Comment by echelon
1 day ago
I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.
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.
WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
They're doing what AWS and the other hyperscalers have done. Making bank on other people's hard work because "pure" open source allows for third party commercialization without compensation. (Or even giving back, as is with WP Engine's case. IIRC, they're not a top contributor to the open source code.)
Shouldn't we be angry at the appropriators that take everything and give nothing back?
AWS is 99.999% closed source. They're taxing the industry and contributing to increased centralization. Much of what made the early web so exciting has been hoovered up by these open source thieves.
Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
Again - I think the community is attacking the wrong person here. Matt acted immaturely, but he's the one that put in the work. Not WP Engine.
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.
This open source purism only benefits the leeches.
This is the same defense I see repeated for Amazon and Google, and they're two of the biggest destroyers.
Honestly OSI and their definition of "open" has been a scourge. Google and Amazon encourage this thinking because it benefits them.
You can have non-commercial "fair source" for customers that prevents vultures from stealing your hard work. That's ethical, yet it gets dunked on by OSI purists.
You can demand that profiteers be required to open source their entire stack. But these licenses are discouraged and underutilized.
But when this keeps keeps happening again and again and continues to be met with victims blaming -- I'm disgusted by the open source community's failure to be pragmatic and sustainable.
You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy. And so what did they take and take and never give themselves?
Open source has a problem.
Open source, and Free Software especially, isn’t about pragmatism, or at least not only pragmatism. It’s about user freedom.
And I only hear people complaining about shared source and other proprietary software licenses when the people using them claim they’re open source so that they can piggyback on that goodwill without actually participating. It’s perfectly fine if someone wants to release stuff under a closed license. They just don’t get to do that and then brag about their open source contributions.
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There are things that are compact but build an interoperability ecosystem around them. Various compression algorithms, cryptography algorithms, communication protocols benefit from having a permissively-licensed implementation. Producing a closed-source fork won't make much sense, and where it does, won't damage the ecosystem. If I invented a new image compression format, I would like to see it supported everywhere, including all possible closed-source software.
There are things that are complex enough, and build an ecosystem on top of them. Producing a closed fork may split the ecosystem, and strangle the open branch if it. These things should use a copyleft license, or maybe dual strict copyleft + commercial license. Linux, Python, Postgres, Grafana, Nexcloud are good examples.
WordPress did it almost right, it uses GPL v2. But to force contributions from hosters, they should have used AGPL, which did not even exist at the time.
If you're mad about what someone can legally do under your license, get a better license
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Your whole outlook is against the philosophy of Free Software. The whole point of free software is user freedom. If users can get better/cheaper services from WPEngine than they can from WordPress, and this is putting WordPress out of business: good. Companies should compete on services, not by enforcing a software monopoly.
This is better for users than the alternative. Since they're using open source software, they can always switch back if WordPress starts offering better services, or switch to some new company that can do it even better than either in the future.
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If you don't like that, just use AGPL that force SAAS to publish the modifications.
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> You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy.
For source-availible software, you do. Someone "stealing" your code is table-stakes, if that turns your stomach then open source licenses aren't for you. You can sell your software and enjoy all the same protections of copyright that FOSS benefits from, instead. Microsoft built an empire doing that.
It's no use crying over spilled milk if the software is freely licensed. There just isn't. If a paid competitor can do a better job, it will inevitably replace the free alternative - that's competition. When you try to use fatalist framing devices like "open source has a problem" you ignore all the developers happily coexisting with FOSS. The ones who don't complain, many of whom spend their whole lives never asking for anything but the right to contribute.
If that's a problem and you dislike your neighbors, you're the one who needs to find a new neighborhood.
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This is not "open source purism," dude, what are you even talking about? This is just choosing a proper open source license.
>This open source purism only benefits the leeches.
I don't understand what open source purism even is.
You pick a license for your software, and now you're mad because people are making money off of it. Then why even go with an open source license?
Do what Bill Gates did tell people to pay up for using Microsoft software, because Microsoft software isn't open source.
What are you crying about?
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OSI was literally started by the leeching megacorps (look at their list of sponsors this is not some grand conspiracy) to shame people away from creating more fair licenses.
They are already angry enough that they had to consider AGPL as open source because it meets all their criteria.
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The extortion was to get them to contribute or pay somebody to contribute. And the threat was to withdraw his own resources.
The threat was to "go nuclear". Among other things
* Start a smear campaign
* block people from wordpress.org unless they ticked a loyalty checkbox stating they weren't affiliated with wpengine
* Take over and null Advanced Custom Fields, a WPengine plugin
* Block wpengine from wordpress.org, which is baked into wordpress, refuse to name a price for access, refuse to allow development of any alternate plugin hosting system
* Ban wordpress.org accounts of anyone who spoke up in favour of wpengine
* Start specific campaigns to poach wpengine clients
* start a website listing the staging urls of all wpengine customers and cite which ones left wpengine
I'm sure I've forgotten some things. The deal with extortion is you may have a legal ability to request money you are not legally entitled to. You may have a legal ability to take certain actions. But what is often not legal is threatening to take certain otherwise legal actions UNLESS you are paid money you are not legally entitled to.
