[HN Gopher] WP Engine sent "cease and desist" letter to Automattic
___________________________________________________________________
WP Engine sent "cease and desist" letter to Automattic
Direct link to letter: https://wpengine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De... Related article on
TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-
wp-en...
Author : kevmarsden
Score : 272 points
Date : 2024-09-24 00:21 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| This seems like it will be relevant...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
| firecall wrote:
| > Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg
| unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP
| Engine a "cancer to WordPress."
|
| In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to
| the Web.
|
| The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing
| broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more
| than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf
| CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can
| figure out without hiring IT.
|
| Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a
| better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system
| that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
|
| If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could
| add a WSL-like layer for WordPress cancer plugins... I don't
| know. I wish someone would have the conversation. I don't even
| care whether it's Rust.
| iambateman wrote:
| Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does.
|
| I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I
| really enjoy but it hasn't gotten much market pick up.
|
| There's definitely some thinking in this area on how to move
| WP users toward Laravel.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at
| Laracon last month was great.
|
| However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a
| system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and
| plugins available, without touching code. An open-source
| Squarespace, basically.
|
| Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for
| most people unfortunately...
| bsder wrote:
| > And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-
| shelf CMS is all they need
|
| Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of
| all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.
|
| The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't
| look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."
|
| Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely
| like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely
| different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS
| (because reasons)!"
|
| Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the
| company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet.
| And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a
| political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now
| fuck off."
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > Response from IT
|
| This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly
| hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an
| IT department.
|
| Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees
| before a single IT guy.
|
| WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the
| off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy
| or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right
| now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress' lunch, and (if
| you don't need plugins) is objectively superior in many
| ways.
|
| We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that
| role which won't make programmers swear, or let closed-
| source solutions shut out the open ones.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up
| an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a
| year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us
| they work working on it.
|
| I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and
| marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause
| and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we
| should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets
| up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail
| blast system."
|
| I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head,
| wide-eyed.
|
| The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same
| SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a
| separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind
| of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM.
| External accounts would need to be set up manually. They
| used a different domain thinking they could just change it
| later but it got so baked into everything that changing it
| everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting
| solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because
| none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image
| was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set
| up in a way that made it compatible with anything we
| already had in place.
|
| I told marketing there was no way I could make this work
| and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling
| me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane
| compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't
| we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you
| could plug that in?" Jfc no.
|
| The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm
| refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain
| that they had decided not mention any of this to me from
| the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it
| work.
|
| I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but
| you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate
| this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more
| monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd
| need that either way even if the plugins were compatible)
| and if you want a team to write some custom integrations
| for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure
| they can support it when the plugins change and break
| everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no
| longer maintained."
|
| He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not
| sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to
| work."
|
| I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can
| imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that
| was considered acceptable.
| johng wrote:
| This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You
| can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down
| the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script.
| Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty
| trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and
| there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's
| one of the simplest things to integrate with something
| else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made
| something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad
| and didn't want to play ball.... could just be
| misinterpretation over text, who knows.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| * yes the images would be an easy fix
|
| * their CRM plugins did not support Salesforce
|
| * even if it did, they didn't realize that was like an
| extra $1500/month for API connection (something like
| that), which was also balked at, but just a plain fact
|
| * they already built everything out and changing plugins
| was not an option
|
| * I have almost no experience with WordPress and 0 time
| to figure it out alongside the myriad of other projects
| on my plate
|
| * 0 thought went into authentication and that was also
| something I couldn't change
|
| * this was not built by a team with WordPress experience,
| or any technical experience
|
| They said "it's set up like this, make it work". I
| couldn't, not without dropping everything and hiring
| someone to do it, and managing a contractor(s) which was
| also not an option.
| gnu8 wrote:
| > He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm
| not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a
| website to work."
|
| I would quit the moment I was spoken to in that way, if
| not sooner.
| bigiain wrote:
| > The problem is that marketing wants a website that
|
| ... they can publish and update content without having to
| get IT involved - just like they did at their last job
| where the website was WordPress.
|
| Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing
| department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs
| to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just
| not how the world works.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions
| without IT involvement for obvious security and stability
| reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security
| maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't
| care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job
| and why the dept exists.
| bigiain wrote:
| Those concerns are kinda the raison d'etre for WPEngine.
|
| For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department,
| or so large and where the IT department has effectively
| become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just
| buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let
| them do their thing.
|
| I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes
| have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both
| ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized
| businesses do not have an IT department, and also that
| there are people and departments in their own
| organisations who's IT needs are real but are not
| considered a priority by the IT Department.
|
| (Often understandably not the IT departments priority,
| the people in a bank IT department who're securing
| financial systems from continuous attacks almost
| certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set
| up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be
| a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_
| frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things"
| they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I'll just ignore the "IT pushback comments", as if we
| don't have real actual reasons for pushing back against
| the stupid shit people with no experience think is a good
| idea.
|
| The main problem, security aside, is when shit goes south
| (and it will at some point), IT will be asked to handle
| something they didn't set up, don't know anything about,
| and will be looked down upon when they can't get it
| working quickly.
|
| As long as there is ownership of any problems by whomever
| set it up, yeah, go nuts, but experience also tells me
| that's _never_ how it works.
| gg82 wrote:
| And then people bypass IT for things that IT would be
| happy to help them with and end up getting called in to
| fix some non-standard thing that has become critical to
| their work.
| bsder wrote:
| > Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing
| department that adds zero revenue
|
| Please reread. I said the _website_ brought zero revenue.
|
| The website for our company never broke 5 digits in
| _total_ views. I could almost precisely correlate who was
| looking at our website with who marketing was currently
| talking to. Scaling was useless. Dynamism was useless.
| etc.
|
| All resource spent on the website was _worse than
| useless_ as it took marketing away from doing _anything
| else_ which would could result in revenue.
|
| A _lot_ of businesses are in the same boat where the
| website brings in zero revenue. A static website would be
| more than good enough but somebody in mangement chain has
| a "Must Keep Up With The Joneses" streak. And then you
| wind up on WordPress.
| ksenzee wrote:
| Drupal is trying for basically this with its Starshot
| project. It might just work, if they can get enough people to
| build third-party themes.
| bigiain wrote:
| > Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer
| a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent
| system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
|
| And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask
| around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's
| experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours
| a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which
| there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos
| which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own
| site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making
| widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business
| is.
|
| I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on
| WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking
| about how to run their business website.
|
| (I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the
| WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to
| have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while
| being identical in use to WordPress so all the people
| currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's
| different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to
| make it. )
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity
| versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress.
|
| For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on
| my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate
| significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if
| you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish?
| PHP and Apache come up a lot too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's like any other system designed to be used by people that
| are not technically savvy. Lots of things have default values
| that are not sane. That's why the script kiddies hit every
| server they can with known defaults and vulns. Otherwise,
| it's like any other publicly facing internet server in that
| it takes maintenance with patches and updates and being
| informed on what you're running and changes being made.
|
| So because the majority of users are not savvy, it's become a
| cesspool. Then you read about it on a tech forum like HN and
| it is derided as an inferior product rather than allowing
| improper use by the user/operator.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I've had an interview last week for a company doing
| WordPress stuff, and their tech lead, computer science guy,
| said their next project was a monitoring tool running unit
| tests in production to understand the health of the app
|
| It's not only the non-tech-savvy, even CS guys become trash
| when they go too close to WP
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its
| ubiquity versus its quality_
|
| Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by
| someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of
| relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins
| and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server.
|
| Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But
| WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.
| joe_g_young wrote:
| I think your response can be said of any application made
| before now.
| smt88 wrote:
| There are degrees of bad. All code bases are bad.
|
| But I've been writing web software for 30 years and
| WordPress is among the worst mainstream applications.
| It's worse than its PHP competitors at the time, and it's
| worse than Ghost and many of the competitors that came
| after it.
|
| You can't just dismiss all criticism of the past because
| it was the past. Some people wrote worse software than
| others in the past, just as they do today.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Personally I'm think a big issue is the insistence of
| wanting to keep everything as backwards compatible for as
| long as possible. It becomes a burden. At some point you
| have to accept to make substantial changes in order to
| improve the situation but it's not going to happen in the
| WP ecosystem because that's one of their selling points.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It shows the code base rarely matters compared to user
| adoption.
