Last month.

“ We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.

So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case“

“If organisations have carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and determined, with good reason, that the risks they face are low, they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:

easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”

Your turn. Where are these compliance costs?

A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.

https://www.shopify.com/blog/shopping-cart-abandonment

"According to Baymard Institute, 70.19% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Think about that. For every 100 potential customers, 70 of them will leave without purchasing. How much would your revenues increase if you were capturing those sales instead of losing them?"

Honey provides value to merchants because it reduces cart abandonment: it's easy for Honey to argue that without Honey these sales would not have completed and therefore Honey deserves the commission on the sale.

Even in cases where Honey didn't find a discount, Honey can argue that by searching for coupons on behalf of the user the user gains confidence that the price they're paying is the best price and that's why they complete their purchase.

If you’re stuck in the bureaucracy: escape it. Their rules aren’t serving you so why obey them? Escalate to their legal department, send a certified letter about your impending legal action against them. Enforce your contract.

We can't pick and choose which contributions are valid and which aren't. WP Engine spend money on the development of WPGraphQL a free plugin, WP Engine spend money on the development of Advanced Custom Fields which they release for free for millions of WordPress sites to use... of course they're not doing that out of some altruistic moral crusade, of course it's a clear calculus about the benefit to their bottom line, but that doesn't change that they're contributing.

The "Five for the Future" contributions are specifically about contributing to WordPress Core, which is owned and controlled by Matt Mullenweg: you're playing into Matt's absurd narrative that the only valid contribution is one that is made to something under Matt's control.

I think WP Engine are Private Equity leeches, I have zero doubt about that, I wish that they were to contribute more but that's the deal with Open Source software, that's what we choose to allow by releasing Open Source software. The moral obligation we have when we use Open Source software is to respect the license, Matt had the choice about the license to release WordPress under, he made the choice for it to be GPL.

dhh is more eloquent and authoritative than I, read these if you need further convincing:

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

https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-...

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843802126281257347 https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843803465719620012 https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843804108932944122

Matt seems to have missed that dhh called out his use of the WordPress trademark as the strategy to "get Al Capone" which Matt has admitted to multiple times.

What's the truth, Matt?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...

"“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.” WP Engine competes directly with the hosting services offered by Automattic and WordPress.com, and Mullenweg argues one of the reasons for its success is the use of “WordPress” across its site. “That’s why we’re using that legal avenue to really, yeah, pressure them. That’s true: we are pressuring them.”"

Is this about the trademark or not?

Matt’s position is (ostensibly) based on his hard line views about the moral obligation to contribute created through the use of open-source. The trademark sideshow is based on Matt’s understanding that a moral argument isn’t going to convince a private equity backed company to spend money they don’t need to spend. Matt believes WPEngine has a moral obligation to contribute and the trademark licensing fee is the easiest tool he has to force action.

Matt is making a moral argument. WPEngine don’t care because they’re driven by money not morals.