[georgehotelling]

What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.

However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.

The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.

This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.

Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.

I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.

However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.

Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.

(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)

[015a]

What is Netflix's economic incentive to pay their AWS bill every month?

My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.

Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.

WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!

[AlienRobot]

I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.

>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...

I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.

[georgehotelling]

> I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.

[digging]

> What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit?

Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

[tacker2000]

What do you mean? They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy?

They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.

[patmcc]

This situation might kill one of WP Engine or Wordpress.com, but I sure wouldn't bet on it being WP Engine that ends up in the grave.

[ziddoap]

>Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

This situation is not going to kill WP Engine.