| rurban wrote:
| Excuse me. phpwiki did exist before mediawiki and
| wordpress, and allowed no custom php in plugins and
| themes. It was all safe. Already 20 years ago.
|
| And as worse is better predicted, all new ones went
| insecure, with less features, but nicer looking themes.
| firecall wrote:
| Way back in 2013, Matt Cutts from Google said in a talk:
|
| "WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of Search
| Engine Optimization (SEO)"
|
| Agencies really latched onto that!
|
| SEO was the new hotness.
|
| An industry was then built around WordPress.
|
| Clients would hear that it was the best at SEO, and they
| wanted a CMS they could update themselves.
|
| Agencies could churn out variations of the same WordPress
| site and plugin stack, and then charge clients for ongoing
| hosting and maintenance fees to keep it updated.
|
| Then there are all the plugins that get added depending on
| the whims of the 'developer' at the time.
|
| The WordPress website then languishes when the agency or dev
| vanishes, WordPress gets hacked, and the client gets charged
| again.
|
| The WP GUI builder plugins are a whole separate hellscape all
| to themselves!
| ufmace wrote:
| I run my own Wordpress server for a blog, and IMO it's
| basically fine if you use reasonable deployment management
| practices and don't install 500 random crap plugins and
| themes. The basic install is about as bulletproof as it gets
| in the mainstream web software business.
|
| I don't particularly love PHP, but you don't need to touch it
| if you don't try to write any plugins. Yes, some of its
| practices are pretty wacky, like every plugin has full access
| to the filesystem and database to do basically anything, and
| the system expects to be able to update code files in place
| from web requests, but meh, just give it it's own $5 server
| and let it do its thing, and definitely be very careful which
| plugins you use and how you get them.
|
| What you get in return for this is a perfectly fine CMS that
| anyone with basic computer skills can run. Yeah, static site
| generators are cool and all that from a tech expert's
| perspective, but nobody who isn't a tech expert can actually
| do anything with them, and oh, by the way, the ability to
| make any changes at all typically involves at the very least
| SSH access to the host server with full write permissions.
| econcon wrote:
| We had that problem in barebones WP with no plugins at all.
|
| Once we installed a few security plugins, it worked out just
| fine!
| chris_wot wrote:
| I personally don't like block themes.
| lightlyused wrote:
| Similar experience here. Poorly documented and inflexible.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| Yeah I run wp2static on clients, cancel the hosting then push
| the files to vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages.
|
| A PHP version is vulnerable. If you upgrade it, some plugin
| breaks. If you manually upgrade the offending plugin, the pesky
| developer now wants a subscription. Just a nono. I build on
| Hugo.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route;
| their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically
| implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to
| sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and
| takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they
| want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not
| more.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as
| a CMS.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yes, I know, I use it too. But github is hardly usable by
| non technical users , nor is markdown. We are talking
| about marketing deps of billion$ companies.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I think your question answers itself if you look from the
| perspective of a non-technical marketing person who's
| used to WYSIWYG tools, rather than a programmer who's
| reading a site called Hacker News.
| vundercind wrote:
| "I need to add an image gallery"
|
| "I need to add and edit multistep forms that send an
| email to me"
|
| "I need to change one of our social media links"
|
| That can be mostly or entirely self-serve for marketing
| folks on Wordpress, with all the work happening in their
| browser. Plus tons of other stuff.
| stvltvs wrote:
| There are other plugins that generate static sites. Not sure
| if they would work for your use case, but worth looking into
| if you haven't.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| Must clarify: not wp2static, but a random plugin breaking
| on php upgrade, sometimes requiring a subscription in new
| versions.
| breck wrote:
| I'd love to get your feedback on https://hub.scroll.pub/.
| Create new sites in 0.1 seconds. No signup required.
|
| It's a new stack, but it's pretty revolutionary foundation, and
| as we get some good templates and imrpove the UX, I think it
| should bring a lot of joy to people who currently suffer with
| wordpress. It's all open source/public domain. Having started
| my programming career in Wordpress ~17 years ago, I have been
| able to take my favorite parts from it and get rid of all the
| annoying parts (like requiring a database, php/javascript
| hybrid, etc).
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
|
| me neither but it pays; when we get called, bad things already
| happened, so it's always an emergency which means we can ask
| for 400-500$/hr to fix it. And there are _so_ many bad wp sites
| that we can retire on that alone. But let me tell you about
| OpenCart, Drupal, etc which also are all lovely targets and
| more niche so higher hourlies!
|
| As someone with a formal verification and static typing
| background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is
| very good business.
| mmarian wrote:
| Any recommendations on how you can find that kind of work?
| I'd personally enjoy it, but I don't know how to break into
| it without working as a WP dev at an unsustainably-low wage.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > As someone with a formal verification and static typing
| background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is
| very good business.
|
| May I ask how you find this kind of work? The kinds of orgs
| with hacked/broken/incompetently-run WP installs don't tend
| to be the type of orgs you'd find via professional
| networking, but by going through the dregs of Craigslist's
| gigs pages, no?
| busterarm wrote:
| That's on the customers. I used to work at a shop that used WP
| and it was a huge force multiplier. We were WP Engine customers
| and at some point we moved to Pantheon.io and then we moved to
| a static site with an internal-only WP frontend for content
| editors.
|
| We had 2 developers, a PM, 20-30 content writers and $5B ARR.
| Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen. Even when we
| switched to building a static site, we still had our content
| editors write markdown in WordPress because it was easier to do
| that and pull all of the content from the database on deploy
| than train them.
|
| The absolute worst part of being a WP Engine customer was being
| on Linode and the yearly Christmas Eve DDOS.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen.
|
| So they weren't web sites but spam.
|
| What I'm curious about though is if your former workplace
| still exists or is now AI generating the spam...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| That's pretty unfair. Most of the work I do can be
| considered "marketing" since it's corporate sites and
| portfolios. Businesses need to have an online presence of
| some sort and someone has to create one for them. Not
| everything is SEO spam.
| nottorp wrote:
| > it's corporate sites and portfolios
|
| Oh wait. You used "corporate sites and portofolios". The
| OP used the generic "content" though. There's a
| difference.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| OP said "Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen"
| which is just marketing sites. But pretty much all
| business sites are marketing. If you don't have an
| e-commerce and you're not a saas of some sort, you have a
| marketing site. It's there for visibility and to provide
| information.
| busterarm wrote:
| Not spam at all. I just don't want to be so obvious about
| what the business was, even though I've mentioned it in the
| past.
|
| Think top 10 keywords space and spanning about 4-5 of them.
|
| It's the largest business in its space and a major national
| advertiser both digitally and traditionally. You have seen
| their ads on the street, on TV, on websites and on Youtube.
|
| Even internationally, you have seen their ads on TV. Big
| hint.
| nottorp wrote:
| :) I don't watch TV and run ad blockers online, sorry.
|
| When you're using terms like marketing, leads and content
| writers, it sounds like a content mill with zero
| substance. Even if it's "top 10 keywords".
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > That's on the customers
|
| No that's on the various design agencies that sell "custom
| websites" and instead they just slap together a 59$ theme and
| a dozen plug-ins. Most customers don't know shit about the
| web and they just trust the agency to do a professional job.
| And in my 10+ years of experience as a freelancer I've seen
| plenty of agencies taking advantage of clients.
| pluc wrote:
| WordPress has the same problem as PHP: it's too easy to do
| what you want the wrong way. The right way is great, but
| the wrong way is easier, cheaper, more common, more
| documented, etc.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Totally agree.
|
| Wordpress used as a CMS where you build everything from
| scratch using built in functions and the absolute minumum
| number of plugins (in my experience it was exactly 1,
| ACF) can generate sites that are solid.
|
| I have projects I built a decade ago that are still
| online, are still running and haven't been hacked.
|
| The problem is that the overwhelming majority of WP sites
| aren't built like that. Because "there's a plugin for
| that". And you end up with these monster sites with dozen
| of plugins, each importing their own scripts and styles,
| all injecting their own crap, all bringing in their own
| issues. And you use those on kitchen-sink style themes
| that are designed to do everything and end up doing
| nothing well.
|
| But that's the inevitable result when you lower the
| barrier to the point where one can just click buttons and
| install whatever.
