Comment by gpm
21 hours ago
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.
> It’s about user freedom.
I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about
Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
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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
Bingo. This is the crux of the whole thing.
Thing is, whenever they use, or switch to, a "better" license, people get mad about that too.
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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.
Free software has nothing to do with making services cheaper.
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If you don't like that, just use AGPL that force SAAS to publish the modifications.
Seriously. I don't even understand what the argument is about.
> 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?
> I don't understand what open source purism even is.
I believe GP is referring to the behavior of users, not the developer. That is, an increasingly large segment of the industry refuses to touch software using non-OSI-approved licenses. Open source purists view non-OSI "source available" licenses with the same disdain as fully proprietary closed-source software.
In turn, this situation makes it extremely hard for independent-minded developers to form businesses for any software that doesn't lend itself well to SaaS. Massive companies can afford to release things as FOSS, but smaller/bootstrapped businesses effectively cannot.
Compare this to a few decades ago: the industry used to be less dogmatic regarding licenses, and there were a lot more smaller independent software vendors.
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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.
If we're listing them in detail personally I think one of the most offensive (though least commercially relevant) offenses was to attempt to use public resources, the trademark owned by a 501c3 charity, fraudulently transferred back to Matt, to extort them. Both since that's obviously fucking wrong, and they were already only making nominative use of the trademark (i.e. using it to refer to WordPress's product) which they have a free speech right to do.
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I wrote a blog post about this: https://ma.tt/2025/09/externalities/
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