Dries Buytaert

I will use the terminology which I invented and use, I don't know more appropriate words.

There's technical open source (code licensed under free license), social open source (accepting contributions, working towards the user, maintaining), and stewarded open source ("the product" with the team, roadmaps, release cycles, but the code is open and free).

Technical vs social: many projects are made to solve the issue of the author, and just published on the internet under a FOSS license for everyone, nothing more. For a random project on the internet, you should not by default assume that the author is willing to fix the issue you report, implement the feature you'd like to have, or merge your contributed code — author may not be interested in solving your issue, they already solved theirs. That's open source which does not have social component.

What you have here is a stewarded open source: a Google project which have a team on a salary. The team has their own plans and goals on their product, and in addition they accept contributions. They might not be interested in them, or even be hostile to external contributions, because some PRs just disrupt their plans, not suitable in their architecture view, or could be seen as a maintenance burden which they didn't ask for. Check CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository: the code contribution is in the bottom of the list, and they have a hour and a half movie on how to contribute!

Since this is a team on a salary, your task is first…

Long post, writing this for myself as well:

The players

- WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011;

- WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010 with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director;

- Automattic is a private company that owns and runs WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles Mullenweg;

- WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that makes money by hosting WordPress since 2010;

- WP Engine and Wordpress.com are direct competitors;

- WordCamp is a conference run by volunteers that happens regularly, this year it happened between 17-24 of September

--

What happened, afaik:

- Sept 23: Matt calls WP Engine "the cancer of WordPress" on his blog [1][2][3] and says that it profits from the open source without contributing enough

- Sept 24: WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic to “retract false, harmful, and disparaging statements”, after Matt Mullenweg called it a “cancer” [4]

- Sept 25: Automattic sends a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, alleging unauthorized use of the WordPress trademark [5] and I quote "If you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine."

- Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking plugin updates from WP Engine

- Same day: Matt on his personal blog says Automattic has "been attempting to make a licensing deal" with WP Engine "for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along" [7] and doubles…

Matt isn't being held to a higher standard, he's being held to a different standard, a standard he chose.

WP Engine is a company that chose to build a business around a piece of software released under a license that permits their commercialisation of the software.

Matt is an individual who chose to release software under a license that permits companies to build a business around the software and has then chosen to initiate a "nuclear war" against one of those companies who is complying with the license he chose to release the software under because they are not contributing to the software in a way that he deems acceptable.

They're fundamentally different actors in fundamentally different positions. WP Engine has behaved exactly as one would expect from the start. Matt has behaved in a way that suggests he has lost his damn mind, doing everything in his power to harm a business that is complying with the license he chose.

I don't disagree with the idea that WP Engine should contribute more, I don't disagree that Private Equity is harmful to Open Source, but I fundamentally disagree with Matt's weaponisation of Open Source to make a point. There is a lot of great prior thinking on this subject[1], Matt has many options, he is making the choice to behave in this way, it is not a foregone conclusion.

Our discussion isn't going to lead anywhere, but we can revisit it in a month when Matt's downward spiral has resulted in the inevitable. Perhaps, at that point, you'll…

That's at the heart of this discussion. There are two legal entities at play here: automatic, a for profit company, and the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit. It's believed that the latter carries independent governance over the open source project. As it turns out: that's likely not the case, and there's a potential conflict of interests.

That doesn't imply it's a bad model. Drupal is governed in a similar fashion, with safeguards in it's governance model to avoid this.

Dries Buytaert also considers the maker/taker issue, but does so from a place of, seemingly, healthy conversation.

https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

I think the big issue is that, ultimately, a lot rides a lot rides on the character and the acumen of the foundational maintainer / creator of a FOSS project. As well as how they succeed in creating a particular perception about themselves. Sadly, the "mad king" moniker in the lwn article is kinda apt in WordPress' case after these last week's.

As for funding, I do believe companies leveraging FOSS have a moral obligation to contribute back, but that it's not the world we live in. Unless there are tangible incentives to do so, it's hardly possible to enforce this. As per Dries: promotion and visibility as a "trusted" party through the project's channels is probably the most concrete form of leverage a FOSS project has.

Thank you for sharing. This is exactly the kind of problem that centralised social networks give us, but which most people will not understand because for most people this will not happen.

I think it is important that we solve the problem of centralised social networks.

And I think Nostr has the right idea. Nostr differs from ActivityPub in that identity is not tied to the instance that you use.

To quote someone else:

> Nostr uses a public key to identify users, while ActivityPub utilizes a more conventional user account system. ActivityPub user accounts are based on domain names, which can be controlled by third-party entities. Nostr's identification system is more decentralized, as it does not rely on domain names controlled by outside parties.

https://dri.es/nostr-love-at-first-sight

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with GitHub banning your account and the stars, issues, PRs, comments and so on that you lost.

Hopefully in the future when a truly decentralised alternative to GitHub exists, other people can avoid that kind of experience.

An alternative to GitHub, in the shape that Jack Dorsey has put a bounty on here.

> But it’s old and even the founder abandoned it long ago around 2012.

Dries is still using Drupal. Here is his personal blog, where he discusses updating to Drupal 11: https://dri.es/drupal-11-released

Dries is the founder of Acquia, whose products are all based on or related to running Drupal websites.

Dries was the keynote speaker at DrupalCon Barcelona last month, where he discussed the new features currently under development in Drupal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wce6FkNN2Io

> It was also a nightmare upgrading the versions of it.

This was an issue prior to version 8. All major versions since then have been directly upgradable. It usually takes me 2-3 hours to do a major version upgrade. Maybe a few more if there's a lot of custom code.