| busterarm wrote:
| Supply and demand.
|
| These businesses exist and operate the way they do because
| of customer desires. The customers could hire better
| agencies but for a number of reasons don't.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Sorry but saying that it's "customer desire" is nonsense.
| Most customers don't have the skills to judge the work
| they receive. They know they need something done. They
| trust someone. How are they supposed to know if what they
| got was subpar? It's like that in every profession. You
| have to trust that the person on the other side is
| professional and more often than not they're not.
| andruby wrote:
| > 2 developers, a PM, 20-30 content writers and $5B ARR
|
| Please tell me that these 30 people weren't the full company
| generating $5B in annually recurring revenue?
| sixtyj wrote:
| And so nice it looked at the beginning...
|
| Instead of WordPress, what solutions do you use?
|
| Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Webnode and other wysiwyg ones are
| even worse imho.
|
| Are there any non-Nodejs or non-React open source CMS that
| don't vendor lock you?
|
| Because I feel that WP somehow sucks in details and
| maintenance, but I can't find anything comparable without being
| sucked into development hell. :)
|
| Thanks for suggestions.
| pjerem wrote:
| Are the good old PHP CMS dead ? Things like Joomla, Dotclear,
| Drupal ...
| sixtyj wrote:
| They are not dead. The reason why WP took web by storm and
| Joomla and Drupal became less visible is that WP did a lot
| of work in instant usability - their 2 minutes'
| installation changed the game imho.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| After a few years building on WP I switched to
| https://getkirby.com/ and never looked back.
| sixtyj wrote:
| Thanks. It seems really good. PHP, files and folders
| instead of db, easy templating, plugins, admin interface
| built on Vue.js, open source at GitHub and a commercial
| license as well. Since 2012.
|
| The only issue is to have more themes available, at
| getkirby-themes_com there are 22 only.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Because it's not designed with a theme approach. It's
| designed to build custom sites. Themes aren't really a
| thing inside kirby because of the tight relationship
| between content itself and admin interface. I like to
| think at it as an in between something like Laravel and
| WordPress.
| sixtyj wrote:
| I got it. But explain this to people who are spoiled by
| $59 themes :)
|
| More themes that you can choose from -> more Kirby users
| -> stability -> more users coming from other solutions
| etc...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| It's an entirely different target audience. Kirby is a
| tool that's designed mostly for developers, and not
| really for end users. There's no one-click install,
| there's no pressing a button to install plugins. And
| that's by design.
| sixtyj wrote:
| Well, in fact it was two clicks install :) I've
| downloaded it, unzipped into a folder and with PHP
| running I was ready... No Nodejs and React needed. These
| are so painful to maintain.
|
| So Kirby is really nice to run.
|
| And I understand your point.
| arp242 wrote:
| WordPress isn't that bad. Okay, the code is kinda messy in some
| places, but which 25 year old project isn't? And yes, in the
| early days it was cowboy coding, but those days have been over
| for more than 15 years.
|
| What "broken and malware ridden WordPress site" typically means
| is "customer installed a bunch of random plugins from random
| sites written by teenagers or bozos who don't know what they're
| doing". And yes, that can screw things up, but that's not
| really WordPress's fault IMHO.
|
| Maybe it can do more to protect users from this; I don't know.
| But obviously the plugin ecosystem is a hugely important part
| of the WordPress platform and you can't just lock that down
| technically. Just make sure you only install plugins from
| authors who aren't teenagers or bozos.
|
| I'll add that personally I don't especially like WordPress for
| various reasons. But at the same time I don't think this is
| really a fair criticism.
| Kye wrote:
| My slightly earlier submission with a direct PDF link for people
| who aren't able to view Twitter:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631920
| CPLX wrote:
| Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive.
|
| Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's
| comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of
| what's wrong with WP Engine.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's kind of perverse of Matt considering:
|
| A. He accuses "WP Engine" for being confusing branding. He
| literally owns WordPress.com; which confuses tens of thousands
| of people on a daily basis. ("Are you on the WordPress login
| page?" "I swear that I am!")
|
| B. He complains about the post revisions not being limitless.
| But until recently, WordPress.com had a limit of 25.
|
| C. If post revisions matter, surely plugins matter, right?
| WordPress.com requires going up _two_ tiers to use any
| unapproved plugins.
|
| D. Matt was an investor in WP Engine, and _even appeared on
| their podcast last year_ , even though this revisions system
| limitation has been in place for a decade?
|
| E. This is the same Matt who wrote the _WordPress Bill of
| Rights_ , complete with specifically saying "The freedom to run
| the program, for any purpose" and "The freedom to study how the
| program works, and change it to make it do what you wish."
|
| F. The same Matt who wrote in the WordPress trademark policy
| that "WP" _is not_ a WordPress trademark and _anyone_ may use
| it however they wish?
|
| G. The same Matt who forked B2, and if B2 was still around,
| would be quite vulnerable to B2 potentially complaining about
| Matt's lack of contribution to _them_?
|
| It goes on. I hate to say it, but every sign points to Matt
| being a hypocrite. Even an extortionist.
| johng wrote:
| Not to mention his text messages. It's clear that if they
| were willing to pay, he was willing to not even mention them
| in his keynote. It looks quite clear that he wanted money and
| was willing to let everything slide if they got it.
| keane wrote:
| (1) The WPE C&D is, in my opinion, sloppily written, full
| of equivocation/fallacious reasoning. The situation is not
| "clear". (2) We haven't heard Matt's explanation of the
| text messages. (3) The WordPress name was registered in
| 2006 by Matt's company Automattic. In 2010 it was
| generously (no good deed is unpunished) transferred to a
| 501(c)3 and Automattic was given a license to the mark (at
| least in WordPress.com). According to WPE themselves: "the
| payment ostensibly would be for a 'license' to use certain
| trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no
| such license". That's a potentially disputed claim: they
| very well may need a license as they are (currently)
| possibly in violation of the (generous) trademark policy by
| advertising services they've titled "Essential WordPress",
| "Core WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It's unwise
| to malign Matt publicly - a court will be sorting out the
| necessity of the license.
| etchalon wrote:
| You don't end a trademark dispute with a blog post
| claiming a host utilizing a feature any sane host would
| utilize is a violation of some core tenant of WordPress.
|
| You end it with lawyers talking to lawyers quietly.
| keane wrote:
| Have you taken a look at wpengine.com? The name WordPress is
| everywhere with them declaring they are "The most trusted
| WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech
| Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider" and that "WP
| Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". The WP Engine C&D
| insists they're allowed to use 'WP' (as you echo) but the
| dispute could be partly related to this broader marketing,
| which possibly creates confusion (a court will likely have to
| decide).
|
| Edit: To your first point, Automattic, who originally
| registered the trademark, apparently has a license from the
| trademark owner (the Foundation) to use the mark (at least
| for that domain). https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-
| wordpress-foundation/ WP Engine, by their own admission, does
| not have a license. It also seems odd to call Matt perverse
| in what seems to be a trademark dispute without any
| acknowledgment that he is the inventor of the software, as
| such the founder of the community, that his friend Christine
| Tremoulet coined the name, and that his company originally
| registered the trademark.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| WordPress's own trademark policy states:
|
| > For example, a consulting company can describe its
| business as "123 Web Services, offering WordPress
| consulting for small businesses," but cannot call its
| business "The WordPress Consulting Company." Similarly, a
| business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as
| "XYZ Themes, the world's best WordPress themes," but cannot
| call itself "The WordPress Theme Portal."
|
| If WordPress specifically says that using the tagline "the
| world's best WordPress themes" is okay, it's hard to show
| anything WP Engine has done as being unacceptable.
|
| https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
|
| Edit, because I'm responding too fast or some nonsense:
| That's an interesting point; but if that were true, Matt
| should have used that as his argument, after sending a
| polite letter first explaining that was going too far. This
| did not happen; and considering Matt was on their podcast
| and didn't give a darn until lately, it appears to not be a
| real problem.
| keane wrote:
| The paragraph prior:
|
| >All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can
| use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain
| their services, but they cannot use them as part of a
| _product_ , project, _service_ , domain name, or company
| name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an
| affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress
| Foundation or the WordPress open source project.
