> Doing so would not only enrich affluent lawyers but damage the brand of WordPress worldwide, resulting in regular folks and small businesses looking for the exits.
I seriously doubt this. Even the majority of tech people are unaware of this dispute. And most businesses are too busy to care.
> Even the majority of tech people are unaware of this dispute. And most businesses are too busy to care.
I still don't understand what the hell is going on and I see posts about it on HN every couple days. Who is the original wordpress and who is the fork. Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?
I’m honestly not sure what they’ve done wrong (or illegally). But it seems like Mullenweg has alienated a lot of people by what seems to be very erratic behavior.
I am curious to see what many WP employees think of all this.
I believe the short of it is, create a massive business built on Wordpress but contribute zero funding or resources back to Wordpress, and then bicker with wp throughout this drama.
Demonstrably not true. Matt may not be happy with the amount of resource, but people associated with WPE make all sorts of contributions to the Wordpress community.
The Wordpress license does not require any contributions. If they wanted that to be forced they should have licensed accordingly. To demand payment to Matt's for-profit company and withhold access to the non-profit Wordpress.org is a shakedown akin to demanding protection money, full stop.
So…did everything they are legally allowed to do? I get Redis and Elastic Search are mad at Amazon, but that’s what happens when you release code under an open license.
Also, the recent ACF business would show that WPE were being stewards of one of the backbone plugins of the ecosystem.
If WP was supposed to have a new class of license (let's call it "transactional source"), they really should have published with that license.
Instead, they licensed under Stallman's GPL2. Given his general ethos around freedom of software, I would honestly be curious to hear his thoughts on using trademark as a cudgel to arbitrarily prevent otherwise-permitted uses of GPL-licensed code.
Building a massive business out of an open source project is by itself a huge contribution to the project. Ecosystem growth is a tide that lifts all ships.
As a hosting provider, getting into a conflict with people who you have a software and service dependency on could be described as non-recommendable, especially if there is no formal contract involve. There are a few historical examples of companies being based on accessing free apis of youtube/social networks and then having their access removed suddenly, killing the company over night. Initiating lawsuits in response to a trademark dispute (a dispute that had yet to become a lawsuit) managed to escalate things fairly fast.
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.
Not siding with either Matt or WPE, but I think just sponsoring community events should not be giving back enough. If I remember clearly, companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. spend substantial (to the community) monetary and non-monetary support to many open-source projects, in addition to sponsoring community events.
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
And the community of people who _use_ WordPress to run their websites, and the people who help them to do that, and the 3rd party plugin and theme developers who make WP work for so many different kinds of websites - can all go and get fucked.
I can see how clients that have sites hosted on WPEngine can be a bit concerned. Did you receive any queries by people who do not have anything hosted by WPEngine, but rather simply have a wordpress site on some other hosting company/self-hosted?
I work at a hosting company and we have received zero questions, and we have a fair larger number of clients who sites are built on wordpress. In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
Yeah. One of those clients is hosted on GCE. She is quite technical and plugged into general IT news, and they are in the middle of due diligence with potential investors though.
> In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
Is that true if Matt/Automattic win against WPEngine, and he starts using that as precident and starts demanding 8% of revenue as his standard shakedown on anybody who's used the "WordPress" trademark to generate revenue?
So you don't use it, or understand anything about what's going on, apparently, but you have big opinions on it contrary to those who actually do know what's up. Brilliant. No notes.
Automattic are claiming they own the trademark on WordPress, WP, etc, when it comes to CMS software & hosting of that software.
WP Engine is a prominent hosting provider for WordPress, who also contribute several very popular plugins.
Automattic have sued WP Engine. Automattic have blocked WP Engine from updating any of their plugins, or anything else on wordpress.org. A vulnerability was found in a WP Engine plugin, and Automattic have taken it over (but are not doing any maintenance). Automattic's CEO went on a number of unhinged rants here and elsewhere.
