Disappointing Atitude

I have used WP for well over 15 years now and I never really liked WP Engine business model, so I can understand why Automattic is fed up. However, ACF has been a staple in the lives of many developers and site owners, so as a developer that values open source, I find it extremely offensive that WP hijacked the ACF plugin and forced people to “upgrade” to this one.

Open Source is all about choice, so it would be OK to fork it and even endorse it or suggest it as an alternative… but to forcefully, “steal” users away via “trusted” updates, it’s immoral at the bare minimum, and abusive towards the community.

Imagine bringing your car to a garage for maintenance and suddenly you are having parts replaced without your authorization. Even if they are copies, they are not the same product that I chosen to use.

As a plugin developer myself, I find it extremely concerning that Automattic can just come and take away our free work and forcefully move the users to their own plugin. It would be completely fine if they fork it, edit it, rename it, etc… but it’s not ok for people to update a plugin, and suddenly you are using something else.

ACF has a PRO license, which people paid for in a lot of cases.
That means they have chosen to use that product, so no matter who Automattic wants, I strongly disagree with “forcefully” taking away someone else work.

I could care less about WP Engine business, and I never really recommended them because of some of the things Automattic accused them for, but to go and do this… you just dropped even below your level.

People in the open source community talk about treason, not towards WP Engine, but towards the community. Forcefully updating a plugin to use their own… that is not how Open Source works.

Shut it down, fork it, nag users to change, etc, it’s all fine by me.
Automatically updating users to your own fork no.

I cannot drop my review to 1 start because it would not reflect the quality of the code, but I am sorry, it’s very unlikely any serious developer will want to use this plugin, or contribute their own code, knowing that something similar could happen.