Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

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> You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.

I'm not arguing that they are obligated to provide free services. What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor. Also, this was without any announcement and clearly intent on interrupting the service for mostly unrelated third parties (namely WPEngines customers), just to hurt WPEngine.

As to them being hostile to negotiation, we don't know what happened behind close doors. But from the facts that were publicly presented, Matt wanted an amount of money, has (so far) not presented any reasonable legal basis for it and has overall been pretty emotional, so I do believe WPEngine when they claim that the demand was unreasonable and in bad faith on his side.

If this would have been a calm announcement that WP will cede any free hosting services to for-profit WordPress resellers, with a reasonable timeline for migration, he would have my full support. Maybe I could even get behind singling out WPEngine, if the case was solid. But the way this happens, Matt just looks like the bad guy.

> If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege.

But someone allows free passage on a toll bridge for everyone and suddenly decides to just deny your transport business specifically and publicly insult you, it looks a bit different. Especially if the owner of the bridge just happens to run a competitor for your business, things do look a bit fishy. I mean, fair enough, but this move was clearly intended for maximum damage and someone doing that does not at all look like the reasonable party, sorry.

> What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor.

Or, to rephrase:

They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.

Which, when you phrase it that way, not only sounds reasonable, it sounds obvious.

What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers. Using your free resources is expensive. Like, money expensive.

This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?

Get real. You would 100% do the same thing in that situation.

> They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.

Well, I'm not really seeing the evidence for abuse, to be honest. They were using these resources like any other WP hoster.

> What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers.

As are Automattic, Pressable and many others.

> This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?

This is painting the case in a way that I don't see supported by the presented facts. Just to be clear:

If I provide a free API and Amazon suddenly starts using it, increasing my expenses by an order of magnitude, then yes, I'd block them immediately.

If, however, my API is used by millions of customers, advertised as free and some percentage of these requests are sent by Amazon-hosted versions of my software, the situation would be quite different. I understand the intention of not wanting to foot the bill of a competitor, but in that case it does not seem unreasonable at all to give prior notice, even if just for a few days.

The way you paint the situation implies that WPEngine was suddenly DDOS'ing the API and required an immediate, unannounced blockage. But, from the facts presented, this doesn't seem to be the case at all. Also, just to be clear, this blockage affected uninvolved third parties - if this was just affecting the company, I'd probably have no compassion for WPEngine. But technically they actually blocked people and companies who bought hosted WP from WPE and a little leniency would have been a _much_ better look for Automattic.

Also, just to be clear - this API was provided by the WordPress Foundation, which is not a competitor of WPE. Automattic is. This seems like a major conflict of interest.

I do get Matts motivation of not wanting to provide free services for a company he regards as really bad, but the way this was handled in terms of public communication, shaky legal accusations, actions with uncalled for immediacy and overall emotional language is just not a good look. This could have been and should have been handled much more professionally, at least in my opinion.

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