WP Engine is not WordPress

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/

by pentagrama • 2 years ago

267 163 2 years ago

wordpress.org

teddyh• 2 years ago

Isn’t this what trademarks are for?

realce• 2 years ago

I don't think you read the article

rgbrenner3• 2 years ago

If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.

cantSpellSober• 2 years ago

The author's argument is that calling WP Engine's causing confusion. If so, wouldn't they be suing instead of blogging?

sgammon4• 2 years ago

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system

I'm not sure I see how the absence of a revision tracking system rises to a violation of sacred principles.

sgammon4• 2 years ago

You can also just turn it on by emailing support...

SadTrombone2• 2 years ago

You can turn on an extremely limited version. Did you read the post?

sgammon4• 2 years ago

Are my downvoters here drafting posts that have greater than 5 revisions? Or?

np_tedious• 2 years ago

The revision system is not (not is it claimed to be) a sacred principle of life, morality, or society at large. It's a core tenet of WordPress.

snowwrestler4• 2 years ago

According to whom? I’ve developed and run Wordpress sites for nearly 15 years and never enabled revisions on a single one.

This whole line of thinking—one person defining the “core tenet” or whatever—seems directly contrary to the ethos of open source. If Matt doesn’t think people should be able to turn off revisions, he should put that in the license. Otherwise, users can do what they want and open source leaders should celebrate that.

x0x0• 2 years ago

Not to mention I'm skeptical the majority of WPEngine sites are blogs, particularly with prices starting at $240 a year.

Rather they're company marketing sites. That's certainly what I used WPEngine for, and the service was well made, particularly their ability to test WP updates in staging.

pluc4• 2 years ago

I mean, yeah. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Because an option exists to store every revision doesn't mean you necessarily have to do it for free. It is a costly feature. They're free to chop up WordPress as much as they like and monetize features that elsewhere are default. They're not hiding it and users can choose to go elsewhere. Otherwise every WordPress host would be the same, just hosting vanilla WordPresses... and while the WordPress people may not like it, ain't nothing wrong with it.

tomphoolery• 2 years ago

while the WordPress people may not like it

hmm i wonder why... https://wordpress.com/wordpress-hosting/

always great to see devs sh1t on other devs under the premise of "this isn't right!!!" when in reality it's just affecting their bottom line. money makes the world go round!

SadTrombone2• 2 years ago

Did you read the post? They have no problem with other Wordpress hosts and are calling out WP Engine specifically. They even suggest switching to literally any other WP host that isn't WP Engine.

mattl• 2 years ago

And this post is on WordPress.org

See: https://wordpress.org/hosting/

rgbrenner3• 2 years ago

You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing.

Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.

pluc4• 2 years ago

WordPress makes those features disable-able themselves, nobody has "chopped up" anything here.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

That's it.

lightlyused2• 2 years ago

They really thing WordPress is something special. It really isn't; there are better systems. I think Matt is just mad because he is not getting any revenue from wpengine.

That being said, some commercial users of open-source software need to be better contributors to the eco-system and not just vampires.

lightlyused2• 2 years ago

Wow. I was right. https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...

IYKYK I guess.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Amazed that this got to the point where an official post was deemed necessary.

ChuckMcM6• 2 years ago

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops".

Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators.

It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

coliveira• 2 years ago

rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable

Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.

clankyclanker• 2 years ago

That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction.

As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/

Sparyjerry• 2 years ago

Obviously many people will use open source without contributing. The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs, let you know about them, and maybe even try to fix them, especially if they also become or are reliant on the software. They might even want improvements to make it work for them and again work on them if they have a need for it. If a software is good and/or mature enough it doesn't need to be open source in the first place and doesn't need contributions. Wordpress has sort of reached that mature place where it is already 'good enough' but you can't now un-open source it.

bigiain3• 2 years ago

I still recall back in the day <wavey lines> before the OSI decided to politicise (and perhaps even value-extract) the term "open source", there were still a heaps of people doing groundbreakingly useful coding and giving it all away.

Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself.

Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it.

License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead.

While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too.

It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise.

So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order.

