WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter's servers from accessing WordPress.org resources – and therefore from potentially vital software updates. WordPress is an open source CMS which is extensible using plugins. Its home is WordPress.org, which also hosts …
Drupal has got harder and harder to manage over the years, with the need for Composer etc, whereas Wordpress is always pretty easy. But you'd write off Wordpress because they've fallen out with one hosting company? I don't know WP Engine but the name suggests they have built their entire business around Wordpress. It looks as if they give nothing back. Just choose a general-purpose host or use generic cloud resources.
I can recommend TextPattern as a potential alternative. My brother works on it in his free time, and over the years a small team of volunteers has completely overhauled the internals. It doesn't have the massive ecosystem of plugins that Drupal and WordPress do, but for the basics I find it very good.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. It's open source, with some licence conditions. Are there any conditions where you can just suddenly decide that certain people oe companies can longer have free access to said "free" software on a whim?
I think in this case, they've both got issues and I'm having trouble wanting to side with either. Whatever the outcome, it might well have an effect on other projects and user, for good or ill.
They can't prohibit WPE from using their software without changing their license and making it no longer the GPL and no longer free or open. That doesn't extend to using their website. There is nothing in the terms that forbids them from doing what they have done. As long as WPE can get the source to the software they already have, which they have already because it's PHP, the license is not violated. The spirit is in many ways, but the letter of the license has been followed. Depending on the market, that could be illegal for other reasons. For instance, if Word Press were large enough, this could be considered anticompetitive action that is prohibited. I doubt this applies either, but if it does, it is unrelated to the code license.
You are Matt Mullenweg and I claim my five pounds! :-)
Seriously though, you're right. However, there are lots (and lots and lots and lots) of people making a profit on the back of Wordpress. The latest figures I can find suggest that over 60% of websites that use a CMS use Wordpress. That works out to over 40% of all websites worldwide. Even allowing for a significant percentage being non-profit, that's still a lot of people making money from their Wordpress websites. Some of those will have built it themselves, but some will have employed an agency or web developer to do it for them, so there's another layer of people profiting from Wordpress. Some may self-host on their own server, however a much larger number will also be paying a hosting company, which may itself be providing a managed Wordpress service. So there are even more people and companies making a profit from Wordpress. Very few of those people will be contributing back to the Wordpress ecosystem in terms of source code, bug fixes, etc. although they may be contributing financially by using paid/premium plugins, themes, etc. In any case, the whole money-go-round has arisen due to the way that Wordpress has been licenced and supported (in terms of the plugin repository, updates, etc.) If Matt/Automattic want to change that, then they are within their rights to do so. However, if they're going to change it, they need to do so fairly.
By all means, they can go after WPEngine if they want, but if they don't then also go after everyone else - GoDaddy, Hostinger, Dreamhost, Siteground, whoever (and, ultimately, the agencies and developers too, even me) - they're not playing a straight bat. If that's the way they do want to go, they need to think about changing the licence and terms of their service across the board and take whatever flak that entails - including the probable loss of a lot of developers and users. If they cherry pick, they're going to get flak for it and lose some of those people anyway.
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Hosted wordpress at wordpress.com is provided by Automattic, the company that is the lead Wordpress developer. Wordpress.org seems to be run by the same people but through the non-profit that is responsible for Wordpress and owns the Wordpress trademark.
There are lot of other people who provide wordpress hosting, including WP Engine.
Hmmm...I'm not so sure it's as simple as that.
At the end of the day, WPEngine is a hosting company that offers a managed Wordpress hosting service. Just like dozens, if not hundreds, of others. For reasons that aren't really clear to me, Matt Mullenweg appears to have got a bee in his bonnet about WPEngine. Why them and no-one else? How many of the other companies offering managed Wordpress hosting contribute significant time and resources back to the Wordpress core, etc? I'm prepared to bet that many of them put even less back into the project than WPEngine does.
