[HN Gopher] Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew ...
___________________________________________________________________
Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles
Mullenweg [pdf]
Author : dangrossman
Score : 538 points
Date : 2024-10-03 00:29 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wpengine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wpengine.com)
| chuckadams wrote:
| COMPLAINT FOR: (1) Intentional Interference with
| Contractual Relations; (2) Intentional Interference with
| Prospective Economic Relations; (3) Computer Fraud and
| Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. SS 1030 et seq.; (4) Attempted
| Extortion; (5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. CodeSS
| 17200, et seq.; (6) Promissory Estoppel; (7)
| Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement; (8) Declaratory
| Judgment of Non-Dilution; (9) Libel; (10) Trade
| Libel; and (11) Slander.
|
| Spicy.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Of these, the ones that are interesting are basically 1, 2, 3,
| 4, 5, 10.
|
| The CFAA claim here is actually basically an extortion claim
| (plus other throwaway general claims) framed in CFAA terms.
|
| See 18 U.S.C. SS 1030(a)(7)
|
| This is actually somewhat uncommon to see :)
|
| However, it seems likely to be dismissed (without prejudice) or
| need to be amended since it looks like it doesn't plead the
| claim properly.
|
| "(g)Any person who suffers damage ... may maintain a civil
| action ... A civil action for a violation of this section may
| be brought only if the conduct involves 1 of the factors set
| forth in subclauses (I), (II), (III), (IV), or (V) of
| subsection (c)(4)(A)(i).
|
| They do not actually explicitly allege one of these factors is
| present, and it reads like it is a necessary element to
| maintain a civil action claim.
|
| Now, mind you, the factors are present (It's stuff like 'you
| have to cause at least 5k in damage), but the response is going
| to state they've failed to plead a claim by not explicitly
| meeting all the necessary elements.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Well, there's also specifically the element of exceeding
| authorization that doesn't even seem plausible on its face.
|
| The real meat of the federal complaint is the request for a
| declaratory judgment.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Yeah but at least they bother to plead the exceeding
| authorization portion.
|
| I actually think they want more than just the trademark
| issue resolved.
|
| I agree it is sort of the _minimum_ they want resolved (but
| i flag it as non-interesting because i don 't think they
| will have a lot of trouble winning unless there is
| something amazing in the response)
|
| But i think they bothered to include the CFAA claim and
| unfair competition claim because losing access to those
| services worried them (and because the unfair competition
| claim enables them to air a whole bunch of evidence of
| conflicts/etc in front of a jury when it would otherwise be
| irrelevant)
| jcranmer wrote:
| A speculation I've heard is that the CFAA is meant to try to
| get some preliminary injunctive relief.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Yeah, but they won't because they haven't fully pleaded the
| claim :)
| talldayo wrote:
| It's hard to even imagine what a best-case scenario looks like
| for Matt at this point. Putting aside the matter of
| righteousness, his business is pretty much chalked for
| professional applications at this point. B2B partnerships are
| done - anyone with lawyers on-staff are going to get shoulder-
| tapped and asked to find another hosting solution. Smaller
| customers have all the more reason to bleed out to competitors,
| and the plugin/theme ecosystem is going to see the writing on the
| wall better than anyone else. _Qui bono?_ Who is Matt
| "protecting" from harm, really?
|
| I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here.
| On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack
| an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel
| like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a
| baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't
| understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would
| be a shockingly wasteful decision.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| If it's any three things, it's about money, money, and money.
|
| Zooming out a bit, Automattic acquired Tumblr and like all
| those before it seems to be choking on it.
|
| Competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow and Shopify are all
| nipping at WordPress' marketshare.
|
| I don't know what WordPress.com's stats look like, but blogging
| is out of sytle. New cool kids want the new black. That is to
| be social media influencers. Along the same lines, the
| WordPress Community is "aging out". Events online or off
| there's too little "youth" engaged and excited about the
| product.
|
| In shoet, the pie isn't what it once was. Matt looked around
| the room, saw deep pockets (i.e., WP Engine) and made a go for
| it. That was a poor decision. Seeing himself as a cult leader
| who would get unwavering support from his cult (aka The
| WordPress Community) was another mistake. People are fatigued
| and enough them have stopped drinking his Kool Aid. There are
| pockets of support but certainly not what it used to be. Many
| WP people are anxious to move on from the Mattopoly.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _blogging is out of sytle_
|
| OTOH maybe the majority of WP users are not blogging.
|
| It's anecdotal but I know about a dozen WP users first-hand
| (and maintain a couple of those installations) and none of
| them use it for blogging. It's mostly for marketing websites
| and shops with WooCommerce.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That's .org version of WP. WP.com - Automattic's bread &
| butter - was the big 2nd gen blogging platform.
|
| Yes, agreed WooComm is new. Nonetheless, social media'ing
| has replaced "I got a website" and "I got a blog."
| safety1st wrote:
| Whatever else may be going on, your observations contain
| errors. Automattic has been on an insane revenue growth
| tear for years. WordPress install growth out in the wild
| has been flat for two years but not ticked down, when 43%
| of the Internet runs your software there are probably a
| lot of reasons it's hard to grow that number.
|
| In general, companies in this vertical are not really
| hurting.
|
| https://getlatka.com/companies/automattic
|
| https://www.wpzoom.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/
|
| Data = good; facts = good
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| "Insane" revenue growth _in the past_. The question is:
| What 's going on in Matt's head? What does he see in the
| future?