|
| At https://wpengine.com/plans/ they appear to offer _a
| product /service_ titled/branded "Essential WordPress"
| with others to choose from being "Core WordPress" or
| "Enterprise WordPress". (mirror: https://web.archive.org/
| web/20240921160743/https://wpengine....)
| mthoms wrote:
| Thats covered by Nominative Fair Use. It's the same body
| of law that allows a repair shop to advertise that they
| are a "Volkswagen Repair Shop" (as long as there is no
| implication that they are officially endorsed by the car
| company).
| keane wrote:
| Attempt to sell a product titled "Essential Disney(r)" or
| a service titled "Enterprise Outlook(r)" and it's not
| going to go well for you.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > Edit, because I'm responding too fast or some nonsense
|
| It probably isn't you.
|
| There is a short timeout of a few minutes on the Reply
| link in a thread. I think this to discourage hasty and
| unthoughtful arguments.
|
| But if you click the timestamp on the comment, it takes
| you a page where you can reply immediately.
| sureIy wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Who knows what put a chili up
| his, but this debacle has started out of nowhere and he's not
| the good party here.
| _hmry wrote:
| There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2
| days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406
| cldellow wrote:
| I don't use WP Engine or WordPress, so I don't have a side in
| this fight.
|
| As an outsider, that context seems a bit dubious to me.
|
| @photomatt has tweeted [5135]: "[...] Please let me know if
| any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up
| about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in
| WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that
| you get support. [...]"
|
| If this was true, I would think that @photomatt's twitter
| feed would be loudly boosting this disgruntled employee's
| story of WP Engine-imposed limits and subsequent retaliation.
| Yet @photomatt's twitter feeds seems silent to me. This makes
| me skeptical of this context.
|
| [5135]: https://x.com/photomatt/status/1836862087320195174
| mthoms wrote:
| Meanwhile, right now over on Reddit there are WordPress
| Core developers posting about this anonymously for fear of
| retaliation from Matt.
|
| He has... a bit of reputation.
| ufmace wrote:
| That, and the whole thing about Matt M going on a scathing
| rant about how bad WPEngine supposedly is[0], supposedly
| because they don't support WP page revision control as well
| as he'd like. Seems a bit over-the-top and breathless to me.
|
| I figure the whole thing is a corporate whine-fest over who
| makes more money from actually hosting Wordpress sites.
|
| [0] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
| x0x0 wrote:
| Seems unlikely though? Matt wrote a post on the web, ie he
| had unlimited length available to him. If the dispute is over
| employee contributions, then he should have made that the
| focus of his complaint.
| Aloha wrote:
| Disclaimer WP Engine Customer -
|
| I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit
| piece.
|
| I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need
| cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the
| vagaries of running wordpress myself.
|
| I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from
| Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like
| lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market
| segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.
|
| I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and
| would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is
| the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.
| philistine wrote:
| Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently
| from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP
| Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off,
| as Automattic offers.
| Aloha wrote:
| Which particular service of Automattic?
|
| Like Wordpress.com in hindsight seems to offer it, but its
| not clear to me that I'm their customer target.
| x3sphere wrote:
| Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they
| don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at
| least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The
| base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure
| how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| WP Engine offers headless WP CMS to static, for one, and it's
| pretty slick. I don't believe Automattic offers that, yet.
| But I bet Automattic builds it in, in the near future, and
| that's probably what this WP Engine beef is really all about:
| money.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Wordpress.com is very limited and locked down relative to the
| .org variant hosts like WPE.
| x0x0 wrote:
| They offered many features that wordpress.com copied (staging
| sites with one-button cloning; easy backup and restores;
| automated updates of php and wp code; tweaks to prevent
| security issues; automatic cdn) and others like serious
| engineers answering support tickets to help you sort out
| whatever fragile, insecure wordpress crap your marketing
| team, or their wordpress contractors, installed on your site.
|
| We shouldn't overrate a lot of those features, because I
| think they were pretty obvious things to want. But WPEngine
| was, afaik, the first to market with all of the above in a
| pretty-cheap and seamless package.
| authorfly wrote:
| Jason Cohen has done a number of talks on the origin of WP
| engine as being reliable/fast/secure in terms of
| preferences at the time of launch;
|
| But I think you are right, the features you listed
| naturally contributed and strengthened those needs.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| > cheap reliable hosting
|
| I can't speak to the reliability, but it's definitely not cheap
| muglug wrote:
| Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial
| wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text
| messages are so much worse.
| keane wrote:
| It's not uncommon for a license being required to use a
| registered trademark. WPE denies they need one. Matt apparently
| disagrees.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| If this is indeed true, that ship has sailed. WP Engine was
| founded nearly fifteen years ago. You need to enforce your
| trademark for it to be valid: you don't get to decide
| fourteen years later that you're actually not happy about it.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| This is funny considering WP Engine has been the only thing that
| kept me developing wordpress sites for years.
| mdotk wrote:
| I'm no fan of WP Engine and their outrageous prices for very
| average performance, but this is a terrible look for Matt M if
| true. reply
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _WP Engine is not WordPress_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water
| cooler talk, which is what HN is for.
|
| I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here,
| their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently
| include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as
| punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat
| they might sue).
|
| The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards the middle
| where they describe Mullenweg's keynote speech. It makes,
| according to WPE, these claims (numbers mine):
|
| 1. Claiming that WP Engine is a company that just wants to "feed
| off" of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back.
|
| 2. Suggesting that WP Engine employees may be fired for speaking
| up, supporting Mr. Mullenweg, or supporting WordPress, and
| offering to provide support in finding them new jobs if that were
| to occur.
|
| 3. Stating that every WP Engine customer should watch his speech
| and then not renew their contracts with WP Engine when those
| contracts are up for renewal.
|
| 4. Claiming that if current WP Engine customers switch to a
| different host they "might get faster performance."
|
| 5. Alleging that WP Engine is "misus[ing] the trademark"
| including by using "WP" in its name.
|
| 6. Claiming that WP Engine's investor doesn't "give a dang" about
| Open Source ideals.
|
| Under a US defamation analysis, claims (1), (3), and (6) appear
| to be statements of opinion. Statements of opinion, even when
| persuasively worded and authoritative, are generally not
| actionable as defamation. It might depend on the wording; in
| corner cases, an opinion can be actionable if it directly implies
| a conclusion made from facts known to the speaker and not
| disclosed to the audience --- but the facts involved have to be
| specific, you can't just imagine that I've implied I have secret
| facts (or my audience expects me to) because I'm Matt Mullenweg.
|
| Claim (4) seems like it's probably just a fact? Is WPE assuredly
| the fastest possible provider at any given price point? The
| "might" also seems pretty important there.
|
| That leaves (5) the allegation about the trademark dispute, which
| doesn't sound like an especially promising avenue for a lawsuit,
| but who knows? and (2) the bit about employee and former employee
| reprisals. The thing about (2) is if there's a single example of
| a disgruntled WPE employee who thinks they missed a promotion
| because they stuck up for the WordPress Foundation or whatever,
| WPE might have a hard time using that claim.
|
| You'd think that before WordPress/Automattic started directly
| demanding funds from the board of WPE, they probably had some
| kind of counsel review this stuff and figure out what they could
| and couldn't safely say?
|
| Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these
| claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to
| roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're
| alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these
| interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").
|
| This is one of those times where I'm saying a lot of stuff in the
| hopes that someone much more knowledgeable will set me straight.
| :)
| akerl_ wrote:
| I assume the real goal here is to have the letter exist and be
| public, as a counterpoint in customer conversations.
| aimazon wrote:
| Matt is predictable. WPE wrote this letter for the community.
| They knew Matt would throw a fit and they would be able to take
| the high ground while also releasing an assassination of Matt's
| character. The Wordpress community doesn't care about
| Wordpress.com, Matt just blew what little credibility he had
| left. Worthless as a legal letter, brilliant as a response for
| the Wordpress community. Matt will inevitably step down within
| a few weeks, and a few years from now, this will be seen as a
| pivotal moment enabling WPE to dominate Wordpress.com. Matt
| could not have played this worse.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I don't follow the WP ecosystem very close since I left it
| years ago when I found better tools but I very much look
| forward to see if your confident prediction holds true.
| onli wrote:
| Matt has no reason to step down. He will explain where the
| monetary claim is coming from - probably the development time
| promised and not delivered, or the use of the trademark - and
| then you have two competing narratives. One by the Foss
| software maker, one by a big enterprise. Why would a relevant
| part believe wp engine? And even if, how would that harm
| internal automattic structures in a way that he loses
| control?
