[HN Gopher] So long WordPress
___________________________________________________________________
So long WordPress
Author : ValentineC
Score : 263 points
Date : 2024-10-28 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chriswiegman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chriswiegman.com)
| ttul wrote:
| It gets so much worse. Today, my sales guy was trying to register
| for WordCamp, a conference that we have been attending for years
| as an essential place to meet customers. And then he encountered
| the registration form for a WordPress.org login, which neatly
| specifies that you affirm you have no "affiliation with WP
| Engine, whether financial or otherwise." [1]
|
| Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We
| use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my
| team can register for a WordPress.org account.
|
| I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the
| requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman
| Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad
| prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear
| business justification (aside from limiting competition).
|
| Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take
| note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually
| usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got
| that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into
| building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into
| what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another
| direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-...
| diggan wrote:
| > Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP
| Engine. We use their service to host our website
|
| Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore? Just
| because I bought something from Amazon doesn't mean I'm now
| affiliated with Amazon. "Affiliation" (usually) means something
| like a formal association, partnership, or close connection,
| not that you're just a customer.
|
| Besides that, dump Wordpress regardless, clearly they've lost
| focus from the actual users and Matt seems to be fighting some
| war others can't even see the reason for.
| netsharc wrote:
| Isn't that what lawyers end up doing, arguing which
| definition of the word applies? And since (as far as I can
| surmise) elonmusk.php hasn't clarified what that word means
| in his checkbox, won't it be safer to be cautious?
| dylan604 wrote:
| This brings back the horrid memories of what the definition
| of is is type of sentences
| netsharc wrote:
| How about an argument for millions of dollars due to a
| missing punctuation mark:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-
| com...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > "Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see
| the reason for."
|
| We see the reason. That reason is money. The lies /
| gaslighting aren't for OSS, etc. It's about MM's bottom line.
| aksss wrote:
| This is why any decent contract or agreement has a
| definitions section. Ambiguity in legal docs should always be
| minimized.
| Terretta wrote:
| On the contrary, it's why contracts use boilerplate.
|
| Boilerplate words have all been litigated. Boilerplate
| clauses are well understood.
|
| Affiliate, affiliated, affiliation, words like these are
| boilerplate, unless you go to the trouble of locally
| redefining.
| loeber wrote:
| A lawyer would beg to differ.
| bell-cot wrote:
| But only after you'd committed to paying his standard
| hourly rate for begging-to-differ services.
| simlevesque wrote:
| When Matt was asked to clarify what he means by
| "affiliation", he said: "ask your lawyer" and "I can't answer
| that for you"
| OtomotO wrote:
| If he can't answer such a question, he shouldn't get to
| ask.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Agreed, and I think this isn't really about whether he
| personally knows legal jargon, but about whether he had a
| clear idea WTF he wanted before making brash demands and
| threats.
|
| (Or, much less charitably, the intentional use of vague
| language in bad faith.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If he can 't answer such a question, he shouldn't get
| to ask_
|
| No? If my employer asks me to clarify my employment
| agreement, I don't have an obligation to be their
| armchair counsel.
| Terr_ wrote:
| That analogy is backwards: You'd be the one asking your
| employer to clarify _the terms they chose and wrote
| themselves_ which they are trying to press upon you.
|
| It's totally reasonable to ask the party _introducing_
| "shall not associate with" into a contract exactly WTF
| "associating" is supposed to cover.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You 'd be the one asking your employer to clarify the
| terms they chose and wrote themselves which they are
| trying to press upon you_
|
| I've made edits to employment agreements. It would be
| totally inappropriate for the other side to demand legal
| advice from me. It would be _polite_ for me to clarify.
| But I'm under no obligation to.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It sounds like there's some confusion here between "hard
| legal obligation to give non-binding external advice"
| versus "moral and practical obligation to fix the binding
| wording if they are actually interested in mutual
| agreement and understanding."
|
| I suspect most people asking Mr. Mullenweg "what do you
| mean by X" are doing so with a subtext or next-step of
| "now go fix the text to correctly capture what you really
| meant."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I'm reading "he shouldn't get to ask" [1] as distinct
| from he shouldn't ask in a hard legal sense.
|
| > _with a subtext or next-step of "now go fix the text to
| correctly capture what you really meant"_
|
| That's unreasonable. An e-mailed clarification is a
| reasonable ask. (Adding a clarification is nice. But not
| a reasonable expectation. Especially from a proven
| nutjob.)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975496
| eli wrote:
| If they can't explain the basic intent of the agreement
| in the first place, I'd be awfully hesitant to sign.
|
| Matt was just asked if the spirit of the checkbox was to
| keep out customers and wouldn't answer. That's not really
| the same as asking him for legal advice.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If they can 't explain the basic intent of the
| agreement in the first place, I'd be awfully hesitant to
| sign_
|
| This is fair.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Velcro shoes for everyone
| luskira wrote:
| he is legit having a mental breakdown
| dwattttt wrote:
| Your lawyer can tell you what, legally, it is allowed to
| mean.
|
| He cannot tell you what Matt means by it. The question
| stands.
| giobox wrote:
| I saw this exchange too and was shocked - _it is Matt who
| has chosen to add this checkbox and chose the wording of
| the question_ - if he cannot explain who should or should
| not check it, or what he means by his own words, how can
| anyone?
|
| His responses to perfectly sensible questions about this
| ridiculous box has been awful.
| dustywusty wrote:
| The language is intentionally vague, and leaves the
| determination on the person who has to check the box.
|
| I have a competing product and shouldn't get too far in the
| weeds on what I truly think here, but the predominant feeling
| across people that have to interact with this is that it's
| done on purpose.
|
| It's not so much that people don't understand what the word
| "affiliation" means, it's that you'd have to be completely
| certain that a lawyer, hired from what is clearly a litigious
| org, would have the same understanding.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This isn't a legal document from the federal government.
| There's no perjury risk. Just click the box and get what
| you need. What, is Matt paying for deep background checks
| on everyone that does check that box? It's one of the most
| ridiculous checkboxes on the interwebs
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Nobody said perjury. Violating contracts is actually
| illegal though, FYI.