|
| Truth: Belief drives behavior.
|
| To go nuclear as MM did, what is he believing? What is
| his future like?
|
| But you picked a good word: insane.
|
| So yeah, we're on the same page. The difference is
| direction. Past v future.
| Loudergood wrote:
| Considering he's gone nuclear for dumber reasons in the
| past(see Tumblr) what he sees and reality are probably
| far different.
| zambiboy wrote:
| > Automattic's bread & butter - was the big 2nd gen
| blogging platform
|
| Its not. Its used for everything from marketing websites
| to ecommerce. CNN, Reuters etc have their blogs run on it
| too.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That is the .org version. It should not be confused with
| .com version.
| chrismmccomas wrote:
| I'm pretty sure CNN and Reuters are actually on WPVIP,
| which is basically the enterprise version of .com and
| belongs to the same parent company as .com.
| bigiain wrote:
| Work has about 25 clients who use WordPress. Not a single
| one of them "blogs". WordPress is a decent-enough CMS, all
| those clients are just running websites they can edit
| themselves. The big advantage of offering them WordPress if
| having a huge talent pool of people they can contract or
| employ who know how to publish using it, and a huge wealth
| of readily available tutorials and training material for
| them too learn how to do that themselves.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Do they have News that gets updated as the voice of the
| brand? That's a blog.
|
| Do they have a portfolio of work that gets updated as the
| work of the brand? That's a blog.
|
| What about case studies?
|
| Any ongoing activity that's add to the site in a "social
| update" sort of way is effectively the blog.
|
| That's been WP original idenity. As you noted, that's not a
| priority any more. Now tools like Shopify, WebFlow, etc *in
| the eyes of the market* have parity. And while Matt went
| all in on Gutenberg / Blocks there were already a number of
| page builders. Blocks is not gaining traction. It was a
| *horrible* product rollout.
|
| So what's WP's and Automattic's identity now?
| Extortionist?? Certainly looks that way. Ugly but true.
| 3np wrote:
| > People are fatigued
|
| I think this is significant. As I caught up on this
| conversation I've seen it interwoven with saltiness about
| "The Block Editor", which I understand is a new WYSIWYG
| editor replacing the classic editor under deprecation and
| which an increasing part of the community have been feeling
| alienated and forced by. It's been Matt's baby and WP hasn't
| been taking the community feedback to heart.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yup. There is a lack of faith in the leadership, and it's
| spreading. Still plenty of Kool Aid drinking, but far less
| fear about speaking out
|
| People took time off and spent money to go to WordCamp US.
| MM used his keynote to shit on a prominent entity in the
| ecosystem. And entity many people know, use and love. There
| was no need to go nuclear at that event, using that
| keynote.
|
| Either someone said "No Matt, this isn't a good time" and
| he ignored them. Or no one close to him stood up to say
| anything. Both of these scenarios are ugly.
| handzhiev wrote:
| I can hardly imagine anyone being in cult with WP. People use
| it because of the huge ecosystem around it and the accessible
| talent pool. One can hardly be impressed by the tech itself -
| in fact almost everyone thinks it sucks.
| greyface- wrote:
| Full PACER/RECAP docket, for those interested in following future
| filings: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-
| inc-v...
| sys13 wrote:
| What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make
| Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce
| enthusiasm for the OSS project.
| caust1c wrote:
| Wait that's not making it better? /s
|
| Seriously though, it's a freaking legacy. Sad to see it go this
| way.
| jameslk wrote:
| I'm an arm length removed from all this drama having not used
| Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels
| overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue
| between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I'd
| use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that
| happens between corporations all the time
|
| My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk
| away with a better position than before, and that will be that
| threeseed wrote:
| > irrelevant to my concerns
|
| This is very relevant to anyone that cares about open source.
|
| Companies being able to host any OSS without the threat of a
| trademark dispute is vital to the software industry.
| jameslk wrote:
| Kind of a similar situation as https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema...
|
| This didn't kill Mozilla in the end or really affect the
| OSS community for Firefox or Debian
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Mozilla didn't cut Debian users off from the plugin
| ecosystem or any other Mozilla services.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I don't think there was ever any expectation that the
| Firefox/Iceweasel trademark dispute would "kill" either
| organization. About the most serious it got, IIRC, was
| some heated discussions on the Debian bug tracker; there
| were never any legal threats involved, and the situation
| was ultimately resolved to everyone's satisfaction by the
| name change.
| lolinder wrote:
| One of the two entities completely controls the plugin
| ecosystem and wielded that control against the other entity
| (the largest WordPress host except, possibly, Automattic
| itself) to block them and all of their customers out of the
| ecosystem over this dispute.
|
| That's why this matters to average developers. WordPress _is_
| the plugin ecosystem, and messing around with it does as much
| damage to the WordPress ecosystem as left pad did to npm--it
| 's not unrecoverable, but it's a major setback that could
| quickly become unrecoverable.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I believe WPEngine is actually larger than Automattic. This
| is an attempt to get the bigger (and likely better) company
| to pay the bills of a company that took a bit too much VC
| money and now needs the revenue to support it.
| dmix wrote:
| Does Tumblr make Automattic much money?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I doubt that a website they bought for $3 million from
| Yahoo is a significant contributor to their net income.