WPE's core business is "hosting for WordPress websites". If they were to change this to "ForkPress", they'll have to rebuild the brand and search volume behind it. So I'm not convinced that this is a viable solution to their current problem.
I doubt many developers will get on a WP Engine fork of WordPress. Maybe if they funded an independent non-profit foundation that would take care of a fork that could work, but you still need the traction of the community to make it a success.
I don't know about that. I think there are many different definitions of success here. WP Engine would want to make sure that it's customers are well taken care of and have a solid web hosting experience. That would be success to them. I'm not sure how much they would care about outside users or developers (they might care a lot, but I don't know). But, the real question is -- would a fork benefit their customers?
If the answer is yes, then I expect to see a fork happen quickly. That may be the only way (or best way) for them to keep some degree of control over their system.
"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.
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?
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).
> A WordPress fork is also something Automattic fears, as it was oddly mentioned in a term sheet...
Matt has explained that that language was actually addressing allegations that WP Engine forked the WooCommerce Stripe extension and replacing attribution. For whatever Matt's explanations are worth these days.
The language of the term sheet certainly could have been read as preventing them from forking WordPress as well, so it's possible that was an ulterior motive.
Is this really the case? Maybe I'm missing something, but yhe WordPress codebase is still available, what is not is the one repository for convenient one shot downloads. You could create an equivalent repo off of one of the existing mirrors or put it together yourself off of the codebase.
So maybe someone will fork the repository? But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
> You could create an equivalent repo off of one of the existing mirrors
Can you though? And if so, for how much longer?
Matt is already not letting developers log into wordpress.org without disclaiming any relationship with WPEngine. He is 100% going to demand the same from people mirroring that repo as soon as he thinks of it.
> But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
CloudFlare offered to do that for free. Matt said "Fuck you! I'm destroying WordPress instead, for the communiteeeeeeee!"
Someone needs to leverage WASM and other container methods to build an entirely new version of WP with a solid architecture that can still leverage the existing ecosystem by isolating/sandboxing popular themes and plugins and making them think they are running in WP.
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.
This sounds like some sort of attempt at Ultimate Scope Creep. How did we get from ‘licensing faux-issue’ to ‘a complete rebuild with a very complex architecture just to support the plugin ecosystem’?
To a first approximation, about zero people/companies have a problem they need solved which boils down to "I need a replacement for WordPress using a significantly more modern and better architected codebase."
By far the most common problem people are solving by using Wordpress is "I need to be able to fix website errors/typos without calling up a web development agency and waiting 2 weeks and paying $1000, and I need to be able update my homepage or add new pages which then fit into the menus and site navigation easily". Second most common problem they're solving is "I need a website which is easy and affordable to employ or contract experience people to edit and manage it for me".
Not a single WPEngine or wordpress.com customer has ever chosen or rejected them because they asked themselves "Is this run on a mess of legacy early 2000s vintage PHP and badly designed MySQL databases, or does the backend run beautifully architected and formatted Rust/Haskel/Go?"
No. Not from my point of view, as someone who has a couple of dozen WordPress clients.
"Someone" needs a CMS that's able to be securely, performantly, and professionally managed by hosting companies, and that is as easy for small and medium businesses to use and as easy to find experienced staff and agencies to help run.
We do not recommend as use WordPress because of it's "solid architecture" or "isolation/sandboxing" or it's FE Dev buzzword de jour use of "exciting" "new" technology.
We recommend it because the Widget Factory owner can probably get one of his grandkids or niece/nephews to act as website editor for him, or the piano teacher can get one of their students to help out with their website in return for discounted lessons, or the online store owner can easily employ someone with WordPress admin experience to get themselves off eBay/Marketplace and onto their own website. Or the lawyer/plumber/accountant/whoever's office manager or "that young staff member who's good with computers" can run Wordpress - perhaps with assistance of their existing outside IT consultants to install/manage it and perhaps setup/customise it initially.
