I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
In case Matt removes the link to the actual ruling from his post, and also simply for HN readers' convenience, here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/169/wpengine-i...
> I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
Describes me as well.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
(Note, I'm not defending anything that MM has done, but you're allowed to change your license, even if users dont like it.)
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?
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.
They are already angry enough that they had to consider AGPL as open source because it meets all their criteria.
* 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.
But WP Engine was equally shitty (even if it's "legal" - OSI purism has no sense of justice) to steal his company's lunch, from their decades of hard work, and contribute absolutely nothing back.
Again, it reeks of the same foul behavior we see from the hyperscalers.
If you call me names, you’re misbehaving and should be called out for it. If I retaliate by knocking over your fence and spraypainting your cat, you get to sue me even though you were the one who behaved poorly, but legally, to start with.
TL;DR Matt claims WPE acted unethically, which is shameful. WPE claims Matt tried to ruin their business, in ways they say are illegal.
By the letter of the law, WPE is squeaky clean. But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
ACF was so important to the ecosystem that Automattic felt the need to grab it after they kicked out the maintainers. Doesn't that go against the story that WPEngine was contributing nothing?
The last time I encountered someone making these points, they had a financial bias. Is that true for you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Definitely. And not only companies; even Debian rejected some packages because the upstream owners added restrictive "desires" on top of the actual licenses.
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.
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?
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
[1] Taken from the complaint https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
This category of licenses is unsustainable. The hard working people that made the thing get ripped off by profiteers who are given a complete pass. Profiteers that seldom contribute back. (Where's the monorepo containing the whole of AWS code?)
You won't call them "thief", but I will. They're taking advantage of the spirit of open source and slicing open the jugular of the original authors as they take away the market for themselves. They did nothing to earn it.
And it's made worse by the fact that the community encourages this. (See this very thread.) We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved. You get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
Heaven forbid you give your customers unlimited rights but prohibit vultures from stealing your lunch.
"Open" is basically whatever the hyperscalers want that benefits their bottom line. Either taking over projects they can host lucrative managed versions of, or foisting maintenance onto the community.
So yeah. Matt was immature - but he was stabbed in the back by a bunch of shameless profiteers.
And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
OSI purism is killing actual open source. The company writing the open code just had their revenue cut by a group that only takes and doesn't give.
Why can't we shame this? Fix this? It's a real problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't be too kind to the trillion dollar company. Mobile is a computing platform where you and I don't have any rights. The entire category belongs to two giants, and you can't get your own code on the platform without obeying their rules and paying their taxes.
> Millions of people use Linux every day
Linux has worked out pretty well. Google still uses platform advantages to force vendors to obey their rules. When you're that big, you carry gravitational weight and can draw the lines where you want.
We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
And we punish small companies trying to swim up the gradient by holding them to a different set of standards.
Google has a way to massively profit on Linux and Elasticsearch and Redis. To remove the profit from the authors of those softwares and redirect it to themselves. They're a giant.
WordPress can't even profit off the very thing they wrote. Someone used the OSI license to yank it from them.
> KHTML fork.
Embrace extend extinguish. Now Manifest v2 is gone. Google is very good at this game.
> Embrace extend extinguish. Now Manifest v2 is gone.
You keep on hammering on this point and I don't think it makes sense the way you think it does. Manifest v2 (and extensions in general!) are a feature which Google created and added to Chrome entirely themselves. I'm not a fan of what they did in Mv3 either, but it's their feature, and it's their prerogative to change it. If you're arguing that something (the license?) should prevent them from making changes to their software which you don't like, whatever you're imagining has drifted rather far away from open source.
Google is playing chess at a level where we mere mortals can only be bystanders.
They can invest billions of dollars into a piece of software that the entire world benefits from. I wouldn't call it pure benevolence or charity, but I'll give them that. It's useful software that they didn't have to write or give away.
The problem is that Google isn't one person. It's a collection of forces seeking to optimize the overall position and profitability of the company. Even if that means that they might impinge upon or even willfully pilfer from the broader commons.
Chrome is now a central chess piece in controlling the web, advertising, and search. Maybe it didn't start that way, but it's what it has become - intentionally or not. And now that most people are using Chrome, Google is free to boil the frog, tighten the noose, etc. Their grip on the funnel is iron clad, and they can apparently operate monopolistically without interference from the DOJ.