Is it just because WPEngine have been successful and make lots of money? Well, sorry, but if that's the problem, the answer is to provide a better or more competitive service yourself and get your own share of the pie. Kicking off and saying they can't use your platform or have to pay huge fees to use it or that you're just going to stop providing certain facilities (that are still provided to all the other companies doing the exact same thing as WPEngine) just smacks of sour grapes and extortion. Especially when the platform in question is open source and widely used (regardless of what any of us might think of it from a technical point of view). As others have said, this is one of the potential problems with open source as an idea - give stuff away essentially for free and you're going to have to find other ways to earn your crust and fund the work. If you're going to start changing the rules about who has to pay what, then you either need to see about changing the licence itself or you need to apply your new rules fairly across the board. That certainly doesn't look like what is happening here.
I don't really have a dog in this fight. I do a bit of Wordpress stuff, but don't use WPEngine - their offerings have some nice features, but are over-priced compared with what you can get elsewhere. The whole thing has, however, got me wondering which hosting company might be in the crosshairs next and whether it might then impact me in some way. If that's the case, I'm not going to go host-shopping to find someone who hasn't yet incurred Matt's ire, but I will look at dropping Wordpress altogether. In fact, I've been thinking about getting out of the game anyway - it's too much of a race to the bottom in terms of price nowadays. By the look of things, this might be the perfect time to call it a day.
…. Doing stupid things. Both WPEngine as well as Wordpress.org offer eye-wateringly expensive wordpress hosting, compared with, for example, siteground, who offer an overall better service anyway. The Wordpress.org block can be worked around in the most trivial of ways, and in the meantime, wordpress.org signalled very clearly that they are not to be trusted.
What a mess
I have no skin in the game, other than having had to use WordPress for client sites in a different life 8/9 years ago - but this is misleading.
Yeah, both WordPress and WPEngine are expensive for what they are. You can spin up a Linode instance and pay £5 a month for the same sort of "service". Except you are responsible for updates, you're responsible to make sure it's secure etc. There are a lot of users who aren't savvy like that, and that is where WPEngine/WP.org/WP.com come in. You're paying them to do what we do ourselves for free.
There are a lot of managed hosting companies out there. Companies that will update their own servers, or at least you can't, so they had better be doing so. Many of them will also automatically update Word Press for you. Hopefully that is a good thing. The prices for such things are all over the place, including some who have a low-storage option below the cost of the typical entry-level VPS, usually because you're not getting your own VM but have to share with other users. I wouldn't be surprised that both of the hosting services mentioned aren't doing that and are quite expensive. I won't do a full comparison because I prefer to self-host and self-manage.
Nobody has to distribute online immediately at their own expense even though that's often done now. I'm sure Wordpress will also gladly supply DVDs if sent a cheque to cover the cost of the DVDs and self-addressed envelope with stamps to cover postage.
Although as it's WP Engine they'll probably forget to include the cheque and the stamps to pay for postage.
I know pedants gotta pedant, but come on.
If WordPress don't want their software used, then don't provide it to people, and don't have it under the GPL. Simple.
They can't pick and choose who is and isn't a customer. Plenty of sweatshops web design agencies are building WordPress sites for idiots businesses in a similar manner to WP Engine. Are they going to block their access too because they're not paying WordPress a penny for it?
They can't pick and choose who is and isn't a customer.
They're not a customer, they're a leech. Some corporation making commercial use of open source software and keeping that as profit or distributing it to shareholders but not contributing money back to the original project has to be addressed somehow, perhaps the FUTO licence is a good first step.
Thousands of companies offer WordPress hosting and don't pay for it and the licence says they don't have to. The WordPress business model is a "freemium" one and going with an open source licence was always just about getting market share. But if they didn't want others to do the same, they should have thought more about the model. As for using the trademark to enforce copyright, RedHat pioneered this approach: look at us we're open source… but you have to pay use anything with a trademark….
Word Press or any other project can put their code under whatever license they want. If, at the beginning, they wanted to put their software under a license that demanded payment from everyone, or demanded payment from some people while not to others, they could do that. They can, though I would dislike, change their license now. They chose not to and benefited by doing so. They can hardly blame anyone else when people use the terms they chose to apply to their code.
As for the FUTO license, it's a perfectly valid choice for FUTO or others to use. It's their code. They can do whatever they want. It will likely restrict development in some ways because it makes reproduction and modification harder. If I get the code to one of their products and modify it, I may not be allowed to use my own code in something commercial without paying them, whereas they may not be able to use my code in their version without paying me. We'd have to have a separate agreement assigning copyright or giving each other dispensations from the license terms in order to accomplish that. That kind of term can add a lot of friction to an open source community. I respect FUTO a lot for trying to thread that needle, whereas a lot of faux-open licenses have taken the freedoms that free software has entailed and trampled on them while pretending they didn't. I think the people who came up with this have the best of intentions, unlike some others, and I think they're motivated to fix problems. However, I'm not confident that their license succeeds at that and would act with caution if someone else owned code under that license.