None of those people care about whether it's written in Rust, or uses WASM, or is dockerized and autoscaling. Their #1 problem is "can I quickly update my website if I find an error or if I have to put an important message to my customers on my homepage?" #2 is "can I easily learn how to do simple edits to my site, and can I easily find employees can work with it, and can I finb contractors/agencies who'll be able to help with more complex changes/updated?" and somewhere down below #1 is "is my site at least reasonably secure from being hacked, and if it is hacked can I get it restored/repaired rapidly".
There are dozens or hundreds of "better technology choices" that WordPress these days. It's really hard to find a "better business choice" for a lot of projects though.
The article explains it as a fork that just blindly copies the changes in the original source to avoid legal complications but not add any new technical value.
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.
I'd argue that what WPEngine sells (rents?) is perhaps closer to a "distro" in the Redhat/Ubuntu/Arch/whatever sense.
They use WordPress core the way Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel. They use the GPL themes/plugins the way they use all the gnu utils. They use paid/pro plugins and themes like Ubuntu uses restricted and multiverse repos. If they feel the need, they can customise the kernel/core within the restrictions and obligations of the GPL however they choose to.
And WPEngine then wrap WordPress core in a whole bunch of what they and their customers consider "value add". Easy and automated backup/restore, one click dev/staging versions of the site and the ability to promote those into production when desired, automated provisioning and renewal of ssl certs, curated plugin backlists, monitoring and affected customer notifications of security updates across 3rd party plugin/themes as well as core, platform level WordPress specific optimisation, managed OS and web server and database security patching and updates. And like RedHat, they provide a "single neck to tread on" when something goes badly wrong: a support department that's both experienced and capable of solving pretty much any WP disaster 24x7, with a platform that can quickly and easily use to provide the needed help, and a pre existing business/financial relationship so both sides of that disaster and recovery are at least partially coincident it'll be charged and paid fairly and promptly.
For every single one of our WP clients, all that value add is totally worth the price jump from $5/month on GoDaddy et al. to $25/month of WPEngine. And for us, WPEngine has a better offering for what we value than wordpress.com.
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".
I've been looking for an alternative that let's me set up a site for non-technical users but I haven't found any open-source alternative. With Wordpress I can install something like GeneratePress & Blocks, set up ACF and add some custom fields, and anyone can manage the site. End users don't want to be writing React and Tailwind to edit their site.
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.
Tell me of one where a small business can get an experienced CMS user/editor/publisher on practically zero notice, and at basically regular office admin payrates.
_That_ is WordPress's "killer feature".
And its why my best guess at the long term outcome here involves a smoking crater where Matt's reputation and Automattic/wordpress.com/WordPress Foundation/wprdpress.org used to be, and either a similarly "Mutually Assured Destruction" crater where WPEngine once was, or perhaps a decimated-by-legal-bills hollow shell of what it is now.
And something like ClassicPress or AspirePress or other forks to "soak up" the huge existing talent pool of people who know how to run websites using something close enough to what WordPress used to be, and the thousands for hundreds of thousands of theme/plugin developers and Wordpress specialist developers/agencies/contractors choosing to hitch their professional lives to one or all of the emergent forks.
And for millions of website owners to shake their heads again at how annoying but essential IT nerds and their stupid drama are for them to run their business/website...
Have fun with less/no good software. I'm one of the biggest proponents of FOSS software you can find, but eliminating moneymaking schemes entirely for everyone is just fantastical.
Except the people who are responsible for or manage 40+% of the websites on the internet. The ones who are aware of how early they might become "acceptable collateral damage" to Matt's deranged "nuclear" "war" on WPEngine, and the business ramifications of "waiting till the war settles" if that means significant website downtime or emergency website migration to avoid it.
