The systemic issue is companies the world over not giving their fair share back in terms of contributing to foss.
I might agree with most of your points, I’m just trying to get people to realize there’s the local issue of Matt/wp and then there’s this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
I don't know about invariants, but there is absolutely a trend of for-profit companies setting up a business around open source and only later trying to close the doors to lock out the competitors that the Free Software system is explicitly designed to encourage.
> this global issue of companies building businesses off foss and not giving back.
I'll never understand this complaint about not giving back. I can understand if they're asking for free support and coercing you into saying yes, but that's rarely the concern, the concern is always "giving back".
If you release it under GPL, then companies are obliged to abide by the GPL and release their modifications, nothing more or less. If you release it under a less restrictive license then they have no obligations at all, and you presumably chose that license specifically because it made the software easier to use in enterprises.
If giving back matters so very much then you're not really interested in Free Software and you should put those requirements in the license. But you don't get to piggyback on the FOSS movement and then complain when people use your software freely to compete with your for profit.
Like when you factor in all the negative externalities what is worse?
As for the license, yea I mean that’s kind of the direction I want people to talk about.
We have foss absolutists, but there’s these emerging systemic issues now for a few decades and I think that the literalism surrounding the foss principles needs to address it more fundamentally then saying go non free.
The dichotomy is not effective anymore when there is so much bad faith.
This is the part that I disagree with—to the extent there's bad faith, the bad faith is on the part of the for profits that pull the bait and switch, not the users.
Making your dev-focused project FOSS gives you enormous tailwinds that you can ride to dramatically increase your chance of success. That's the draw for these VC-funded FOSS projects. But those tailwinds come with expectations that you'll respect the license and not throw a tantrum when people actually take you at your word.
If you want to be the sole vendor for your project then you should make that clear from the beginning in the license, but people don't do that because then the tailwinds go away.
The key point is that there's no moral issue here (at least not on the users). You offered free stuff and people took you up on it. When you gave out the free stuff you got a lot of free publicity with that free stuff. You made a trade-off, and it's bad faith to try to convince your fans that the people on the other end of that deal are doing something wrong.
The only damage being done when someone makes money using open source software, is to the ambitions and ego of a developer who imagined that "open source" meant "give me your contributions so I can build an empire." Fortunately, open source is for the benefit of all of us. Nobody owes them fiefs.
What absolute leeches they are.
(And I'm saying this as someone who dislikes WordPress in general, in the sense that I'm not a super invested Automattic user or something. It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim)
WPEngine are adults, they can (and are) taking care of themselves.
But sorry, if you start using your position as CEO of Automattic, and President of WPF to:
- push rants forcibly into the dashboards of your for-profit offering's commercial competitors
- lock users of a competitor out of a whole raft of functionality because of your beef with their provider
- break users sites in the name of effectively hostage-taking a plugin
Then what else are you but a "bad maintainer"?
> as a leach [sic]
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor. That's easily described as leeching.
> is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events)
Well, given that at these recent events they've given money, been banned from attending and had all references to their name removed, I think their contributions are valid.
Also "that doesn't count, it's just marketing", yes, marketing dollars that they are contributing to the community to make the cost to the rest of the community in hosting events less. You sound like Matt here, "Well, yes, they contribute, but not in the way I tell them to, and in the amount I tell them to, so it's not reallllly a contribution."
