LWN: Comments on "WordPress retaliation impacts community"

Availability of Tea Varieties

sammythesnake — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 23:10:13 +0000

You should come to the giant Tesco here in Coventry - I was looking for some lavender tea, because my daughter requested it, and spent fully twenty minutes trying to find it in about 20ft of shelving devoted to tea.

There were *seven varieties* of Rooibos alone, FFS. No lavender, though...

Tough, but that's business

pizza — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 16:53:41 +0000

> > Meanwhile, a "promise" is not a legally binding contract.
> Well. Not in general, no. But in this case?

In this case? Still no.

> In the Real World, if you have allowed people for *years* to, say, freely cross your property in order to get from A to B, suddenly erecting a roadblock is legally questionable,

Unless there is an "public right of way" on said property, still no. This can be explicit (ie listed on the deed) or implicit (due to some law that requires it). Neither applies in this case.

> Also in this case (blocking access to a service, not a road) there's an implied promise of No Roadblocks,

No such promise existed. Again, they are not obligated to provide these services to the public at large, or anybody they choose to not associate with [1] [2].

> which can be inferred from the fact that the property in question belongs to a tax-exempt entity that's been created with the explicit purpose of providing said access.

Except... that's not the case here. But even if it was, that still doesn't mean they are legally obligated to provide access to everyone, for free, in perpetuity.

Mind you, I'm not saying that Mullenweg's actions are necessarily _wise_, but legally speaking, it is his [near-]absolute legal right to do so.

[1] Except where law demands -- eg if providing a service to the public as a whole, one can't deny service based on race, gender, and a handful of other legally protected classes. Eye color is not one of them.
[2] I routinely block large swaths of the internet from accessing my internet-facing servers/services. I've also removed/blocked individual accounts numerous times. Should I not be allowed to do this?

Tough, but that's business

smurf — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 16:21:34 +0000

> "I revoke permission for you to use my property" does not rise to the level of estoppel.
> Meanwhile, a "promise" is not a legally binding contract.

Well. Not in general, no. But in this case?

In the Real World, if you have allowed people for *years* to, say, freely cross your property in order to get from A to B, suddenly erecting a roadblock is legally questionable, esp. if the roadblock only applies to people with green eyes.

Also in this case (blocking access to a service, not a road) there's an implied promise of No Roadblocks, which can be inferred from the fact that the property in question belongs to a tax-exempt entity that's been created with the explicit purpose of providing said access.

Tough, but that's business

pizza — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:14:31 +0000

> Have you heard of estoppel?
> Have you heard of breaking your promises?

"I revoke permission for you to use my property" does not rise to the level of estoppel.

Meanwhile, a "promise" is not a legally binding contract.

> There's also the allegation he was running the 50?1?3?(c) for his own personal benefit, which is or should be illegal.

Key word -- Allegation. The truth of that is for the courts to decide, if anyone cares enough to file suit over that issue.

> If someone can launch a CREDIBLE lawsuit against you, I would hesitate to describe you as "fully within your rights" ...

*shrug* At the end of the day, absent a written contract to the contrary (which doesn't appear to exist, or they'd be waving it around from the yardarm) nobody has any inherent right to indefinitely receive any services from wordpress.org, or its owner, for free or otherwise.

F/OSS (and the GPLv2 specifically in this instance) grants you the right to use/alter the software you have in your hands right now, nothing more. No warranty, no support, no updates, no hosting/collaboration platform, nothing. And nobody has attempted to take that away from any wordpress user (or hoster).

Tough, but that's business

jzb — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:39:30 +0000

Things are not entirely quiet on the lawsuit front. WPE is seeking a shorter timeline for emergency relief, and Automattic/Mullenweg have until 30 October to file opposition to the motion for preliminary injunction. There are some additional filing deadlines with a hearing set for 26 November on the preliminary injunction. That might be worth covering when it happens, we'll see. AFAIK (and it's possible I've missed something) Automattic still hasn't filed any sort of counter-suit.

