this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
48 points (84.3% liked)

Programming

17491 readers
55 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
[email protected]
48
The ongoing feud between Wordpress and WP Engine is threatening open-source principles and good name (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/programming
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 26 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What a bizarre headline. No it's not. It's proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it's specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that's the problem.

Speaking of which,

Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine's monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic's WordPress servers and resources.

tbh, that's totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don't know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a "free tier" of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.

Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It's not some moral thing.

[–] ericjmorey 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Everyone can save time and just read your synopsis. These are billionaires backed by huge investment funds fighting over service fees.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Right. I mean, there are no heroes here, to be sure; but there are also no horrible dog-kicking villains, either. Just two entitled brats, both trying to take more than they're owed.

[–] ericjmorey 1 points 1 month ago

Yup

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago

Once a developer starts charging for his product, the code is no longer open-source--it's proprietary, which falls under completely different licensing rules.

This is wrong. Open Source does not mean its free of charge. You can copy and fork the code and do whatever you want with it (including selling). And the developer has the right so sell the product too. This does not mean its proprietary, if the license and the code is Open Source.

Because people think Open Source means free of charge, is the problem why the Open Source developers have a hard time to make money and a living.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

... WordPress had a good name?

... Required use of proprietary software causing a bunch of headaches and arguments... somehow makes FOSS less reputable?

Is this guy from another planet?

...

Oh. Oooohhhh.

This is connected to the Prime TumblrBrain Powertripper, the bastard king of the land of delusional manipulative narcissists.

Ah.

That explains perfectly why the discourse around it is utterly contradictory and nonsensical.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m confused. The article makes note that, “Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine's monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic's WordPress servers and resources.” But then goes on to note that David Hansson, “believes Mullenweg's actions do not honor the principles set by the GNU General Public License (GPL).”

It sounds to me that Mullenweg wants compensation for their server resources, not use of their Wordpress software — otherwise wouldn’t everybody who uses WordPress outside of wordpress.com be on the hook too?

If that is the case, how is it any different than RedHat charging for support services for their distribution of the Linux kernel and corresponding GNU software?

I feel like I’m missing something here.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Unless you fork the WordPress source code, it is hard coded to use Mullenweg's Automattic (his for-profit company) servers for plugin updates. This is not something you can tweak in a config somewhere.

So this isn't charging for support services. The open source WordPress is hard coded to be reliant on the for-profit Automattic servers, because Mullenweg has been mixing his non-profit and for-profit business shit.

This has not been a problem ever before. But instead of handling this in any way that might make sense, Mullenweg turned off the update servers for everyone with no notice when WPEngine rightfully responded incredulously to his sudden demand for 8% of their profit based off some weird claims about copyright that are invalid due to Mullenweg's own chosen license terms for WordPress.

He could set up free and paid tiers based off how much load on his servers people create. He could have the code adjusted to make the update server something that could be configured. He could engage the community to have a distributed volunteer network of update servers and reduce his server load by having his servers only provide proper update hashes to validate the updates were not tampered with.

But instead he's having a very very public tantrum with absurd negative impact to the community of people reliant on this open source software.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Thank you. That’s the part I was missing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Can you use the WordPress software without the WordPress servers?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Of course. You can host Wordpress just about anywhere that offers a recent enough version of php and access to a database

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then why does WP engine need access to this specific database?

[–] RonSijm 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Because Wordpress is also hosting 1000s of plugins that WP engine users can install.

I'm not sure what the license regarding those things is, WP engine could probably just mirror it -

But they basically got locked out of the default ecosystem infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I feel like mirroring the plugins would resolve this issue, since the argument seems to be centered on server costs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

The argument centering on server costs would be logical, but the actual legal battle going on, and Mullenweg's stated justification behind asking for 8% of WPEngine profit, is claims of misuse of copyrighted names.

Meanwhile the WordPress license explicitly cedes copyright over the name WordPress and the initialism WP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Not easily, honestly.

WordPress on its own is very bare bones, you're almost certainly going to want to install plugins, which by default can only be done from the builtin connection to WP servers.

WP without plugins doesn't even have basic things like gallery light boxes. Honestly it seems deliberate, since the easiest way to get a lot of basic features that should be in core is to install the automattic(the company that owns wordpress) jetpack extension, that also installs a bunch of data harvesting connections to their proprietary SaaS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Very easily, actually.

The LAMP/LEMP stack has been the standard for literally decades. Any typical shared web hosting by default uses the LAMP stack with CPanel management. And CPanel has the Softalicious software installer which has had a WordPress auto installer for a very long time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You completely missed that I was talking about installing plugins.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, I didn't. I just ignored it because it's not a very good point or relevant to the question.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You are completely missing their point. The plugin repo and updates are hardcoded to use WordPress's servers, that's the issue here. Yes, you can totally self host WordPress, you don't need something like cpanel (in fact, I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion, and I think the last time I used that archaic backend was in 2015), but if you want access to the plugin repo + automated plugin updates, you are unfortunately impacted by this BS.

Why be rude to people who are just trying to explain the issue to you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Ah yeah I definitely misunderstood the question of the comment they were replying to. I only brought up CPanel because it's extremely pervasive and is an example of how easy it is to host WordPress.

On the flip side, you can upload plugins to install them and the plugins can be coded to use different servers for automatic updates. In fact, the most popular platform to buy paid plugins and themes, Envato, has a plugin to facilitate updates which don't use the WP.org repo servers.

Honestly, the plugin repo and "click to update" system is one of the biggest problems with the WP ecosystem. Since the vast majority of plugins and themes are horribly made and run by idiots, it's very often that updates will break sites outright. That's why I disable it for client accounts.

Sorry I came off as rude. It was just a misunderstanding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can only be done by default ... also means there are other options.

Matt disappoints but their plugin repository isn't a vendor lock in like Apple denying other app stores (without acts enforcing it etc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not aware of any method to add a third party plugin repository. (Is the software that runs the plugin repository even open source?)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I don't know, but I guess the reason why it isn't done yet is because nobody perceives it as a problem. It would require a repository plugin to install plugins I think. But it all comes down to plugin distribution and deployment. Mostly if you want something outside the default repository you can just upload it to your own install / stack. If a developer provide alternative download ways. Like a github release for example.

[–] Kissaki 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They have taken over the ACF plugin in the plugin store. In an intransparent manner. It is GPL licensed, but had a pro license and features sold. And still does have them on their publishers side.

A strength of the GPL is that the community can fork and take over projects.

At the same time, and this instance is such a case, on a centralized platform, projects can be taken over instead of be forked.

They developed and published a plugin. Now it's been taken over by someone else, on the primary distribution and discovery platform, and they have no control over it. Worse than that, the takeover now offers their sold functionalities for free now.

This makes the "open source but not free, but after two years true FOSS licensed" licenses look very useful if not necessary for businesses and developers that want to monetize. At the very least when they [have to] use centralized platforms.

[–] FizzyOrange 1 points 1 month ago

The GPL doesn't allow you to use someone else's trademark. Though in this case it might be tricky for "WPEngine" to claim WordPress violated their trademark, and apparently WP has T&Cs that allow them to do it anyway.