Automattic "aligns" it's contributions to WordPress
Aligning Automattic’s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress
Automattic will stop contributing to WordPress after reaching 45 hours a week, "aligning" its contributions to those by WP Engine, and because the lawsuit is taking up their resources.
That whole blog post is so full of salt, that it really hurts to read.
Still going on about the "imbalance of the contributions", well that's open source for you - you don't get to control who contributes how much, all you can do is ask nicely, and provide a good experience for contributors. Acting like a lunatic does not do that.
legal attacks started by WP Engine
Of course they did after the witch-hunt and the absolutely illegal, unethical and plain ridiculous behavior of Automattic. The counter they did, the whole ACF takeover and the slandering are a lawsuit handed on a plate.
The way "community" is quoted in that article for those who dared to disagree.
This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health.
Yeah, as a developer I also hate when lawsuits are stopping me from working. He had no problem letting go of nearly 10% of his staff with their "alignment offer" to get rid of people who again dared to disagree, but the legal action is diverting resources now.
But the whole "Focused on the Future" paragraph is going full mask off:
Before, they said that resources will be reallocated to "for-profit projects within Automattic", and
We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term
It's only a matter of time another hostile takeover will take place, and Matt will attempt to go full for-profit on WordPress itself.
We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org when the legal attacks have stopped.
Full on extortion. Stop the lawsuit or we won't contribute.
Honestly, if I'd be dependent on WordPress for my work, I'd not sleep well and start going into something else right fucking now. How are people that stupid, childish and entitled getting into such positions.
All I have to say to you is you've clearly never had to unfuck a WordPress that has been fucked by WP engine. They purposely take and obfuscate the open source WordPress environment and make it so their customers are dependent and slaved to only work with them. They can go fuck themselves. Automatic is definitely not being cool about it but they are in the right.
So, you mean using a proprietary vendor to operate something binds you to that vendor? Congratulations, you've just discovered vendor lock-in.
"Obfuscating the environment" is also an absolutely unhinged claim, what even is that supposed to mean?
And again, Automattic is NOT in the right. What Automattic did was break license terms, attempt to extort, steal code, and light their whole brand, company, ecosystem and community on fire. Matt spit in the faces of his open source community (and open source in general), and every single person dependent on WordPress losing their job because of the shift he's causing will be blood on his hands personally. Even if WP Engine was questionably morally or ethically, they did play by the laws and the license terms. Matt went on a mental breakdown and additionally to his unethical behavior broke several laws on that journey, which is exactly why he is losing the lawsuit. Matt and Automattic are NOT in the right.
That's so petty, I'm actually impressed. Like, it's VERY hard to end up universally disliked by everyone, but it looks like Matt's figured out how to do it.
That's the biggest crybaby nonsense: Oh no, the lawsuit is making us broke. Yes we started this whole thing but it's not OUR fault! It's those bad evil private equity firms. Yes, we take equity money too, but not from the BAD firms! Fine! We'll take our ball and go home!
Also, hilarious because I'm sure all the developers they have on staff are not involved in doing ANY lawsuit anything, though if they are, I'm going to watch this even closer since if there's a group of people that firmly do not understand legal shit more than developers (because developers rightfully expect the rules and procedures to make some sort of damn sense) I don't know who it'd be.
Well that's one way to shoot yourself in the foot..
Apologies for the laziness here, but I self-host a WordPress site with a bunch of old blog posts that are now private. I'm not ready to make it an offline archive yet (maybe I'll restart blogging one day), but I'm not interested in supporting or otherwise using WordPress any more. I don't have any major requirements or plugin dependencies.
What is a good alternative to self-hosting WordPress these days?
Edit: thanks for the suggestions so far. One key requirement is the ease of importing hundreds of WordPress posts from its output format. I don't really want to manually process them all, I did that to get them into WordPress way back when I switched to it.
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?
Essentially, yes: they're not going to contribute to their primary project because some fee-fees got hurt. It's not really a suicide note, but they've certainly decided they're not opposed to it.
Yikes. I feel sorry for the 3rd party vendors who are going to be getting awkward questions from their clients about why they think that WordPress is going to be a viable platform in the future