Probably every company that provides software these days is including at least some open source s/w in the build and the vast majority are not contributing back. This includes all of the top IT companies such as Apple, Google, MS etc, never mind huge multi-nationals not necessarily seen as s/w providers. My car, my satnav, my TV, my phone, to name but four items I own all have interfaces that when dug deeply into have the licence agreements for various open source libraries integrated into the system. Anything that shows images or plays sounds has almost certainly got open source mp3 and jpg libraries integrated.
True. The also sponsor "Google Summer of Code" too and ceratinly should be lauded where that's due. But it's highly likely they use code from projects they don't support or contribute back to too. MS support quite a bit of open source too. But they mostly do it for commercial reasons, ie they want some (or a lot) of control over the projects they find useful to them. Or in MS case, it's just part of Extend, Embrace, Extinguish :-)
This seems like a shakedown. It seems to be targetted at a single hosting operator, which looks dubious.
I could understand if they announced a commercial service, made the terms clear, had a clear fee structure and then every host who wanted to access the .org resources would have to pay some kind of fee. But picking out a single successful operator looks more like it is manipulating the market for its own benefit (presumably because it offers pricy hosting services that this company competes directly with).
This is the problem with FOS... eventually projects either die through lack of resources, or they succeed in which case the owner has leverage to start extracting money from users.
The good approach might be a clear "premium" option or added services available from the start. The bad approach is to build a huge following then try to blackmail companies successfully exploiting your free software and if that fails, start to use your free project's heft to steer customers to your own competing services.
The other big question is why does the corpo have any influence on the actions of the .org, anyway?
I've always understood the split between corpo/.org for FOSS products to define the boundary between what the community retains (.org) in return for – you know – actually building the whole product, and the money-making entity to be set up as just one service provider to profit, employ a core team of developers, and, ostensibly, to sponsor that community.
It's supposed to be a hedge so that all the FOSS developers don't just immediately jump ship, fork, and refuse to ever touch the original code again – potentially turning directly to their lawyers to ask whether a corporate take-over is legal. FOSS devs understand that they're getting ripped off (in a way) but that the split is inevitable as soon as the projects becomes successful enough to demand a stable revenue stream coinciding with corporate profiteers looming, inexorably, anyway.
It seems to me that Automattic are proudly and loudly pronouncing the quiet bit: FOSS projects are basically suckers for this abuse. I don't particularly care one jot about Automattic, WPEngine or WordPress but I do care about FOSS (in general) and it seems to me that this story is relevant as a cautionary tale for the whole ecosystem.
Oh, it's all about the trademarks, that's all. Really. Really, really! No, don't look behind the curtain!
Let's face it, in most cases, that's pretty much the shortcode for "I don't have a proper technical case or decent legal argument for what I want to do, so I'm going to whine a little and wave my hands around to pretend there's a good reason for my crap!"
Good grief...
Oh the irony! If anything is a cancer then it's Wordpress. Proof that being popular doesn't mean being good. It's awful software that, even after more than 20 years of development, still contains critical design flaws that lead to the many bugs. Yes, due to the widespread adoption of the LAMP ecosystem, it is easy to setup and run, but it is not easy to keep secure.
Slightly off topic, but at a previous employer we had a WordPress install on its own dedicated server for corporate fluff. Management blogs and such. There was what felt like a weekly or twice weekly panic as one of our front end devs would have to patch yet another critical WordPress bug. The site was even hijacked at one point despite this frequent updating.
The "auto updates" quite often left the site in an unworkable state, hence the applying updates by hand and rolling them back whenever any broke things. As for plugins, this was a fairly minimal install to simply give our senior management somewhere to post their ramblings.
Fortunately, you can now get managed hosting that will manage most of that for you.
Of course, to get something designed for blogs to look like a modern website, you need all kind of plugins, themes and whatnots and they come with their own security issues, update problems and freemium pricing risks.