Tough, but that's business

Wol — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:28:34 +0000

> Mullenweg is fully within his legal (and moral!) rights

Have you heard of estoppel?

Have you heard of breaking your promises?

Everything seems to have gone quiet on the lawsuit front, but basically that's the essence of the lawsuit - that Mullenweg knowingly mislead other people in the ecosystem, and that he broke a whole bunch of promises. That's definitely not moral.

There's also the allegation he was running the 50?1?3?(c) for his own personal benefit, which is or should be illegal.

Okay, you never know how a lawsuit is going to go, but that one appears to have legs ...

If someone can launch a CREDIBLE lawsuit against you, I would hesitate to describe you as "fully within your rights" ...

Cheers,
Wol

Glad I decided to not use WP

Wol — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:21:19 +0000

And this seems demonstrably borne out by the facts post-Covid.

I know there are supply chain issues which could still be causing problems, but the variety of choice in supermarkets over here has dropped dramatically. My personal example is coffee (which was declining pre-Covid), but since then the range has been cut back sharply - and many supermarket brands disappeared completely for a while. They have come back, but far smaller than before. And tea - I want to buy some Gunpowder, but most of the traditional blends have disappeared. There's a decent choice of fruit teas, but not old-fashioned traditional.

And a lot of brands now seem exclusive to just one or two retailers, where you used to be able to get them everywhere.

Cheers,
Wol

Tough, but that's business

pizza — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:59:22 +0000

> Mullenweg would still be the guy who'd messed with the central essential repository for the project, supposedly run by an independent 501(c)3, purely for personal business advantage, and kicking out project contributors for questioning him.

You're confusing "Software" with the "Service" of providing software.

Absent a contract stating otherwise, *nobody* is owed *anything* beyond the source code they have in their hands *right now*. They are not entitled to new versions of said software. They are not entitled to add-ons ("plugins", "themes", etc) written by other people. They are not entitled to have their own add-ons or software hosted by someone else, for free. They are not entittled to a collaboration platform provided by someone else, for free. See where I'm going here?

They are free to create their own modified version of that software. They are not entitled to give it the same name (due to trademark law).

Ultimately the only property right is the right to exclude others from what is legally yours. Mullenweg is fully within his legal (and moral!) rights to do what he is doing for (nearly) any reason whatsoever.

Glad I decided to not use WP

edgewood — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:40:32 +0000

Themes and plugins do have a bit of "shelf space"-like pressure; the WP upgrade treadmill. WordPress releases frequent updates and version upgrades. Themes and plugins have to test against the new versions, at least, and mark themselves compatible.

A plugin that stops doing that will not show as compatible with the current version in listings, and many security plugins will warn users of those plugins.

So makers of those plugins must invest some amount of time on an ongoing basis.

Tough, but that's business

davidgerard — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 09:37:54 +0000

No, it's absolutely about open source. If WP Engine vanished into dust tomorrow, Mullenweg would still be the guy who'd messed with the central essential repository for the project, supposedly run by an independent 501(c)3, purely for personal business advantage, and kicking out project contributors for questioning him.

Glad I decided to not use WP

smurf — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 07:18:51 +0000

> The harm might be small ("aw man, they got rid of my favorite scent!")

Well, yeah, but on the other hand there's the harm (and, demonstrably, loss of sales) caused when the customer stands in front of that shelf for minutes and then leaves without a deodorant because there's simply overwhelmingly too much choice here.

Personally I don't want a deodorant with a favorite scent. I want one that makes me stop looking+smelling like a sweaty pig, period end of discussion. Nice scents are a separate concept, to be found three aisles over.
Unfortunately the deos without scent get somewhat buried, if not crowded out outright, by the 23-variety brands.

Yes this analogy extends to web frameworks/backends; my choice there happens to be Flask (or rather Quart-Trio, its sane-async-ized pseudo-fork).