| dylan604 wrote:
| maybe it's just me that always has that "under penalty of
| perjury" sarcastically running in my inner voice whenever
| I see these types of ridiculous EULA type of things.
|
| Somebody should really force the issue to "have standing"
| to fight the ridiculousness. I'm shocked WP Engine hasn't
| already
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Companies are absolutely allowed to arbitrarily ban
| certain people or groups of people from using their
| services, and if you sign a contract attesting to you
| being allowed to use the service, you can absolutely be
| found guilty and/or liable of breach of contract.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Illegal? Or just a civil problem? Illegal takes it in a
| pretty severe direction.
| eli wrote:
| Some courts have interpreted the definition of
| "unauthorized access" in the CFAA pretty broadly. That
| checkbox about WP Engine is arguably an "access control
| mechanism" since you can't access the site without
| checking it. Maybe it's a stretch but it's not _that_
| much of a stretch.
|
| I could see a breach of contract argument too.
|
| IANAL.
| throwup238 wrote:
| IANAL either but I was under the impression that changed
| with the _Van Buren v United States_ Supreme Court case
| [1]. If you register and accept a EULA, it's no longer
| "unauthorized" access, regardless of whether you exceed
| EULA limits, as long as you're using the authorized
| interface (as opposed to trying to get access to the
| servers via SSH or some other side channel). It's not the
| criminal courts' job to enforce access limits.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/19-783
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Civil infractions are still called "illegal", at least in
| the US
| acdha wrote:
| You're thinking about this from the perspective of good
| faith. I think the people who are worried are looking at
| it from the perspective of no longer being comfortable
| saying something is too absurd to happen.
|
| For example, say your company ends up on Matt's legal
| radar and he trawls the logs looking for accesses from
| your IPs and says you violated CFAA - even if you're
| totally comfortable that you'd prevail in court, that
| could be an expensive process and discovery might turn up
| things you'd prefer not to be public. In situations like
| that it's easier simply not to risk dealing with him
| since people who are focused on vengeance will often
| waste resources on pointless activity just to prove a
| point.
| yifanl wrote:
| I know what the words means to me, I don't know what it means
| to Matt, and his opinion seems to be the relevant one.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _" Affiliation" (usually) means something like a formal
| association, partnership, or close connection, not that
| you're just a customer_
|
| In securities, yes. In general use, not necessarily.
| brailsafe wrote:
| "Not necessarily" can apply to almost any use of language,
| but I feel like this kind of thing can commonly be
| interpreted as non-affiliated. In an analogous case, if you
| work for an organization that performs public elections, at
| least in my country, you can't be affiliated with a party,
| but your personal business (voting for them) isn't
| included. Being publicly connected with or being
| compensated by another entity would seem to me to present
| an arguable affiliation
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Being publicly connected with or being compensated by
| another entity would seem to me to present an arguable
| affiliation_
|
| It looks like it's a legitimate legal issue [1][2].
|
| TL; DR It may make sense to explicitly clarify when
| you're using the term 'affiliate' as it is defined in 17
| CFR SS 230.601 / Rule 144 [3] versus "affiliate,
| including but not limited to []," or whatever.
|
| [1] https://www.sackrosendin.com/blog/2017/03/landlord-
| loses-ove...
|
| [2] https://casetext.com/case/iqbal-v-ziadeh-2
|
| [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?wid
| th=840&...
| bawolff wrote:
| Regardless, its kind of like asking someone to declare they
| aren't a communist or other bullshit political tests. I would
| refuse out of principle.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The language is, as described, intentionally vague and people
| with varying degrees of "affiliation" have been hit by the
| consequences.
|
| Matt also refuses to provide any elaboration on intent and
| instead says "you should talk to a lawyer".
|
| This has the chilling effect he is looking for. No-one is
| "talking to a lawyer" to create or use a Wordpress.org
| account. Anyone who has sniffed the same air as WPE knows the
| intent.
| velcrovan wrote:
| If you buy something from Amazon you've made a one-time
| exchange.
|
| If you use WP Engine, you have an ongoing agreement with them
| to provide and support a service on which your business
| depends. A reasonable and literate person could construe that
| to be an affiliation.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The problem is that Matt/WordPress is not using the standard
| definition of affiliation. On social media, Matt suggested
| that being a customer or service provider to WP Engine was an
| "affiliation" for purposes of that checkbox.
| n3storm wrote:
| What if I being a customer "help" this company translating a
| part of the software? I am more than a customer then? should
| or shouldn't suggest features? how charm may I interact with
| support so I can still be a customer and not something more?
| Can I wear T-shirts of this company?
| jchw wrote:
| > Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore?
|
| I have neither a WordPress.com account (I mean, that I know
| of, anyway) nor an affiliation with WP Engine. However, can
| we back up for a minute? If a website is asking me to make an
| assertion that may have legal consequences, it should
| absolutely be spelling out the intention and meaning of the
| language it uses. If you ask me what "affiliation" means,
| I'll give you my best answer as to what I understand it
| means. If you ask me to sign a document that says I do or do
| not have affiliation with some entity, I will tell you to
| clarify what an affiliation is and refuse to sign without it.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Does merely hosting a website on WP Engine constitute an
| affiliation? I wouldn't consider myself affiliated with Apple,
| Microsoft, or Volkswagen, just because I use their products and
| services.
| morgancollett wrote:
| I would say, no. Matt Mullenweg says, ask your lawyer.
|
| If only he'd said no as well - not doing so seems petty.
| tejtm wrote:
| Remember all those chapters of legal mumbo jumbo you had to
| click-thru just get on with your day?
|
| You may not consider yourself an affiliate but if the lawyers
| decide you are a teapot then you are either a teapot or were
| very rich.
| badrequest wrote:
| The author (and myself, coincidentally) used to work at WP
| Engine. I still have friends there, I could still describe
| their infrastructure if I had to. How am I not to interpret
| myself as "affiliated?"
| Fidelix wrote:
| What a silly notion. You're not affiliated to a company merely
| because you are their customer.