Which, if the numbers I've seen bandied around are accurate, is something like $400mil annual revenue to WPEngine, representing over a million WPEngine websites who are _directly_ in danger of Matt's current supply chain attacks. And with dozens or hundreds of smaller WordPress hosting companies looking on in horror wondering if they and their customers are next in Matt's extortion war. And probably tens of thousands of web dev firms and digital agencies who're all thinking "WTF?" and making contingency plans for all their WordPress clients no matter where they're hosting them.
> Doing so would not only enrich affluent lawyers but damage the brand of WordPress worldwide, resulting in regular folks and small businesses looking for the exits.
I seriously doubt this. Even the majority of tech people are unaware of this dispute. And most businesses are too busy to care.
> Even the majority of tech people are unaware of this dispute. And most businesses are too busy to care.
I still don't understand what the hell is going on and I see posts about it on HN every couple days. Who is the original wordpress and who is the fork. Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?
> Is there a clear "bad guy" in this?
It’s more like dumb and dumber than good vs bad.
I'm at a loss - what exactly has WP Engine done that is "dumb"? As far as I can see, it's an umbrella for "will not cave to Matt's every wish".
I’m honestly not sure what they’ve done wrong (or illegally). But it seems like Mullenweg has alienated a lot of people by what seems to be very erratic behavior.
I am curious to see what many WP employees think of all this.
Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic. WP Engine is the other party in the current drama.
I believe the short of it is, create a massive business built on Wordpress but contribute zero funding or resources back to Wordpress, and then bicker with wp throughout this drama.
>contribute zero funding or resources
Demonstrably not true. Matt may not be happy with the amount of resource, but people associated with WPE make all sorts of contributions to the Wordpress community.
The Wordpress license does not require any contributions. If they wanted that to be forced they should have licensed accordingly. To demand payment to Matt's for-profit company and withhold access to the non-profit Wordpress.org is a shakedown akin to demanding protection money, full stop.
So…did everything they are legally allowed to do? I get Redis and Elastic Search are mad at Amazon, but that’s what happens when you release code under an open license.
Also, the recent ACF business would show that WPE were being stewards of one of the backbone plugins of the ecosystem.
If WP was supposed to have a new class of license (let's call it "transactional source"), they really should have published with that license.
Instead, they licensed under Stallman's GPL2. Given his general ethos around freedom of software, I would honestly be curious to hear his thoughts on using trademark as a cudgel to arbitrarily prevent otherwise-permitted uses of GPL-licensed code.
WordPress was a fork of b2/cafelog to start with [1], which meant that they had to stick with the GPL.
[1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
Correct, which adds to the reasons they really shouldn’t be trying to shake down users.
Building a massive business out of an open source project is by itself a huge contribution to the project. Ecosystem growth is a tide that lifts all ships.
Can't wait for Linus to start badmouthing everybody that offers linux hosting.
As a hosting provider, getting into a conflict with people who you have a software and service dependency on could be described as non-recommendable, especially if there is no formal contract involve. There are a few historical examples of companies being based on accessing free apis of youtube/social networks and then having their access removed suddenly, killing the company over night. Initiating lawsuits in response to a trademark dispute (a dispute that had yet to become a lawsuit) managed to escalate things fairly fast.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/10/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-dra...
> 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.
WPE maintains a number of community plug-ins and until last week was the single biggest corporate sponsor of WordPress community events.
Not siding with either Matt or WPE, but I think just sponsoring community events should not be giving back enough. If I remember clearly, companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. spend substantial (to the community) monetary and non-monetary support to many open-source projects, in addition to sponsoring community events.
I have dozens of clients on WordPress and I've not heard from a single one. I'm pretty worried personally, though.
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:
And the community of people who _use_ WordPress to run their websites, and the people who help them to do that, and the 3rd party plugin and theme developers who make WP work for so many different kinds of websites - can all go and get fucked.I can see how clients that have sites hosted on WPEngine can be a bit concerned. Did you receive any queries by people who do not have anything hosted by WPEngine, but rather simply have a wordpress site on some other hosting company/self-hosted?