|
| Also, I see no way how this going forward even in front of
| courts could end up with wp engine replacing WordPress.com.
| aimazon wrote:
| Automattic benefits greatly from their close relationship
| to Wordpress. Using the power they have to threaten a
| commercial competitor that has a good reputation in the
| community will push the Wordpress community to reevaluate
| that relationship. The contributions Automattic makes to
| Wordpress are valuable but valuable contributions do not
| excuse bad behaviour. Souring the relationship between
| Automattic and Wordpress is a major blunder, which Matt
| will be responsible for. If Automattic lose their
| preferential treatment and are forced to compete with WPE
| based only on service then they will be crushed because
| Automattic's offerings are not as good -- there's a reason
| Matt is so sensitive about WPE. Automattic are just as
| dependent on venture capital as WPE, even more so because
| of how their business has been losing focus. Automattic's
| value is based on its relationship with Wordpress, whereas
| WPE's is entirely based on the service. Matt is threatening
| Automattic's most valuable asset, removing him may be seen
| as the only option to rescue the relationship.
|
| As an aside, people don't usually act like this when things
| are going good. Perhaps Matt is lashing out because of
| pressure he is already under.
|
| edit: and to close the loop, Matt is demanding benevolence
| from WPE that Automattic themselves don't engage in.
| Automattic own the Wordpress.com domain and promote their
| hosting service through Wordpress.org (which causes the
| exact confusion Matt accuses WPE of benefiting from). The
| money Automattic spend on supporting Wordpress project is
| not a donation, it's quid pro quo. Would WPE pay $10m a
| year to own all that? Of course, any rational company in
| the space would... but that's not what Matt is offering.
| jarito wrote:
| 8% of revenue in perpetuity seems like a licensing deal,
| not payment for services. WP is arguing that they don't
| need a license deal to deliver their service which seems to
| be true? Therefore, the 8% just seems like a shakedown to
| get money - good old blackmail.
| pxtail wrote:
| > Matt just blew what little credibility he had left
|
| Just "lol", it's really funny line when taking into
| consideration all the years how he manages WP, cares about
| direction it moves, fosters and cares about OSS, directs
| funds and all of other countless things AND putting on the
| other chalk some WP hosting which happened to grow for one
| reason or another and is contributing peanuts compared to
| what it gains from the WP. No, he still has a lot of
| credibility.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Maybe my view into the Wordpress community (mostly via
| Twitter) isn't representative, but it does not seem like WPE
| represents the community's views from what I'm seeing.
| slouch wrote:
| Take a look at the votes on Matt's reddit comments
| https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| In a sub that size with a subset of people who are quite
| pissed, those scores don't look that bad to me. The OP
| only has +17. We'll see, I guess.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a
| banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including
| WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct
| competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but
| I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's
| some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't
| know enough about the law to know whether they have a chance of
| winning such an argument). If Automattic was purely producing
| open source software with no vested interest in profit, that
| would be a different story perhaps.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Abuse of position" is not generally an actionable claim.
| uudecoded wrote:
| Generally, but also especially when the position is
| "WordPress".
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes, but being the editor of the software used by your
| competitor is certainly funny.
| sfmike wrote:
| just for monopolies right? And for hosting online and
| software that does it(two verticals of wordpress) there are
| hoardes of options.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > just for monopolies right?
|
| I suspect that's still not actionable in the way the
| parent poster means, since AFAICT there no private right
| of action: _You_ can 't sue, only petition some
| government agency to bring their own lawsuit.
| throwup238 wrote:
| US antitrust laws grant private rights of action for
| monetary damages and injuctive relief. They're unlikely
| to apply to Automattic/Wordpress though.
|
| (Most other governments don't grant these rights though)
| DannyBee wrote:
| Unfair competition is, particularly in California, which
| interprets it's UCL very broadly.
|
| Let's set aside all other claims (there are others), and
| take a look at "Unlawful, Unfair, and Fraudulent Business
| Acts" under that.
|
| We'll also throw out unlawful business acts (I don't see
| anything unlawful so far).
|
| Unfair: "An "unfair" business act or practice, as defined
| by the UCL, is typically committed by either a company or a
| business competitor. ... In the context of a business
| competitor, it is considered an unfair business act when
| the company does something that broadly undermines
| competition in the marketplace."
|
| Additionally, they consider " immoral, unethical,
| oppressive, and unscrupulous" business acts to be unfair.
|
| Banners on wp engine sites probably not a good thing under
| this. Threatening your competitors with bad keynotes unless
| they pay you, also probably not a great practice.
|
| (I do think you'd be fine to say they suck. I just don't
| think you can get away with basically extorting them)
|
| Fraudulent: "The UCL also prohibits "fraudulent" business
| acts or practices, which means any conduct that misleads or
| deceives consumers."
|
| Note that it does not have to be defamation, or malice, or
| illegal. Just misleading or deceptive. More exactly, it
| does _not_ have the elements of common law fraud - Intent
| is not a requirement, and negligence can be a violation.
|
| So pure opinions without intent or with negligent intent
| that actually deceive consumers, while not defamation or
| common law fraud, are quite possibly a fraudulent business
| practice.
|
| Overall, I think they have a stronger case than you might.
| Not on defamation, but on other things.
|
| Regardless of the outcome, the approach i see taken by the
| Automattic CEO here seems remarkably stupid.
|
| Don't mix your roles unless you want a court to mix your
| roles.
|
| When he threatens to ban them from wordcamp[1] in what
| capacity is he doing it in?
|
| 1. Which, btw, the central website totally avoids
| mentioning who is in charge or paying overall anywhere i
| can find. I hope it's not the foundation (or him or
| automattic) and he's not mixing roles further while
| threatening his competitors.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm just happy to have successfully baited you into
| commenting. You're obviously more authoritative than I am
| on this.
| trog wrote:
| I have never thought of WPE as a competitor to WordPress.com
| but perhaps weirdly I think of WordPress.com as a competitor
| to WordPress.org.
|
| For example, if I have a WordPress site I've built from
| scratch out of WordPress.org, I am just going to assume
| trying to put it on WordPress.com will be annoying (and
| possibly even impossible?), because of issues with themes or
| plugins or whatever due to the fact that WordPress.com is a
| separate, hosted SaaS-style CMS, and not a hosting
| environment for WordPress sites.
|
| WPE, by contrast, is Just Another Webhost to me, with some
| special bells and whistles for WordPress.
| fhd2 wrote:
| It's quite possible to host a "normal" WP installation with
| custom themes and plugins on WordPress.com (on the more
| expensive plan), I've done it a few times. But as much as I
| want to like it, I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. Some
| stuff that should be easy is just ridiculously difficult,
| like pulling logs programmatically. I think the main
| audience it caters to is people hosting a basic site with
| off the shelf themes.
| camgunz wrote:
| Isn't this completely fine? If you and I both make aspirin,
| but we both put a little something extra in it (me vanilla,
| you salt) and I put banners on my web page saying
| "bastawhiz's salty aspirin puts the ass in aspirin", doesn't
| this just seem like typical rivalry? My point here is that
| defamation is defamation no matter the scale. I think scale
| is relevant re: damages, but not as to whether or not rivalry
| escalated to defamation in the first place.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on
| the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE
|
| > I put banners on my web
|
| There's a large difference between putting up a banner on
| _your_ site and abusing your position to put a banner on
| _every_ site you can.
| malermeister wrote:
| If you sell my aspirin in your shop, you will have to
| accept what I put on the packaging or stop carrying my
| product.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| That's true, but does not apply to this situation.
|
| Automattic is not the owner of WordPress, the WordPress
| Foundation is. Even though many employees of Automattic
| work (maybe full-time) on WordPress [1].
|
| So I sell your aspirin in my shop, and a friend of yours
| helped you package your aspirins and while doing that put
| some stickers onto your aspirin.