| kstrauser wrote:
| You believe that. I believe that. I'm sure my lawyer believes
| that. I'm sure Matt's does, too. I'd prefer not to have to
| convince a judge or jury to see it our way. If I were in the
| author's shoes, I don't know if I'd expose my company to that
| much of a legal risk with someone who's been acting
| "interestingly" recently.
|
| I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I
| don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why
| someone might not want to split legal hairs with their
| leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win
| such an argument in court.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I 'm sure Matt's does, too_
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep
| end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who
| legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts
| them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's
| due to bias and not the law.
|
| (I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a
| name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide
| Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures
| complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at
| press conferences they called.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| All I know about the recent Matt and WordPress kerfuffle
| is what I've read here on HN. Based solely on what I've
| seen of his own comments here on these stories, I think
| you're right. What I meant in that sentence was "Matt's
| lawyers do, too", even if Matt might not think so.
|
| One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy
| camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting
| business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really
| believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about.
| He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe
| this bullshit."
|
| By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that
| a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and
| doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for
| billable hours I completely believe it."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >I know folks, including some successful ones, who
| legitimately believe that anything that commercially
| hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against
| them, it's due to bias and not the law.
|
| Sounds exactly like one of the candidates running for
| POTUS!
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| The fact he is using Wordpress.org would seem to be a clear
| violation of its 501(c)(3) IRS status. If someone has not filed
| a complaint by now with the IRS perhaps they should. The C3
| must be very careful in sharing staff with the for profit
| entity, and it must be very careful in how they interact.
| robjwells wrote:
| One of the revelations over the course of this saga was that
| WordPress.org != WordPress Foundation. It's under the
| personal control of Matt Mullenweg.
| phonon wrote:
| Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried, but
| the IRS turned them down. It's Matt's personal toy (staffed
| by people from Automattic), as far as anyone knows.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Which is another signal that Matt isn't serious about the
| Wordpress Foundation. The correct move would have been to
| form a for profit subsidiary owned by the foundation to run
| Wordpress.org since it's an unrelated business activity.
|
| It's a well trodden path used by tons of nonprofits like
| the Smithsonian, Mozilla, OpenAI, etc. when they need to
| operate something that the IRS won't grant tax exemption.
| phonon wrote:
| Well, wordpress.org runs at a large loss...not clear how
| that could work exactly...
| throwup238 wrote:
| The Foundation gives its subsidiary money, just like any
| other parent company can.
|
| Whether or not Wordpress.org makes money is irrelevant to
| its for/non profit status. It's a legal technicality due
| to IRS tax exemption rules for unrelated business
| activities. They have to put those operations into a
| separate subsidiary, even if it never makes any profit.
|
| If the nonprofit can't afford to run Wordpress.org then
| the whole nonprofit was a farce anyway.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Well, wordpress.org runs at a large loss_
|
| Someone's getting paid something for the hosting
| referrals here:
|
| https://wordpress.org/hosting/
|
| I quote from the page:
|
| > If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and
| click through from this page, some will donate a portion
| of your fee back
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _The correct move would have been to form a for profit
| subsidiary owned by the foundation to run Wordpress.org
| since it's an unrelated business activity._
|
| They formed WordPress Community Services PBC, which now
| runs the "official community" WordCamps, so sponsors
| didn't have to restrict their messaging:
|
| https://wordpressfoundation.org/news/2016/introducing-
| wordpr...
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried,
| but the IRS turned them down._
|
| My interpretation of their story [1] is that holding the
| WordPress trademark wasn't enough for 501(c)(3) status, so
| they had to do something educational like promoting free
| software.
|
| They transferred the trademark once they received 501(c)(3)
| status, and could have transferred the operation of dot org
| too if they wanted.
|
| I believe the consensus among the moderate community is
| that Matt continues to hold onto dot org for "control",
| just like how the Foundation's board mostly comprises
| Matt's friends, and never had actual external community
| involvement.
|
| [1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-
| foundation/
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I keep repeating this on X:
|
| He needs us. We don't need him.
|
| Unfortunately, anecdotally, there's a lot of group thinking in
| WordPress. It's one of the reasons "The WordPress way" is able
| to run counter to industry best practices. Most people don't
| know any better, and the handful who do don't speak up. It's a
| textbook case of toxic kindness.
|
| Given the collective actions / behaviors / culture, I've been
| saying this for close to 10 years:
|
| It's not a community. It's a cult.
| lioeters wrote:
| The other day I was thinking how communities around a
| programming language or software framework sometimes become
| toxic subcultures, where its members dogfood the product too
| much to the point where they can't think outside the box. I
| guess corporations take advantage of this mechanism of
| brainwash feedback loop to foster loyal employees who believe
| in the mission, who can speak the lingo and think in the
| given conceptual framework, no matter how arbitrary or wrong.
|
| It also leads to "big fish in a small pond" syndrome, where
| people in the inner circle start to think highly of
| themselves, to look down on the "newbies" and users. They
| value thier expertise in this niche without realizing its
| relative poverty and low quality in the larger context. It's
| a mix of arrogance and ignorance that insulates their ego.
|
| I hope the collective disillusionment that WordPress is going
| through will be healthy for ecosystem in the long run. Let a
| hundred forks and alternatives bloom!
| froh wrote:
| > Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually
| usher in a replacement.
|
| yes!
|
| bitkeeper tried licensing shenanigans and lost to git.
|
| smalltalk did licensing shenanigans and lost to Java.
|
| Qt almost died and motivated Gnome.
|
| In software, inacceptable licensing gives birth to your worst
| competitor.
|
| /s
| ValentineC wrote:
| WordPress has a huge moat in terms of brand entrenchment.
| Most business people in companies know what "WordPress" is.
| ankleturtle wrote:
| The part which did it in for me was learning that Matt
| personally owns Wordpress.org. It's not the Foundation. It's
| not Automattic. It's Matt, personally.
|
| Nope, that's a bus factor of one. I'm done.
| itronitron wrote:
| If people stop using WordPress, then presumably that will
| negatively impact WP Engine, which might be the whole point.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That's not what affiliation means. This checkbox is similar to
| T&C that "prevent" competitors from signing up. It's more about
| having grounds to bring up WPEngine's behavior in court if they
| check the box. It's understandable you did not realize this,
| though, and perhaps that chilling effect was intended.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about
| the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the
| Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act_
|
| Send a copy to your state AG [1]. Copy your governor's office
| [2] and state representatives.