The extortion claim was dismissed as the judge found there's no civil extortion tort under California law. California prosecutors haven't seen fit to file charges, so no formal proceeding.
But you're being rather blithe in your description.
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I wrote a blog post about this: https://ma.tt/2025/09/externalities/
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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.
So many times I've seen people complain about situations that would have been solved by choosing the license that actually matches how they intend others to use their work.
Some engineers seem stuck to the idea that if they choose a permissive license, people will still contribute back for some idea of "community" or "goodwill" - while really the license itself is the declaration of expected behavior.
By choosing a license, you're explicitly setting how you intend that code to be used - if you want don't /really/ want other people to monetize your work with no feedback, for example, that is what the license is for. If you don't want people to "leech" on your work, then choose one of the (many) licenses that disallows that.
This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.
I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."
My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.
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Yep. And the reality is that 99.99% of open source is driven by a single contributor. I used to live in the open source world and talk with companies who were thinking about releasing something as open source and the biggest myth I had to disabuse them of was the idea that lots of contributors would show up to work on the code. In rare cases with high value projects that does happen, but mostly not. Honestly, GitHub was the best thing to happen to open source because it made it much easier to get the code and create PRs. In the old days, you had contributor agreements, emailed patches, etc. The bar was a lot higher for a contributor.
Yeah, and this is blatant when it is VC startup type stuff. But on the other hand you have say Redis, which seemed to be just some legitimate OSS cool but boring infrastructure for a long time, patches welcome. And then it becomes some VC 'cloud solution'. And everyone has to adapt (or pay).
These days I honestly suspect tons of people do not think about the license they choose for their projects AT ALL and just reflexively put MIT. Like, if they were sleeping and you prodded them and said "license", they would mumble "MIT".
> 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.
Exactly. It's very convenient to claim that somebody else benefits from the open license when there have always been dozens of competitors behind wordpress ready to take their place.
There are even commercial WP competitors with highly superior product like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. And you know what? They make fraction of what Automattic does. The strategy to offer free product and then make money on addons and hosting is clearly superior. But let's no mistake WP is for Automattic more like open-source freemium NOT some ideologically pure charity.
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?
WordPress is GPL - the GPL, like all "Open Source" (using OSI's definition) licenses enables commercial use, and that is a subset of one of the FSF's core principles (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).
I haven't been following this conflict: have the terms of the GPL been broken?
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The opinion that those who consume should contribute back is not wrong, and as an open source contributor I fully agree, but it should be understood that anything free is going to be taken. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world, after all.
I don’t put old furniture on the curb with a FREE sign expecting someone to knock on my door and offer $100 for it. I expect it to be gone without a trace. If I want something, even if it’s 1% of the value, then I’ll have a yard sale. It’s no different here.
Licensing is a form of conveying expectations. Putting an MIT license in my repo conveys that I expect absolutely nothing in return, just like the free sign on the stuff I tossed out.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.
Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.
Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.
> CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
The overwhelming majority of software is not opensource. Somehow the people writing and presumably making a living from them get by just fine.
> And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
Publishing code under an opensource licence and then going hysterical about people using that code as allowed by the licence is suggestive of a mental disorder.
> You won't call them "thief", but I will.
Well, then we've found the problem. You ideologically disagree with the framing of free software. That's fine!
Millions of people use Linux every day, run iPhones with BSD code and run software made with open source libraries. They download Javascript resources and freely-licensed Unsplash JPEGs to populate a webpage interpreted with a KHTML fork. If you think they're stealing, that's an extremist ideology that is not reflected in the spirit of any open source project I'm aware of.
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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 not AGPL though, and AGPL would have solved the underlying problem. GPL existed to force companies to release changes so “I can have it also”; and that’s a political view, the whole “free as in freedom”. Cloud wasn’t accounted for in this pre-centralised internet. 2001 (B2), is long before AGPLv3, but if you have the same ideology, that’s what you want. You built a thing using GPL based code, I want it also.
Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
WPE says they use WordPress unmodified from the upstream source (which they contriubte(d)) to. The AGPL would not have changed anything in this dispute.
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?
No matter what my personal opinion one may have, it should not change the way one interprets a legal document, should it?
>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.
I don't think it makes sense to bring Big Tech into this, nor would I say opinion runs along a spectrum/binary. Neither WPE nor Automattic are Big Tech.
The main problem with Big Tech is that they're all criminals, they increasingly break the law at vast scale and the legal system seems incapable of doing anything about it. The issue of primary concern with them is a matter of law and society, namely are we a society of laws? Or one where the powerful merely purchase the justice system they want to have?
With WPE vs Matt, WPE has broken no laws as far as I know, and if Matt has, he probably isn't powerful enough to subvert the justice system to his will.
There is no obligation to contribute back. That's the whole point of open source. It's irrelevant how much WP Engine contributes.
Also, uh, they did contribute back, and to the ecosystem.
That they didn’t is pure lies and FUD from Matt who retreats back to the position that it “Wasn’t enough”…
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.
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.