- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Automattic will stop contributing to WordPress after reaching 45 hours a week, “aligning” its contributions to those by WP Engine, and because the lawsuit is taking up their resources.
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Maybe I’m out of the loop, but isn’t this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?
Essentially, yes: they’re not going to contribute to their primary project because some fee-fees got hurt. It’s not really a suicide note, but they’ve certainly decided they’re not opposed to it.
Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future
$5 says there’s a hard fork led by all the commercial providers and anyone else who has a business that depends on Wordpress, and that it happens fairly soon.
It’s GPLed, so while you can’t call your fork Wordpress, you can just rename it and carry on with everything as it was, except you’re no longer involved in dealing with crazy.
I’m not sure the average customer of any of those businesses knows or cares about the name of the software that their site runs, and won’t give a single crap about it not being Wordpress but some other name while otherwise staying exactly the same - or, maybe, without an opinionated obstructionist sitting in front of the code approval path, perhaps even better.
I’d laugh my ass off if WP Engine would lead a hard fork called WP Core. If any WP Engine folks read this, feel free to use the name, I won’t sue, I promise.
That’s a much better name than something I was thinking.
I just made the assumption they’d do the standard open source thing and call it Libre-something.
I’d pay actual money to see the meltdown Matt would have if it was forked and called WP Core.
That’s so petty, I’m actually impressed. Like, it’s VERY hard to end up universally disliked by everyone, but it looks like Matt’s figured out how to do it.
That’s the biggest crybaby nonsense: Oh no, the lawsuit is making us broke. Yes we started this whole thing but it’s not OUR fault! It’s those bad evil private equity firms. Yes, we take equity money too, but not from the BAD firms! Fine! We’ll take our ball and go home!
Also, hilarious because I’m sure all the developers they have on staff are not involved in doing ANY lawsuit anything, though if they are, I’m going to watch this even closer since if there’s a group of people that firmly do not understand legal shit more than developers (because developers rightfully expect the rules and procedures to make some sort of damn sense) I don’t know who it’d be.
That whole blog post is so full of salt, that it really hurts to read.
Still going on about the “imbalance of the contributions”, well that’s open source for you - you don’t get to control who contributes how much, all you can do is ask nicely, and provide a good experience for contributors. Acting like a lunatic does not do that.
legal attacks started by WP Engine
Of course they did after the witch-hunt and the absolutely illegal, unethical and plain ridiculous behavior of Automattic. The counter they did, the whole ACF takeover and the slandering are a lawsuit handed on a plate.
The way “community” is quoted in that article for those who dared to disagree.
This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health.
Yeah, as a developer I also hate when lawsuits are stopping me from working. He had no problem letting go of nearly 10% of his staff with their “alignment offer” to get rid of people who again dared to disagree, but the legal action is diverting resources now.
But the whole “Focused on the Future” paragraph is going full mask off:
Before, they said that resources will be reallocated to “for-profit projects within Automattic”, and
We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term
It’s only a matter of time another hostile takeover will take place, and Matt will attempt to go full for-profit on WordPress itself.
We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org when the legal attacks have stopped.
Full on extortion. Stop the lawsuit or we won’t contribute.
Honestly, if I’d be dependent on WordPress for my work, I’d not sleep well and start going into something else right fucking now. How are people that stupid, childish and entitled getting into such positions.
Well that’s one way to shoot yourself in the foot…
Apologies for the laziness here, but I self-host a WordPress site with a bunch of old blog posts that are now private. I’m not ready to make it an offline archive yet (maybe I’ll restart blogging one day), but I’m not interested in supporting or otherwise using WordPress any more. I don’t have any major requirements or plugin dependencies.
What is a good alternative to self-hosting WordPress these days?
Edit: thanks for the suggestions so far. One key requirement is the ease of importing hundreds of WordPress posts from its output format. I don’t really want to manually process them all, I did that to get them into WordPress way back when I switched to it.
Sounds like Automattic just had an upsydaisy moment meeting with the CFO. Could have, you know, not been a dick and saved the lawyer costs…
If I were WP Engine, I’d crank up contributions in response.