|
| [1] https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
|
| [2] https://www.usa.gov/state-governor
| baggy_trough wrote:
| https://bullenweg.com is getting spicy.
| breakingcups wrote:
| This whole saga is just so bizarre
| sgerenser wrote:
| what the heck did I just read?
| docdeek wrote:
| Pretty sure that is an extract from (one of) public lawsuits
| brought by former aides to MM's mother that were employed by
| MM.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Possibly better background, with the lawsuits linked in the
| post:
|
| https://heatherburns.tech/2024/10/14/say-their-names/
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I know, I want my two seconds and mouse click back.
| speed_spread wrote:
| That was troubling me too, so: from what I understand
| (someone feel free to correct me if you know better), Mister
| Wordpress hired people to take care of his ill mother who
| seems to also have serious mental issues (ref. all the crazy
| sex talk and racism). One of the caregivers got fed up of the
| abusive behavior (which wasn't part of the contract) and
| complained multiple times to Mister Wordpress about it, who
| then told his mom she should stop making up crazy shit about
| him and just be a nice person to the people who are trying to
| help her. Which seems to have made it worse because she's
| just stark raving mad. Whether there are actual Asian women
| involved at all remains to be seen (ah) and is beside the
| point.
| SalmonSnarker wrote:
| You're also missing that the lawsuit alleges mullenweg lied
| to the employee about the nature of the job, and rather
| than being a personal assistant it was nearly 24/7
| caretaking of his mother under constant abuse (including,
| but not limited to, having sleep disturbed by calls from
| the mother, being denied meal breaks, and being forced to
| work during thanksgiving without meals.)
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yup. A 400M net worth should be enough to hire multiple
| hardened caretakers. Or maybe, just maybe, professional
| psychiatric assistance? Seems like someone's in denial of
| their mother's condition.
| SalmonSnarker wrote:
| It is sublime that mullenweg would be deeply concerned about
| his "free speech" and then seek to SLAPP down anyone archiving
| a list of his misdeeds.
| esskay wrote:
| They were threatened with legal action from Matt so have
| essentially shut down and replaced it with that, from the
| sounds of it Matt tried to go directly to the domain registrar
| and isp to identify its owner (apparrently githubs still too
| hard for him to figure out).
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Man, if that website wants to accomplish anything whatsoever,
| they should really consider adding even the tiniest amount of
| relevant context.
| nacho2sweet wrote:
| The whole community and ecosystem is full of shady dishonest
| businesses and practices it seems. Besides all the recent drama
| as an end user and plugin buyer I have had to ask for 2 separate
| refunds from major plugins for shady dark pattern re-bills or
| secret upsells. I used to not consider myself a mark but maybe I
| am 42 now so I am starting to miss the real opt out buttons (4
| pages deep below the fold). Anyways I don't like being in any
| ecosystem that is full of this stuff and not worth my time to
| manage all of it.
| lxe wrote:
| A very large part of WordPress ecosystem is just incessant
| upsells for plugins and borderline scams.
| ankleturtle wrote:
| If you really want to see the shady, dishonest side, try to
| have a discussion about nulling plugins. You'll get called
| every name in the book for adhering to the GPL.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| > I've officially left the WordPress project after 14+ years of
| contributing including:
|
| Sorry to be an asshole but this is a good lesson on not to over
| index your life on a single idea.
| pooper wrote:
| Wordpress saga is spicy in itself but really this is also a
| wake up call for any programmer like me who is overly dependent
| on a single technology such as dotnet or java. However, what
| else can we do? There are only so many hours in a day. What
| reasonable alternative do I have?
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| html doesn't have this issue :)
| jjav wrote:
| Using only open standards and open source with a suitable
| license.
|
| Being disciplined about this is very difficult, see RMS. But
| it is the way.
| odo1242 wrote:
| I mean, Wordpress is open source with a suitable license
| (GPLv2). You can install plugins from wherever you want.
|
| So is every piece of software implicated in this drama,
| including Advanced Custom Fields (free edition)
|
| I really don't see how the discussion of open source
| pertains to Wordpress
| manishsharan wrote:
| >>but really this is also a wake up call for any programmer
| like me who is overly dependent on a single technology such
| as dotnet or java
|
| Java is open with competing implementations from Oracle,
| Redhat,AWS and of course OpenJDK and several other providers.
| jraph wrote:
| Aren't all these distributions of openjdk, therefore
| largely being the same codebase?
| odo1242 wrote:
| Yeah, there's really two main implementations of Java -
| OpenJDK and GraalVM. Both are decently mature/stable.
| esskay wrote:
| Sightly different comparing a cms to an entire programming
| language. A more apt comparison would be your career being
| entirely focused on Umbraco or OpenCMS rather than dotnet or
| java.
| tr3ntg wrote:
| An estimated 40% of global websites use Wordpress in some way.
| It's hard to come up with a more generally applicable set of
| skills than "Wordpress" at least based on total users worldwide
| (I'm not here to defend WP, I've never liked it)
|
| That said, I don't think the author's experience with Wordpress
| has poor transportability into other niches anyway.
| lapcat wrote:
| The article began, "It's true that I had largely been moving
| away from the WordPress project since at least 2017." Also, the
| author didn't say that he _regretted_ contributing to
| WordPress.
|
| Things change, and you move on. If someone got divorced, would
| you say that's a good lesson to never get married?
| water-data-dude wrote:
| You should diversify by having multiple families.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Well you are over indexing on someone by getting married.
|
| Whether after 10 years you don't end up regretting the
| decision or not is something you probably can't control.
|
| Marriage like any other social constructs primarily focuses
| on preserving culture in sacrifice of individuals.
| whalesalad wrote:
| WordPress has been a terrible tool for 10+ years. Good riddance.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Not really sure why anyone use WP in 2024 tbh.
| sroerick wrote:
| What better alternative is there as a webdev? Genuinely
| looking for answers from a production perspective.
