Matt Mullenweg: 'WordPress.org Just Belongs To Me' 42
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has asserted his personal ownership of WordPress.org in a new interview, offering new insight into his clash with hosting provider WP Engine. "WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,"
Mullenweg told The Verge, justifying his decision to cut WP Engine's access to WordPress.org servers. He cited trademark concerns and insufficient ecosystem contributions as key reasons for the action.
Mullenweg said he altered WordPress Foundation's trademark policies to specifically target WP Engine, adding language about their lack of donations. He likened his approach to getting "Al Capone for taxes," using trademark leverage to pressure the company into greater contributions.
Mullenweg said he altered WordPress Foundation's trademark policies to specifically target WP Engine, adding language about their lack of donations. He likened his approach to getting "Al Capone for taxes," using trademark leverage to pressure the company into greater contributions.
A masterclass of burning bridges and all goodwill (Score:4, Insightful)
This is tomfoolery of the worst calibre.
I'd be extremely surprised if WordPress wasn't forked after this.
It's particularly ironic given WordPress's initial success when Movable Type burned all of its bridges and goodwill.
Re:A masterclass of burning bridges and all goodwi (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be extremely surprised if WordPress wasn't forked after this.
To what end? The whole point here is that no one is contributing to Wordpress. If people were contributing then it wouldn't have caused the problem in the first place. This is a bit more than just going after company X for making money off your efforts. This is company X making money, while using your trademark to market your product as theirs while simultaneously disabling some functionality that would be in the base product.
Yeah everyone is acting like a 2 year old, but in this case someone's ice-cream did actually get stolen, so it is understandable that a temper tantrum ensued.
Re:A masterclass of burning bridges and all goodwi (Score:5, Interesting)
The trademark infringement is there, no doubt. He may even win in court. But forking WP could happen easily. If 150+ people left the parent company over the direction WP is taking and all these animosities between Matt and WP Engine, they could easily fork WP and call it "The Free CM" and start development from there. Think of how mariadb forked MySQL is the de facto standard in distributions now.
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The point, though, is that if Wordpress.org is continually accepting contributions, that fork will exist, but it will just end up contributing to wordpress. The exception to that would be if the fork started relasing GPLv3 or later code whilst Wordpress continued to insist on GPLv2 or later as they do now. Also, at the point that
This is pretty much a clear and legitimate use of his control of the trademarks. It's the same arguement as when people give away their code as public domain orunder stuff like the
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There are multiple reasons for forking software. One is what you said, which is WP continually accepting contributions from a fork. The other reason is if you just don't care about the original product anymore and want to go your own way, and that's what I'm talking about. If they fork, they don't even have to contribute back to WP if they don't want to. They basically could take WP through a completely new path (albeit under a different name) and do what they want. If the end-users start to see things
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Personally, I think it's about time Wordpress saw a fork. Something that takes it in a different direction, because a lot of addons need to be baked into the CMS, like SEO, instead of ripping people off by forcing them to buy expensive extensions.
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Not they just make it available as a hosting service. It is GPL, not AGPL.
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Yes, but that then isn't a competing open source fork, which means they lose the benefit of getting other people involved in the development and that the original software can then move to the AGPL and try to use it's collaborative benfit to win in the long run. In the cases where this has failed, its because e.g. Amazon was willing to keep releasing their fork under an old GPL license.
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Forking could happen, but will the ecosystem shift with them?
After the OG showed everybody merely abiding by the license is not anywhere near enough and that you also need to bow down before his nonsensical whims? What do you think?
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There's no reason why a fork can't make itself compatible with the plugins. Yes, for that portion of the software it'll have to keep up with the plugin conventions in WP, but it can still be a fork and functional. Look at the forks of Firefox that can use the same plugins.
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Of course a fork could happen, but again I ask to what end. What do you hope to achieve that Wordpress isn't doing already. This isn't a case like MariaDB / MySQL. Those are purely contractual issues seen under the singular guise of making money. That doesn't appear to be what is going on here. WP Engine isn't the only host, it's just one of many, but it's the one singularly in the target of this tantrum.
