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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

I believe the fact that WP Engine relies on WordPress’ servers to run their platform suggests that this is more than just an open-source issue. If the problem were solely related to the source code, WP Engine’s access to WordPress servers wouldn’t be so critical. Although I’m not very familiar with WordPress, it appears their service is highly dependent on WordPress maintaining its servers, which makes the expectation for some kind of financial support seem reasonable.

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Everyone relies on those servers. That's how WordPress ships. There is no way to make it use other servers and WordPress is an otherwise very flexible platform; it benefits from centralizing all of that as illustrated by the way it's designed. The whole ecosystem works around it.

So should everyone have to pay then? Everyone who uses the software uses the servers. If not what's the threshold? And remember that Matt has insisted WordPress.org ("those servers") belong to him personally, not to WordPress or to Automattic.

If you're going to monetize access to plugins and themes produced from volunteer work on your open source code... can they monetize too? Does everyone get a cut?

> Everyone relies on those servers. That's how WordPress ships. There is no way to make it use other servers

Making this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected:

> > When do you plan to add support in the admin UI for alternate source urls for plugins and themes, so that others can more effectively mirror your apparently overtaxed infrastructure?

> Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885

It's all about maintaining control.

If I run a service that hosts VS Code in the cloud, should I have to pay Microsoft for my users to be able to access the extension marketplace or receive updates?

Visual Studio Code is the proprietary version (under the Microsoft Traditional License) of the open-source Code - OSS repository (licensed under MIT). Most of the code is open source, except for a small portion that includes elements such as code used for or providing access to services we run in our data centers (e.g., access to the Visual Studio Marketplace).

Summarized from the following article: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-between...

If your whole business depends on leeching off of someone else’s servers, you should probably be contributing to those servers in some way.

What does that have to do with this tweet?

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