I work at a hosting company and we have received zero questions, and we have a fair larger number of clients who sites are built on wordpress. In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
Yeah. One of those clients is hosted on GCE. She is quite technical and plugged into general IT news, and they are in the middle of due diligence with potential investors though.
> In terms of going nuclear, anything regarding trademark will have zero impact on our clients.
Is that true if Matt/Automattic win against WPEngine, and he starts using that as precident and starts demanding 8% of revenue as his standard shakedown on anybody who's used the "WordPress" trademark to generate revenue?
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?
So you don't use it, or understand anything about what's going on, apparently, but you have big opinions on it contrary to those who actually do know what's up. Brilliant. No notes.
I don't see any opinion in my post. I am literally asking why this is important. Are you a troll?
Automattic are claiming they own the trademark on WordPress, WP, etc, when it comes to CMS software & hosting of that software.
WP Engine is a prominent hosting provider for WordPress, who also contribute several very popular plugins.
Automattic have sued WP Engine. Automattic have blocked WP Engine from updating any of their plugins, or anything else on wordpress.org. A vulnerability was found in a WP Engine plugin, and Automattic have taken it over (but are not doing any maintenance). Automattic's CEO went on a number of unhinged rants here and elsewhere.
You very clearly expressed the opinion that no one should care what Matt has done.
Reminds me a little bit of Arduino LLC vs Arduino SRL. (which was ultimately resolved amicably)
https://hackaday.com/2016/10/01/arduino-vs-arduino-arduino-w...
WPE's core business is "hosting for WordPress websites". If they were to change this to "ForkPress", they'll have to rebuild the brand and search volume behind it. So I'm not convinced that this is a viable solution to their current problem.
I doubt many developers will get on a WP Engine fork of WordPress. Maybe if they funded an independent non-profit foundation that would take care of a fork that could work, but you still need the traction of the community to make it a success.
I don't know about that. I think there are many different definitions of success here. WP Engine would want to make sure that it's customers are well taken care of and have a solid web hosting experience. That would be success to them. I'm not sure how much they would care about outside users or developers (they might care a lot, but I don't know). But, the real question is -- would a fork benefit their customers?
If the answer is yes, then I expect to see a fork happen quickly. That may be the only way (or best way) for them to keep some degree of control over their system.
"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.
If it were WPE only, that is true. But right now there are some very large companies also in the crosshairs as possibly next on the list:
- GoDaddy
- Amazon (AWS)
- Bluehost
- Dreamhost
and about a thousand smaller hosts, all of whom would be very unhappy to suddenly have to pay 8% of revenue to Automattic.
A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.
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?
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).
All a new foundation needs for traction is a policy against admin dashboard spam
> A WordPress fork is also something Automattic fears, as it was oddly mentioned in a term sheet...
Matt has explained that that language was actually addressing allegations that WP Engine forked the WooCommerce Stripe extension and replacing attribution. For whatever Matt's explanations are worth these days.
The language of the term sheet certainly could have been read as preventing them from forking WordPress as well, so it's possible that was an ulterior motive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726622
Is this really the case? Maybe I'm missing something, but yhe WordPress codebase is still available, what is not is the one repository for convenient one shot downloads. You could create an equivalent repo off of one of the existing mirrors or put it together yourself off of the codebase.
So maybe someone will fork the repository? But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
> You could create an equivalent repo off of one of the existing mirrors
Can you though? And if so, for how much longer?
Matt is already not letting developers log into wordpress.org without disclaiming any relationship with WPEngine. He is 100% going to demand the same from people mirroring that repo as soon as he thinks of it.
> But hosting is expensive, especially if you're going to get hit by something at the scale of WPEngine.
CloudFlare offered to do that for free. Matt said "Fuck you! I'm destroying WordPress instead, for the communiteeeeeeee!"