|
| Most successful shops I meet or talk to are all-in on
| Wordpress and I don't think this drama has affected this
| calculation. Big Indian SEO + Wordpress firms with American
| sales teams rule this market.
|
| I haven't done freelance web work in a couple years, but I
| remember pouring a couple hundred hours into exploring static
| generators and alternative CMSs just to decide that yeah,
| Wordpress was probably the cheapest and most user friendly
| option to.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| Drupal is seriously worth another look if you haven't used
| it in a while. It's really a mature CMS that was completely
| rewritten a number of years ago. There's also currently an
| initiative underway to make a new "distro" of Drupal that
| is more user friendly and less developer focused, which
| could be great for people coming from WordPress.
|
| Drupal does have a learning curve, it doesn't have the
| robust marketplace of off the shelf themes that WP has, but
| I love it.
| sroerick wrote:
| I struggled with Drupal when I used it. I was responsible
| for taking over a crowdfunding site which had been built
| in Drupal and as an intermediate Wordpress and Django
| developer, I found Drupal's learning curve insane and it
| felt like the entire ecosystem was stagnating and dying.
| There are a lot of Reddit posts that go something like "I
| took a pay cut to work on a stack other than Drupal and
| I've never been happier". It's also the second most hated
| stack after salesforce.
|
| I don't know if any place where Drupal has been
| successfully used except for large corporate blogs, which
| I think it seems well suited for, but I'm happy to be
| corrected here.
|
| It wasn't for me but I'm glad you like it! If you're well
| suited to it I think it's a great career path.
| prox wrote:
| I used to be all Drupal, and then the big rewrite broke
| so many upgrade paths, with some critical modules left
| abandoned. I waited for a whole year for that, and even
| invested time to see if I could do some work, but it's
| just too much, and Drupals documenting is (was?) poor.
| It's internal stack is or was also really opaque.
|
| You really need a team for that. I switched to Wordpress
| for just that reason, it's a lot easier to tinker with.
|
| I love to hear that has changed.
| ebcode wrote:
| Have you checked out Backdrop CMS?
| https://backdropcms.org/
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much just d7 without the d7 EoL? Better
| to migrate a d7 site to it (assuming a rebuild with
| current Drupal is too much work or doesn't have necessary
| modules) than run d7 despite EoL, but I'm not sure it
| makes sense to spin up a new site using it over current
| Drupal.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Idk about user-friendly. This is a very subjective
| benchmark.
| sroerick wrote:
| In practice, there are a lot of non-technical users who
| can navigate the Wordpress backend. I'm not saying it's
| particularly well designed, just that the large install
| base has led to a far larger number of experienced users.
| vundercind wrote:
| Your marketing folks know how to use it and you can configure
| it so they can manage a lot of stuff they'd have to bug you
| for otherwise, which neither you nor they will tolerate for
| long.
| vachina wrote:
| It is insanely easy to self host, migrate and author stuff on
| it. And its frickin free.
| throwawaymatt wrote:
| I've built over 700 WordPress websites and launch 4-5 each
| month. I expect to launch at least 30 in 2025. AMA and give
| me your example of something "better" and I'll gladly tell
| you why it's not. I've spent my career using these tools and
| deploying them for real people (not marketing departments
| creating throwaway sites).
| dustywusty wrote:
| Yeah, this is what it comes down to. WordPress has an
| incredible following for a great reason: it works well for
| the people that know how to use it.
|
| Designers and agencies are more than happy to continue to
| use it, and frankly they should -- it is their bread and
| butter. The WP drama is news for us web-devs but will
| affect their market in no way whatsoever.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| This is preference. I just don't see why its anyone's
| preference. I will just build an admin dashboard that
| allows a site owner manage their content, however, I'm not
| building as many sites for other people, so you probably
| have a better perspective as someone who does it
| professionally for 3rd parties.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I will just build an admin dashboard that allows a site
| owner manage their content
|
| With WordPress, there are 5 different plugins already
| built that have more features than the dashboard you're
| planning to build, and the agency/person maintaining the
| site may already be familiar with them. WordPress and
| other PHP CMSes may not have the best architectures
| (Drupal was downright atrocious), but the ecosystem is
| thriving with pre-built, customizable tools for the 99%
| of customer needs.
|
| Virtually all web hosts, including very cheap ones
| support PHP-cgi and MySQL, so deploying WordPress is
| frictionless. CMSes written in other languages have
| deployment more friction.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Honestly don't even know if this reply is ironic anyways
| due to the username.
| legitster wrote:
| With WordPress, I can stand up a unique, functional website
| in a day. With a robust UI. And even with some advanced
| eCommerce features. It's not the best CMS in the world but
| compared to Drupal it's like building with Legos. You can
| also let it run for years without needing to go in and
| update/fix anything.
|
| There are not many other self-hosted services that really
| compete at the same level.
| donatj wrote:
| As someone who spent ~5 years working with it professionally.
| It's the plugins.
|
| The underlying source code is terrible, but it's pre-existing
| plugin ecosystem is unbeatable.
| theteapot wrote:
| Wordpress was always terrible.
| rtytry wrote:
| Trips me out people made an entire career with WP. My hat is off
| to them. WP is so hard for me to figure out. It is almost
| unbelievable that someone would commit their life to that
| insanity but I respect the hell out of them.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I'm not sure what you think is so complex. I started doing
| plugins and themes for it at 15 years old and I'm no genius.
| AndroTux wrote:
| It's not necessarily hard. But it's cumbersome and just one
| of the worst codebases I ever had the pleasure of working
| with. Basically everything about it is legacy, bad design
| choices, hacks, workarounds and compatibility fixes. That's
| what makes it complex. It needs a rewrite 10 years ago. But
| due to the deep integration of thousands of plugins that will
| never be possible.
| creativenolo wrote:
| From personal experience, the complexity comes from how 'not
| obvious', unexpected, or (outwith WordPress) unconventional
| much of WordPress is.
|
| It is a fascinating code base that is a result of it evolving
| through end user needs, over years, rather than being a grand
| software architecture with developer ergonomics at the core.