The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).

pdntspa• 2 years ago

This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does

Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness.

Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.

jonas21• 2 years ago

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable.

How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.

nqzero2• 2 years ago

try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch

sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma::

note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect

ChuckMcM6• 2 years ago

My thoughts were posted in Mastodon: https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 but the TL;DR is that writing code adds value, and that value will be realized by people who take it for free, even if you don't want them to. From my perspective (not saying its the right one, just one that I've reasoned to) that is theft.

mynameyeff3• 2 years ago

Agreed.

ChuckMcM6• 2 years ago

People are a blend of attitudes with regard to this. You will encounter many people who are incensed that the software they wrote and gave away for free is being sold as part of a product and making someone else lots of money.

You will find these folks want two things; One to generously give away something of value for others to use, and two for nobody to make any money off the thing they gave away.

When people who feel that way find out their software is being sold or otherwise enriching a third party, they feel like their effort has been "stolen."

blackoil2• 2 years ago

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft.

Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.

ChuckMcM6• 2 years ago

I posted it on Mastodon https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783

tonymet2• 2 years ago

You can’t license software as open source, with a liberal license, and then get angry when someone profits off of it. That is one of the many valid uses. If you don’t want commercial use, license your property with a limited license that meets your expectations.

blendergeek• 2 years ago

Not everything that is immoral will necessarily be illegal. We can't legislate morality. The WordPress.org folks seem to be taking a position that WP Engine's behavior is immoral. That doesn't mean that WordPress.org has some duty to attempt to use every governmental remedy at their disposal to prevent WP Engine from taking these (allegedly) immoral actions. Instead, the folks at WordPress.org are attempting to use public shaming and boycott to bring WP Engine in line.

Do you believe that governmental mandates are the only acceptable solution to (this class of) immoral acts with software?

bastawhiz7• 2 years ago

If what you're saying is indeed the case, that's some awful hypocrisy. WordPress.com (run by Mullenweg!) is not "real WordPress". It disables the installation of most plugins unless you pay them a boatload of money. Arguably, that's just as "hacked up" as what WP Engine is offering.

Imagine going after a direct competitor for doing to your open source project the exact sort of thing that you commercially do to that same project. The idea that they're immune to the morality argument because they contribute to the OSS project more is ridiculous.

Kye8• 2 years ago

This isn't the WP.org folks. This is Matt Mullenweg. Whether this is representative of the open source project is uncertain.

echoangle5• 2 years ago

The post and your comment are missing the argument for why it’s immoral though. Is taking an open source server project and offering paid hosting based on it immoral? Is it only immoral because they changed a setting from the default?

Would it immoral if I offered a paid hosted MySQL server? Would it be immoral if I changed the columns-per-table limit to 100?

tonymet2• 2 years ago

His case for WP engine being immoral was even flimsier.

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

WordPress itself was forked from b2 which is GPL, and now Automattic is worth billions of dollars. Ironic, isn't it, when they accuse WP Engine of the very same behavior they had exhibited?

toxican• 2 years ago

I've been out of the WP community/scene for a number of years now, but this post is kinda weird. Revisions definitely aren't the hill I'd die on when choosing a hosting provider at all. Especially considering WPEngine does a lot of things very well:

1. Dead-simple staging environments

2. Support for Local, which makes WP development an absolute breeze because I don't need to maintain docker, vagrant, or a LAMP stack, etc. And it makes deployments quick/easy.

3. Dead-simple backup/restore features

4. Simplified cache-management

And yeah, I've got the technical know-how to handle all of that myself directly on a proper server and all that devops-y goodness. And yes, $5/mo shared hosting cPanel provider would be comparable (and let's be real, it's good enough for most people using WP)....But man is it nice to just charge/pay a little more for a host that just does that crap for me with a nice interface.