> You could create an equivalent repo off of one of the existing mirrors or put it together yourself off of the codebase.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AspirePress/
Hey, they have a new logo !
Someone needs to leverage WASM and other container methods to build an entirely new version of WP with a solid architecture that can still leverage the existing ecosystem by isolating/sandboxing popular themes and plugins and making them think they are running in WP.
https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/wordpress-in-the-browser/
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.
This sounds like some sort of attempt at Ultimate Scope Creep. How did we get from ‘licensing faux-issue’ to ‘a complete rebuild with a very complex architecture just to support the plugin ecosystem’?
WP has needed this for a very long time, this is just the proverbial straw breaking the camels back.
> WP has needed this for a very long time
Said no-one using WP for their website ever.
To a first approximation, about zero people/companies have a problem they need solved which boils down to "I need a replacement for WordPress using a significantly more modern and better architected codebase."
By far the most common problem people are solving by using Wordpress is "I need to be able to fix website errors/typos without calling up a web development agency and waiting 2 weeks and paying $1000, and I need to be able update my homepage or add new pages which then fit into the menus and site navigation easily". Second most common problem they're solving is "I need a website which is easy and affordable to employ or contract experience people to edit and manage it for me".
Not a single WPEngine or wordpress.com customer has ever chosen or rejected them because they asked themselves "Is this run on a mess of legacy early 2000s vintage PHP and badly designed MySQL databases, or does the backend run beautifully architected and formatted Rust/Haskel/Go?"
No. Not from my point of view, as someone who has a couple of dozen WordPress clients.
"Someone" needs a CMS that's able to be securely, performantly, and professionally managed by hosting companies, and that is as easy for small and medium businesses to use and as easy to find experienced staff and agencies to help run.
We do not recommend as use WordPress because of it's "solid architecture" or "isolation/sandboxing" or it's FE Dev buzzword de jour use of "exciting" "new" technology.
We recommend it because the Widget Factory owner can probably get one of his grandkids or niece/nephews to act as website editor for him, or the piano teacher can get one of their students to help out with their website in return for discounted lessons, or the online store owner can easily employ someone with WordPress admin experience to get themselves off eBay/Marketplace and onto their own website. Or the lawyer/plumber/accountant/whoever's office manager or "that young staff member who's good with computers" can run Wordpress - perhaps with assistance of their existing outside IT consultants to install/manage it and perhaps setup/customise it initially.
None of those people care about whether it's written in Rust, or uses WASM, or is dockerized and autoscaling. Their #1 problem is "can I quickly update my website if I find an error or if I have to put an important message to my customers on my homepage?" #2 is "can I easily learn how to do simple edits to my site, and can I easily find employees can work with it, and can I finb contractors/agencies who'll be able to help with more complex changes/updated?" and somewhere down below #1 is "is my site at least reasonably secure from being hacked, and if it is hacked can I get it restored/repaired rapidly".
There are dozens or hundreds of "better technology choices" that WordPress these days. It's really hard to find a "better business choice" for a lot of projects though.
What's the difference between a zombie fork and just a regular old fork?
The article explains it as a fork that just blindly copies the changes in the original source to avoid legal complications but not add any new technical value.
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.
"Mirror"? Maybe?
I'd argue that what WPEngine sells (rents?) is perhaps closer to a "distro" in the Redhat/Ubuntu/Arch/whatever sense.
They use WordPress core the way Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel. They use the GPL themes/plugins the way they use all the gnu utils. They use paid/pro plugins and themes like Ubuntu uses restricted and multiverse repos. If they feel the need, they can customise the kernel/core within the restrictions and obligations of the GPL however they choose to.