|
| [1] https://www.df.eu/blog/wer-steckt-hinter-wordpress-
| ueber-die... (German)
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Does WPF take issue with this operational decision by
| Automattic? If so, they have the avenues to deal with it,
| and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if
| it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF. I seems more
| like this, from my understanding:
|
| You sell a brand of aspirin in your shop. The brand has
| outsourced most of the production and decision-making to
| another company. That company puts messages on the
| bottle. If those messages bother me, I can bring it up
| with the brand and see if they'll address it, or stop
| carrying the brand, but the question of whether they've
| overstepped is for the brand owners rather than me.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if
| it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF
|
| Tortious interference - where one party (Automattic)
| interferes with a contractual relationship between two
| parties (WPengine, their customers), in this case by
| means of disparagement pushed to the dashboard of
| WPengine instances.
| mthoms wrote:
| Here's the thing. Guess who is the head of the WordPress
| Foundation?
|
| Matt Mullenweg. CEO of Automattic.
|
| Now guess who The WordPress Foundation granted sole
| rights to sub-license their trademarks? You guessed it.
| Automattic.
|
| Yeah, it gets worse the more you look at it.
| keane wrote:
| Automattic originally registered the trademark WordPress.
| They donated it to the WordPress Foundation while
| retaining a commercial license to the marks.
| https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-
| foundation/
| camgunz wrote:
| One person's "abuse" is another person's "I have this
| platform and can use it however I like." For another
| example, whenever cable companies (dish, etc.) have
| licensing disagreements with content creators, they put
| up a bunch of ads that are like, "ESPN's unfair
| negotiations mean you may lose access to this channel,
| call this number to complain". That's never been found to
| be defamatory--it occurs to this day.
| justinclift wrote:
| Nah. Putting disparaging claims directly on the dashboard
| of my customers seems pretty abusive, and if it happened to
| me I'd be looking at legal options too.
| tasuki wrote:
| Automatic are publishing a blog post and syndicating it
| to RSS, and some other software (WP.org) is displaying
| that feed.
|
| If you choose to use the WP.org software as is, it's kind
| of your fault, isn't it?
| camgunz wrote:
| What about regular, non-disparaging claims? Isn't it a
| fact that WP Engine turns off the backup stuff? Truth's a
| defense to libel.
|
| This seems to me plainly like regular old competition.
| Can you point to something that's clearly defamatory?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| No, it would be like if Google started using Google Tag
| Manager to put banners on websites that use Plausible
| Analytics saying "this website uses analytics that might
| not be accurate!" Or if Cloudflare started putting banners
| on websites that use S3 saying "downloads might be slow
| because this website doesn't use Cloudflare R2"
| __jonas wrote:
| Sorry could you expand on this, how can they "put a banner in
| [...] WordPress instances hosted by WPE"?
|
| I was under the assumption that WordPress is OSS, and
| WPEngine is running this software on their platform, so there
| was an update to this software, contributed by Automattic
| developers which included a banner denouncing WPE, and the
| WPE people decided to just deploy that update to their
| platform?
|
| I don't think that means they "put the banner on their
| instance" does it? If they are unhappy with the management of
| the open source software they are using on their platform
| they presumably could fork it, or decide to not deploy the
| version that includes this banner, no?
| pluc wrote:
| There's a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that
| displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his
| rant, making it show up everywhere.
| __jonas wrote:
| Ah I see, thanks for clarifying!
|
| I have seen the mentioned blog post now [1] the whole
| thing is starting to make more sense to me.
|
| [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
| crashbunny wrote:
| I'm also not a lawyer, pleased to meet you.
|
| > I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case
| here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D
|
| I believe, as a non lawyer, in some places to be able to sue
| for defamation you must first contact the defamer and demand
| they take it down.
|
| I have no idea and no opinion if there is a case. If there is a
| case a C&D might be a necessary step.
| mintplant wrote:
| People in this thread seem to be focused on the defamation
| angle, but is the more important allegation not the alleged
| demand for large amounts of money to not destroy WP Engine's
| business? Matt sounds like a wannabe mob boss in the
| screencapped texts, sending photos of the crowd before his
| keynote and talking about how he could still "very easily" make
| it just a Q&A session if WP Engine agrees to pay up.
| Kye wrote:
| Agreed. I'm confused by a lot of the discourse in this
| thread. The extortion seems like the important thing. I would
| think (paraphrasing) "I'm going to destroy your business if
| you don't pay me" is extortion regardless of the merits of
| the claims used in carrying out the threat.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean if a business if built on top of your business, is
| it actually illegal to say "Pay me if you want continued
| access?" Is it the wording that makes it illegal?
| Kye wrote:
| Who built what business on whose business? It's not clear
| what you're referring to.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| ... to the open source project WordPress? 1) it'd be hard
| to forbid any one entity from using it, based on the
| licensing, and 2) the announcements and banners pushed to
| users referenced WP.com, Matt's for-profit competitor
| which WPengine doesn't use, and brings about elements of
| tortious interference.
| tptacek wrote:
| Extortion does not look like an easy case to make. Pull up
| some of the state statutes: they all seem to have intent
| and malice requirements, and/or, like California, require
| the threat to be of an _unlawful_ injury. Threatening to
| ruthlessly exploit capabilities you lawfully have, like the
| bully pulpit of leading the WordPress project or the
| strictness with which you license your trademark, is
| unlikely to meet that standard.
|
| (But see below for the 'DannyBee comment on how UCL unfair
| competition might work even if you can't make a case under
| the extortion statute itself).
| chuckadams wrote:
| Exactly, the extortion is the most serious allegation, but
| WPE isn't providing a lot of background in terms of what and
| how much Mullenweg was demanding, only texts that came well
| after the demand was made. My guess is if there's a really
| damning email, WPE's lawyers served them a legal hold
| privately rather than make it public.
|
| Alexa, order ten cases of popcorn...
| slouch wrote:
| Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual
| revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/
| comments/1fnz0h6/comment/...
|
| He posted this after receiving the C&D.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Cool, thanks for the link. I wonder how much of
| Automattic's board is made up of Matt's personal friends.
| He'd best hope it's a majority.
| gibrown wrote:
| No need to wonder: https://automattic.com/board/
| duskwuff wrote:
| Out of five board members, one _is_ Matt, one was the CEO
| of Automattic before Matt took over the role, and a third
| was an early investor. The other two are harder to pin
| down.
|
| https://automattic.com/board/
| mthoms wrote:
| Notably, Matt demanded that would need to be paid to
| Automattic instead of the WordPress Foundation. (that's
| according to WPEngine).
|
| Automattic is Matt's private, for-profit company and a
| direct competitor to WPE.
| tptacek wrote:
| There are things in that WPE C&D that make me question
| how candid they're being; for instance, the trademark
| dispute seems an awful lot more complicated than the
| letters "W" and "P".
| chuckadams wrote:
| Perhaps, but as I mentioned elsewhere, MM is putting on a
| master class on how not to resolve such disputes.
| slouch wrote:
| That's because Matt's Foundation gave Matt's Automattic
| the exclusive commercial trademark license.
| https://x.com/photomatt/status/1838671002529665394
| keane wrote:
| Matt gave away the software he invented and founded a
| commercial venture to monetize his efforts despite this.
| Automattic originally registered the trademarks. Years
| later they donated them to the foundation, to make the
| marks available for noncommercial use and limited
| commercial use. In the process Automattic _retained_ the
| exclusive commercial license to the marks.
| arp242 wrote:
| Matt's message reads:
|
| > They had the option to license the WordPress trademark
| for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either
| as payments, people (Five for the Future .org
| commitments), or any combination of the above.
|
| So they could have "paid" by just hiring a few WordPress
| devs to work on it. That is: not necessarily by
| transferring dollars to Automattic.
|
| IMHO this is an important bit of nuance missing in this
| thread.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| There is simply no need to preserve documents given how public
| this was. If pressed the grievance can be corroborated
| externally.
|
| The letter in entirety is a warning of potential legal action.
| That _is_ the next action if the other party neither ceases or
| desists.
|
| Maybe this is normal, but we're glorified animals trying to
| find justice out of a made up process. It's arbitrary, hence
| arbitration. Not a lawyer either. You probably know more
| terminology than I do; I just deal with them a lot :/
|
| _edit:_ I think it 's a little strange to be placing
| _judgements_ at this stage. We 'll hear the facts if this goes
| to court. There's enough to know several are upset. Another
| consideration: by placing the numbers you're kind of trying to
| make their argument. Why? Let them.
| akerl_ wrote:
| It seems pretty likely that there's communications internal
| to Automattic or the Wordpress Foundation where they talked
| about their objectives and plans, assuming the details in the
| claim are accurate.