Chrome might be open, but you won't be able to afford to deviate from Google's choices. The engineering hurdles are too steep for small teams to overcome. And because of browser monoculture, the experience with other browsing technologies and platforms degrades.
The result is that we're being herded like cattle. I don't think the folks at Google think of us this way, but that's how it is in practice. Behavior at scale to increase profits.
Google gets to proudly proclaim that Chrome is "open source". But in reality the only force that can meaningfully steer the product - the entire web ecosystem at this point - is Google. And they use that power against us.
Open source is a strategy for big tech. In the case of Matt vs WP engine, it's simply enabling a vulture company to dip into the tip jar without tipping out.
My point is that "open source" isn't entirely pragmatic about users and freedom. In some very real cases it's inequitable and not sustainable. By empowering monopolizers, it's orthogonal to user benefit.
Amazon gets to steal databases and make managed offerings that pull profit from the originators into AWS' coffers instead.
Google gets to, well, own the web and search and everything.
WP Engine gets to dip into Wordpress' decades of hard work.
I don't see how the users benefit. Just the greedy growth minded profiteers.
Users aren't even in the conversation. The conversation is entirely about who profits and controls. And that is, to me, what's fucked up about all of this.
They got to be worth a trillion dollars somehow. I hate Apple with the passion of a million suns; guess what? They sell something people want. They make money, they survived. Their copyright is preserved equally as well as the AS-IS terms of the BSD license. And despite being whipped like a dog, there are still multiple BSD OSes with modern software packaged for them.
> We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
Do "we"? I'm running Firefox right now, maybe you're on an iPad or some other platform that locked you down. But that's your problem, if it concerned you then you should have returned it to the Apple store.
People still have a free choice to run whatever software they want. Wordpress is not being made "less free" because hosting companies won't get out of bed to pay Matt's bills. If the project has to die to prove it, it will die as a free program. It will still be forkable and maintainable by the community because that was the intention and spirit of the project.
> Google is very good at this game.
No, the fed is just particularly bad at it.
Google's big problem is that they monopolize online advertising and the DOJ refuses to neuter them. If your free access to the internet gets tragically cut off by Apple's indignant software policies... not my problem, is it?
You can be a Firefox user, and your Firefox usage is impacted by the overwhelming market share capture of Chrome and Chromium browsers.
You can use Librem and be impacted by your government requiring software that will only run on iOS or Android. Or Chrome.
> DOJ refuses to neuter them
Yes, but don't give them the free pass. Even if a company's objective is to take as much of the pie as possible, Google and Apple actively employ lawyers to skirt the regulators.
We have to live with these damages, the same way we've limped alongside a broken internet for the past decade. Its possible these abuses will be encoded in American identity for decades to come. The next step is surviving top-down control, and freely-licensed software will be the only alternative to the digital monoculture.
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.
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.
Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
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.
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.
That they didn’t is pure lies and FUD from Matt who retreats back to the position that it “Wasn’t enough”…
Only the extortion (1030(a)(7)) CFAA claim was dismissed, and it was dismissed with leave to amend.
It is sad how his reputation is.
I wouldn't touch Wordpress.com, ever, although I still use wordpress the software and am happy to see movement in decentralizing the plugin and core repos.
I removed/converted my last Wordpress site (commercial and otherwise) last month.
If you have an infrastructure, stability is a good selling point.
For those who still need word press, I recommend checking out the roots.io open source collective, they have done great work bringing modern PHP development practices into WP projects. Bedrock and Sage are a great starting point to any project.
The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
Taking legal advice now? Rhetorical question, more a statement: last time you were here, you didn't.
edit: For the uninitiated, page 24 is neat. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
[1]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12276/how-to-...
And I say this as somebody who thinks that the block editor is... fine. I use it in a hybrid style, using ACF to create blocks that behave and perform natively but don't require directly using all the stupid build tool cruft.
That's actually very cool. In most runtimes the "core" built-ins and standard libraries are immutable. You'd have to recompile them with your changes to get the same effect. Not so with PHP. A footgun, but in this case a useful one.