Glad I decided to not use WP

rmunn — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 02:50:47 +0000

The "nobody needs 23 types of deodorant" analogy is an interesting one, because it illustrates how freedom can look messy when you only examine it from only one point of view. It's perfectly true that nobody needs 23 types of deodorant... but all 23 of those types are in the store because *somebody* is buying them. If one of those 23 types was discontinued, *somebody* would be harmed. The harm might be small ("aw man, they got rid of my favorite scent!") or it might be large ("oh no, they got rid of the only one I wasn't allergic to, now I have to either stop wearing deodorant or have an itchy rash all the time"). But if one of those deodorant types went away, somebody, probably many people, would experience some level of harm. And so, what looks messy when you look at it from just the point of view of the individual buying (who just wants one variety), actually has good reason to exist when you consider the whole population of people buying deodorant.

The analogy isn't perfect here, because keeping products on shelves costs a story money, even if it's only opportunity cost from not having a better-selling product on that shelf space. So if nobody buys one variety of deodorant for months and months, the store will move it to the 75% off bin and give that shelf space to a more popular variety that they'll make money on. Whereas with Wordpress themes, plugins, etc., their overall size is so small (a handful of megabytes in most cases) that the cost of storage is tiny; there's no limited "shelf space" like there is in a store. So even if nobody downloads one theme or plugin for months and months, it won't be removed, unlike the deodorant varieties at the store.

But for nearly all of those themes and plugins, *somebody* is using them (in fact, probably many people are). So while the choice can be overwhelming to a newbie (unless someone has written recommendations -- "start with this setup, and choose from these three themes. You can add others later if you want."), there's a reason for it to exist.

It's true, though, that themes without sample pages or preview images are of VERY limited value. Not just to newbies, either.

Burning bridges...

kn — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 05:43:43 +0000

> There should be formal systems in place, like standard contracts, to ensure that at least some proportional part of the value makes it back to the people who create it

Should employees cover parts of company losses as well? If not that would just punish entrepreneurship and risk-taking. If people want a bigger piece of the pie, there are stock options. Most people don't like risk.

Tough, but that's business

Paf — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:14:25 +0000

Given the way the dispute is being handled is hugely impacting the open source project and its users, I think I have to disagree. There’s a corporate dispute but it’s a dispute centered on an open source project.

Governance of FOSS when powering a profitable commercial ecosystem

raven667 — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:15:02 +0000

> the questions about sustainability of open-source projects, and who profits from them versus who produces them, are in need of addressing. Instead of having that conversation, Mullenweg has put questions about governance, centralized software distribution, and software supply chains at the forefront.

I think there is still room to have a conversation about governance and how when you have multiple large competing companies who profit and collaborate on an open-source software platform there needs to be an *independent* Foundation which acts as a mediator for their competing interests and has sustainability of the platform as their primary goal, rather than the private profit of any one of the organizations. The independence of Fedora from Redhat, the Linux Foundation and its relationship with Intel, the FAANG, Samsung, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc. etc. which prevents them from knifing each other in the back, and many others is a main thing that WP lacks, MM's insistence on personally controlling WordPress.org and Foundation as well as Automattic is what's creating a conflict of interest, the large community of commercial vendors who depend on the ecosystem don't have representation and a formal way to mediate what should be a private spat between Automattic and WP Engine. If WordPress.org isn't having the cost of running the package repository properly accounted for they can lobby both Automattic and WP Engine and others to defray costs, maybe setup tiering where small individual instances don't pay but hosting companies with more than X number of installs are asked to contribute something toward maintenance.

There seem to be a number of people who view FOSS as a free resource to strip mine for value with no thought about contributing to maintenance and sustainability (the oldest license, the GPL, has obligations for those who sell it that encourage maintenance and sustainability), that FOSS developers are basically employees they don't have to pay, rather than partners who share a goal. Maybe that's why "open-core" products tend not to foster much of a community, but shared infrastructure, that wouldn't stand alone as a product, does more often.

Tough, but that's business

kleptog — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:02:42 +0000

If nothing else, these actions would deny them the protection of being a 'mere conduit' for the purpose of the digital services act.

Whether there's actually any legal recourse is a different question.