| technion wrote:
| Note that one of the most popular plugins, to the point
| many WordPress people suggest it's the only plugin that
| should be part of core, is acf. Which is a plugin
| contributed by wp engine.
| jameslk wrote:
| The more you press the nuclear button, the more you damage
| your reputation. I'm of the opinion that the circumstances
| here are exceptional and rationality will prevail
| lolinder wrote:
| The damage to your reputation comes because pressing the
| nuclear button even once is an unhinged thing to do. The
| reputational damage is because once you've pressed it
| once we consider it _more_ likely that you 'll press it
| again because you've shown yourself to be the kind of
| person who presses that button.
| bigiain wrote:
| Yep. We no all know not to trust anything that Matt or
| any of his businesses or non-profits are involved with.
|
| Unless WordPress, both the open source codebase and the
| plugin/theme publishing/distribution channels, are
| completely free of Matt's influence - they are now a
| serious risk any business using Wordpress needs to
| address and mitigate.
| creinhardt wrote:
| Is WPEngine actually the biggest Wordpress host? I'd have
| bet that GoDaddy had more, or maybe even
| BlueHost/HostGator/EIG.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Matt seems to have jumped on WP Engine essentially because
| they were making a lot of money. So now, any other company
| that is making a lot of money (or hoping to make a lot money)
| with Wordpress may wonder whether Matt will target them too.
|
| What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit
| number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of
| attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do
| other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big
| creative agencies) need to be concerned?
|
| Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And
| companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere
| rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big
| advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
|
| I agree it might not have much effect on random people using
| or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need
| a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that
| depresses that investment can depress the overall project
| trajectory.
| iambateman wrote:
| Hopefully you're right.
|
| I expect long-term effects for both entrepreneurs and
| enterprise.
|
| Companies that would've started in the ecosystem just got a
| clear signal that success comes with a tax.
|
| And the risk-management department of every enterprise will
| use this* as their logical basis for choosing something with
| a better license.
|
| * Matt unilaterally turning off WP updates for millions of
| WordPress sites is a major risk signal.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I mean sure if you want to rely on a tool where this guy will
| disable chunks of it because he's had a hissy fit, I guess it
| "won't affect you".
| fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote:
| You're welcome to your opinion, but my company is in the
| market for a large enterprise CMS management contract, and
| this situation has taken every WordPress option off the table
| due to uncertainty about the business and technical stability
| of the ecosystem. I highly doubt we're the only ones feeling
| that way.
| jameslk wrote:
| What alternatives is your company considering now, if you
| don't mind sharing? Genuine question
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Probably Drupal, _maybe_ Joomla, or maybe something more
| custom if in PHP-land. Otherwise one of the other CMS /
| DXP platforms (some require eye-watering enterprise
| budgets): https://cmscritic.com/key-takeaways-from-
| gartners-2021-magic...
| eaton wrote:
| DXP: When you have nine products, one logo, and a hundred
| salesbros.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Heh didn't know you were on HN too, this court case is
| like a bat signal for anyone involved in PHP
| historically.
| pbowyer wrote:
| Isn't it just! Karma comes around.
| luckylion wrote:
| If you were considering Wordpress for a "large enterprise
| CMS", you shouldn't be making those kinds of decisions.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Why?
| partiallypro wrote:
| Can you explain your reasoning? Wordpress is pretty
| scalable, if done right. Even Microsoft uses Wordpress in
| some of its microsites. I know some of the new federal
| government sites even use it (for instance whitehouse.gov
| as part of the USDS project). It's highly supported and
| has been tested vigorously for decades now. It can at
| least be considered for various projects, even large
| ones.
|
| Sometimes you don't need a complex solution for various
| projects, this thought process reminds me of people
| building highly scalable configurations for projects that
| just don't need it then overrunning in costs and
| overengineering it all.
| luckylion wrote:
| > in some of its microsites
|
| Exactly. That's not a large scale enterprise CMS.
| WordPress is fine for that.
|
| But if you wanted to do something that requires fine-
| grained access control, publishing control, audit logs
| etc, you're not going to use WP, or you're building a CMS
| on top of WP. I'm doing that all day because I work in an
| industry that loves WP and everybody knows WP, so it's
| easy to collaborate. I've built dozens of plugins to
| accommodate for our various needs because you will hit
| some hard walls if you scale to large amounts of URLs,
| and you will run into problems with the code quality in
| popular plugins when you're going beyond "I just want it
| to look nice and work okay".
|
| I don't hate WP. I'd consider myself a WP veteran, I've
| worked a lot with WP over the years, I've contributed
| code to core, I've found various bugs. I wouldn't ever
| consider it for anything that I'd call "enterprise" or
| "large". It's like when somebody talks about building an
| enterprise data management system and then says "the fact
| that the inventor of the CSV format liked pineapple of
| pizza will make sure that I won't consider CSV as the
| data store for my system". If they considered CSV before
| finding that out, they really shouldn't be making
| decisions in that type of project.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Matt is usually the lead developer at WP.org you can find his
| references in almost all changelogs. I still think, attention
| and resources will be diverted.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And what is more sad is that it really appears that the
| WordPress figurehead is to blame.
|
| Matt has made so many unforced errors in the last month, in
| addition to revealing, one way or another, that he basically
| considers WordPress, the .org, the .com, the Foundation, and
| Automattic, all to be synonymous, which is news to a
| significant portion of the community, let alone to the
| incorporation and other founding filings.
