Automattic Slashes WordPress.org Support in Battle With WP Engine (automattic.com) 29
Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin.
The company, which runs WordPress.com, blamed the cutback on legal costs from its battle with WP Engine, which CEO Matt Mullenweg previously called a "cancer" to the community. Automattic said remaining contributions will focus on "security and critical updates" through the Five for the Future program.
The company, which runs WordPress.com, blamed the cutback on legal costs from its battle with WP Engine, which CEO Matt Mullenweg previously called a "cancer" to the community. Automattic said remaining contributions will focus on "security and critical updates" through the Five for the Future program.
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Is anyone claiming that he should be forced? If he wants to quite wordpress he is completely free to do so, would anyone care?
It seems more the other way around that Matt seems to think that others should contribute to his project.
This is his own product. He acts like he is doing charity by working on this product that he owns himself and that makes him most of his money.
While there are some redeeming qualities, up to a few years ago Wordpress has mostly been junk technically and it's rise to prominence was
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Why should he quit something he started? It's his toy, he can take it home and not allow WP-Engine to play with it.
Why? Because there is a preliminary injunction that says he can't 'take it home'. That would make a civil case into contempt of court and could land Matt in prison.
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And now he is all enraged because nobody else is interested in spending millions on his pet project?
I read the actual legal complaint filed by WP Engine. I'm not sure that you have an accurate grasp on what is going on.
WP Engine's complaint centres around a theory grounded in Promissory Estoppel. The claim is that WP Foundation promised that WordPress would always be free and open for everyone for ever. When WP Foundation started asking WP Engine to pay for using WordPress.org as a distribution mechanism for plugins and other software packages, WP Engine viewed this as a reneg on the promise that was made
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I read the actual legal complaint filed by WP Engine. I'm not sure that you have an accurate grasp on what is going on.
None of what you wrote is in contradiction with what I said? Obviously wpengine is going to mention in their claim the significant market power of wordpress, their promises WP made to the community, that literally every other person or company in the world is allowed to use that resource, that the action locks their customers out of access to third parties, that wordpress hardcodes wordpress.org for plugins, the established presense, etc.
That gives legal standing to WPEngine and obviously a court was going
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Is anyone claiming that he should be forced?
Yes. The courts are, implied by the injunction. Now I fully understand that a lot of the time a preliminary injunction is intended as a "pause" on something while the court case sorts the matter out and arrives at its verdict. But the injunction is still force. It is compelling Matt to either continue providing services for free or to abandon his business and livelihood.
I'm sorry that my response was not that clear, but that statement is what I was trying to refute. And certainly WP Engine also claims that
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to at least temporarily stop extorting a competitor by pulling access like that from one day to the other.
well, about that, wp engine isn't competition to wordpress, it's more of a freeloader making business at wordpress' expense (literal expense since they don't even pay for the distribution network cost, which wordpress has indeed been "forced" to maintain in that bogus injunction), which is kinda the point.
mind you, the wp engine guy might claim some bizarre legal right to that but that doesn't change the fact he's a total dick, the wordpress guy might be justifiably mad at this but still is a total narcissi
Re: You can't force someone to work for free (Score:2)
He is enraged that he tried to go back on his promises and wasn't allowed to.
He's also enraged that the license of the project he based his project on doesn't allow him to take his toys and go home. He can either watch other people play with them or he can play like he said he was going to. Or he can go play some other game.
Let this be a lesson to all, don't make promises you don't want to keep.
Drupal Starshot (CMS) (Score:3)
dropping Jan 15th. Will see how the visual editing works and how fast it'll progress the make Drupal a viable CMS for the average person liek D7/6/5 were.
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Learn more about Drupal CMS here, (was code-named Starshot):
https://www.drupal.org/about/s... [drupal.org]
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Re: Drupal Starshot (CMS) (Score:2)
Drupal is actively maintained and has a healthy community and a culture of caring about security. In what way is it abandonware?
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Why are there more Drupal 7 sites than 8 9 or 10 versions? I believe the non coder community felt largely abandoned when it shifted to requiring more technical knowledge to upgrade build and maintain on the platform. That is probably what he was implying.
Now this may sound harsh (Score:3)
But I think Norm knew exactly what should happen to everyone in this story.
Let's bring back easy wysiwyg desktop web tools. Most web sites are effectively static, anyways.
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Let's bring back easy wysiwyg desktop web tools.
Core memory unlocked: FrontPage and Dreamweaver MX. You're telling me 2002 was 23 goddamn years ago?!?
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23 years ago, I was writing ASP pages in JScript for a site running on IIS (shudder).
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Bah. I coded in Notepad like god intended, and that was peak WWW. With frames.
Re: Open Source Shit Show (Score:2)
Don't you think "sour" would have been an easier target for a joke?
So 100 people losing their jobs? (Score:3)
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Pretty much. He's been a dick through this entire thing and it all seems it's his personal butthurt attacks taking everyone else down with him.
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WPEngine did the suing. This litigation isn't a legal attack by Automattic/Mullenweg. Although he did provoke the issue.
I stand with Matt Mullenweg (Score:4, Funny)
I fully support his efforts to kill Wordpress for the good of everyone on the internet.
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Maybe if we're really lucky, somehow he'll take the entire PHP ecosystem with him.