Burning bridges...

raven667 — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:52:32 +0000

> History is full of examples of people who had good ideas but their employer took all the profit. Here's a $100 gift card for your trouble.

This is an area where software engineering unions could help by facilitating an adult/peer conversation between the creators of value and the managers/takers of value as to how much each party should be skimming off the top for their personal wealth. There should be formal systems in place, like standard contracts, to ensure that at least some proportional part of the value makes it back to the people who create it and isn't _entirely_ captured by low-value middlemen (even if it mostly is ;-), $100 gift cards are probably not sufficient.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. At least Automattic was willing to spend $30k/head to buy out 150+ employees who think their leadership is nuts.

Tough, but that's business

raven667 — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:44:14 +0000

That's not dissimilar to the relationship between IBM/Redhat and Oracle, and a lot of people have taken exception to even the mild case of consolidating patches in kernel RPMs, let alone blocking a community member, instituting a loyalty test and expropriating their code.

is this in character?

Heretic_Blacksheep — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:41:12 +0000

Two things to remember when it comes to the law: neither side knows how any given court and/or jury is going to decide any specific case (at least in the US), and in this case neither one is a lawyer. DHH can call on examples all he wants, but in the end he's not qualified to give a legal opinion so take his assertions as you would any layman's. Being an 'expert' on open source doesn't mean he's qualified to make an 'expert' opinion on the _law_ even as it applies to open source. Especially not internationally. The only thing he can do is point out similar cases, if any, then let others draw their own opinions from that. Keep in mind that even if a case appears similar, it may diverge in what may appear insignificant ways to a layman, but important to qualified lawyers.

I skimmed DHH's opinion, and it seems reasoned and sane. But don't forget he's a layman, not a lawyer.

ugh

ballombe — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:28:05 +0000

... which include this
''
It's even more outrageous that Automattic has chosen trademarks as their method to get their "Al Capone" when up until 2018 they were part owners of WP Engine before selling their stake to Silver Lake!
''

If indeed Automattic has sold its share of WP Engine, then surely the buyer should be considered to have contributed
to WordPress by buying them.

dhh post ends by
"But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. "

This seems a apt summary.

ugh

smurf — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:10:52 +0000

Well, for the sake of the Wordpress community let's hope that he has learned something from the mountain of negative feedback he's got for that blog post (as opposed to simply running away from it).

Burning bridges...

Heretic_Blacksheep — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:07:09 +0000

And even then you better read the fine print and have a contract lawyer review any potential loop holes in the contract and relevant law with you.

Gatekept projects like this one should already have this big blinking sign over them that reads something like "You don't own this star, hitch your only wagon to it at your peril."

I'm unsympathetic with all sides, including the Word Press users, for the aforementioned gigantic red flag waving in the storm winds.

Use such products with the ongoing understanding that wagon's spars can be cut loose and destroyed at any given time and plan accordingly.

ugh

knewt — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:22:12 +0000

Also available here: https://archive.today/https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/

And showing roughly when it went walkies as well

ugh

jamielinux — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:04:08 +0000

That link 404s now as Matt apparently deleted his post. It's not on web archive either.

But for anyone else reading, as helpfully pointed out by someone on HN, it's still available on Bing cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2fma.tt%2f2...

ugh

geert — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:50:40 +0000

Unfortunately that link no (longer?) works...

Tough, but that's business

taladar — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:16:16 +0000

A competing company losing access to the infrastructure is one thing. Banning anyone who merely asks for clarification on that new checkbox seems incredibly self-destructive though.

Tough, but that's business

smurf — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 06:37:27 +0000

I don't think so. When your IP is what amounts to public infrastructure and you allow basically anybody to use it, discrimination against any one entity can and probably (IANAL and all that) will be construed as unfair business practice.

And sorry but if blocking a single company from updates and kicking out their widely-used ACF plugin isn't unfair practice, I don't know what else that term should mean.

Tough, but that's business

felixfix — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 05:58:00 +0000

And both parties can lose tremendous goodwill. Mutual Assured Destruction.