| marpstar wrote:
| He's completely unhinged. The threats that he made that are
| outlined in this document... how is this NOT extortion? Any
| lawyers around?
| lolinder wrote:
| He claimed in an interview there's context to the texts
| that makes it look better, but he hasn't actually released
| that context, just said that it exists and he wishes WP
| Engine would [0]. I'm having a hard time imagining context
| that would make this _not_ extortion, and if there really
| is context that makes it better I 'm unsure why he's not
| releasing it himself. He's certainly not gone into no-
| comment-on-legal-matters mode, so his silence there speaks
| volumes to me.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
| photomatt wrote:
| What would you like me to answer? I haven't doxxed any
| private texts from other parties like they have. I've
| only been releasing things I've said or sent.
| aimazon wrote:
| https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
|
| "May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with
| WP Engine via email."
|
| Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May.
| The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a
| (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and
| Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post
| suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying
| the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly
| undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you
| presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to
| them months ago.
| photomatt wrote:
| Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-
| long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the
| timeline and the final term sheet here:
| https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
|
| WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress
| and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise
| fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think
| they're official WordPress.
|
| If you watch this stream with Theo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
|
| He polls his audience and 54% of the thousand people
| watching thought WP Engine was an official thing, based
| on visiting their website that day. They have since
| updated their website a lot, including rewriting customer
| testimonial quotes without permission:
|
| https://x.com/photomatt/status/1841644271939604628
| lolinder wrote:
| If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few
| months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and
| a match and threaten to burn their house down if they
| don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of
| extortion.
|
| The context you need to share isn't that there exists a
| document that you wanted to sign and that they knew
| existed before you made the threats, the context you need
| to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here
| for your own good) is context that makes those texts not
| look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a
| massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
|
| No one here is disputing that you might have been in the
| right until September. It's your actions in September
| that you need to account for.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a
| few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline
| and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they
| don 't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of
| extortion."_
|
| This analogy seems tangential, and I don't think it
| supports the rest of your post.
| lolinder wrote:
| Did you read the allegations in the complaint?
|
| Here are some of the texts it says Matt sent:
|
| > I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk:
| "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open
| Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
|
| > I've got quotes from current and former employees, some
| may even stand up and speak as well.
|
| There's the gasoline and matches. And then, while he's on
| stage:
|
| > I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so
| my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about
| WordPress very easily
|
| In isolation this sounds very much like "nice community
| goodwill you have there... would be a shame if anything
| were to happen to it." In the context of the other texts
| and phone calls WPE cites it sounds more like an explicit
| threat with no subtly.
| posterman wrote:
| Since when did relaying employee experience constitute an
| existential threat to a businesses ability to operate?
| This forum is littered with people who engage in
| "threats" as a mode of business every single day.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| That's a weird analogy. It'd be more like your natural
| gas provider trying to negotiate a deal and then when you
| don't reach an agreement they turn off the valve to your
| house.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not talking about him cutting them off from
| WordPress.org (that's problematic for other reasons), I'm
| talking about the repeated texts and phone calls
| threatening to launch a smear campaign against them if
| they don't sign a deal. That is what looks like
| extortion.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > 8% is typical for a franchise fee
|
| I see _many_ WordPress hosts use these trademarks in the
| same way WP Engine does.
|
| How many of them are paying this typical 8% of monthly
| revenue fee?
| cdolan wrote:
| Narrator: Zero
|
| Source: Matt
| photomatt wrote:
| Other hosts have contributed significantly to
| WordPress.org and Automattic over the years, in a variety
| of arrangements. None have abused the WordPress and
| WooCommerce trademark as much as WP Engine has, hence our
| C&D against them.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I didn't ask about "a variety of arrangements" though, I
| asked about the terms you describe as "typical".
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Other hosts have contributed significantly to
| WordPress.org and Automattic over the years
|
| In reverse order:
|
| 1. Why on earth are other hosts obligated to contribute
| to _Automattic_ , their competitor, just because
| Automattic also contributes to the open source project?
|
| 2. You have, on multiple recent occasions, spelt out
| unequivocally that WordPress.org is YOU, and not the
| Foundation. Again, why on earth are WordPress hosts
| obligated to contribute to _you_?
| tky wrote:
| The more Matt tries to explain himself, the more this
| looks like a protection racket.
| camgunz wrote:
| A couple posts up is claiming Mullenweg's singling out WP
| Engine, and here you're claiming he runs a protection
| racket against anyone who wants to make money running
| WordPress sites. Which is it?
| tky wrote:
| I said no such thing.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's hard for me to believe your idea of a racket is
| pressuring a single business. You can't have it both
| ways.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Doesn't _every_ protection racket start with a first
| victim /customer?
| camgunz wrote:
| This argument is pretty tedious. If I have a chicken, I
| don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that
| chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more
| chickens.
|
| But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic
| argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark,
| offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this
| characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't
| give back to the community, and that's bad. I can
| understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a
| race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly
| how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while
| still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their
| profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress
| itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them
| off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but
| in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I
| really don't understand why people are so against him
| here.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens,
| even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay
| eggs and make more chickens.
|
| It, at the very least, provides evidence you're into
| chickens.
|
| Demanding 8% of a single competitor's revenue does a
| similar thing.
| camgunz wrote:
| I don't dispute that, only the equivalence you and others
| are trying to make.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, a protection racket tends to _start_ that way.