I like revisions as a feature. Hell, I made reference to them a lot in the training material and sessions I put together for clients way-back-when as a way to give clients the confidence to tweak copy without fear of completely ruining their site. But this blog post seems to pretend it's the heart of WP and without it, it's an entirely different piece of software all together, which is absurd.

walterfreedom• 2 years ago

Personally, most the features Wpengine offered wasn't very useful for my team and we just went to rent servers on Hetzner for the sake of simplicity. Same goes for Cpanel too. We just used google drive + mysqldump to synchronize the database and rsync to synchronize the files. However, we manage the site ourselves with a team of 4 dedicated software engineers so I don't know if this approach would work for customers who just want a site that they will edit themselves.

graeme• 2 years ago

This feels like a private which has reached the public shorn of the context that would be necessary to understand it.

I use Wpengine and have enjoyed it. They have some aggressive upsells and you learn you can ignore them. Actually had no idea about revisions, hadn't used them before I hosted with Wpengine.

I very much like using Wordpress and Wpengine has helped make it easy to do so. I'm sure they have some things to work put between them but I feel this needs more info. At a certain level it's open source software and if it isn't a trademark violation and is allowed by the license terms then Wordpress has only moral suasion to work with.

Very happy with the work Wordpress has done to make an amazing ecosystem. If they need something from WPEngine to keep things going I think it's fair to ask and perhaps they did but we're a bit in the dark here.

pluc4• 2 years ago

It's a little telling that 1) Matt has nobody around him to say hey maybe don't post that on our corporate site without context and 2) if he does nobody pointed that this reads like another millionaire hissy fit because someone is doing something they don't want them do and they're used to getting their ways with no resistance.

racked2• 2 years ago

It might not be WordPress, but then WordPress is often an inefficient, error-prone piece of dung anyway. WP Engine is the only painless WordPress hosting solution I've seen. It's fast and has a great backend panel for debugging. Hard to do all that yourself for that price, unless you're hosting WP in bulk.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

We settled on Wordpress and WP Engine for the marketing side of my employer's website. Strictly speaking, I'm in charge of all of our technology choices, but my time and attention is better spent on our product, and WP Engine and its deployable artifacts is good enough for leadership. (We are a very small company)

My boss (ie the owner) has never asked me about per post versioning. When we need to roll back, WP Engine's custom snapshotting fits the need.

donohoe2• 2 years ago

I hear you for marketing. On journalism side it is helpful - depends on editorial workflow which varies from org to org.

shortformblog2• 2 years ago

I personally dislike WP Engine after years of having used them. Earlier this year there was a story about how Cloudflare had bizdev representatives reach out about a technical issue under the guise of customer support. I saw the very same thing with a client on WP Engine a few years back, and it was over something that they likely could have done something about given their position in the ecosystem: Too many spiders hitting old URLs.

Instead of recommending strategies to help fix it, they jacked up our prices. It was a huge pain for everyone involved.

But I think the challenge is, at an agency level, it’s hard to move to another CMS host because it’s seen as difficult to move up the food chain. Providers like WP Engine exploit this misunderstanding by targeting non-technical customers with promises that they’ll help you out. That was clearly an opportunity for them to step in, and they used it to put on the squeeze.

bsder• 2 years ago

Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, WPEngine IS WordPress.

Running WordPress is such a pile of security and customer support suck that nobody wants to deal with it. Consequently, if you are being made to run WordPress, you also want to pay somebody to make the pain go away. If I pay WPEngine, I can tell my marketing and design teams "Customer support is over there. Talk to WPEngine and leave me alone."

If WordPress made their software such that hosting administration wasn't such a fiasco, WPEngine would have viable competitors and wouldn't be able to extract the ecosystem.

sublinear• 2 years ago

I can only speak as someone who has done enough web dev to feel like every CMS is designed to get in the way and extract money.

Using any variant of wordpress on a project seems equally negligent.

Kye8• 2 years ago

This has the same energy as a spat between two Mastodon instances. Did he make any effort to work this out with them in private? I'd think he would mention that if he did.

Actually, since WordPress supports ActivityPub now, it's a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.

usaphp2• 2 years ago

He mentioned during the talk that he made multiple attempts to resolve this in private but the other side wasn’t interested in hearing him, he also said he did not want to do this presentation

Kye8• 2 years ago

That's an hour long video. This detail should be in the post. A few sentences at most.

bastawhiz7• 2 years ago

Am I missing something? This feels like such a bizarre hill to die on. He's upset that a company offers hosting of his software with a default setting changed. I guess, don't have that setting then?

