I’m here to have some conversation, look for information and learn new things. Besides the Galician (Portuguese far from the north), I write in castellano, english et français.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 10th, 2021

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  • Yes, but I guess what is limited is access to those resources from a site running on WP Engine servers. I also assume that users can download the themes from outside WP Engine and install them anyway.

    The Subversion repositories with the code are also public. Anyone can use them. There is no restriction of freedom by restricting access to such a repository, if the code is still publicly available.

    This way WP Engine still has the opportunity to mount its plugin and theme repositories, without taking abusive advantage of the WordPress repository infrastructure.

    There is work, energy consumption and so on behind it. Expenses that WP Engine is not taking on and does not even want to compensate for.

    Automattic’s reaction may seem like overkill, but it’s a clear and forceful wake-up call to companies that are out to parasite their work and infrastructure. They do it because they have a privileged position. I think they are right to do so.

    This does not mean that somebody could criticize a possible lack of consistency when Automattic is the company that adopts abusive attitudes towards third parties.




  • The FSF has clear guidelines and follows them rigorously, nothing else. It’s good that they don’t make exceptions. Any problem with microcode or other proprietary drivers starts with the fact that they are not free. Making exceptions would partially solve the problem, but the situation would not change significantly, and the FSF would then be violating its own principles.

    The FSF’s job in this regard is to try to open debate about the problems of not having free security patches and, in any case, to try to uncover hidden vulnerabilities in proprietary tools and facilitate the creation of free tools that solve the problems.