| Give someone prominent a thumping with relative impunity,
| use the threat of that to get everyone else to comply
| camgunz wrote:
| Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss
| extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a
| business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP
| Engine?
|
| I'm not 100% in the tank for Mullenweg, there's some
| inconsistencies I find troubling. But WordPress is an
| incredible, open project. Mullenweg's built an admirable
| community and business. There are so, so many WordPress
| hosting sites, and they're doing great. Mullenweg has
| outlined his issues w/ WP Engine (they turn off history).
| Does anyone honestly think a private equity firm would do
| better than he has? Does anyone in all these WordPress
| threads truly believe a good outcome here is PE firms can
| do as they like, giving back relatively very little to
| the community and slowly diluting the trademark? Who
| thinks this is sustainable? Who in his position would let
| this happen?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia
| boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a
| business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP
| Engine?
|
| Success with the latter potentially encourages the
| former.
| camgunz wrote:
| All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--
| either directly or through insinuation like you're doing
| here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've
| seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The obvious unanswered question is "why just WP Engine?"
| Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and
| service providers would be wise to at least be anxious
| about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.
| camgunz wrote:
| He wrote a whole blog post about it: they disable
| history.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| So can WordPress Core. It's an explicit option:
|
| define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );
|
| Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross
| revenue.
|
| What other unspoken rules are there lurking behind "don't
| turn off revision tracking"?
| camgunz wrote:
| > So can WordPress Core. It's an explicit option:
|
| I don't understand why this matters. You were asking for
| a reason, that's the reason. You can call it a "thin
| excuse", but Mullenweg's been upfront about his position.
|
| > Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross
| revenue.
|
| The 8% comes from the trademark licensing agreement [0].
| They also offer to put them in the Five for the Future
| program if they do the contribution (they can also spend
| that 8% on people working on WordPress, which again
| enriches Mullenweg not at all, or some combo). This
| sounds pretty clearly like it's addressing the "you
| contribute very little back to the community" criticism
| Mullenweg has.
|
| There's even more evidence in the "Forking" section,
| where they're basically like, "quit switching the
| attribution codes on our stuff".
|
| Again, it sounds like WP Engine was being pretty uncool,
| and Mullenweg's trying to get them to be cooler.
|
| [0]: https://automattic.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
| tky wrote:
| You continue to suggest I've insinuated he is extorting
| others and I have done no such thing. Please stop that. A
| protection racket does not need a quorum of victims to be
| distasteful or illegal.
| camgunz wrote:
| It does need to be a protection racket though. Mullenweg
| didn't walk up to WP Engine and say, "sure would be a
| shame if you somehow lost access to the plugins repo, if
| you pay me some $$$ I'll make sure that doesn't happen."
| He wrote a public blog post about how they turn off
| features he considers essential to WordPress. I'm not
| him, but it seems like if they just flipped that feature
| on (which would enrich him not at all) he'd be cool.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Seriously, you need to stop talking.
|
| You've admitted a number of times in this thread that you
| consider the nonprofit organization to be just an
| extension of the for profit company. There are serious
| consequences for that for the organizations and you
| personally.
| mthoms wrote:
| The source for that figure is literally "random person on
| twitter".
|
| I'm not even joking. Matt reposted it earlier today.
|
| https://x.com/sandro_groganz/status/1841437394236489874
| rideontime wrote:
| I was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the
| chat replay before deciding whether the results of any
| poll taken during that stream are credible.
| MikeDVB wrote:
| I have to wonder how many people that voted even know
| what WordPress is or even use it. It's easy to click a
| button on the screen to vote one way or another during a
| stream while being completely uninformed.
|
| Sure it's in use by a large portion of websites (43% I
| think I saw last) but that doesn't mean that 43% of
| people know what WordPress is.
|
| That stream wasn't on a WordPress-centric channel.
| psyopsy wrote:
| 54% of about 200 viewers voted, out of may 1200 peak
| viewers on twitch. Dude, come the fuck on.
| mthoms wrote:
| >8% is typical for a franchise fee
|
| Matt you literally got that figure from a random person
| on Twitter early _today_. Remember? You re-tweeted it.
|
| https://x.com/sandro_groganz/status/1841437394236489874
|
| https://imgur.com/a/L9OrWct
|
| Please get a lawyer.
| wise_young_man wrote:
| Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be
| defended against all not just one. Do you really believe
| they are the only ones? Are you going to go after
| everyone next?
|
| Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to
| use the trademark approach, I think your actions are
| going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I
| hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have
| in time.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>WP Engine's business is built on violating the
| WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a
| franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace
| who think they're official WordPress.
|
| You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about
| the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8%
| being typical? For what kind of franchise?
|
| If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert",
| do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
| ipaddr wrote:
| A new car dealership pays 3-8% back to their parent
| company plus a 1-2% marketing fee, upto 500,000 as an
| initial fee. They get logo rights and inventory.
|
| If this wasn't open source they could ask for those fees
| but they decided to give away their software with an open
| license. Without that license they would have never grown
| into what they became. But Matt sees another company
| doing well and he gets jealous and demands a piece of
| their success and goes postal when he doesn't get his
| way.
|
| I think he needs to step away from wordpress.org because
| the conflict of interest is too great.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Didn't you give their CEO's phone number to somebody who
| interviewed you? That seems like a clear breach of
| privacy to me.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties
| like they have
|
| You did share their CEO's personal phone number to The
| Primagen though, did you not?
