[scarecrowbob]

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites.

I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects.

The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting.

My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software.

Leaving aside my opinions about the actual legal weight of commercial plugins in that ecosystem, having a bunch of systems with un-patchable software (until you pay for the latest release) has caused a whole lot of problems for the world.

There are other problems with WP of course. I'm completely burned out on trying to fix things with it, so hopefully I can find some other work when I get done trying to be a musician.

However, I find the community is quite unique in its lack of tolerance for the idea that GPL means GPL.

[mdgrech23]

I started my career on Wordpress. In a lot of ways it was where I learned to program. I'm surprised you stuck w/ it as long as you did, guessing the cash must of been pretty good. To me once you're deep into the internals and writing your own plug-ins you might as well just build something custom. I think it's a good middle ground for someone technical and willing to put in a lot of time but not the know how to truly make something custom.

[scarecrowbob]

Indeed, money was okay and I was remote and fullt time w/ 30-hours and benefits for 7 years of that. I asked for a raise given the economy and was denied, so f- it :D Now that my kids are grown I can afford to be a sound engineer and musician.

If I were introducing young folks into building stuff for the web (and I am considering doing that locally), WP would be my platform of choice for the reasons that you state. It really isn't bad if you are doing mostly what it is designed to do. It's got a lot of horrible parts to the code base, but if you never have to touch them (and there is a lot of equally shitty code written to aid in that effort) then it doesn't really matter.

However, if you're integrating an ERP and a SSO system that has many thousands of users, it gets to be a bit hairy. You're correct that at a certain point a wholly custom solution makes sense. But if the shop where you're working is married to WP because that is where all the success stories they know how to tell live, then WP it will be.

[winternett]

WP has had so many major compromises over the years I gave up on it and adopted using Drupal as a framework. I think Drupal focuses far less on for-sale modules and themes, which makes it far less exploitable. The way themes and modules are implemented are more secure than WP as well, and there has been a pretty good community running Drupal for many years now.

A lot of people try to impose the same kind of "name brand" identity on open source software, and it just doesn't work. Underneath, it's based on the same code and libraries, and a lot of the time it's vulnerable to human agenda and human flaws.

[mbakke]

> My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software.

Why is that a an issue? Sounds like WP has solved a problem that an entire industry has wanted to achieve since the invention of the GPL.

Red Hat also sells GPL software. The problem for them is that customers are simply rebranding Red Hat at a cheaper price point, becoming competitors.

I'm kind of surprised this is not happening in WordPress land.

[scarecrowbob]

Except it doesn't really solve the problem.

You might as well just have whatever normal for-pay license. The reason it is an issue is that not just that it's not legitimate GPL (which is ethically wrong to me- it's literally stealing from a community).

The issue is that it splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure. That's fine until you get a security issue and the community can't collectively update to mitigate the issue until the people using the software have paid for their liceneses.

To your point about rebranding stuff, people do that but it's not discussed often in the community. Personally, I feel like white-labeling people software sounds like a community service.

But there really isn't any money in that and it's shunned by the community, so you get a lot of malware created (which is, once again, a problem created by the culture around selling GPL software as if it were closed-source).

Anyhow, other than a few large plugins, the people making real money in the space are doing custom work and leveraging the open source, which is the "real" solution and what folks are doing in other ecosystems as far as I can tell. There are plenty of folks making money off "commercial" WP plugins, but IME that's not the main source of income into the economy around WP.

[mbakke]

So selling GPL software is unethical, but selling proprietary software is? That's an unusual point of view!

I don't have WP experience and don't understand what "splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure" means. I can sort of understand the argument that not buying a new license can prevent upgrades, but, I still think it's within the spirit of the GPL. As a user of said plugin, you can choose to make the necessary changes yourself (or hire someone for it). Or look for a gratis alternative.

To me it sounds like the GPL is doing exactly what it was designed for.

[jrm4]

That's kind of weird, the whole thing strikes me as a reasonable fudge around the GPL (which I agree is incredibly important.)

Do your homework in the ecosystem and you can get that experience, or just pay to get around it seems reasonable, if definitely not ideal?

[scarecrowbob]

Yeah, that's a legitimate point of view.

I've seen enough cases where folks have paid to "get around" some problem and it's ended very poorly, often require extensive work that could have been don correctly the first time with some bespoke code instead of many layers of kludges.

Could just be a problem with low-rent software dev in general, but the plugin ecosystem doesn more harm than good in that area, at least IME.