|
| That's what they're talking about preserving.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I can see that, I'm saying it's superfluous
| akerl_ wrote:
| Why?
| presspot wrote:
| Because he's never litigated a case in court.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives
| these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've
| come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless
| you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to
| assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D
| "punctuation").
|
| This is the big one to me, actually. If Matt used the
| announcement feature in the WP.org codebase to place an
| announcement in WPEngine customers consoles telling them they
| should not support WPEngine, but instead his for-profit
| competitor, WP.com, it's pretty hard to argue that that is
| anything but tortious interference.
| DannyBee wrote:
| The defamation angle is not interesting.
|
| They are pretty clear they will go after them for torturous
| interference, unfair competition, etc.
|
| California's UCL is much broader than you may think here - it
| is consistently interpreted very broadly by california courts,
| and has fairly low requirements (IE fraudulent business
| practices under the UCL do not have meet the same requirements
| as fraud)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >6. Claiming that WP Engine's investor doesn't "give a dang"
| about Open Source ideals.
|
| But dang is not theirs to give!
| pluc wrote:
| Well, there's that context we were all asking for.
| mrwyz wrote:
| I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages
| WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license
| allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe
| their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and
| Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy:
| https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Eh, sounds like mere puffery to me.
| jmull wrote:
| The policy says,
|
| ...a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself
| as "XYZ Themes, the world's best WordPress themes," but cannot
| call itself "The WordPress Theme Portal."
|
| It sounds like "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and
| Beyond" would be allowed.
| mrwyz wrote:
| To me, it seems they have been using the mark to describe a
| product and the policy says clearly:
|
| > but they cannot use them as part of a product
|
| I mean, just go to wpengine.com and look at the first menu
| item: Products --> WordPress Hosting.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can
| use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain
| their services
|
| I think the policy is somewhat vague on this; does
| 'Wordpress Hosting' refer to and explain the offered
| service? Clearly. Is 'Wordpress Hosting' a "product" WP
| Engine is selling? Kind of, yah?
|
| My understanding of trademark is also that "we've been
| doing this for ages and you didn't say anything" is a
| pretty solid defense, and "Wordpress Hosting" is about the
| most generic hosting service offered on the internet at
| this point, everyone and their dog offers it.
| echoangle wrote:
| It doesn't matter what the policy says if there is no legal
| basis for it. WordPress can't prevent Nominative Use,
| everyone can call the thing they are doing "WordPress
| hosting" if it is WordPress hosting. If the policy doesn't
| allow that, the policy can be ignored.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Even if WordPress could suppress nominative use, do they
| really want a world where everyone selling wordpress-
| based services and products avoids saying "WordPress"
| like it was the name of The Dark Lord Himself? Maybe it's
| time for some malicious compliance by way of a hard fork
| that strips the word "WordPress" everywhere except where
| legally required.
|
| Even if Mullenweg somehow had 100% of the facts and law
| on his side, he's still an embarrassment to both the
| company and the foundation.
| bawolff wrote:
| Not to mention, wouldn't this be allowed generally? Like you
| are allowed to use trademarks if it is the correct
| description of the products you sell.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
|
| [Ianal]
| sfmike wrote:
| exactly the link was cited and that citation directly refutes
| the claim
| sureIy wrote:
| You're making no sense. Those words are just marketing, they're
| not shitting on Automattic like Automattic is doing.
| sfmike wrote:
| could someone articulate that wordpress.com is more trusted
| then wpengine?
| echoangle wrote:
| You can't prevent someone from using your Trademark as a
| description with your trademark policy. Everyone can use your
| Trademark to identify the thing, they don't need your
| permission. I could call myself the best Linux admin ever and
| the Linux Mark Institute can do nothing.
| mrwyz wrote:
| That's not how U.S. trademark law works.
| mthoms wrote:
| Yes it is. Go ahead and Google "nominative fair use".
| echoangle wrote:
| Do you want to explain how it does work? And what exactly
| that I said is wrong?
|
| Here's the Wikipedia article on the subject:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
| mrwyz wrote:
| The law is not black-and-white. Absolutes like "Everyone
| can use your Trademark to identify the thing" don't fit
| in this context. Your reliance on Wikipedia to summarize
| a doctrine further demonstrates you don't have a firm
| grasp on the subject. Of course none on HN should listen
| to legal interpretations (including mine) because it's
| often not that simple. You can get a glimpse of the issue
| by reading this commentary from the American Bar: https:/
| /www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
|
| I think (and that's my opinion) that a jury would see
| that what wpengine is doing is not fair use and that
| their offering is creating confusion among consumers, but
| that's not for me (or you, or anyone else here on HN) to
| decide.
| echoangle wrote:
| Well I'll be ready to watch the lawsuit for trademark
| infringement then. Except there won't be one because
| there's no chance that's trademark infringement. All the
| statements on the website of WP engine (as I currently
| see it of course) don't imply any affiliation with the
| Wordpress trademark owners and are pretty factual. Do you
| have some more explicit reasoning for statements on the
| website that you find infringing?
| partiallypro wrote:
| I know it's not considered "contribution" in the sense that Matt
| was talking about, but WPEngine owns and maintains some of the
| most popular and powerful Wordpress plugins on the planet. I'm
| not sure why he chose to pick a fight with them. My best guess is
| that he wants Wordpress.com (hosting) to be what WPEngine became.
| riffic wrote:
| in the court of public opinion I think I know who I'm going to
| side with.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I'm going to side with chaos: let both fail, let new products
| come up.
| seydor wrote:
| This reads more like a blog post than a cease and desist. Why do
| they take so long to get to the point of their demands. Matt is
| entitled to have opinions , and they should stick to the opinions
| they find unlawful instead of rambling on about everything he
| said
| Spivak wrote:
| This is a pretty bad look for Matt, it comes off as yet another
| CEO who's mad that there's no first-party advantage to hosting
| OSS. Thanks to the GPL and no CLA he can't take it proprietary
| like others before him. When you're mad at someone for using
| their freedom-to-run and freedom-to-modify it doesn't come off as
| pro-OSS as you think.
|
| Weaponizing the trademark that's more strongly associated with
| the software itself than the company Wordpress is a pretty low
| blow. WP Engine is hosting Wordpress, full-stop. There's maybe a
| discussion to have about when modifications constitute a fork
| that warrants a different name but we're about as far away from
| that as you can be.
|
| I honestly don't know why Matt cares. His competitor is owned by
| PE, just wait for them to eat the business and offer a one-click
| migration. Play the long game.
| etchalon wrote:
| It sounds like Automattic was desperate for money and played a
| desperate hand badly.
|
| The receipts in the C&D don't leave one with a positive
| impression of Matt.
|
| I'll wait for Matt's response, but I can't imagine it's anything
| more than "well, we deserve the money I was demanding!"
| keane wrote:
| Just as an observation this reminds me of the dynamic that other
| open-source software distributors are tasked with defending.
|
| Let's say you were distributing a browser, let's call it Firefox.
| You might have a corporation and a nonprofit and call them the
| Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation.
|
| Maybe in this scenario you would allow certain commercial uses of
| your registered trademarks so that the software could be
| distributed by others. Parameters in this policy might only allow
| the commercial use of the trademarks in certain ways, enabling
| others to advertise their product like "Grammarly for Firefox" or
| even their service "Download Firefox from CNET" without
| infringement. But these parameters would go on to disallow one
| from using the terms in a way that implied a direct connection to
| the Mozilla Foundation or caused confusion with regards to the
| root product such as advertising your site, CNET, as "The Firefox
| Store".
|
| Then let's say someone renamed their CNET site FFXSource. And
| then advertised themselves as "The Most Trusted Firefox Tech
| Company" and that their download was "The most trusted Firefox
| build". They might be told this violated the terms that don't
| allow implying official connection to the wider project. (And
| then let's say the download they were offering had the browser
| History pane feature stripped out.)
|
| In this scenario, it seems it would be the duty of the trademark
| owner, the Foundation, to seek that FFXSource either come into
| compliance or, to continue use that exceeded the blanket
| guidelines, to acquire a dedicated, more-expansive commercial
| license. (Of course none of my thoughts on this are legal
| advice.)
| ipaddr wrote:
| I don't think any of those issues you raised passes the bar.
