[usaphp]

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.

[Kye]

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.

[b112]

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.

[deepfriedchokes]

Maybe Wordpress should consider a different license.

[rmccue]

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.

[deepfriedchokes]

Well, crap. Thanks for explaining.

[outofpaper]

Further clarification: the project can be relicensed under a compatible license. This approach would mean that new code is released under the new license, such as the AGPL, while the existing code remains under the GPL. It's a little complicated but quite doable.

[mrbungie]

You need to have a compelling backlog to continue developing down the road or someone can just fork it.

[outofpaper]

WP Engine might try forking it (as they are free to now) but they don't contribute that much to Wordpress as is.

[softwaredoug]

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

[niemenmaa]

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

[mynameyeff]

Gnarly...