There's no mention of the source code being changed or custom patches being applied. So the allegation that it's "something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress" is maximally overblown. Unless, again, I'm completely missing something.

Kye8• 2 years ago

Automattic's own managed WordPress platform severely restricts features all the way up to the top plan. I guess it's okay for them to do it.

edit: I am referring to WordPress.com which is the offering comparable to WP Engine.

donohoe2• 2 years ago

I think you need to give more context.

I’ve been a WP VIP customer at various points and I don’t think this is true as a general statement.

It really depends on context.

n3storm• 2 years ago

Cannot upload own themes or plugins at WordPress.com

Also there has been issues for years when trying to move away and transfer __your__ domain to another provider.

addicted• 2 years ago

Yes, you seem to have the argument backwards.

The argument isn’t that “turning off saving revision data” is terrible. That’s not the problem or the argument.

The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.

The “default setting” is an example of this behavior.

Also, calling turning off all historical revision data as just “changing a default setting” in a content management system is disingenuous to say the least.

bastawhiz7• 2 years ago

The argument is that private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can.

Then why isn't WordPress.com completely obliterating WP Engine in sales? Surely if the argument is that WP Engine is bad and cutting corners, and they have their own first party commercial offering, that first party offering is so good that nobody thinks twice about the private equity hosted version?

softwaredoug3• 2 years ago

Matt Mullenweg, author of this post, is CEO of Automattic, a for profit company with valuation in the billions. Largely raised from private capital

adolph• 2 years ago

private equity will use open source, maximize profits from the Labour open source volunteers have done, and minimize costs wherever they can

Still a bizarre hill to die on. Were contributors misled about the license that allows a private or public company or a nonprofit org to use the software for profit?

Did Matt Mullenweg delude himself into thinking that only people who share his ethos about content would use the software?

Did noone learn anything from the lamentations that started with Berkley and ATT, continued with Redhat and most recently with Elastic-Amazon and Hashicorp-itself?

My impression is that Mullenweg is a thoughtful person, so maybe I'm missing something.

blackoil2• 2 years ago

Why open source the software, if you don't want others to use it?

shortformblog2• 2 years ago

The linked video offers the full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU

(Relevant section starting around 10:14)

I think he’s using this as one prominent example of overall harm to the space.

wmf• 2 years ago

Matt is mad that WP Engine is profiting without contributing much back. This "it's not WordPress" seems like a fig leaf on top of that concern.

bastawhiz7• 2 years ago

It's his right to feel like that, but it's also WP Engine's right under the WordPress source's license to do what they're doing.

nsonha• 2 years ago

But the wording makes it like it's about revisions.

bluevaletines2• 2 years ago

Matt is moving the goalposts of what he’s considering “contribution.”

WP Engine has been the top sponsor of all WordCamps for years.

benjaminwootton• 2 years ago

If this is their worst complaint about one of WPs biggest hosts then he isn’t doing too badly.

I’m not sure if he’s still involved, but the founder Jason Cohen seems very nice and down to earth. I’m sure he would turn the setting back on in 5 minutes if Matt came knocking and this is all there was to it.

WP Engines whole reason for being is that open source Wordpress is a car crash to manage. The hacks, the spam, the broken addons on upgrades are in a league of their own. They’ve probably done more to help the platform than hinder it.

fakedang• 2 years ago

Didn't Jason Cohen sell to private equity?

Highly recommend reading his smartbear blogs.

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

A more accurate title would have not claimed its not WordPress, but moreso emphasized that WP Engine does not provide historic record of your blog posts by default, which every other WP host does, because its how WordPress was designed. Weird title, feels misleading.

safety1st• 2 years ago

He owns a competitor, Wordpress.com.

That said, his point is valid. WPEngine is one of the most expensive hosts in the industry yet they meddle with the behavior of WP as well as the underlying PHP and web server and disable a lot of things. Anyone who would like to build a website on WPEngine is advised to read:

https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/

And that's just the stuff they admit to.

