Comment by jkaplowitz

No amount of altruism or engineering work entitles you to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...

When you publish something under an open source license, you entitle the rest of the world to use it to get rich. That's what the license says on the tin, what the licenses have always been advertised, etc. I have absolutely no problem with AWS or WPEngine using that entitlement, nor do I have any problem with any software engineer (or software engineering organization like AWS) choosing not to publish source code they didn't promise to. Even if I wasn't of this opinion though - I don't see how someone violating this supposed prohibition could possibly entitle Matt to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...

Edit: I know it's off topic to talk about flagging, but can we consider not flagging the comment this is in reply to? I think it's generated valuable discussion for people learning about this case... even though I strongly disagree with the author.

To say that 99% of what became WordPress was "done by him and his company" completely ignores the rich ecosystem of free and non-free plugins that have driven its value. A competitive landscape of hosting solutions like WP Engine drives increased demand for that plugin ecosystem; such demand, in turn, increases the value of WordPress and the company that shepherds its development.

My sympathies would lie, say, with a small development team, with minimal third-party contributors, for whom donations would make a massive difference in their ability to focus on their passion project, being stiffed by the AWS's of the world without as much as a corporate sponsorship of the project. Or even a small startup who sees a large behemoth supplant their ability to drive revenue via hosting.

My sympathies do not apply to $7.5B companies. At that scale, if your core product is open source and you're not continuing to innovate (including on business models beyond mere hosting) to stay ahead of competitors who are using your product the way the entire contributor community (not just you as the creator!) licensed it to them, there's no moral high ground.

> They're just leaches on an open source license.

This mentality drives me bonkers. If you don't want other people doing what they want with open source code, then don't open source it, at least not under a permissive license.

People are upset with Matt (though not necessarily the commenters you were replying to - TBH I thought it weird you posted your comment implying they were "attacking" Matt when they were simply pointing out the actual reality of the court ruling) because he wants to have his cake and eat it to: he wants to get all the benefits of open source (i.e. faster adoption and ecosystem creation) but then thinks he can be arbiter of some rules he made up in his head about "how much" someone who makes money off WordPress needs to give back.

Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.

For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?

> I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.

Wordpress became as successful as it did because of the open-source license.

If you were starting a website of your own using a tool just like this, and it wasn’t up on GitHub with a fully open source license, would you use it or look for an alternative that met those criteria?

Wordpress extracted significant value from the open-source license itself (and probably wouldn’t exist today without it). I’m not sure they realise that.

I really don't think it's fair to say the community is attacking Matt. Some people may be unfairly hounding Matt, but I think for the most part people are just pointing out that Matt is saying things that are misleading, without much prejudice to whether or not the situation was fair to begin with. It can be true that WP Engine is a leech and that Matt violated the law at the same time; the courts only care about the latter.

Unfortunately, though, people are really wont to loop the open source sustainability question into everything, even if it's only tangential (in that the WordPress situation is related to it in general, though it has little to do with the actual case here IMO.) Thus, like a broken MP3, I feel obliged to point out that not everyone universally agrees that we need to "defend" open source in this way.

Open source and free software are ultimately movements whose primary concerns are the rights of the users of the code with open/free licensing, not the developers; except of course by virtue of developers themselves being users. I think this is getting lost or perhaps intentionally ignored simply because people want the model of monetizing free/open source software by selling it as a service to work and be sustainable. Philosophically, open source doesn't care if it's fair what WP Engine did or how Matt can make a living, and this is definitely both for better or worse, but trying to alter these characteristics will result in something that is less universally applicable than open source, so I think it's moot. (Of course, the most philosophically suitable response to SaaS is AGPL, but again, AGPL is mostly concerned about the rights of users, not the rights of developers.)

