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   FeralRobots (feralrobots@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 08:48:25 JST FeralRobots

   • Dare Obasanjo

   @carnage4life TBC Automattic has never even tried to offer a service that's truly comparable to what enterprise WP hosts offer.

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 08:48:24 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Bret Carmichael

     @bretcarmichael @FeralRobots I can say from experience that this language is absolute poison for an open source community. I have never, not even once, seen it solve actual free-rider problems or improve the support for underfunded contributors.

     I have *often* seen it used by parties fighting over dominance of a market that is profitable but no longer growing explosively.

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     Bret Carmichael (bretcarmichael@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 08:48:25 JST Bret Carmichael

     in reply to

     @FeralRobots I don’t believe that’s the point though. I think the core grievance is that WP Engine is extracting large sums of money from other people’s work — like a parasite — while contributing little in return. I’m not saying that’s actually true. I have no idea. It’s how I interpret the complaint.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 08:49:46 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Bret Carmichael

     @bretcarmichael @FeralRobots IMO the biggest danger (to everyone) is when one of the financially motivated players starts defining parasitism and contribution in relation to direct engineering support for a project roadmap they control, rather than broader community and ecosystem participation.

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     Bret Carmichael (bretcarmichael@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 09:02:46 JST Bret Carmichael

     in reply to

     • Eaton

     @eaton @FeralRobots There are other ways for handle this for sure. For example, they could modify the open source license for future versions of WordPress. This punishes users though, because WP Engine's customers are all WordPress users.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 09:02:46 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Bret Carmichael

     @bretcarmichael @FeralRobots Wouldn't Automattic be parasites using the criteria being laid out, though? It was built on top of b2, an open source project that was, at the time, seeking donations and contributions. Instead of doing that it was forked and used to build a for-profit business that didn't benefit b2 users unless they migrated to Wordpress.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 09:05:18 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Bret Carmichael

     @bretcarmichael @FeralRobots I'd argue that was the way the GPL is designed to work, and the only reason it didn't turn into a conflict is that WP went in a different direction.

     WPEngine isn't simply sitting around dumping copies of WP onto shared hosting and counting its money; it puts engineering work into stuff, some of which is specifically for its customers, some of which is usable by the broader community.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 09:09:09 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Bret Carmichael

     @bretcarmichael @FeralRobots The danger I referred to is that when Automattic is simultaneously a competitor to WPEngine, capable of deciding that its own feature priorities are The Road Map For Wordpress, AND capable of declaring its competitors parasites because they don't materially support that Autogram-determined roadmap, the license may be open source but the project no longer is.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 09:18:54 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     To be clear, I've got a lot of strong feelings about this because I was part of the Drupal community for a long, long time — from before Acquia existed to long after they became the dominant player in it — and we had to hash painfully through many of the same dilemmas and bruising negotiations. I've disagreed with Dries about tons of stuff, but we're incredibly fortunate that, for his part, he never pulled anything like this.

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     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 10:04:30 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     (also, there's the time in '06 that drupal's upcoming core theme was ported to wordpress and announced *as a wordpress.com option* before drupal actually shipped… and Matt dismissed it as 'some people getting outraged’) https://acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-copies-drupal-theme/ https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/general-discussion/2007-08-16/drupal-garland-and-wordpress