| Last time I touched it, changing domain names and sync dbs
| all required plugins. Yet in page editing works like magic.
|
| I assume no-one building Wordpress today would build it like
| it is build.
| neiman wrote:
| Isn't every community is like that after so long? Like, I don't
| like the way that Matt behaved recently, but regarding most of
| the complains in the post -- these exist in any community or
| organization which is big enough and has been around for long
| enough.
| pier25 wrote:
| He migrated his site ot Hugo:
|
| https://chriswiegman.com/2024/10/this-site-now-runs-on-hugo/
|
| I can understand WP for non-technical users but I'm still amazed
| at web dev teams still _not_ using static sites for blogs and
| marketing sites.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Usually it comes down:
|
| - easy client login for template tweaks, uploads, and redirects
|
| - forms
|
| - extremely minor server-side functionality thing
|
| WordPress is perfect for this.
| sroerick wrote:
| "Extremely minor server-side functionality thing" is where
| SSGs fail miserably. All of a sudden you're using SaaS forms
| or whatever else, or your self hosting some other
| tremendously inferior CMS and your margins go out the window.
|
| Wordpress killer that accomplishes these things you mentioned
| would interest me. Statamic looks interesting in this context
| but it wasn't super well formed 4 years ago when I dug deep
| into this ecosystem
| amluto wrote:
| 20 years ago, CGI covered this use case pretty well. I
| wonder if anyone has tried to make a modern equivalent.
|
| Maybe something along the line of a Cloudflare Worker (but
| using the open source stack) or possibly something minimal
| and flexible based on WASM or JS that could be invoked from
| different servers could work.
| sroerick wrote:
| CGI / PHP is really not a bad way to work in 2024, even
| though I was traumatized by PHP in my early days. I've
| only experimented with it though, I think it would be
| hard to maintain at scale, and I've heard there are not
| insignificant security concerns. It's a lot easier to
| hire somebody to maintain a Wordpress install than it is
| to mess with Apache or PHP.
|
| When I figured out that Wordpress literally is executing
| every piece of PHP every time the site loads it was kind
| of a "woah" moment for me
|
| Interesting idea with the Cloudflare thing
| amluto wrote:
| A problem with Wordpress and with most CGI setups is that
| there is no privilege separation between the script and
| anything else on the site. It would be nice to let
| individual pieces of server side script be deployed such
| that they can only access their own resources.
|
| I don't _think_ Cloudflare workers, as deployed by
| Cloudflare, really tick that box either. Some of the
| university "scripts" systems, with CGI backed by AFS,
| came kind of close.
| kentonv wrote:
| > I don't think Cloudflare workers, as deployed by
| Cloudflare, really tick that box either.
|
| They mostly do. You can map different Workers to
| different paths in your site. A Worker can only access
| the resources it is explicitly bound to. E.g. if you
| create a KV namespace for storage, a worker can only
| access that namespace if you configure it with a
| "binding" (a capability in an environment variable)
| pointing at the KV namespace. Workers on your account
| without the binding cannot access the KV namespace at
| all. Some more on the philosophy in this blog post:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-environment-live-
| object-...
|
| There are a couple of caveats that exist for legacy
| reasons, but that I'd like to fix, eventually:
|
| * The HTTP cache is zone-scoped. Two workers running on
| the same zone (domain name) can poison each others' cache
| via the Cache API. TBH I want to rip out the whole Cache
| API and replace it with something entirely different, it
| is a bit of a mess (partly the spec's fault, partly our
| implementation's fault).
|
| * Origin servers are also zone-scoped. All workers
| running on a zone are able to send requests directly to
| the zone's origin server (without going back through
| Cloudflare's security checks). We're working on
| introducing an "origin binding" instead, and creating a
| compat flag that forces `fetch()` to always go back to
| the "front door" even when fetching from the same zone.
|
| Note that if you want to safely run code from third
| parties that could be outright malicious, you can use
| Workers for Platforms:
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-for-
| platforms/w...
|
| (I'm the tech lead of Cloudflare Workers.)
|
| (EDIT: lol wrote this without reading your username. Hi,
| Andy!)
| amluto wrote:
| The worker binding system seems pretty great. I'm
| thinking more about the configuration / deployment
| mechanism.
|
| In the old days, if I wanted to deploy a little script
| (on scripts.myuniversity.edu, for example), I would stick
| the file in an appropriate location (~username/cgi-bin,
| for example), and the scripts would appear (be routed, in
| modern parlance, but the route was entirely pre-
| determined) at a given URL, and they could access a
| certain set of paths (actually, anything that was
| configured appropriately via the AFS permission system).
| Notably, no interaction was needed between me and the
| actual administrator of scripts.myuniversity.edu, nor
| could my script do anything outside of what AFS let it do
| (and whatever the almost-certainly-leaky sandbox it ran
| in allowed by accident).
|
| But Cloudflare has a fancy web UI [0], and it is 100%
| unclear that there's even a place in the UI (or the
| command-line API) where something like "the user survey
| team gets to install workers that are accessible at
| www.site.com/surveys and those workers may be bound to
| resources that are set up by the sane team" would fit.
| And reading the "role" docs:
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/mana
| ge-...
|
| does not inspire confidence that it's even possible to
| pull this off right now.
|
| This kind of thing is a hard problem to solve. A nice
| textual config language like the worker binding system
| (as I understand it) or, say, the Tailscale ACL system,
| is nice in that a single person can see it, version it,
| change it, search-and-replace it, ask an LLM about it,
| etc. But it starts to get gnarly when the goal is to
| delegate partial authority in a clean way. Not that
| monstrosities like IAM or whatever Google calls their
| system are much better in that regard. [1]
|
| [0] Which I utterly and completely despise, but that's
| another story. Cloudflare, Apple, and Microsoft should
| all share some drinks and tell stories of how their
| nonsense control panels evolved over time and never quite
| got fixed. At least MS has somewhat of an excuse in that
| their control panels are really quite old compared to the
| others.