The revisions being pulled out are the most egregious I would say. Revisions are an insanely important feature for some publishers, we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.

Their 'long query governor' can be very frustrating and in my experience, contrary to this document it cannot be fully disabled.

All these restrictions have crept in over the last few years. WP Engine pulled the usual trick of finding ways to lock people in, and then reducing service to increase margins.

snowwrestler4• 2 years ago

He also owns WP VIP, which is much more expensive (and exclusive) than WP Engine.

WP Engine is popular because they hit a sweet spot of automation, capability, and price. That means some things are turned off or tuned. In my experience, WP Engine generally has made good choices there.

That said, they are choices that won’t be perfect for everyone.

we've had enterprise customers who had to fight tooth and nail to get this turned back on and paid an arm and a leg for it, this would not have been a problem on any other WP host I'm aware of.

Then just move those sites to another host? Why would you bother fighting and paying for this? I have 3 Wordpress sites that are too complex for WP Engine and they are hosted elsewhere. And yes, it’s more expensive than WP Engine, but if a site is truly “enterprise” then the difference is not material.

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

disable a lot of things

Like how wordpress.com disables stats unless you're on a premium tier? Or like how wordpress.com disables plugins entirely unless you're on another premium tier? That kind of disabling of things?

sfmike• 2 years ago

Agreed this is a shocking amount of cognitive dissonance.

bkyan2• 2 years ago

In my experience, the revision system in WordPress is not performant. The more revisions there are for a given page, the longer it takes to publish that page, eventually leading page publish requests to time out. I usually have to limit the number of per-page revisions to keep, to prevent that from happening.

b0ner_t0ner• 2 years ago

Most Wordpress sites can go static (like using WP2Static), so the HTML online is always fast.

racked2• 2 years ago

Only if you avoid common plugins that need some server-side interaction, for instance Gravity Forms.

(Probably _unless_ you use some custom rewrite rules, but then you're walking on less-trodden paths)

bkyan2• 2 years ago

The performance bottleneck with regards to revisions is on write, rather than on read.

dbg31415• 2 years ago

WP Engine does backups differently… and rather than force you to copy and deploy complex histories to prod, which wastes time, they just snapshot the server nightly. You can roll back as needed.

The way they let you copy the DB between staging and prod, honestly it’s faster and better for their users the way they do it vs. default WordPress. My 2 cents.

softwaredoug3• 2 years ago

What's maybe more disturbing is the CEO of one privately backed company (Automattic) can use a privileged community position to malign another community member (WPEngine). As a passive observer of Wordpress it feels like a very icky conflict of interest. Especially when you throw in the oooh "spooky boogieman private equity" fearmongering language.

amanzi• 2 years ago

The WordPress revision system is a real pain to deal with. I've been hosting and running a multi-site WordPress site for about 15 years, and the biggest drain on server resources was the revision system. Thankfully, there's a setting to limit to disable the revision history: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/

For Matt to call WP Engine a "cancer" because they use WordPress-supported functionality to turn off a WordPress feature is bizarre. All WordPress hosts modify the software to make it work for them. Especially Automattic!

snowwrestler4• 2 years ago

WP Engine is fantastic. I’ve hosted Wordpress directly on Linux (with me as sysadmin) and tried out or evaluated probably all the most popular WP hosting platforms… including both WordPress.com and WP VIP, owned by Automattic. I settled on WP Engine.

It seems a little disingenuous for Matt to pull on the self-righteous mantle of open source in order to run down a company that directly competes with his commercial platform.

What happened to the idea of WordPress as an inclusive, flexible project that lifts all boats? What happened to open source means you can do what you want?

The more I think about it, the more troubling this seems for other commercial entities working with WordPress. Is Matt going to start putting targets on the backs of companies who get too successful with “his” software WordPress?

steviedotboston• 2 years ago

It's pretty bizarre to claim that WP Engine is causing confusion here when the real confusion is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

sureIy• 2 years ago

Is it honestly that confusing? One has a download button and one lets you sign up. Anyone knowing who to set up that zip file knows the difference.