Seems like the PHP world is going to the hell it always promised – I've no problems with the many people who have happily developed with the language or found systems that "worked for them" – but WordPress, Drupal, Typo3 seem to be taking leaf out of Zend's book and are demanding fairly hefty fees so that "something doesn't happen to your website". I've moved the website for one customer from a no-longer supported version of Drupal I think to Typo3 a few years ago because I didn't want to have to maintain it myself. Extremely low traffic but happy to pay for hosting and security maintenance of around € 100 a month. That's due to triple in order to keep up to date with Typo3's LTS releases! Currently muling my options but won't be signing off on that.
While I've used Wordpress and worked with it a fair bit over the years and don't find it quite as dreadful as you seem to do, I do agree that Wordpress' head honcho (or one of them) referring to WPEngine as a cancer is a bit of a pot-kettle-black situation.
Wordpress definitely has its issues and, if you ask me, has contributed significantly to website and Internet/network bloat. As have other CMS and WYSIWYG web builders, etc. However, Wordpress sites don't have to be unmitigated, insecure disasters. The fact that so many often are is more due to something we have all seen across multiple technical industries for years. Complex tools are made sufficiently easy that less experienced, or even inexperienced, people can use them and build stuff without understanding enough about what is actually going on under the hood. The end result is people developing things that are, at best, sub-optimal and, at worst, downright dangerous in some way or other.
Not that I'm claiming to be perfect of course - we've all made our cock-ups in our time and I'm sure there are loads of things I could do better - but I've been involved in building and managing a fair old assortment of Wordpress sites over the years with zero security incidents and hardly any significant downtime (other than hosting/server failures that were outside my control). So far! And, as I mentioned in another comment here, this whole carry on has left me thinking it's time to retire from the game anyway, so I'm hoping that that record will remain unblemished!
Please let this be irony/tongue in cheek. Please.
In any case, I don’t think I will stop using it.
Sometimes the word “black” is just a reference to a colour, not a value judgement about something that is entirely unrelated.
If an actual cooking pot or kettle get in touch, I might reconsider my position.
I had to scroll this far down to see facts posted.
WP is hot, foul smelling garbage. The absolute dumbest, bass-ackwards website building software I have EVER seen. Ever.
And I thought NetFusion and FrontPage was bad. Then along came WP.
Full disclosure - I am a developer who has developed WordPress plugins and themes for my clients to extend functionality to their unique needs. I don't use WP Engine (or Wordpress.com) for hosting.
This isn't about WP Engine being a leach, this is about WP Engine being competition for Automatic's Wordpress.com hosting
WP Engine doesn't really make money directly from WordPress per se - they make their money from people who use WordPress and pay WP Engine to host and help them with their WordPress sites. They are a great ambassador for WordPress, and contribute to WordPress by driving customers to WordPress and theme and plugin developers who have built businesses around WordPress, but Matt Mullenweg doesn't see it that way and in his short-sightedness he is trying to weaponize the open source to which thousands of others have contributed.
What this really means is that every plugin developer will need to set up mirrors and create alternate means for distribution, because we can no longer trust WordPress to have the best interests of the community. It isn't a big deal for me since I already have that infrastructure in place for updates to the plugins that I developed, but it will be for others.
But it also creates a business opportunity from anybody who wants to write a plugin to independently monitor the versions of other plugins and then proxy the updates. If I wasn't already over-committed on other projects, I might do that myself.
WordPress are about to discover that once you've allowed a particular use of your software you can't stuff the genie back into the bottle without pissing off large numbers of people and causing damage to your business that probably exceeds anything your attempts may gain. Seems obvious but a surprising number of companies just don't seem to understand this.
How often do we see this story of a company profiting from upstream open source - in this case WordPress - getting pissed than somebody downstream from them is also profiting? Do they compensate developers outside their own company who contribute to the code or to the ecosystem through plugins?
Or is this another case of "your work is free to me, my work is not free to them?".
Compare also Oracle (Java), Redhat (Linux).
" WordPress.org are no-longer providing free hosting of plugins for WPEngine"
So either pay up or go somewhere else ultimatum.. to go somewhere else takes time and will need users of that plugin to reconfigure where it comes from, so plugin no longer available = no updates
Is that clear enough?
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