Content Management Systems (CMS) Wars Around WordPress and a New WordPress Beta
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WordPress ☛ WordPress 6.7 Beta 3
WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 is now ready for testing! This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites.
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Yury Molodtsov ☛ WordPress Doesn't Matter for the Future of Web
In case you haven’t been following, there’s a huge drama in the WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, launched a crusade against WP Engine, a company selling managed WordPress hosting and the competitor of his own entities. You can catch up on the story here.
But the funniest part of this WordPress drama is that WordPress is irrelevant.
Yes, it still powers around 40% of websites. But it’s not the future of the web. You *can* be both big and irrelevant. IBM created PCs as we know them and is currently worth $214Bn, yet nobody cares much about them. In fact, this scandal is probably the most attention WordPress received from the public in the last few years.
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WPEngine Inc ☛ ACF Plugin no longer available on WordPress.org
Advanced Custom Fields is a sophisticated plugin with over 200,000 lines of code, which we continually develop, enhance, support and invest in to meet the needs of our users across WordPress. We’ve made 15+ releases over the past two years, since joining WP Engine, and added significant new functionality to the free plugin as well as continually improving performance and our security and testing practices to meet the ‘enterprise grade’ that our users deserve.
The change to our published distribution, and under our ‘slug’ which uniquely identifies the ACF plugin and code that our users trust in the WordPress.org plugin repository, is inconsistent with open source values and principles. The change made by Mullenweg is maliciously being used to update millions of existing installations of ACF with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the Advanced Custom Fields team.
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Andy Bell ☛ “Secure Custom Fields” is not Advanced Custom Fields
As part of Matt’s increasing irresponsible and irrational behaviour, WordPress took over the extremely popular plugin, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), renaming it “Secure Custom Fields” (SCF). With it, they stole years of reputation, good reviews and most importantly, trust from ACF.
If you update ACF via your wp-admin dashboard, it will be replaced with SCF. SCF does not have the ACF team behind it, so updating to SDF will potentially put your website at risk. It’s also important to note that this affects users of the free ACF plugin, not paid users who already get updates direct from ACF.
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Armin Ronacher ☛ The Inevitability of Mixing Open Source and Money
You might have a lot of opinions on David Heinemeier Hansson, but I encourage you to read two of his recent posts on that very topic. In Automattic is doing open source dirty David is laying out the case that Automattic has no right to impose moral obligations on beyond the scope of the license. This has been followed by Open source royalty and mad kings in which he goes deeper into the fallout that Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) is causing with his fight.
I'm largely in agreement with the posts. However I want to talk a bit about some pretty significant difference between David's opinions on Open Source funding (on which these posts appear to be based): the money element. In 2013 David wrote the following about money and Open Source: [...]
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Lev Lazinskiy ☛ DHH Is Kendrick
For the last few weeks the open source tech world has been observing some drama between the founder of Wordpress and WP Engine. I cant say that I am on the side of a PE firm, but Matt seems to be doing everything he can to turn the community against him.
Recently, DHH stepped into the ring to provide his opinions on the matter and it seems like we have ourselves the equivalent of the Drake v. Kendrick rap beef.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Dirty words are politically potent
Now, eventually people figured out that a) the [Internet] mattered and, b) it was going dreadfully wrong. So my job changed again, from "how the [Internet] is governed matters" to "you can't fix the [Internet] with wishful thinking," for example, when people said we could solve its problems by banning general purpose computers: [...]
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Trademarks
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The Register UK ☛ WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring user groups
The reference to that trademark harks back to the incident that set off the last three weeks of animus between WP Engine and WordPress, after the latter demanded WP Engine license the "WordPress" trademark – by paying for it – to continue its business hosting websites that run the open source content management system.
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Update
More here:
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Automattic is doing open source dirty
A key part of why open source has been so successful over the last several decades is the clarity and certainty of its licensing regime. Which allow you to build a business on open source without fear of frivolous claims or surprise shakedowns. The terms of the deal are spelled out in the license agreement, and the common ones, like MIT, BSD, or GPL, have all stood the test of time.