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by elwebmaster 635 days ago
I am an outsider to WordPress ecosystem but what really annoys me is that even here on HN people can’t tell the difference between OpenSource software and using another’s services without authorization. They can’t tell the difference between “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”. I am utterly disappointed by that and wish the community will educate itself. Surely releasing the software under open source license does not give commercial entities the right to leach off of the foundation’s infrastructure in perpetuity. That being said, certainly Matt could have taken a different approach. Just that he sounds like a nice guy and didn’t do it. The right thing to do would be to put a statement in the terms of service saying “by accessing Wordpress.org for commercial purposes through automated means you agree to the charge of $1000/MB downloaded using your IP address”. Then sends multi-billion dollar invoices to WPEngine like Oracle would do. File lawsuits. Replace the updates and plugins when requested through WPEngine IPs with ones showing a “Cease and Desist” notice and notifying end users that access to their site is denied due to outstanding invoice of their hosting provider. Boom. Checkmate.
1 comments
lsaferite 635 days ago
Just to be clear, WordPress has the update servers hard coded. If they wanted you to use a different server, making it easily configurable by an end user would seem like the first step before cutting of access to a whole swath of IP addresses.
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elwebmaster 635 days ago
It is Open Source, right? It means everyone is free to change the source. Oh wait, but that’s hard. Much easier to just point your control panel at the original distribution and start the money printing machine while someone else is footing the bill.
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chuckadams 635 days ago
There is no "control panel" to point. api.wordpress.org is hardwired into the source, and the implementation of that API is not open source. Matt has personally informed us that he is perfectly happy with this setup and has no plans to change it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41675671#41678014

So it's WPE's fault for not forking the ecosystem earlier?

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