mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

354K
active users

WordPress hit the same problem other open source cloud software like Redis, MongoDB and ElasticSearch have.

You do a bunch of R&D only for another company to host your software and provide the same or better service with your free labor.

Usually companies change licenses in response to this form of asymmetric competition. It’s unusual to first demand a portion of revenue and then sue for trademark violations instead.

The business impact on Automattic/WordPress must be non-trivial

FeralRobots

@carnage4life TBC Automattic has never even tried to offer a service that's truly comparable to what enterprise WP hosts offer.

@FeralRobots I don’t believe that’s the point though. I think the core grievance is that WP Engine is extracting large sums of money from other people’s work — like a parasite — while contributing little in return. I’m not saying that’s actually true. I have no idea. It’s how I interpret the complaint.

@bretcarmichael That's Matt's framing. They're very far from the worst in that regard, & WPE are not wrong when they offer as counterpoint all the non-coding stuff they do to promote the platform.

He's pretty all over the map on his claims, & in the context of trying to extort payments for legitimate use of WordPress identity, it all looks pretty bad.

@bretcarmichael @carnage4life
What I keep coming back to is that there's a model out there for how to make money while letting other vendors sell a turnkey build of your open-source CMS: Acquia & the Drupal Foundation vs Pantheon. I don't see Dries Buytaert extorting from Pantheon. I do see both Acquia & Pantheon making a lot of money.

@FeralRobots @carnage4life Meta also found a nice way to manage its open source Llama. It's free to everyone. However, if you have more than 700,000 MAU, you have to get a license from Meta. This addresses enterprises like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft that could effectively resell it at scale. To your point, trying to peer-pressure someone into donating is not a recipe for success.

@bretcarmichael @FeralRobots I can say from experience that this language is absolute poison for an open source community. I have never, not even once, seen it solve actual free-rider problems or improve the support for underfunded contributors.

I have *often* seen it used by parties fighting over dominance of a market that is profitable but no longer growing explosively.

@bretcarmichael @FeralRobots IMO the biggest danger (to everyone) is when one of the financially motivated players starts defining parasitism and contribution in relation to direct engineering support for a project roadmap they control, rather than broader community and ecosystem participation.

@eaton @FeralRobots There are other ways for handle this for sure. For example, they could modify the open source license for future versions of WordPress. This punishes users though, because WP Engine's customers are all WordPress users.

@bretcarmichael @FeralRobots Wouldn't Automattic be parasites using the criteria being laid out, though? It was built on top of b2, an open source project that was, at the time, seeking donations and contributions. Instead of doing that it was forked and used to build a for-profit business that didn't benefit b2 users unless they migrated to Wordpress.

@bretcarmichael @FeralRobots I'd argue that was the way the GPL is designed to work, and the only reason it didn't turn into a conflict is that WP went in a different direction.

WPEngine isn't simply sitting around dumping copies of WP onto shared hosting and counting its money; it puts engineering work into stuff, some of which is specifically for its customers, some of which is usable by the broader community.

@bretcarmichael @FeralRobots The danger I referred to is that when Automattic is simultaneously a competitor to WPEngine, capable of deciding that its own feature priorities are The Road Map For Wordpress, AND capable of declaring its competitors parasites because they don't materially support that Autogram-determined roadmap, the license may be open source but the project no longer is.

To be clear, I've got a lot of strong feelings about this because I was part of the Drupal community for a long, long time — from before Acquia existed to long after they became the dominant player in it — and we had to hash painfully through many of the same dilemmas and bruising negotiations. I've disagreed with Dries about tons of stuff, but we're incredibly fortunate that, for his part, he never pulled anything like this.

(also, there's the time in '06 that drupal's upcoming core theme was ported to wordpress and announced *as a wordpress.com option* before drupal actually shipped… and Matt dismissed it as 'some people getting outraged’) acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-co drupal.org/forum/general/gener

Acko.netWordpress.com copies Drupal themeA blog about random hacks, graphics and design, math and other ephemera.

@cfg @carnage4life
My mistake. So sounds like the issue is they've had poor luck selling the service.