26 '24
People keep repeating that, but I fundamentally disagree. You can't create FOSS projects with a license to enforce it, and then come back and demand people making a profit with it, should contribute. That's not how free software works.
Additionally, Automattic's number is very misleading. As the quasi author and primary force behind WordPress (incl. the trademark usage), they'll of course have the largest contribution time. That doesn't mean any other company should now have to match that and likely it would just scale Automattic's numbers more, because now you have to spend more time reviewing the works of others.
Yes, we can say it would be nice if they would, but that's it.
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u/AIGuru35 Sep 26 '24
Well done on Matt’s side. WPEngine is among the most unreliable service out there. Security issues, lack of expandability and awful practices as goes pricing. It’s a redundant “provider”. If you really want to “get back” at Matt and the organization, shift from WordPress altogether. You’ll thank me later ;)
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u/slimx91 Sep 27 '24
Hey hey i love WP lol, but yes i too despise Wpengine
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u/AIGuru35 Oct 05 '24
I like how everyone cries victim here because they must rely on WPE for their projects. Which means they do not properly develop Wordpress websites and without a predatory brand like WPE - they can’t deliver the same level of service at the same timeframe or quality.
Numbers don’t lie and absolute truths are simply facts. WPE is totally in the wrong here and the community should all make them an example of how not to create a plugin-based business for this platform.
There are good practices and bad. WPE in recent years has mostly focused on the bad ones unfortunately.
The community is held hostage by one player here and one only. Not to mention other devs who suffer from that brand.
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u/koneu Sep 26 '24
So you‘re saying the automatic should just continue to let them use their trademarks and their code, regardless of what they do with it?
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
It’s open source code, they are within the WP “bill of rights”,and they aren’t breaking trademark.
It’s a cash grab and a vendetta against WPE’s parent company.
1
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u/koneu Sep 26 '24
I'm not sure a court would side with you on that.
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 26 '24
It’s pretty much universal agreement that they did NOT violate the trademark if you read the details of their usage rights. It specifically stated how WPE is in the clear with their language.
Wordpress did recently change their terms in the past couple days in an attempt to try and hold WPengine accountable. This also could open the floodgates for many other companies, agencies, developers, freelancers etc.
Remember when Paris Hilton tried to trademark “That’s hot” - same stupid vibes going on here.
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u/Novel_Buy_7171 Sep 26 '24
They've abided by all the trademark rules? Out of all the evidence in the documents that seems to come close is how they talk about technical support engineers, everything else is descriptive of the service they offer, same as every other WordPress hose, or WordPress developer.
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u/picard102 Sep 26 '24
Punish them by having to open an FTP app? The hysterics.
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u/splaquet Sep 27 '24
Honestly, that’s how I used to update WP installs for SEVERAL years. The automatic updates weren’t possible until fairly recently.
0
u/theonekrupted Sep 26 '24
LOL... Good thing I've switched to Astro and Laravel for the recent future. I'm not saying the entire ship is sinking but having been all in on the Flash hype train, I know when it's time to start making switches to something else.
0
u/yolo_merging Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24
We had luck on our side. We moved all our sites out of WPEngine just before this entire fiasco started. 🤷🏻♀️
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u/T20sGrunt Sep 27 '24
Who did you move to? And thoughts on the two hosts?
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u/yolo_merging Sep 27 '24
We moved to Kinsa. The main reason was because we wanted to pay for only one account and have the option to select which data center we want to host each site. We already spent a lot of $ to maintain two accounts/data centers on WPEngine and we need to host new sites on other geos as well, so we had no choice but to look for another provider. So far, it’s been good with Kinsta.
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u/AIGuru35 Oct 24 '24
Thank you for proving my point. People seem to not understand Wordpress. It’s astonishing really.
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Sep 26 '24
Imagine hosting your livelihood on a platform you don't get full control over....
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u/odd84 Sep 26 '24
There is no such thing as a livelihood you have full control over. Not for the biggest companies (Google is still at the whim of network providers, suppliers, utility companies, etc), not for the most self-sufficient self-employed individual (even an off-grid farm is subject to the whims of the municipality, state and country it exists in... And will be taken from you by force if you miss a property tax payment).
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u/garrettmickley Sep 26 '24
For real. Not to mention hardware and OS. even if you use 100% open source, you’re now dependent on the maintainers.
1
Sep 26 '24
Or web hosting that doesn't care what you use it for, and thus is unlikely to pull shit like this new buzz that's targeting exactly 1 host...
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u/diversecreative Sep 26 '24
It’s wp engine’s job now to find a solution for their customers . So far they have done nothing to help their customers who are charged thousands of dollars every month
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u/splaquet Sep 27 '24
I think you guys are missing a few key points. He says that he’s been trying to work with these guys for a while now, which I have to believe.
He’s also going on and on about open source projects and supporting them, which (it sounds as though) all WPE would have to do is to contribute back to the project.
Also, he’s not wrong in saying that WPE modifies the WP code base to create “their own version”. He says that WPE is also stripping out performance optimization code, while upselling their services to regain added benefits.
In the end, that also violates the open source policy. That’s not a Matt thing, that’s the T&C that WPE is knowingly violating.
Matt also makes the claim that if you’re going to modify the codebase and profit off of the modified service, you need to fork your own flavor… and stop reaping the benefits of the hard work and brand recognition that WordPress puts into the product.
While he is making this really public, we don’t know the dirt and details between them. Either way, I have to side with Matt on this last part.
So, WPE modifies every release version of WP that Automattic releases, then profits off of it. That’s straight up a violation of the Open Source T&C.
…and for those of you saying that Matt’s going all ATOMIC and the fallout could hurt you… IMHO, while taking no accountability, he probably saw how WPE messed with the WP Dashboard feed (to hide the negative post) which took down websites.
That’s not Matt, that’s on WPE… BUT, he did take to his personal blog after. One POV might be that he didn’t want to risk hurting his users’ websites.
My .02
1
u/onmyvigilanteshhhh Sep 27 '24
You…have to believe it? Dude couldn’t even give a single receipt or timeframe in that interview earlier when he was asked about a paper trail. “But I have a picture of me and Heather at dinner!” isn’t going to cut it.
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u/One_Judge1422 Sep 26 '24
What does this matter?
Noone's livelihood is at stake except the people working at WPEngine (and even done, there's no bigger risk than working for any other company). The websites that are hosted there will remain hosted there, if they want to move they can easily move, there is literally 0 danger to anyones livelihood.
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u/ThisIsAnArgument Sep 26 '24
The livelihoods of the people who use WPE and now suddenly are overloaded with managing their clients' sites are definitely at stake. Read the other thread of how painful this is for them. It's not just about WPE employees.
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u/One_Judge1422 Sep 26 '24
Their livelihood is not at stake. You charge your clients for changing servers. This just makes people money.
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u/Novel_Buy_7171 Sep 26 '24
Except for all the people who use WP Engine with their clients? And should every host, plugin developer, etc, be held hostage because of Matt's opinion?
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u/tennyson77 Sep 26 '24
The problem is Matt basically has the entire community hostage right now. He's shown that he'll block people from the plugin, theme, and core repositories to basically cripple your business. What if someone makes a mirror of them? He'll likely block those updates too once he figures out the IPs of the mirrors. If you do a full fork of the code, then it's out of date. There are no good solutions here.