What you could argue is that Automattic is gatekeeping the best features to the .com and using it as a manager/trojanhorse for the .org version.

tr3ntg• 2 years ago

A more accurate and even more confusing statement would be “Wordpress is not Wordpress” which is a reality that I’ve had to explain to clients (in a former life) countless times.

“But when I go to Wordpress.com…”

SORRY, forget everything you saw there, that’s not Wordpress. Same logo? Yes. Branding? Yes. Company? Yes. But it’s not Wordpress.

This one setting that WP Engine disables is a shame, but it’s nothing compared to the confusion that Automattic has brought upon themselves

creinhardt• 2 years ago

I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.

PedroBatista• 2 years ago

And leave huge chunk of brand recognition money on the table while having to spend copious amounts of it to build another brand?

If me or you were in the same position we would do the exact same.

jacobyoder• 2 years ago

And github != git, which we're still wrestling with over a decade in to its life. Yet, for some people 'github===git' so that just compounds the issue.

bubblesnort• 2 years ago

You just turned off the capital_p_dangit filter!

WordPress ;)

usaphp2• 2 years ago

It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.

Kye8• 2 years ago

This seems like a detail that could be covered in a few sentences in the post. In fact it seems central to his argument so it's weird that he didn't. Allegedly it's in the hour-long video, but that's asking a lot.

b1123• 2 years ago

Some people, even smart ones, make the mistake of thinking people pay attention to an entire event like this.

Likely, his mental model is that eveyone reading that blog has read his X.

mynameyeff3• 2 years ago

Gnarly...

deepfriedchokes2• 2 years ago

Maybe Wordpress should consider a different license.

rmccue• 2 years ago

WordPress cannot relicense; it’s a fork of a GPL project originally (b2) and there is no copyright assignment, so you would need explicit permission from every contributor including the forked project’s.

softwaredoug3• 2 years ago

It’s ultimately just going to make WP Engines life harder to not contribute back. Forks are a PITA.

niemenmaa• 2 years ago

Thanks for the context! Are there some sources you (or someone with twitter account) could provide to this?

ActualHacker• 2 years ago

Says the company with a competing product

browningstreet• 2 years ago

I hosted on WP Engine for many, many years and everything got slower, including their control panel.

I moved to a service that cost me less for two years than what I paid WPE for one month, and they’re faster and have had zero issues. I also had to rely on backups and they worked too.

WPE was great in theory a few years ago, but then they acquired a few other companies and added too many distancing layers for tech support. They have professional features and a cool API, but their hosting speeds are now abysmal.

thr0waway001• 2 years ago

WP Engine is so incredibly overpriced.

erlend_sh• 2 years ago

That whole post boils down to Mark & co(s) not having the necessary protections for their product, so they’re left with nothing to do but cry “foul” as a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work.

(A)GPL provides no protection here.

Polyform NonCommercial however does protect against this, because WP Engine would have to pay for the privilege of re-sale.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/

See also the closely aligned Fair Source:

https://fair.io

echoangle5• 2 years ago

a leech non-consensually sucks value from their body of work

I would argue that releasing your code as open source already is the consent, and you can’t really revoke the consent later (make the license more strict when you already released it). They might not like it now but I wouldn’t call it non-consensually.

dz0ny2• 2 years ago

I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages.

Here’s a common example: you have a blog with 20 pages and 20 custom plugins (quite a standard these days). In a year of hosting that one, you’ll end up with millions of revisions in the database, which is really resource and speed issue for MySQL servers as the developers of WordPress never considered sharding; everything is stuffed into one table, with no indexes by default.

So, usually, the size of the DB and resources to run it go over what you would expect, so naturally, you limit it to a more sane value.

TLDR; In pristine WP env with no plugins unlimited revisions make sense. In a WP with many plugins they don't as other plugins declare them but not use them and thus we end with a system that uses huge amount of resources for nothing.

Oh and revision in WP is not like GIT revision as is full copy of the content.

pbowyer• 2 years ago

I would agree if revisions were enabled by default just for posts and pages.

