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They have taken over the ACF plugin in the plugin store. In an intransparent manner. It is GPL licensed, but had a pro license and features sold. And still does have them on their publishers side.
A strength of the GPL is that the community can fork and take over projects.
At the same time, and this instance is such a case, on a centralized platform, projects can be taken over instead of be forked.
They developed and published a plugin. Now it’s been taken over by someone else, on the primary distribution and discovery platform, and they have no control over it. Worse than that, the takeover now offers their sold functionalities for free now.
This makes the “open source but not free, but after two years true FOSS licensed” licenses look very useful if not necessary for businesses and developers that want to monetize. At the very least when they [have to] use centralized platforms.
The GPL doesn’t allow you to use someone else’s trademark. Though in this case it might be tricky for “WPEngine” to claim WordPress violated their trademark, and apparently WP has T&Cs that allow them to do it anyway.
Once a developer starts charging for his product, the code is no longer open-source–it’s proprietary, which falls under completely different licensing rules.
This is wrong. Open Source does not mean its free of charge. You can copy and fork the code and do whatever you want with it (including selling). And the developer has the right so sell the product too. This does not mean its proprietary, if the license and the code is Open Source.
Because people think Open Source means free of charge, is the problem why the Open Source developers have a hard time to make money and a living.
… WordPress had a good name?
… Required use of proprietary software causing a bunch of headaches and arguments… somehow makes FOSS less reputable?
Is this guy from another planet?
…
Oh. Oooohhhh.
This is connected to the Prime TumblrBrain Powertripper, the bastard king of the land of delusional manipulative narcissists.
Ah.
That explains perfectly why the discourse around it is utterly contradictory and nonsensical.
Can you use the WordPress software without the WordPress servers?
Of course. You can host Wordpress just about anywhere that offers a recent enough version of php and access to a database
Then why does WP engine need access to this specific database?
Because Wordpress is also hosting 1000s of plugins that WP engine users can install.
I’m not sure what the license regarding those things is, WP engine could probably just mirror it -
But they basically got locked out of the default ecosystem infrastructure.
I feel like mirroring the plugins would resolve this issue, since the argument seems to be centered on server costs.
The argument centering on server costs would be logical, but the actual legal battle going on, and Mullenweg’s stated justification behind asking for 8% of WPEngine profit, is claims of misuse of copyrighted names.
Meanwhile the WordPress license explicitly cedes copyright over the name WordPress and the initialism WP.
Not easily, honestly.
WordPress on its own is very bare bones, you’re almost certainly going to want to install plugins, which by default can only be done from the builtin connection to WP servers.
WP without plugins doesn’t even have basic things like gallery light boxes. Honestly it seems deliberate, since the easiest way to get a lot of basic features that should be in core is to install the automattic(the company that owns wordpress) jetpack extension, that also installs a bunch of data harvesting connections to their proprietary SaaS.
Can only be done by default … also means there are other options.
Matt disappoints but their plugin repository isn’t a vendor lock in like Apple denying other app stores (without acts enforcing it etc).
I’m not aware of any method to add a third party plugin repository. (Is the software that runs the plugin repository even open source?)
I don’t know, but I guess the reason why it isn’t done yet is because nobody perceives it as a problem. It would require a repository plugin to install plugins I think. But it all comes down to plugin distribution and deployment. Mostly if you want something outside the default repository you can just upload it to your own install / stack. If a developer provide alternative download ways. Like a github release for example.