| ffxsource.. no. The most trusted build. no many people build
| their own and it could be trusted more because someone is
| testing the official build and making changes and ensuring it
| works. The most trust Firefox Tech company is accurate. It
| implies many firefox tech companies exist and they are the best
| one.
| echoangle wrote:
| First, I'm not sure your example comes close to infringing the
| trademark, but even if it does: Wouldn't the correct step be to
| inform the infringing party that you see it as infringement and
| give them a date by shich they have to rebrand, and give it to
| your lawyer after that? Why would you make threats about
| destroying their reputation by doing a keynote about them if
| you are legally in the right? That's just childish.
| ptx wrote:
| > _Then let 's say someone renamed their CNET site FFXSource._
|
| This is addressed on page 5, where they quote the trademark
| policy[0], which until a few days ago said: "The abbreviation
| 'WP' is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are
| free to use it in any way you see fit".
|
| The current policy[1] has since been modified to specifically
| mention WP Engine and make seemingly irrelevant accusations
| towards them, but it still retains the part about "WP" not
| being covered by their trademarks.
|
| > _And then advertised themselves as "The Most Trusted Firefox
| Tech Company" and that their download was "The most trusted
| Firefox build"._
|
| Using that sort of phrasing would clearly be misleading and
| looks like it would have been disallowed by the trademark
| policy, but is that what WP Engine actually did?
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240912061820/https://wordpress...
|
| [1] https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
| keane wrote:
| That is what they did, their actual current advertising
| includes: "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most
| Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed
| provider", "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". They
| also have service plans on offer explicitly branded by them
| Core WordPress, Essential WordPress and Enterprise WordPress.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| semi-off-topic: Does anyone have alternative links to twitter?
| I'm in Brazil and don't wanna go around and risk a fine just for
| a tweet...
| urban_alien wrote:
| nitter
| jeanlucas wrote:
| thank you very much
| malthaus wrote:
| some of the comments here are exceptionally biased towards the
| party that does the "open source washing".
|
| just look at the childish way automattic acted. that's not a way
| to lead an organization or deal with your competition. you
| compete by building a better product, take legal action in an
| adult way if you think they are warranted and in general take the
| high road - not display your immaturity.
|
| the conflict of interest around the governance of wordpress is
| icky on top. so he just puts on his "open source" hat to gain
| favour for his for-profit company?
| 820jf98ajow wrote:
| "I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk
| can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WP very easily"
|
| If I were attending a conference I'd hope that the keynote
| speaker would put more thought into his talk than this. Not only
| is it childish, it's disrespectful to his audience.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Automattic invested in WP Engine in the early days, why didn't
| they acquire it, or WP Engine didn't want to sell. But why did
| Matt choose the open source license that he chose, it seems like
| that at the end of the day he only cares for money and not the
| WordPress community.
| markx2 wrote:
| The fact that he wants money for Automattic suggests that
| Automattic are now hurting financially in some way.
| mrkramer wrote:
| They are both "hurt" financially but that's the competition
| which is normal and which should drive more innovation and
| lower the prices for customers.
| trvr wrote:
| Where does it say that the money he is asking them to
| contribute would go to Automattic?
| mrkramer wrote:
| He is throwing things around like: "it's tragedy of the
| commons", "they are evil capitalists" etc. etc. In another
| words he wants to "hijack" their market share as they
| supposedly "hijacked" WordPress' brand, logo or whatever.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm just confused about the whole thing. Aren't WP hosts a dime a
| dozen? And if you don't like how they conduct their business,
| just set up one yourself. I set up one for a friend on AWS, and
| while it requires some tech savvy, it's not exactly hard for
| someone with basic tech literacy and ability to follow
| instructions.
| mk89 wrote:
| When I read the title I was wondering "strange, wasn't Automattic
| the company behind wordpress? Who knows maybe they split and now
| they sued them for XYZ". Crazy.
|
| Instead of going through all this, can't Automattic do like what
| most companies are doing now? Dual License (e.g., Redis, etc).
| nikolay wrote:
| I love it! WP Engine showed its true colors. I also agree with
| Automattic, and I know customers who got tricked into using WP
| Engine and were later sorry for doing so! Sending C&D over this
| stuff is something that bans them for life in my book!
| markx2 wrote:
| WP Tavern Articles That Recently Went Missing Following WCUS
| Keynote
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fofdpy/wp_taver...
| ncr100 wrote:
| Wow
|
| https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-identifies-godaddy-as-a-...
|
| .. interesting how the phrasing is repeating ("cancer" today)
| -- calling a competitor a "parasitic company" in 2022.
|
| There has to be a more intelligent descriptor for competitors
| to WordPress.com ?
| supermatt wrote:
| WP Engine calls itself the worlds #1 wordpress hosting (with over
| 1.5m clients), but they aren't even in the top 10 material
| contributors to wordpress. Although they have pledged to support
| wordpress development, is is only to the tune of 40 hours a week.
| Their pledge is miniscule given their usage of wordpress and
| isn't even in the top 25 pledges made. It seems they were called
| out on this, and told to resolve it or it would get highlighted,
| and highlighted it was.
|
| Sure, the license allows them to do whatever they want, but
| there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much
| in return. With over $400M ARR, thats something they could easily
| resolve.
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| 100%. WP is GPL and they can use it how they like. And others
| are also allowed to call them out if they want to.
| imiric wrote:
| Nice try, Matt.
|
| In all seriousness, if this whole thing is about some false
| marketing claim from WPE, then call them out specifically on
| that in a tweet or something. Why does it deserve the "scorched
| earth nuclear approach", which equates to blackmailing them
| into giving you millions to prevent you from disparaging them
| in all media outlets? The claims Matt made go far beyond WPE
| not contributing to WP development as much as they say they do.
|
| This corporate mudslinging paints WP.com in a much worse light
| than WPE. IANAL but I think there's a case here for a
| defamation lawsuit at the very least, if not for outright
| blackmailing.
| bdzr wrote:
| Does anyone know why WP engine doesn't actually support multiple
| post revisions by default? I worked with WordPress significantly
| quite a while ago and found it to be an absolute dumpster fire of
| a codebase. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if running a
| scalable WP host required tamping down on some things.
| etchalon wrote:
| Revisions significantly bloat the size of the primary table
| (wp_posts) and secondary meta tables. Because WordPress's
| database architecture is hilariously simple and under-
| engineered, that bloat ends up slowing down every query.
|
| So, to keep WordPress performant, you either need to regular
| prune wp_posts, or you need a continually beefier database
| instance to handle the installation.
|
| Sane DevOps teams just limit revisions to something like "last
| 5" to keep things under control.
| namedia wrote:
| As a software developer, I can understand the point Matt is
| making but it's sad to see him calling another competitor a
| "cancer" to the web. I like Wordpress and was inspired by it a
| lot but with many years hosting Wordpress sites for our
| customers, I find its plugin and theme architecture very
| vulnerable and often be the backdoors for hackers/scammers to
| launch attacks on servers hosting Wordpress sites. Whoever
| hosting Wordpress sites must do a good jobs securing their
| servers to prevent exploits through the Wordpress plugins and
| theming system. I dont know much about WP Engine but they should
| be credited for securing their massive Wordpress installations.
| In my opinion, Matt should focus more on fixing the weaknesses of
| Wordpress architecture than bashing his competitor, Wordpress is
| really a pain point to those providing hosting for it. We used to
| provide Wordpress hosting and did customize it as a website
| builder but due to its fragile architecture, we have decided to
| develop our own CMS system, with 3rd party plugin and theming
| system inspired by Wordpress but have built-in protection
| mechanism to prevent backdoors potentially exist in 3rd party
| code.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| As a former WordPress engineer that built one of the worlds
| largest commercial WordPress deployments, I have a secret to tell
| you.
|
| WordPress, out of the box, if you throw even a portion of traffic
| that you would expect form a large media site at it, will fall
| over.
|
| We modified WordPress, took advantage of all the hooks, basically
| rewrote the post authoring and search system and introduced
| caching and databases on top of the default MySQL, such as
| ElasticSearch for content storage and searching content. We also
| had a network level CDN in front of it at all times.
|
| By the end of it all, what we had was not fully WordPress
| anymore.
|
| You'll find that alot of organisations doing WordPress are doing
| similar things.
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