|
| [1] In the specific case of Google, which I have recently
| used and disliked, it's Really Really Fun to try to grant
| a fine-grained permission to, say, a service account. As
| far as I can tell, the docs for the command line are
| awful, and the UI kind-of-sort-of works but involves a
| step where you have to create a role and then wait, and
| wait, and wait, and wait, and maybe the UI actually
| notices that the role exists at some point. Thanks,
| Google. This is, of course, a nonstarter if one is
| delegating the ability to do something useful like create
| _two_ resources and link them to each other without being
| able to see other resources.
|
| (Hi Kenton!)
| kentonv wrote:
| So, two possibilities:
|
| 1. If you have a relatively small number of users whom
| you want to permit to deploy stuff on parts of a
| Cloudflare account, you may need to wait for finer-
| grained RBAC controls to be fleshed out more. It's being
| worked on. I really hope it doesn't end up as hopelessly
| confusing as it is on every other cloud provider.
|
| 2. If you have a HUGE number of users who should be able
| to deploy stuff (like, all the students at a university),
| you probably want to build something on Workers for
| Platforms. You can offer your own completely separate
| UI/API for deploying things such that your users never
| have to know Cloudflare is involved (other than that
| their code is written in the style of a Cloudflare
| Worker).
| pier25 wrote:
| > _is where SSGs fail miserably_
|
| It's trivial to bundle and deploy some server-side code
| with a static site on Vercel, Cloudflare, Firebase, or
| Netlify.
|
| Usually you simply create a /functions directory wth your
| JS code and that's it.
| sroerick wrote:
| Former webdev, so don't really understand the industry too
| well, but my sense is that Wordpress is the lowest hanging
| fruit if you need customer facing CMS, or e-commerce, or any
| number of other plug and play features.
|
| Hugo might be easier as long as there's no customer facing CMS,
| but as soon as you introduce that back into the mix it's
| significantly worse. I heard if one shop using CraftCMS
| successfully but they weren't really super content forward.
|
| Thus, to cover the spectrum of needs, it just makes sense to
| have a Wordpress stack - one team of developers, on team of
| technologies.
|
| Hugo is great, but I haven't used it a ton. For a lone wolf dev
| maintaining a personal site, probably the way to go. I built
| some sites with Gatsby and having to do Node updates was
| actually way worse than Wordpress updates, and required a much
| higher skill level to accomplish.
| pier25 wrote:
| With most static hosting services you can simply deploy a
| folder named /functions alongside your static files and
| that's pretty much all you need to run server-side JS.
| sroerick wrote:
| Sure, but you don't really have read/write capability. As
| an example, I set up an e-commerce store on Gatsby using
| server side JS, but I was reliant on the hosted Stripe
| product CMS API, which ultimately wasn't a great user or
| development experience
| odo1242 wrote:
| The thing is that websites often need to be accessible to more
| than developers. If your company has to get a developer
| involved every time whey want to change a word on the site
| (don't expect the person who wants to change the website to
| know HTML or Markdown templates), progress gets slowed down
| quite a bit.
| ikety wrote:
| Well you're gonna want CMS anyways right? Why not go full
| WordPress and give your non-technical users even more agency.
| It's pretty hard for them to cause harm in this scenario.
| pier25 wrote:
| In my experience when a company has an in-house web dev team
| everyone avoids using the CMS as much as possible.
| breck wrote:
| I'd like to take this chance to plug my new startup, the Printing
| Press.
|
| It's like WordPress, but instead of digital, it's physical.
|
| It requires no servers or computers at all.
|
| Just paper, which you can make from naturally growing trees, and
| ink (I'm not sure how that is made).
|
| Your blog will last a long time, like hundreds of years.
|
| You can read it while sitting over your poo hole.
|
| Visit our worksite and check it out.
|
| - Johnny Gutenberg
| _fat_santa wrote:
| As a JS/React dev, I had to do some WP work a few years back and
| the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found WP
| itself to be nice to work with but the ecosystem around it is
| just jarring.
|
| In the JS ecosystem if you have an issue then you usually go look
| it up and someone either recommends a fix or a NPM package to get
| around the issue you are having. With WP when you tried to figure
| out an issue it was always endless blogspam with an upsell to a
| plugin or consulting services in the end.
|
| I remember reading so many articles on really basic topics where
| the author would dance around the solution before finally going
| "well if you want the real answer, please hire my WP consulting
| firm and we can take a look".
|
| And with plugins I found it very hard to find anything open
| source or free. Every plugin, no matter how small, always seemed
| to have it's core features locked behind a "premium" version. Now
| I get it, plugins take time to develop and people want to be paid
| for their work but it was just really jarring to go from a
| community where folks contribute to developing the best solution
| for something together versus everyone hacking it on their own
| because they wanted to sell a plugin.
| nicce wrote:
| If you wanted to modify some plugins and host the source in
| GitHub, for example, you were essentially writing your own
| plugins that modify other plugins to be able to do that.
| mjrpes wrote:
| I'm planning to go through this recent thread of WordPress
| alternatives:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fsie1i/top_word...
|
| Any others that people recommend? Will be looking for a basic
| website platform, blog is secondary, no e-commerce, minimal use
| of plugins, open source and hostable, where everything can be
| done in a Web UI with exception maybe of site templates. API
| would be nice to help with conversion from WordPress.
| mpol wrote:
| ClassicPress would be the most painless transition. It is
| basically WordPress without the block editor. Most plugins and
| themes are compatible.
| throwawaymatt wrote:
| > I joined WP Engine in 2018 because it was the one company that
| really did seem to be honest about who they were. Like every
| other company they were in it to make money, but unlike every
| other company they didn't hide that fact behind abusive language.
| They didn't claim I was "family." They didn't claim their work
| was virtuous and therefore somehow "better" than non-WordPress
| orgs. No, they said they wanted to be the biggest host and went
| after that with the best pay I saw in the WordPress ecosystem and
| interesting work on top of it.
|
| Well said. Our agency chose WP Engine over 8 years ago because
| they were hands-down the best managed WordPress hosting provider.
| It revolutionized our WordPress hosting offerings and allowed
| stable, mostly headache free growth. Without the WP Engine's
| platform, and their investments in making WordPress hosting
| modular and safe we'd still be in the stone ages of dedicated/vps
| hosting.
