The YouTube channel @simonscouse has posted exactly two videos.
The first came a little over ten years ago. It shows a hand waving and then wiggling its fingers in front of a patterned wallpaper:
The second came a little over five years ago, and shows a hand – the same hand? – waving in front of a painting of two cats while a child’s voice can be heard in the background:
In a comment on the latter, the producer promised that it’s be “only
another 5 years until the trilogy is completed”.
Where’s the third instalment, Simon? We’re all waiting to see it!
If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress
hosting company (among quiteafewotherthings) Automattic1,
and (c) the WordPress Foundation.
If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!
I tried to draw a better diagram with more of the relevant connections, but it quickly turned into spaghetti.
In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to
having a reasoned conversation about the issue3.
I’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence,
it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.
I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or
the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he
chose to say it upon.
Misdeeds
As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical4,
and legal.
Morally: don’t take without giving back
Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while
making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.
If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s
effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.
The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that children (and some nonhuman animals) seem to be able to work it out for themselves
from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.
Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host
atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s
implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code:
Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.
I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.
Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses
WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of
that code5.
It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress6.
Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP
Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.
But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much
better value-for-money at any price point).
There’s nothing to stop me from registering TurdPress.com and providing a premium WordPress web hosting solution with all the best features disabled: I could even disable
exports so that my customers wouldn’t even be able to easily leave my service for greener pastures! There’s nothing stop me… but that wouldn’t make it
right7.
It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of
that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad
practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide
their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service8.
Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…
Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good
chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that
causes.
I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit
off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve
certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.
If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now9.
In summary…
With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:
WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as
a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about
their status.
Footnotes
1 I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know,
and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any
connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!
2 Though like Manu, I don’t
think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing
things in the 25-year archives of this blog!
3 Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much
clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?
4 There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but
I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example,
which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an
ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.
5 Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else.
I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of
funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.
6 WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly
bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system,
and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost
implications at scale.
7 As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon
WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.
8 I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for
me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!
9 A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a
typical thread talking about this topic!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
A round of especially-crazy zoomies on the morning of this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember was apparently too much for this little pupper, who’s now looking like she’s in need of a morning
nap.
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