| rodgerd wrote:
| He's Temu Elon Musk: https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-
| transphobia-matt-mullenw...
| righthand wrote:
| Honestly there is no "better" for Wordpress anyways, it is
| mature software that is locked into it's tech debt.
| shabgzer wrote:
| "What Defendants' statements and assurances did not disclose is
| that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed
| of moving this intellectual property away from a private company,
| and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had
| quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights
| in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very
| same day in 2010. This meant that far from being "independent of
| any company" as Defendants had promised, control over the
| WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."
|
| Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is
| gold. What a time to be alive.
| int_19h wrote:
| It gets better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726796
| PedroBatista wrote:
| These 2 belong in a Judge Judy episode.
| olliej wrote:
| Um this seems pretty horrendous (from a moral PoV, no idea about
| legal), at the time Mullenweg apparently said
|
| > Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the
| WordPress
|
| > Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring
| access to WordPress and related
|
| > open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most
| central piece of WordPress's identity,
|
| > its name, is now fully independent from any company."
|
| But then the complaint says:
|
| > What Defendants' statements and assurances did not disclose is
| that while they were
|
| > publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this
| intellectual property away from a private
|
| > company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in
| fact had quietly transferred
|
| > irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress
| trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010.
| This meant that far from being "independent of any company" as
| Defendants
|
| > had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively
| never left Automattic's hands."
|
| Again, no idea about the legality of saying you've done one thing
| in public, but functionally ensuring that the actual result is
| the opposite, but morally that's pretty gross.
| Maxious wrote:
| Source for the Mullenweg statement
| https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Also, I saw on X earlier today, someone posted that the
| agreement WP Engine was being asked to agree to included
| verbiage that WPE would not be allowed to fork WordPress. Is
| not forkability one of the keys to OSS? Shady.
| DannyBee wrote:
| It supports their various unfair competition/etc claims, but
| mostly seems written for the IRS/press/etc.
| threeseed wrote:
| > _Mullenweg failed to disclose this exclusive licensing
| arrangement between his nonprofit (the WordPress Foundation) and
| his for-profit (Automattic) in the WordPress Foundation's tax
| filings with the California government, claiming that there were
| no "contracts ... between [WordPress Foundation] and any officer,
| director or trustee ... or with an entity in which any such
| officer, director or trustee had any financial interest"._
|
| That can't be good for him.
| o11c wrote:
| It certainly _sounds_ so, but I went looking for the source and
| I 'm not sure what to look for besides the allegation itself.
| In particular, I did not find a date for that particular claim.
|
| There are also several holes in adjacent statements - for
| example, ignoring the fact that the Foundation was "paid" in
| the form of being given the trademark in the first place. And
| the fact that trademarks can change value over time.
| 3np wrote:
| Without knowing how it works in California, it might be that
| filings are available to the public if you go digging for it
| but not necessarily online.
| photomatt wrote:
| That's not true, will address in court. They made up a lot of
| things in this.
| rideontime wrote:
| Is there any practical difference between transferring
| ownership of the trademark to Automattic vs. granting them an
| exclusive license that they're able to sublicense?
| batuhanicoz wrote:
| As I understand it, WordPress Foundation's board can revoke
| the license if Automattic is no longer a good custodian of
| the brand.
|
| It makes sure even if Automattic is no longer in good
| hands, the Foundation can protect the WordPress brand from
| Automattic.
|
| (I work at Automattic but did not specifically checked the
| details of the trademark agreement)
| rideontime wrote:
| The lawsuit asserts pretty vehemently that it's
| "irrevocable."
| cdolan wrote:
| It quite literally states in the document that the
| trademark is irrevocable
| rideontime wrote:
| Which document are you referring to?
| ValentineC wrote:
| Have a look at the trademark assignment document filed
| with the United States Patent and Trademark Office:
|
| https://tsdr.uspto.gov/caseviewer/assignments?caseId=7882
| 673...
| jonnypants83 wrote:
| as I understand it the foundation board is matt and two
| people matt chose.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The only major difference I can think of would be that the
| license to A8C could be revocable. But that doesn't make
| any practical difference, especially since A8C / WPOrg have
| a hand-in-glove relationship.
| senadir wrote:
| A8C is still a for-profit company, if it's sold in the
| future, and the new owners aren't behaving correctly, the
| trademark can be revoked.
| int_19h wrote:
| Apparently it was an irrevocable grant.
| DataDive wrote:
| That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg
| found out.
|
| Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they
| each will spend 10 million on lawyers.
| csa wrote:
| > Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million,
| they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.
|
| I think both sides more or less see this as a case of standing
| up against a bully -- they may lose out in the short run (in
| terms of money), but they think that they will discourage
| future bullying by fighting back.
|
| I'm not sure if either side is right, but that's why they both
| drew a line in the sand, imho.
| dmix wrote:
| Ignoring the executive drama (on both sides) it is in bad
| taste to build WPEngine off an Open Source project and barely
| contribute back to it.
|
| It's probably a case where their version is so heavily
| customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals.
| But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well.
| Relationships are important in business.
| initplus wrote:
| Harder to justify contributing back when the open source
| project is so tightly coupled to your biggest for profit
| competitor.
