I got lost in this wordpress thing. Tried to read few (probably low quality informed-as-I-am) articles and now I’m even more lost. Can someone ELI5 what’s going on, who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, whether wordpress (product) is to be avoided, etc. Thank you.
Tl;Dr is that matt mullenweg saw that other people were making money from free open source software, and his capitalism boner is trying to fuck everyone over.
He has control over both WPEngines competition and the non-profit Foundation, and is using his Foundation position to try extort his for-profit company’s competition. Typical CEO behaviour.
This isn’t accurate. The issue is that part of that open source software is using non-open source APIs which are paid for by the WordPress Foundation. Making money off open source software is harmless and AFAIK he has no issues with that. However, using an enormous amount of resources where your foundation needs to pay $$$$$ for without contributing anything is what this is about.
The same issue is with Linux, for example. The OS is open source, but the repositories are hosted be e.g. Canonical, which needs to pay to maintain them and for the enormous amount of bandwidth and usage from people updating their packages. That isn’t free.
It’s very common for companies which fork Ubuntu / Debian to contribute back in some meaningful way, whether that’s source code or donations.
WP Engine doesn’t contribute anything.
I don’t think there’s a good guy. Both parties suck here.
I mean, one was always for-profit and didn’t try to hide it. WPE is within the rights to do that. Meanwhile, Matt preaches open-source while acting like a manchild and showing just how controlled it all is by him alone. The only real brand being tarnished is WordPress. I’ve seen more people say their next site will be with a different CMS. Sad.
From what I understand, WordPress has been attacking WPengine more or less out of nowhere and is trying to destroy their business because their product competes with Wordpress.com (for many, many years now)
