Re: WP Engine is not WordPress

I just read Kev’s blog entry, reacting to Matt’s, titled “WP Engine is not WordPress”. And this is my reaction to the original entry.

Firstly, I think there isn’t any problems with the original post.

What Matt discusses is that WPEngine - a huge company that uses WordPress - is disabling revisions by default, while making it extremely hard to enable. And how this practice might spread to others. Understandably, he wants to prioritize the integrity of the content - the thing that he is very much passionate about¹.

This scenario has always happened. Unfortunately big players hold the power to influence and change the standard. If the biggest player advocates against the “revisions” feature, this might very well be forgotten by users and later might be removed as a feature.

I believe, for a project at this scale, it is already quite hard to keep the direction aligned with the original vision, and someone needs to be extreme, opinionated and radical. This is exactly why I respect Richard Stallman and his strong stance about the Free Software Movement and licenses (with the introduction of GPLv3).

The “enemy” is already powerful enough. Someone needs to be the radical one to balance out the situation.

I also understand that Matt might not be happy because they are both trying to do the same thing, but WP Engine does not play with the same rules - altering the WP’s direction.

Nevertheless, this post doesn’t seem to be written in a bad, arrogant form. I feel like he is just unhappy because the company is cost-cutting in a way that he thinks should not be done with the software he started.