I’m kind of happy this war between WordPress and WP Engine happened, and I hope the people who took the severance package are doing okay. WordPress has often felt more like a messy crutch than anything else, and I’ve been wanting to get rid of it for surely a decade. The thing has developed in a direction I’ve never liked, trying to be a full-fledged CMS when originally it had just been a shitty pile of spaghetti code that shat out blogs.
Now it’s gone from my servers. Like any hip person, I’ve moved to a static site generator (Hugo in this case). Let’s see how that’s gonna work out.
Update 2024-10-10: DHH is weighing in on all this with a sober perspective, and it’s all the more relevant because he always played the license game straight.