More hot takes, since I have insomnia.
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@mattdm Oh dear! So, if we're all whining about a municipality-appointed monopolist...
Are we all Umarell?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umarell -
That's am amazing word we should import into English.
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Thomas Depierrereplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
@mattdm WAT. I uh. as the author of the blogpost you link, I have a lot of problems with that take. On one side, we have a guy that is hugely well off, running a massive software company maintaining and upgrading this software. And you are equating his feud to get paid a racket money with people that maintain critical infra for nothing. I uh.
I strongly recommend considering context when making hot takes.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Thomas Depierre last edited by
I'll stand by it. WordPress is open source with no "open core" drawback, and no faux-open propriety license b.s.
That's hard to pull off.
WP Engine is welcome to run a competing company around that software, but they're not entitled to WordPress providing services for their users so they can keep their own costs down. WP Engine is also not entitled to represent themselves in a way that makes them seem like part of the official project when they contribute little or nothing back.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
I get why people are upset, but in part the reaction is _because_ many were taken in by WP Engine's deceptive presentation. The WordPress guy is acting more than a litte unhinged, which doesn't help, but WP Engine seems pretty squarely to blame and that's where the anger should go.
Or: people feel entitled to get stuff more cheaply than the cost of making and providing that stuff, and get angry when that's taken away.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
I am not a particular fan, but capitalism isn't going away anytime soon. Pragmatically in the world we have, the only scalable way to get people working on open source competitive pay (or even _enough to live on_) is for open source businesses to be successful, and for other businesses relying on open source to contribute their share.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
So, yeah — that's the context I'm considering.
WordPress is successful with open source. Good.
Automattic uses some of that success to provide costly services to the world for free. Cool.
WP Engine is not contributing back. Bad.
WP Engine is using the WordPress trademarks deceptively and causing market confusion and real harm. Bad.
Automattic CEO is having tantrums. Not great, but human.
Users are getting caught in the middle. Bad — and ultimately WP Engine's problem to fix.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
To be clear, it's not just your blog post I'm commenting on. But, you say "a massive software company maintaining and upgrading this software" — which, yeah, _my point exactly_.
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Thomas Depierrereplied to Matthew Miller last edited by
@mattdm also note that WP is explicitly not doing what you claim. They do contribute. Maybe not as much as Matt would like (or maybe just enough that he can try to racket them). And they have been really precise about their use of the name and everything.
I get where you come from, but really the context does not fit that take.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Thomas Depierre last edited by [email protected]
The trademark policy (going way back) specifically says that you can't use WordPress as part of a product or service name. Yet, WP Engine has products named "WordPress Hosting" and "Headless WordPress" and services like "Premium Managed WordPress Hosting for Media Sites".
This can easily cause confusion. And, yeah, I think that _is_ carefully calculated — they _are_ really precise about it, in a very specific way. The caps are all theirs.
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Matthew Millerreplied to Matthew Miller last edited by [email protected]
And look at their podcast page — https://wpengine.com/blog/tag/press-this/
Sure, if you look closely, it's named "Press This", but click through and tell me that's not intentionally designed to make you primarily see and think "[The] WordPress Community Podcast".
It seems pretty blatant to me.