[georgehotelling]

What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.

However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.

The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.

This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.

Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.

I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.

However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.

Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.

(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)

[015a]

What is Netflix's economic incentive to pay their AWS bill every month?

My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.

Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.

WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!

[AlienRobot]

I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.

>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...

I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.

[georgehotelling]

> I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.

[AlienRobot]

I'm referring to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406

>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.

If you check Wordpress' Youtube channel, they uploaded the Q&A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU

There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine.

I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it.

>at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.

Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core.

Matt gave an interview to about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM and although he sounded very unprepared and showed no receipts, none of what he says sounds unreasonable.

A key point on the interview is that Matt has been trying to get WP Engine to contribute for years and they kept delaying on him. People called this "extortion," but in my view it's a way an open source project found to get a corporation that profits from open source to contribute. There is a "world-famous" trademark, and to use it you need to pay or contribute dev hours. He says various hosts had the same deal, and because he never had a problem with any of the other hosts, he ended up being "naive" and let WP Engine delay and delay for years because he didn't think they would just never agree to it. In the screenshots in the cease and desist by WP Engine you can even see messages from Matt including one where it sounds like WP Engine is telling him to set up a meeting next week instead of talking about it in the Q&A, to which he responds (paraphrased) "if you're saying next week you're saying no." Even up to the last minute he still tried to get an agreement, sending a photo of the audience, and got no favorable answer.

Ignoring the trademark violation allegations, and the whole "revisions" thing that some may think sounds ridiculous, there was a part he mentions Woocommerce has a Stripe code that gives part of the revenue to WP org, and WP Engine hacked the code to give the attribution to WP Engine, which means the money that would go to WP org (com?) goes to WP Engine. I think this is technically legal because it's GPL, but it doesn't look good if you're diverting millions of dollars that would go to WP org to yourself.

From what I've seen, it really feels like Matt tried everything he could to get a commercial entity to contribute to an open source project and now he's getting the blame because their customers are getting affected by it. It doesn't help that many who use Wordpress do not understand the separation between Wordpress, the source code (that WP Engine can still use), and the CDN that provides automatic updates (which WP Engine got banned from). The millions of WP Engine users using te CDN were costing WP org money that can now be invested in a different way. I've seen some even say a court could issue an injunction to force WP org to provide the updates for free. The "free ice cream" analogy Matt uses in the interview is really apt here.

If this goes to court I suppose allegations will start getting receipts behind them and we'll have a clearer view of what happened. To me, based on Matt's allegations, WP Engine is not being targeted for being a competitor like some say, but they have been given an exceptionally favorable treatment that was unjust to the other Wordpress hosts who were agreeing to pay for the trademark, and all of this was just WP org making things fair again.

In fact, Matt even says that if they do agree to contribute 8% of their revenue in cash or dev hours, they will get unbanned. I'm not sure if they will capitulate, but just the fact it isn't just "money" but "dev hours is okay" sounds to me that this isn't about money.

[digging]

> What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit?

Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

[tacker2000]

What do you mean? They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy?

They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.

[digging]

> They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy

Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.

[patmcc]

This situation might kill one of WP Engine or Wordpress.com, but I sure wouldn't bet on it being WP Engine that ends up in the grave.

[ziddoap]

>Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

This situation is not going to kill WP Engine.