[AlienRobot]

While I agree with Matt's thoughts on Wordpress I don't like this sort of public shaming. If you post this kind of thing, it burns bridges that you can't mend later. How can the two organizations reconciliate after this?

Wordpress wants WP Engine to contribute to the source code because it makes money off Wordpress and uses its servers. I think this is very reasonable.

I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim. Distros have been doing this since forever. This isn't much different from a Youtuber getting banned from Youtube. If you build your entire business upon a single point of failure, this kind of thing can happen.

But I'd rather there was a path forward for them. Right now it's either 1) Matt gets fired as CEO so WP Engine can continue leeching off Wordpress, or 2) WP Engine has to support its own weight fragmenting the Wordpress ecosystem.

Although I use Wordpress I have no idea what people think Wordpress is supposed to be. I love Gutenberg, but everyone hates it, and some hate it because they compare it to site builders instead of WYSIWYG HTML editors. The point is that Wordpress is used by so many websites, both big and small, as a site builder, blogging platform, news platform, and even as a database and shopping platform sometimes, that it's impossible to say how it's supposed to be used.

I think if Wordpress.org makes it clear what are the costs of WP Engine to the project compared to their contributions, it will be easier for people who use Wordpress to understand their side because numbers are neutral.

[kevmarsden]

> I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim.

Patching core WordPress is straightforward, but there's also tens of the thousands of plugins and themes on WordPress.org. Until WP Engine can create a mirror of the plugin and theme repos, there will be security risks.

[porker]

Mirroring is not difficult, I've done it in order to perform code analysis on plugins at scale.

[martpie]

Well, it definitely becomes harder when you cannot (officially) access any of the WP infra, including themes and plugins.

[tomachi]

The cost of providing free ice-cream to WPengine is $218,685 or 7.9% of wordpress.org total income! ($2,768,057). But if the people eating up all the ice-cream you give them for free take you to court.... then you gotta cut off that ice-cream. WPengine should apologise and starting slinging cash to Automattic.

    WordCamp expenditures: $2,159,747 (82.81% of total expenses)
    Meetup expenditures: $229,571 (8.80% of total expenses)
        Total Meetup.com dues: $224,249
        Total Meetup Venue rental & exp: $5,322
    Operations: $218,685 (8.39% of total expenses) <------ HOSTING PLUGINS/THEMES ETC