|
| What kept us as a customer for these 8 years though, has been the
| quality of support. It can't really be measured, but I've found
| their support to be unmatched and highly competent over hundreds
| of interactions.
|
| We've grown over 400% with WP Engine and this entire fiasco with
| Matt blindsided us. Begrudgingly, we're diversifying our hosting
| allocations to protect against this new threat but we'd be much
| happier continuing with _just_ WP Engine.
| legitster wrote:
| > I've watched people pour their lives into giving back only to
| have it all tossed out because their important work isn't what
| Matt wanted people to focus on.
|
| It's sentiments like this that really undercut Mullenweg's
| arguments. "WP Engine didn't contribute to core" when Core was
| just the preapproved feature list that was important to
| Automattic. Even if WP Engine wanted to contribute, their work
| would have just lined Automattic's pockets (hence why he just
| asked for money in the shakedown).
| Trias11 wrote:
| Wordpress is like microsoft. If you want to build a honeypot to
| attract malware and bad scripted traffic quickly - wordpress is
| the way.
|
| Do you need it?
|
| There are way better options today.
| givan wrote:
| If you would like to go back on using a CMS instead of static
| generators please take a look at the one I'm building
| https://vvveb.com it shares the same principles of design and
| architecture simplicity with the freedom of open source.
| rsolva wrote:
| Huh, this looks ... really, really good?
| givan wrote:
| Thank you.
| codingclaws wrote:
| I'm reading the WordPress docs right now as an experienced
| developer that hasn't used WordPress that much. It's kind of
| interesting. There's a whole REST API built into WordPress. And
| there's also a full on Node workflow that you can use to develop
| certain components.
| yurishimo wrote:
| At its core, Wordpress is not bad software, it's just old and
| shows it's age sometimes. I've worked with a lot of really
| talented engineers who built their careers on Wordpress. News
| organizations powering the top breaking stories online run on
| WP. It's a competent, mature, and extensible platform for
| developers, even if the modern marketing is not catered to
| devs.
|
| These days I've moved to Laravel but all of my friends in WP
| world are bummed that their livelihoods are being toyed with by
| the former BDFL now just DFL.
| maxbond wrote:
| There are no benevolent dictators.
|
| People who are serious about building community will put their
| trust in others. They will delegate. They will listen to advice.
| They will compromise. They will be imperfect; they will fail to
| do the best thing for the community from time to time. But when
| that happens, more often than not, they will listen and adapt to
| criticism. We may still call them BDFL. But they aren't truly a
| dictator.
|
| People building petty fiefdoms will inevitably betray the
| community.
|
| When I read about Mullenweg, something I'm struck by is his cry
| bullying. I see him responding to complaints like, "are you
| threatening me? I get a lot of death threats." I bet he does get
| death threats, and to be clear it's not okay that he and other
| public figures have their lives threatened.
|
| But it's common for him to respond to people telling him to go to
| hell as if they were making an actionable threat. See [0]. I
| would be upset if someone hoped I "[died] a forever painful death
| involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few
| times and hammers go flying everywhere." But I would know they
| were being hyperbolic and flipping me the bird, not making a
| threat. (Especially if I was familiar with Tumblr's culture and
| the texture of humor on the platform. Like you might expect from
| the CEO.)
|
| And I certainly wouldn't respond by doxing them. And this is
| really important; doxing someone is _actually_ putting them in
| jeopardy, with no hyperbole. _Doxing someone is an actionable
| threat of harassment._ This is a betrayal of the community 's
| trust, and the exercise of power against the community's
| interests.
|
| I've seen some other examples of him mischaracterizing insults
| (including milder ones than this) as threats, but I wasn't able
| to find them in my timebox. These were screenshots from Twitter
| and possibly Slack, presumably I could find them if I had
| accounts on those platforms.
|
| You can also look at the recent controversy as an exercise in cry
| bullying. "WP Engine is so unfair to the community," he cries.
| "They deprive people of the essential feature of having more than
| 3 revisions without changing a setting." Then cuts a large subset
| of the community off from things that are actually critical, like
| logging in and updating plugins.
|
| I apologize if this was a rant, but here's the point. We should
| be thinking harder about open source governance, because there
| are no benevolent dictators. Positions of power corrupt, and they
| also attract the corrupt to them. When BBS operators were
| powerful in our community, they attracted (at least one) con
| artist(s) [1]; now we see a BDFL using our community to rule as a
| petty tyrant.
|
| When we want to adopt an up and coming project, we should ask the
| BDFL what the plan is for turning over power to democratic
| mechanisms in the community. When a new project starts only 1 or
| few people are there to make decisions, so a BDFL is the natural
| state of things. But we should expect governance to become more
| sophisticated as a project becomes more important.
|
| We should learn to recognize the rhetorical mechanism a petty
| tyrant uses to conflate their interests with the interests of the
| community. Be suspicious of them. Push back. Ultimately, there
| are two mechanisms to hold a petty tyrant accountable; forking
| and rewriting. We should be prepared to do that.
|
| Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are
| people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my
| time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to
| hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in the
| ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good
| response to.
|
| Another objection I don't have an answer to is the very real
| issues projects like Redis and Elasticache have encountered,
| where platform giants capture the value without contributing back
| financially. That's a real problem I'm not smart enough to solve,
| and it does complicate what I'm suggesting.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-
| spars-...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are
| people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my
| time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to
| hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in
| the ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good
| response to._
|
| As someone who's interested in community dynamics like these, I
| think pure drive-by democracy wouldn't work (I dislike
| bikeshedding [1]), but a system where people who've contributed
| either money or quantifiable effort over _a recent period of
| time_ in exchange for voting rights to elect administrators
| might.
|
| "A recent period of time" is important, as communities don't
| really appreciate some old founder-type who's not active in a
| project anymore trying to use their clout to feed their ego.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
| NationOfJoe wrote:
| People keep saying in this thread, there are better alternatives
| but i do not see any listed. i know of - Statamic (php, Laravel)-
| https://statamic.com/ - Strapi (js) - https://strapi.io/
|
| and then a bunch of SaaS platforms. what are the market leading
| open source CMS's?
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