I'm not here to dive into the details of the recent WPE vs Matt incident but rather to discuss the real-world impacts. The actual real world affect (if any) on all of the various stakeholders, regardless of which "side you’re" on.
As someone preparing to launch a business where WordPress will (or should I say would) play a key role in some of our offerings, this incident has two key considerations:
a) Regardless of the specifics or eventual outcome, an ongoing legal battle of this scale is significant and shouldn’t be overlooked by anyone in the WordPress ecosystem.
b) The nature of this dispute could have ripple effects across all contexts – impacting developers, agencies, business owners, and providers alike.
I’m curious about the real-world effects this has had for others. How has this situation influenced your decisions, relationships, and or your services?
Has this made you rethink any of your business strategy or offerings? Or has it reinforced your commitment to WordPress in some way? Have your clients/customers been unaware or addressing the matter with you?
Just feels everyone is very quickly jumping onto the ethics, idealogy and philosophy of the ongoings without much of how this or isn't actually hitting end-users and or their providers.
*beyond how it’s hitting WP Engine of course 🤦♂️😅 if that wasn’t clear
I work at a large company on our WordPress products and I am officially sweating. We bought big into Gutenberg and it’s been a great move for us, but without the promise of continual improvement, WordPress still comes up short for enterprises.
We were able to convince our leaders to use it BECAUSE it was low cost, open source, and stable. All of this hoopla means our leaders could seek to shut down all WordPress products immediately. The alternative for us is usually some dusty, crusty CMS we bought 20 years ago and sacrificing all of the UX improvements we got from WP.
I work at a smaller company and our main site is hosted on wp-engine. I’m hoping this will quickly go away (once the legal bills roll in, maybe a reality check will be in order) If Matt’s going to get in a pissing match after building a product on the backs of OSS giants (PHP, MySQL, httpd, Linux) I don’t see the platform as suitable for business use
Nah, I don’t care. Matt has a point with private equity trying to come in and gobble up open source. WP Engine is a bad host and just went and bought all of the best plugins people use for custom WordPress (ACF, WP Migrate DB, etc) to try and solidify themselves. Fuck that.
Matt could have had everyone on his side, but he went about it in the dumbest way possible, and now he looks like the bad guy.
Matt can have his battle, I don’t care. I’ll still use WordPress over on digital ocean with SpinupWP
I’m much more concerned about the low adoption of the site editor than the trademark issue with WPEngine. Block themes haven’t taken center stage yet—far from it.
The community at this point appears to be interpreting Matt as damage, and is routing around him.
Don’t worry, I shall return and save you. Be well child.
Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but all this madness has negatively effected my mental health. The world is chaotic enough with a big election less than a month away that could result in violence. I’m already slightly stressed all the time figuring out how to adapt my job to AI. And then this completely unnecessary disaster gets piled on top of it with no forseen end date. I am going to try to take a few days off next week and unplug from the internet because I’m on the verge of a breakdown. I just screamed at my cat for knocking over a drink and it feels like I threatened to beat my child.
Biggest potential threats as I see them:
– Matt decides to go after my own host/vital partner.
– Both large operations and scrappy little startups look at the risk involved in getting in bed with Automattic and decide to go another route. Fewer end users enter the ecosystem.
– No forks get off the ground and contributors get a bad taste in their mouth and stop contributing. The overall ecosystem degrades.
– A lot of effort is put into a fork/multiple forks and the organizing effort doesn’t pan out. The projects fail and the community is scattered. The overall ecosystem degrades.
There’s a lot of institutional inertia in play, so I don’t know how things are going to turn out.