And if you could say "Keep revisions for 30 days" and/or "Keep the last 10 revisions for every post". Why that hasn't been implemented...

dz0ny2• 2 years ago

Indeed :)! It's not well thought feature. Also WordPress.com limits to 25 revisions, for exactly the same issue. https://wordpress.com/support/page-post-revisions/

librasteve• 2 years ago

It’s probably worth mentioning that WP Engine author the _Local_ app https://localwp.com/ which is far and away the best tool to build WP sites errr on your local machine. Then just upload to WP Engine and your are live. This valuable innovation is fueling the growth of WP Engine and makes this a bit of a honey trap.

Personally I’m not convinced that keeping a 100% audit trail for reconstruction of old states is useful in production. It may well be a better trade off to run WordPress code in a leaner way for speed and storage requirements. Since that architecture results in many ways to get the current state from the db there is also a purity argument that the default schema is too denormalised. Discuss…

rpgbr• 2 years ago

Using .org blog to attack an Automattic rival is unacceptable. Matt must resign from WP leadership and focus on his business — and post this nonsense over there.

PeterZaitsev• 2 years ago

Matt has chosen to keep Wordpress Opensource, and thanks to him for that.

This allowed companies like WPEngine to exist... and focus their resources like marketing and maintaining their internal "fork" rather than contributing to core Open Source Project... and this might be one of the reasons they are getting some good success.

Generally trademark is what should offer some protection here and I think this is where Open Source landscape was not tested well.

WP Engine claims on their front page they are "Most Trusted Wordpress Hosting" which arguably makes folks to assume they host full featured Open Source Wordpress, which per Matt's article does not seem to be the case.

Kye8• 2 years ago

He didn't choose to keep it open source. He has no choice unless he tracks down all the contributors back to B2 and gets them to assign copyright. This would be the most controversial thing he's done so far and likely lead to a fork. That's the point of a license like GPL.

jcoletti• 2 years ago

Curious why the post has two hyperlinks to the WP Engine domain, and additionally without rel="nofollow", if they despise them so much. Isn't that WordPress essentially passing SEO link juice to WP Engine?

mynameyeff3• 2 years ago

In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.

merb• 2 years ago

tbf I dislike revisions in the forever space as a default and would prefer if they are off. If revisions can expire by default that is fine tough. I have no idea how Wordpress handles it. But most of the time you should backup your hosting data anyway , especially Wordpress, because updates will break stuff and these revisions are useless for that.

Kye8• 2 years ago

The gist I get reading all the commentary is:

a: There's no angle to analyze this attack from where he isn't a massive hypocrite

b: It's not clear why he singles out WP Engine when so many major players in the WP ecosystem have equal and worse ethical issues. Why does this seem like a grudge match when a higher-minded ecosystem-level call for review and change seems like the right path?

Maybe this is a bit radical but I'm not sure the guy who runs one of the biggest commercial WP operations should be able to make posts attacking rival commercial operations on the .org blog.

imiric• 2 years ago

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

And that's their right according to the GPL license, is it not?

This entire tirade reads like corporate mudslinging.

The way you win over customers with an open source product is by offering a better service. Period.

As someone outside of the WP world and without a dog in this fight, I'm now more inclined to look into the WP Engine offering rather than whatever Matt Mullenweg is selling.

tone• 2 years ago

Why is the .org mouth speaking with the .com's words?

This is nothing more than commercially focused.

mrkramer• 2 years ago

One of the most disturbing posts I read ever from some tech executive; instead of encouraging competition and driving quality forward for the users, instead he spreads his venom and calls his competitor a cancer?!

Kye8• 2 years ago

It's now a legal battle: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fn3mjr/matt_mul...

> "WP Engine has now filed formal legal action against WordPress.org, myself, Automattic, and we are doing the same against them, so I may not be able to comment on this too much in the future."

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

I feel like I read something like this nearly two decades ago and the community consensus became: WordPress is not WordPress

The history or vague sentiment that comes to mind for you is probably not from WordPress itself, but plugins or integrations that used it.

A victim of success, WordPress alone isn't much. All of that said... I know absolutely nothing about WP Engine. This isn't an endorsement

throwbmw• 2 years ago

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

WP Engine is not WordPress

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