Background on me:
So, as you may or may not know, I work at an Open Source company. We distribute our software (Snipe-IT) for free – and we support it, as best we can, also for free. But you can also pay us to host it for you, and we will be happy to do that. Or if you need to run it on your own infrastructure, you can pay us for support. This has worked out great for us. We do have some users who leave our paid services saying “moving to self-hosted!” – which, hey, less money for us, so not necessarily great news. But we have many, many more who migrate from their self-hosted installs to ours.
So open-source, for us, is not only an ethos that we believe in. But, just to be very, very clear – it absolutely is an ethos that we believe in. But it has a side effect of giving us a pool of potential customers – and they’re the best types of customers because they know the software already. And our hosted version, versus our “open source version” are both exactly the same.
Yes, we have to spend more resources supporting free users on GitHub, and Discord, and wherever else we might find them. That’s true. But our users will also happily support each other, and we don’t have to do any marketing at all in order to get a steady flow of customers. So, IMHO, you could say that this is a “cost of doing business” or maybe a “loss-leader,” from a business perspective. (Though, again, just to reiterate – we do Open Source because our entire careers have been built on open source. The language we write in is open source. The database we use is open source. The Operating System we use is open source. So this ‘thing’ that has given us so much, it makes sense for us to give back something. And, maybe, without open source I don’t know that we’d have jobs in tech at all?)
Background on WordPress:
WordPress has been, like, our “Big Sibling” since we began. They have a very similar model to ours – you can download WP for free and run it right now. In fact, this very blog runs on it. Or you can pay them to host it for you.
By doing that they’ve become a company that earns billions. Matt Mullenweg himself is reportedly worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million dollars.
We’ve wanted to be just like them – never took VC money, never took any kind of investment, just built a good business from the ground up and employed a bunch of people, and provided a great product for free, and also, optionally, a paid-for product.
They got big enough that they do have competitors who sell the very same product that they sell. WPEngine being the pertinent example today.
WPEngine has a different angle on how they do WordPress. They enable some stuff. They turn off other stuff. They charge for some things, they don’t charge for other things.
And – and this is a bit of a dick move – they also don’t contribute much back to the open source community. The thing is, while I might call it a “dick move,” it’s also completely and totally permissible.
And that should be the end of the story, right there. WordPress is making billions, they have a competitor who’s also making hundreds of millions or billions, and that competitor doesn’t do a good job of contributing things upstream. And all of that is fine and everyone should be happy. Or at least happy-ish.
The state of affairs, as of a week or so ago
But Matt (the founder of WordPress) has fucking lost his fucking marbles. He changed the copyright on the “WP” and “WordPress” marks. All of a sudden. He’s blocked third-party access to updates and plug-ins for WordPress. He’s gone on tirades about WPEngine, his competitor. There are lawsuits and counter-suits flying around.
This is an absolute violation of not only the spirit of open source, but very much so the letter of it. You can’t say “my software is open source until you make at least a million bucks a year on it, and then it isn’t.” That’s not how it works.
Big names like DHH – a guy who I have taken as my personal goal to just “not be like” – has even come out swinging saying that WordPress is very, very much in the wrong here.
So. Cool, cool. Whatever. People on the internet are going to do weird Internet things. I have this blog, our https://snipe.pt blog, and we have a corporate blog – and I bet that Alison has a few more blogs I’m not remembering, all hosted on WordPress. This “drama” (a misnomer IMHO) is a nuisance, and sad, but shouldn’t affect us.
But it does and it will.
Because I’m sure that we’re going to have customers who start to ask, “how can I be sure you aren’t going to go full Matt on us?”
And that’s a big fucking problem. It hasn’t happened yet, thank God, but it could very well happen. And I don’t know what I might tell someone if it did.
So, even though this doesn’t directly affect us, it can possibly have an effect on us. So, now, we have to worry a little bit. No need to do anything, but, probably, have a little worry.
This is where I was as of last night. A little worried, but not losing sleep or anything.
The Latest
While what most of WordPress has done has been generally awful, this is the first time they’re doing something that is actually EVIL.
These custom fields folks made a nice plug-in for WordPress. They contributed it back to WP’s github, as a good open-source citizen should. And WP just stole it.
Now, mind you – the folks who wrote this plug-in are WPEngine. I suspected as much because I can’t imagine them just arbitrarily grabbing some third-party’s code and running with it. Though, hey, maybe they can do that next? The genie’s out of the bottle now.
This is the last straw, for me. I’m going to move this blog onto something else. Unfortunately, I hate everything else.
This is probably some of the worst destruction of value I’ve seen since Elon took over Twitter. Tons of goodwill – poof – destroyed in just a few shitty blog posts.
I’ll do my best to report back on whatever I happen to come up with for my new hosting platform. Honestly, this is more a symbolic move rather than a technological one – because I just simply cannot be a party to this type of shit-fuckery. Shit-fuckery that may even have echo effects on my actual business.