As for the 150+ people who left, they didn't just leave over direction. Worth noting that is 150 people,
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so forking currently isn't on the table there
Well, as someone else pointed out [slashdot.org], there's already at least one fork. Seems like they forked WP because they didn't like the way it was doing some things, which is usually the reason why forks come about. It solves a problem/feature many users didn't like.
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Again intent matters. Tell me WHY someone would fork over *this* issue - the one we are discussing now. The other fork was over a fundamental disagreement with software design - literally the basis for most forks in open source world and easily explainable and understandable.
This case is a contractual disagreement, and the forks over contractual disagreements typically only happen between the contracted parties, and right now those parties have chosen to pursue a legal battle rather than a fork. The employe
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You missed my point. *WHY* fork. What problem do you solve and for whom? Why would you go to the effort of maintaining that fork. Give me your justification for the effort. Simply hitting the fork button on github doesn't achieve anything.
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When you create something it can be difficult to let go, especially when it is being used in ways you neither intended nor approve of and believe you have a way of doing something about it.
But this guy has to let go.
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You monetized my free software better than I could, so give me your money!
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TBF isn't that every opensource developer's worst nightmare?
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"I suck at business" is a great reason not to go into business.
Re:A masterclass of burning bridges and all goodwi (Score:5, Informative)
This is tomfoolery of the worst calibre.
I'd be extremely surprised if WordPress wasn't forked after this.
It's particularly ironic given WordPress's initial success when Movable Type burned all of its bridges and goodwill.
There already is a fork. https://classicpress.net/ [classicpress.net]
It was started when Mullenweg pushed Gutenberg down everyone's throats.
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That seemed like an overkill solution for that particular problem, as there were plenty of plugins that allowed you to keep using the "Classic" WordPress editor in newer versions of WordPress.
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If a client needs a page builder, we often recommend using Gutenburg.
When it was launched in v5.0, it was not at all ready for serious use. Enabling it by default was also extremely unwise, rather than at first giving people the option during installation or upgrade.
These days though, as far as pagebuilders go, it's one of the best available currently. And it's leagues ahead in terms of useability and rendering speed of legacy page-builders like WPBakery / Visual composer.
Thankfully it also doesn't take muc
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Forking isn't going to help the load on the update servers, which I think is one of the points that's he's making. The infrastructure to support WP Engine isn't free. Unless the fork means updates are served from something else, they're effectively providing a lot of infrastructure for free.
What would help the load on the infrastructure would be to not serve the updates from a WordPress instance.
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Normally they'd mirror for their own benefit, local mirror avoids network faults with upstream and some transit bills might apply.
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Re: A masterclass of burning bridges and all goodw (Score:1)
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x.org (vs XFree86), and as mentioned below, LibreOffice.
I guess also FreeBSD (vs 386BSD)?
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WordPress itself is a fork of b2/cafelog
Trying to Cancel WP Engine (Score:2)
Sounds like using anything wordpress is a bad idea (Score:2)
Children all around.
Uh huh. (Score:2)
A lot of people who weigh in on this (both here and in other forums) seem to forget one important fact:
The majority of WordPress users are corporate types, and really won't care as long as their site keeps working and they can use all the same plugins as their friends/competitors. Most of them probably won't even hear about all this.
WordPress will continue on as it always has; a fork is unlikely to be successful; the only question is what wounds WP Engine and Automattic will sustain in the process of deali
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Many of the corporate types you mention aren't emotionally invested in WordPress and don't really care as long as their sites continue to work.
WP Engine has a userbase of 350 million sites. They could lead the fork project, convert their sites to the fork, lose up to 50 million of the purists and silently swap out the remaining 300 million sites with the fork.
Customers of WP Engine already don't have control of the Wordpress "core". This would be a huge FU to Mullenweg and create a parallel economy that man
My only takeaway (Score:2)
Wordpress employs over 1500 people, for what?