Programming

What a bizarre headline. No it's not. It's proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it's specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that's the problem.

Speaking of which,

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.

tbh, that's totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don't know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a "free tier" of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.

Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It's not some moral thing.

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.

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.

Can you use the WordPress software without the WordPress servers?

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.