Tough, but that's business

zorro — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 05:09:20 +0000

I don't think this is about open source. This is about two commercial entities where one, WP Engine, built it's business on the free services provided by the other, Automattic, without a contract in place. And, yes, that means you can lose access to those services at any time and for any reason. Tough, but that's business.

Glad I decided to not use WP

felixfix — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 01:57:41 +0000

A few months ago, I was looking to start a sort-of blog / repository, and tried WP locally. It looked mostly like overkill for what I wanted to start with, too many choices ("nobody needs 23 types of deodorant") for such a small project, so I started something on Substack. Not really what I wanted, but good enough, and a lot simpler to start with, up and running in 5 minutes.

What bothered me the most about WP was a seemingly random incoherent system for a newbie. Too many themes, and the only differentiation was their marketing jargon ("A free multi-diverse fresh re-imagining of ...") which told me nothing, and no sample pages to try them out without downloading and installing and possibly paying. I don't have the time or patience to try dozens of themes, especially when I know so little to start with, and there seemed to be thousands with content-free descriptions.

But I had no idea there was this much drama going on behind the scenes. It seems in hindsight to match the confusing mess I saw, which probably is fine once you've climbed that steep learning curve. I was also confused by having multiple web site sources, which I now realize WP Engine didn't help any.

Mullenweg sounds like a disaster. Maybe the community can sort things out, maybe not. Maybe someday my Substack will need more and I'll look again. But I won't do it as long as Mullenweg is fouling the waters.

ugh

eean — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 22:27:18 +0000

I like how it's a bullet list of crimes and the crime is not leveraging enough money on software he created.

ugh

dskoll — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:33:43 +0000

dhh is David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails fame, and he wrote a post that was pretty critical of Automattic and Matt Mullenweg

is this in character?

Wol — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:10:57 +0000

From what I've seen, it sounds like it's in character. It also sounds (from this dhh post) that Mullenweg actually doesn't understand trademark law (and probably IP law generally).

That statement about use of the Rails trademarks pretty much states the LAW's stance on the matter, not dhh's. For Mullenweg to slag dhh off for merely re-stating the law doesn't give you much confidence in Mullenweg's grasp of reality ...

Cheers,
Wol

Burning bridges...

willy — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:04:37 +0000

It's not exactly unique to working on Open Source. History is full of examples of people who had good ideas but their employer took all the profit. Here's a $100 gift card for your trouble.

I did about 1/3 of the spec work for NVMe 1.0. I barely even got an internal "attaboy" reward. The Windows team got some Divisional Recognition Award for writing the Windows driver (this is a fairly big deal at Intel). Some people who contributed a few lines to the spec founded a company based on NVMe that got sold for $1bn.

You can't get upset about these things. Nobody owes you anything unless you have a contract.

ugh

smurf — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:51:30 +0000

Who is "dhh", and why don't you put the link into your comment?

Great stuff

jzb — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:50:20 +0000

That's what we're here for. Thanks for the kind words!

ugh

jzb — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:49:33 +0000

You're referring to this post, I'm guessing? I had missed it or it came out around the time I hit publish - not sure.

is this in character?

roc — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:49:12 +0000

I would be interested to hear whether this is in character for Mullenweg (from the point of view of those who know him well) or rapid-onset insanity.

Great stuff

yeltsin — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:43:21 +0000

Thank you for researching all this mess and condensing it so neatly, it's impossible to keep track of on your own.

Burning bridges...

NightMonkey — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:40:23 +0000

When a company or individual complains that "their" F/OSS is being used to make money that someone else, they say, "doesn't deserve", the spirit of F/OSS is already being dismissed.

Open Source does in no way guarantee *anyone* money, revenue or profit. Or fame. Or respect. Or a career. It just means what the license says, and that's it. (CLAs undermine the spirit as well.) If you are competing for business and profit, you have many choices in licensing your software. F/OSS may or may not be the right choice.

This article seems very relevant: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/how-open-source-foun...