And WPEngine then wrap WordPress core in a whole bunch of what they and their customers consider "value add". Easy and automated backup/restore, one click dev/staging versions of the site and the ability to promote those into production when desired, automated provisioning and renewal of ssl certs, curated plugin backlists, monitoring and affected customer notifications of security updates across 3rd party plugin/themes as well as core, platform level WordPress specific optimisation, managed OS and web server and database security patching and updates. And like RedHat, they provide a "single neck to tread on" when something goes badly wrong: a support department that's both experienced and capable of solving pretty much any WP disaster 24x7, with a platform that can quickly and easily use to provide the needed help, and a pre existing business/financial relationship so both sides of that disaster and recovery are at least partially coincident it'll be charged and paid fairly and promptly.
For every single one of our WP clients, all that value add is totally worth the price jump from $5/month on GoDaddy et al. to $25/month of WPEngine. And for us, WPEngine has a better offering for what we value than wordpress.com.
The idea being the project is the same, the management is not.
> Do they look at the changelog of upstream and have engineers re-implement the same things only with original code
No, but they may selectively ignore features or changes that might have caused the fork in the first place.
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".
WordPress code is all GPL
If you copy Wordpress code, you do have a license to it.
I’ve been wondering if this will end up with another Jenkins or LibreOffice, where a fork is made and quickly gains mindshare.
Given the complexity and importance of UI in the project, LO may be the better example.
Watching people fight over this crummy old tech is like watching pigs wrestling in mud.
I've been looking for an alternative that let's me set up a site for non-technical users but I haven't found any open-source alternative. With Wordpress I can install something like GeneratePress & Blocks, set up ACF and add some custom fields, and anyone can manage the site. End users don't want to be writing React and Tailwind to edit their site.
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.
Tell me of one where a small business can get an experienced CMS user/editor/publisher on practically zero notice, and at basically regular office admin payrates.
_That_ is WordPress's "killer feature".
And its why my best guess at the long term outcome here involves a smoking crater where Matt's reputation and Automattic/wordpress.com/WordPress Foundation/wprdpress.org used to be, and either a similarly "Mutually Assured Destruction" crater where WPEngine once was, or perhaps a decimated-by-legal-bills hollow shell of what it is now.
And something like ClassicPress or AspirePress or other forks to "soak up" the huge existing talent pool of people who know how to run websites using something close enough to what WordPress used to be, and the thousands for hundreds of thousands of theme/plugin developers and Wordpress specialist developers/agencies/contractors choosing to hitch their professional lives to one or all of the emergent forks.
And for millions of website owners to shake their heads again at how annoying but essential IT nerds and their stupid drama are for them to run their business/website...
…if the mud was millions of dollars
More like billions of dollars. Automattic themselves supposedly have half a billion in revenue — the entire pie is much bigger than that.
Maybe we can have a better world if we don't try to make money off of software development.
Have fun with less/no good software. I'm one of the biggest proponents of FOSS software you can find, but eliminating moneymaking schemes entirely for everyone is just fantastical.
I have been seeing headlines about this WordPress vs WPG or wordpressengine thing for a bit now and honestly, I’m sorry to say it but who cares.
When the “war” settles we will see what the outcome will be, no earlier.
> who cares
Almost nobody.
Except the people who are responsible for or manage 40+% of the websites on the internet. The ones who are aware of how early they might become "acceptable collateral damage" to Matt's deranged "nuclear" "war" on WPEngine, and the business ramifications of "waiting till the war settles" if that means significant website downtime or emergency website migration to avoid it.
Which, if the numbers I've seen bandied around are accurate, is something like $400mil annual revenue to WPEngine, representing over a million WPEngine websites who are _directly_ in danger of Matt's current supply chain attacks. And with dozens or hundreds of smaller WordPress hosting companies looking on in horror wondering if they and their customers are next in Matt's extortion war. And probably tens of thousands of web dev firms and digital agencies who're all thinking "WTF?" and making contingency plans for all their WordPress clients no matter where they're hosting them.
Just someone release a trojan that zeroes all wordpress sites and every repo that contains the source code. Let them recreate that abomination again.