George Stephanis

Howdy, Alec.

So, a couple points:

JetPack

It’s Jetpack. Lower case p. If you’re going to misrepresent us, please at least spell it right. <3

they allow certain plugins to be considered in compliance of GPL which are not in compliance of GPL

How so? That’s a pretty serious allegation, especially considering those in charge of the Plugins Repo on .org (Pippin, Mika, Otto, etc) don’t work for WordPress.com/Automattic.

allowing the bundling of multiple plugins into one massive JetPack, putting many individual developers out of work (free bundling this is straight out of Microsoft’s playbook btw), a tactic allowed to Automattic and Automattic only.

Only Automattic is allowed to make a plugin that does many things? That’s patently false. As a counter-example, take a look at this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-jetpack/ — (despite the name, it is not run by WooThemes, Automattic, or Jetpack)

Also, regarding your allegation that we’re “putting developers out of work” — I didn’t realize that just because Jetpack did something means that noone else can do it as well? Like how we do Contact Forms, so Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 can’t exist. And how we do Related Posts, so YARPP and all of these other options — https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=related+posts — are clearly not in use by anyone at all.

We do a lot of things to drive the platform forward — providing a common set of use cases, but as we’re trying to satiate the basic need of most users, we can’t go nearly as far in depth as many dedicated plugins are able to. Our goal is to keep WordPress a comprehensive easy to use platform, so users can grow with it, and then likely move from using Jetpack for Contact Forms — by way of example — to something else like Gravity Forms. It’s called building and growing an ecosystem.

Moving everything to “services”. There’s no reason that nearly all of JetPack requires login to WordPress.com but it does.

Actually that’s a patent falsehood.

Related Posts is based off the WordPress.com Elasticsearch instance, which preforms the latent semantic analysis to find related content. You can’t do this without an Elasticsearch index.

Publicize uses third-party API keys stored on WordPress.com to push new posts to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and other authenticated services.

Photon uses WordPress.com servers to cache and serve up your images as a free CDN for users. Without connecting to WordPress.com and agreeing to the TOS, we would not have the right to serve up your images.

Enhanced Distribution lets the WordPress.com servers automatically submit your content to Google and other web indexes as soon as it’s published to get your site found.

Jetpack Comments uses WordPress.com accounts as well as Twitter, Facebook, Google to authenticate for comments using WordPress.com API keys without granting access to your remote accounts to random sites that happen to use Jetpack. This is a huge security win.

Jetpack Protect leverages the Jetpack network to nip brute force password attacks in the bud before they get a chance to break in to your site. This requires secure connection to WordPress.com servers to exchange the data.

The JSON API lets you use the WordPress.com JSON API to manage your site — something that required shared keys and authentication to happen.

Plus Likes, Notifications, Uptime Monitor, Single Sign On, WordPress.com Stats, Spelling and Grammar Check, Subscriptions … all of which require authentication and secure communication to WordPress.com servers.

So again — how exactly is it that Jetpack doesn’t actually need to connect to a WordPress.com account to do all this?

Then Automattic bundles and sells your data or analysis of said data on to others. Who knows what Automattic will do later with your data? They owe a lot of money to a lot of venture capitalists with very sharp teeth.

So it sounds like you’re opposed to the idea of third-party services in general? As any company could get bought out then your data could belong to unknown third party services?

You’ve been making some very serious allegations with zero facts to back them up.

not release their own code. I.e. Automattic have lots of great code they entice and sell to their VIP customers but that code is never officially released. Those of us enabling small businesses don’t have that luxury.

What code would you like that we haven’t released? Matt’s stated policy is that he has no problem with us releasing pretty much any code that we feel worthwhile — with the exception of passwords and secret keys and such.

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