I totally can see how the sustainability issue is a huge problem, but if there's absolutely no way to make open source software more sustainable in the long term without changing it into essentially a different movement, then we're just going to need something else (i.e. Fair Source.) However, even if open source proves unsustainable for some models of software, it clearly can do great for other software, so it's probably here to stay, plus we still have many avenues we can go down to improve matters (I think that government funding for open source is brilliant, and it has shown some promising results already IMO.)

I say all of this as someone who would definitely love to be able to just work on open source full time... but I want it to really be open source.

> WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.

To me, its not right that if you follow this open source license legal contract that there's then an additional, arbitrary set of restrictions that you must also follow.

If you don't want companies from making money from your own source project, don't license it in a way that lets them. It's really not that hard.

> Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.

IIRC Manifest v2 was never a part of WebKit. Chrome introduced it in it's browser after they 'took webkit'. Google has continued to contribute to Webkit (and Blink), and is a good example of open source development.

If AWS or WPEngine release their sources, then they are upholding their end of the bargain. Why shouldn't they make money, if they can?

If they are not releasing their sources, because of inappropriate licences, then that's what licenses like AGPL are there for.

I've got much less of a problem with AWS making money than I do with Canonical replacing GPL code with knock offs designed to cut the community out of code sharing.

It's way more nuanced. Wordpress became popular thanks to convergence of many things including work done by PHP and shared hosting providers (and of course linux). WP itself is not that special CMS but it was main platform people knew about where you can easily self-host and thus be in control/independent. I can't understate how much this is THE main feature. And this is mainly thanks to the PHP/hosting not WP itself.

In that ecosystem everybody depends on everybody. It is also shared open competitive market. But importantly more people use WP the better for everyone.

When you start to throw your weight around thinking you should be getting more because it's all your doing... you will upset the balance. People will call you out. Because they want and need the ecosystem to stay open.

For example think about PHP itself... should they be upset and also want more? The creators of PHP didn't become millionares quite the oposite. Why aren't they entitled to some of the pie? Or Linux? Or what about the guy that cofounded Wordpress but never was invited to be part of Automattic?

>I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.

There are two different group of engineers on two different end of political belief and spectrum ( political here might not be the right word ). Unfortunately there hasn't been a healthy debate on HN about this since 2013 / 2014.

We ends up with big tech getting the hate, it doesn't matter what they do anymore. And no one is even willing to defend them going against the vocal HN comment's majority. Since WP Engine isn't big, the leaching hurt doesn't count. And of course Matt acted immaturely, which doesn't buy him much vote. It is forever more like a popularity contest.

We have seen the pendulum swinging back in the past 2 - 3 years. Where HN give credit to big tech even if they dont agree with them. ( I was surprised when someone on HN wrote something good about Meta ).

If there is anything we have learned or should have learned over the past 10 - 20 years. It is better to have a healthy disagreement written or spoken out, rather than being one sided on the topic and silent on another.

No matter what my personal opinion one may have, it should not change the way one interprets a legal document, should it?

There is no obligation to contribute back. That's the whole point of open source. It's irrelevant how much WP Engine contributes.

There is more to giving back than just source code. They can and do offer a service to host instances of WordPress for others to provide value to the WordPress community.

WP Engine literally paid for the conference at which Matt said WP Engine never paid for anything.

Also, Matt gave them permission to do what they're doing.

Also, Matt did to someone before him (that nobody remembers including me), what WP Engine did to Matt. So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on here - if WP Engine is bad, Matt is bad.

Right. The surviving CFAA claim involves Automattic's takeover of WPEngine's plugin listing. I think this is a stronger claim, since it actually involves unauthorized access (rather than blocking access), and the judge seems to agree.

As one of the people being highly critical of Matt in this thread, I actually mildly agree with this. The CFAA interpreted broadly is a terrifyingly overbroad law, and while I don't approve of the conduct of seizing the plugin (and could see, for instance, a unfair business practices claim based on it) I think I'd prefer it if the courts interpreted the CFAA narrowly enough to not include an app store updating an app with something other than what the developer put in it.