| busterarm wrote:
| It's so funny seeing on this board how much people hop up
| and down screaming about big cloud providers are stealing
| from open source creators and how we should switch to non-
| open licenses that prevent companies from profiting from
| other companies' open source projects...
|
| ...and then exactly when a company is profiting from
| someone's open source project and that person is crying
| foul, the whole board is piling on the creator of that
| project primarily because they don't like _his tone_.
|
| Bunch of hypocrites.
| onli wrote:
| HN isn't one person. There was always a lot of criticism
| of those closed source licenses. See for example the
| thread when Redis fell,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562
| immibis wrote:
| WPEngine contributed a lot to WordPress. It was, in fact,
| one of the biggest sponsors of the conference it was just
| banned from participating in. It also wrote the most
| popular plugin.
|
| When Matt says "contribute" he means monetarily. Probably
| (speculation) because his company is about to be bankrupt
| without finding a way to get more money.
| echelon wrote:
| Matt shouldn't have made his thing "open source" [1],
| just like Elastic and other vendors shouldn't have
| allowed Amazon to set up shop and steal their work.
|
| Unrelated organizations coming in, soaking up all the
| profit, and not contributing back is horrible. "Open
| source" needs to be amended to prevent this.
|
| Something like MAU, MRR, or market% seems like a healthy
| way to limit big time corporations from taking over.
|
| [1] Hindsight is 20/20.
| Kye wrote:
| He had no choice. It was a fork of b2.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Automattic requested well over $10 million annually from WP
| Engine, so WP engine would find a lawyer battle cheaper.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| To go to Matt's for profit entity, for his for profit entity
| to direct as they wish.
|
| "I demand you give resources to your for profit competitor
| for them to use as they wish. And I'll pretend to be wearing
| my non-profit, independent hat while demanding it."
|
| Is it any surprise this has gone the way it has?
| sroussey wrote:
| OR to the non-profit entity.
| lolinder wrote:
| The term sheet is here [0], the money option offered was
| only to Automattic. The other choice was 8% of developer
| time to WordPress itself, which is arguably under the
| control of the non-profit, but no one is quite sure at
| this point what the distinction between the two even is.
|
| [0] https://automattic.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
| joeyoungblood wrote:
| And they demanded full auditing while also making them
| agree to not fork GPL licensed software. No CEO with even
| the most basic of business educations would sign this
| agreement. It's a total farse, he's trying to shut the
| company down and either doing so for his own benefit or for
| the benefit of his buddies at Newfold or Blackrock.
| photomatt wrote:
| Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to
| provide free services on WordPress.org in the future,
| especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for
| discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with
| everything I have.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Going to fight this with everything I have.
|
| Your chance to do that was _before_ you threw a grenade into
| the WordPress ecosystem and injured hundreds of thousands of
| innocent WordPress developers over a {trademark|giving
| back|general bad vibes} dispute. No one here is buying your
| attempts to pawn responsibility for your actions off onto WP
| Engine.
|
| They may have legitimately been the bad guys until a month
| ago, but you've thoroughly stepped into that role now and
| you're making no effort to step back.
| aimazon wrote:
| Matt, I mean this sincerely: get yourself checked out. Do you
| have a carbon monoxide detector in your house? You're
| behaving so manically that it's hard to come up with a reason
| for this sort of behaviour unless there's something medical
| going on. The barely-veiled threats to take down
| WordPress.org (did you forget Cloudflare offered to host it
| for free?) aren't a rallying cry, they're a last gasp.
| WordPress is your life's work, don't ruin your meaningful
| contributions to the world. Go to a 10 day silent retreat, or
| buy a ranch in Montana and host your own Burning Man...
| anything but this. You're making a bunch of anti-
| establishment nerds side with Private Equity, that's how
| bonkers your behaviour is.
| photomatt wrote:
| Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. Co2
| where I'm at is 572.
|
| I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a
| day. I have not threatened to take down WordPress.org.
| WPE's preservation requests do complicate things, legally,
| though, for the Slack and forums that W.org offers.
|
| Both Cloudflare and Fastly have reached out offering CDN
| services to W.org, which we're considering. Cloudflare also
| serves a lot of WP Engine. We do like controlling our
| infrastructure, though, for a variety of reasons, and have
| run it without problems or downtime for 21 years. Currently
| the only outside vendor we use is Slack/Salesforce, which
| donates free Slack Pro accounts for 49k users. (I think
| that would cost ~5M/yr.) We also use some Github, which is
| free for open source.
| bigiain wrote:
| You do realise just how guilty people sound when
| complaining about preservation requests for discovery
| during lawsuits?
|
| If you're "right" and "on the side of good and freedom",
| what are you worried about in Slack/forums/whatever?
|
| Because everything made public so far in their filing is
| pretty fucking bad (for you), I can only assume that
| discovery is gonna reveal some even worse behaviour on
| your part - or you'd have responded in public with some
| of that instead of whining about "preservation requests
| complicating thing"...
| cdolan wrote:
| For you:
|
| See paragraphs 32 and 33
| bigiain wrote:
| Yeah. I foresee a possible hilarious outcome here.
|
| Matt wins this case, having the court determine the
| trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of
| thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of
| 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a
| year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10
| billion value.
|
| The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and
| Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars
| of assets between a non profit and a for profit company
| without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive
| damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been
| involved with.
|
| WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these
| companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.
