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What’s happening in the Wordpress ecosystem is insane to watch, and a grim look at what open source can look like if one bad party has total control of a platform.

What’s happening in the Wordpress ecosystem is insane to watch, and a grim look at what open source can look like if one bad party has total control of a platform. 

https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1845169499064107049?s=46

DX Engineer | Head of Developer Relations at /pinata | Tinkering with everything | stevedylan.dev/links

The reply from the main account is nuts....

The reply from the main account is nuts....

https://x.com/WordPress/status/1845179613783142426

I resonate with DHH

https://world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-dirty-b95cf128

What's your take on how WP Engine was using the open-source tool to make big profits without really contributing much back to its development?

It's a general global psychological shift, everyone all of the sudden got this land grab mind virus and everything, in all areas of life, is going through a process of balkanization. You can see it with industrial policy, political stances and posturing, countries returning to land grabs, and in open source in AI and package managers. It's really sad to see TBH.

building /anser https://anser.social | prev. Ledger

That’s true. My mind went to the fact that Wordpress dot org has a marketplace / code hosting similar to GitHub and that’s what was hijacked. It would be akin to GitHub taking an existing repo, keeping the URL slug the same, all the history and stars, but removing access from the owner and renaming it. It’s technically always possible and perhaps that’s the risk you take when you depend on GitHub.

Open source does not really mean much in terms of distribution and licensing.
You can have open source software that does not allow any reuse, self hosting or alternative distribution.

A classic case of a platform "for developers" that likes to compete with the developers of their own ecosystem once they're big enough. Same happened with shopify. They started competing with plug-ins that were very profitable and eventually forced them out of business.