Wow Matt really looking bad on this one. This just reeks of trying to push out a major business competitor to wordpress.com and abusing control over wordpress.org to do it.
The open-source side of WordPress is pretty pissed off at Matt right now. The Slack is heavily downvoting/disliking all of this.
ThePrimeagen invited Matt to explain what's going on.
TL;DW Matt's claim is that he tried to get WP Engine to pay for a Trademark license (or whatever it's called - I'm recalling from watching yesterday), over several months, and they tried to legally block him in every way. Their self-claimed contributions to Wordpress were (as he tells it) that they held conferences where they promoted their own stuff only - code contributions have been minimal.
So the combination of not willing to pay for the trademark + not contributing back (not in code, not in helping the community) is Matt's reasoning for blocking them from using Wordpress' resources.
He also mentioned that he has good relations with other Wordpress hosts, so it's not like he's trying to block anyone else from hosting, but they were all willing to pay for the use of the Trademark (and/or contribute back).
This is accurate, but also, "minimal" here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic's near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.
Hopefully this spurs Automaticc to put more attention into the fediverse. With Tumblr moving to use Wordpress code that could bring all tumblr blogs to the fediverse and get more programmers and resources interested
Wordpress is a security hole anyway, use something else if you have to use plugins for your usecase.
Just not Drupal. Its still pretty bad.
greymatter blog superiority
Would it be wrong to hope they manage to commit some gross act of mutual destruction, and that the outcome would be that I never have to deal with Wordpress ever again?
Genuine question: what is the real alternative to WP? Ghost sucks, Hugo, Jekyll has 0 client approval factor without some shitty third party thing. Wix, Squarespace is not open.
I've been pushing Squarespace for most people who come to me asking about setting up a small store or just simple business website.
Yeah, it's closed source and blah blah blah, but the end of the day, it's not about my opinions on software, it's about the most cost-effective, simple, usable option for the client who is asking me for my expertise, which is almost always not something they're going to have to keep paying me to maintain.
Like if you really really want Wordpress, I'll get you set up, and then quote you a couple thousand a year for maintenance.
Unshockprisingly, very few people think that's the right choice once they see what the keep-it-from-being-exploited cost is.
(And for anyone who thinks that's an unreasonable amount, okay cool. But maintaining a staging environment and testing updates and then pushing everything into production assuming there's no regressions you have to address takes a lot of time.)
Everytime checked someone else's WP, the only thing that came to mind each time was a Jenga block tower. Bunch of themes and plugins that do god knows what and interact together in mysterious way. Touch anything and there's a very good chance everything comes crashing down.
I personally send people to Wix, but I guess Squarespace is fine.
It's that Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns is only alive because all the things that would kill him are cancelling each other out, but in PHP form.
I tend to use Squarespace because uh, they have a marketing budget and everyone tends to already know (or at least one of the people in the meeting anyways) who they are, which makes things an easier sell.
I don't particularly think they're the best or whatever, but they at least do what they say at a price that's reasonable enough and I've yet to be burned by suggesting them, sooooo.....
Yeah, open source licenses don't entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
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