Automattic Slashes WordPress.org Support in Battle With WP Engine (automattic.com) 40
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.
You can't force someone to work for free (Score:1, Troll)
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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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Lol ok. After the last 4-5 years, I have zero faith in what the US legal system says. The judge probably took a fat payment from WP Engine for this
The court order is available here [documentcloud.org] and includes the evidence and the reasoning leading to the decision. As example, in particular in "A. Success on the Merits":
With respect to the first element of the Winter test, the Court focuses on WPEngine’s claimfor tortious interference with contractual relations, as a showing that WPEngine is likely to succeed on the merits of this claim is sufficient to meet this first prong.
To prevail on its claim for tortious interference with contractual relations, WP Engine must show “(1) the existence of a valid contract between the plaintiff and a third party; (2) the defendant’s knowledge of that contract; (3) the defendant’s intentional acts designed to induce a breach or disruption of the contractual relationship; (4) actual breach or disruption of the contractual relationship; and (5) resulting damage.”
WPEngine has established that it is likely to satisfy each of these elements.
If you wonder why, just read the document and realize most of the evidence is citations from Automattic's CEO that directly support the plaintiff's claims.
TL;DR: you don't need a corrupt judge to win if you have a defendant that doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut and basically builds the case for you.
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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
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That being said, WP Engine is suing WP Foundation. Not the other way around. The courts will decide if the promise to keep WordPress opensource and available to everyone for free included a legally binding promise to distribute said source at their own expense regardless of how expensive in perpetuity.
That all sounds really noble, until you remember that Mullenweg shut down wordpress.org access only to sites on wpengine.
So no, it's not that mean old wpengine demands stuff for free, blah blah. It's that everyone in the world got to use wordpress.org for free, for years and years and years, until one day Mullenweg got pissed off at one company.
Your open source installation of WordPress calls out to wordrpess.org for core updates. The whole ecosystem (except for a tiny fraction, until this fracas) of plug
Re: You can't force someone to work for free (Score:1)
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.
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Why are there more Drupal 7 sites than 8 9 or 10 versions?
For two reasons. One, it's not trivial to make that shift. Two, it's very hard to do it without using the command line and dicking with composer.json a lot, and that is beyond a bunch of those users.
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Perhaps we should have a story called "Is Drupal Abandonware?" I just searched for this and got plenty of evidence:
#2 on the list is from Drupal itself: Drupal 7 has reached end of life [drupal.org]. Drupal has repeatedly released major versions that are incompatible with the previous version, requiring migrating all plugins, and requiring a costly custom migration of Drupal core. Therefore many plugins that are written by hobbyists are abandoned, and websites are left to rot. It took them until Drupal 9 to deci
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Drupal 5, Drupal 6, Drupal 7, and Drupal 9 were all different frameworks, with increasingly difficult migration from one to the next (I'm not sure what Drupal 8 was, a precursor to Drupal 9).
5-7 were basically all the same thing and migration was easy. Some modules got updated and some didn't, but you didn't need a new database.
8, which was basically 9 beta, was a big change. 10 is not too different from 9.
Drupal CMS is a turnkey version, with enough themes and modules to just slap it down and use it convincingly. It's just a fatter distribution of Drupal.
if you want your project to last, you need to re-implement it in something else.
If you want your project to last, you can either depend on someone else's framework, or build your own. If you've been using Drupal since 5 t
Re: Drupal Starshot (CMS) (Score:2)
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No, it's not worse than Joomla. Nothing is worse than Joomla, but Drupal might be a close second on the scale of unnecessary complexity.
Re:Drupal Starshot (CMS) - React WebAssembly (Score:2)
Drupal CMS (codename Starshot) is a React-driven, WebAssembly-packaged self-contained CMS that speaks natively to Drupal Core APIs. By separating out the Content Management from the underlying Server, they're trying to reduce the friction for content publishers from engaging with the technical sides of their site.
The ambition is brave but the Drupal Teams are all talk (see ongoing pain points and security vulnerabilities
Now this may sound harsh (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re: Now this may sound harsh (Score:2)
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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.