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Over the past year and a half, the WordPress ecosystem has been consumed by the dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. The legal battles, the public confrontations, the hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields. I’ve written about these events as they unfolded. A lot of people have. A lot of opinions have been shared, from all sides. Most of that conversation has focused on the people involved. On who said what, who was right, who went too far. And while those conversations have their place, they’ve been a distraction from something more fundamental. A structural problem that was there long…
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I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Months. Probably even longer. The reason I haven’t is, ironically, the exact thing I want to write about. There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.
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Every software project is built on layers of other people’s work. Libraries, packages, tools — most of them invisible, all of them essential. There’s a good chance your project depends on code written by someone you’ve never heard of. Someone who doesn’t work for a big company. Someone who maintains their project in the evenings, between dinner and sleep. I want to talk about what it’s like to be on the other side of that equation.
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It’s no surprise that I do not necessarily agree with everything going on in the WordPress ecosystem. I’ve been vocal about a lot of the crap going on around the whole debate with WP Engine. But at the end of the day, I still work with WordPress for a large amount of my working hours every single day. This lead me to reflect on my relationship with WordPress. Not just the software, but also the larger ecosystem, community and leadership. I’ve been personally involved with WordPress in some way for almost 20 years now. That is about the extent of…
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Well, shit. I didn’t expect the events unfolding last week, that ultimately were mainly hurting the end users of the WordPress software, would be the end of it all. But this whole dispute between Automattic and WP Engine has been cranked up a notch over the last couple days. And that is the biggest understatement I can make. I am deeply uncomfortable with the way this legal battle has been unfolding, with it being fought out in public and affecting end users of the software. If it would end there, maybe it would take some time, but I would be…
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A lot has been said and written on the whole dispute between the WordPress project and WP Engine. In this post, I am not going to describe the issue, as there are far more reputable sources available, for example: “Automattic Responds to WP Engine’s Cease and Desist with Legal Action” over on WP Tavern. What is a fact, is that this dispute has grown into a legal battle now between Automattic (in lieu of the WordPress Foundation) and WP Engine. When this all started to unfold, I didn’t feel like I had a voice in this whole ordeal. This changed…