this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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I’m confused. The article makes note that, “Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine's monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic's WordPress servers and resources.” But then goes on to note that David Hansson, “believes Mullenweg's actions do not honor the principles set by the GNU General Public License (GPL).”
It sounds to me that Mullenweg wants compensation for their server resources, not use of their Wordpress software — otherwise wouldn’t everybody who uses WordPress outside of wordpress.com be on the hook too?
If that is the case, how is it any different than RedHat charging for support services for their distribution of the Linux kernel and corresponding GNU software?
I feel like I’m missing something here.
Unless you fork the WordPress source code, it is hard coded to use Mullenweg's Automattic (his for-profit company) servers for plugin updates. This is not something you can tweak in a config somewhere.
So this isn't charging for support services. The open source WordPress is hard coded to be reliant on the for-profit Automattic servers, because Mullenweg has been mixing his non-profit and for-profit business shit.
This has not been a problem ever before. But instead of handling this in any way that might make sense, Mullenweg turned off the update servers for everyone with no notice when WPEngine rightfully responded incredulously to his sudden demand for 8% of their profit based off some weird claims about copyright that are invalid due to Mullenweg's own chosen license terms for WordPress.
He could set up free and paid tiers based off how much load on his servers people create. He could have the code adjusted to make the update server something that could be configured. He could engage the community to have a distributed volunteer network of update servers and reduce his server load by having his servers only provide proper update hashes to validate the updates were not tampered with.
But instead he's having a very very public tantrum with absurd negative impact to the community of people reliant on this open source software.
Thank you. That’s the part I was missing.