|
| Everybody loses.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Whoa. I'm bookmarking this for later. That seems way too
| plausible to my not-a-lawyer ears.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has
| the commercial trademark rights, so licensing money
| wouldn't be transferred to a non-profit foundation.
| bigiain wrote:
| Yeah, but according to the filing, Matt had Automattic
| transfer the ownership of the trademarks to the
| foundation, they had the foundation grant the exclusive
| licence back to Automattic.
|
| If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions,
| there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for
| both the ownership transfer and the licence grant
| agreement.
| metamichael wrote:
| WordPress Foundation: Owns the trademark
|
| Automattic: Owns the commercial right to use and sell the
| license
|
| This is done because the WordPress Foundation is non-
| profit. The legal intricacies of this have been worked
| out a long time ago. You want to use the WordPress
| license? Then you'll have to buy it from Automattic.
| re-thc wrote:
| > The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a
| long time ago.
|
| Doesn't sound like. Most people are still confused.
| metamichael wrote:
| And the WordPress Foundation isn't being sued either. So
| the trademark wouldn't be up for grabs either way. It's
| just a bunch of laymen LARPing lawyers.
| busterarm wrote:
| WPEngine isn't just one out of thousands of WP hosting
| companies. They're an absolute juggernaut dwarfing
| everyone else.
|
| It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers.
| The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting
| services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of
| the WordPress community does not even know that they
| exist.
| bdurette wrote:
| It's "GitHub" not "Github." Capital-h-dangit.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| A decade and a half ago it was "BlackBerry" not
| "Blackberry". Now get off my grassy hill.
| ValentineC wrote:
| For the sake of explaining this thread, the parent was
| making a WordPress reference:
|
| https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/capit
| al_...
| dboreham wrote:
| > I do own a place in Montana
|
| Did not know that.
| rideontime wrote:
| Who attacked whom?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I don't think folks want you to provide those free services,
| is the thing. I think most folks want those housed inside a
| foundation that can seek industry support in the normal ways.
| A lot of people seem to have thought they already were.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for
| discovery
|
| You know comments here and on Twitter can end up as evidence
| in court as well, right?
| zambiboy wrote:
| First, stop talking about this publicly for the love of god.
|
| Second, consider that you may be going through a midlife
| crisis, and projecting it onto this issue as a struggle for
| your LIFE's work. This midlife transition and maturing is
| perfectly normal, its largely hormonal and psychological, and
| it provides a chance for a person to review his or her life,
| making some people properly do that and making some people
| react strongly by rejecting to do that. It does feel like you
| are doing the latter by identifying yourself with Wordpress
| and taking this incident as an assault on your persona.
|
| You are not Wordpress. You are a person called Matt, who has
| infinite facets in him like any other person and like any
| other person, you just cant be simplified and described by
| any singular thing, including things like open source
| projects, like Wordpress. So stop identifying yourself with
| Wordpress and calling it your 'life's work'. You are just 40
| years old for f*ck's sake. Based on the statistics today,
| your generation has another 50 to go.
|
| Indeed, you have put a lot of time and effort into Wordpress
| and succeeded in making great positive change with much, much
| impact. This is great, it is a big success and all of us are
| grateful for it. But stop identifying yourself with it and
| projecting your persona onto it and entering into personal
| fights over it - for that is what this is starting to look
| like. You will keep existing as who you are with or without
| Wordpress. Hopefully, you will straighten things up and sort
| out this matter, learn a few things in the process and do
| even more contributions to Open Source and Wordpress.
|
| But for now, just stop talking publicly about this, let your
| lawyers talk, and take some time to reflect on what is
| written above.
| tky wrote:
| Welcome to the fray, and congrats on your reply being
| wonderfully written. Matt would be wise to take your
| advice.
| hashim-warren wrote:
| This is compassionate and wise
| rossant wrote:
| Most sensible comment in this whole thread.
| bigiain wrote:
| As I see things, WPE's legal _responses_ to being attacked by
| you are what's going to grind your ability to provide "free
| services" into the ground.
|
| All of WordPress's reputation and goodwill transformed into
| luxury cars and 3rd holiday chalets for lawyers...
| curiousgal wrote:
| lmfao my dude stop acting like a pariah, it's pathetic. You
| 100% brought this on yourself. Never thought anyone could be
| so reckless when extorting people.
| DataDive wrote:
| There is a parable that applies here,
|
| ---
|
| The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a
| heavy heart.
|
| "Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other
| animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"
|
| God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I
| understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."
|
| Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-
| powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"
|
| God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world,
| but even I cannot change public opinion."
|
| ---
|
| Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the
| most influential and richest people on the planet. But they
| won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a
| doubt against them.
|
| I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| Ah Quinn Emanuel on the job - yeah, the defendants are cooked,
| one way or another!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| When you hire them, QE is very good at making the opposing
| party spend almost as much as you do!
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The alleged extortion of the WP Engine CEO seems absolutely
| inexcusable regardless of what you think of the trademark
| dispute. Impossible to imagine a valid justification for telling
| someone you'll tattle to their investors and the press if they
| don't accept a job offer.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| It's absolutely unhinged. I really wonder how much legal
| support Matt had during all of this.
| dangrossman wrote:
| There's a "no forking" clause in the term sheet Automattic sent
| to WP Engine:
|
| https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
|
| IANAL, but the WordPress license (GPLv2) says that if you attempt
| to sublicense the software or otherwise distribute it under
| different terms, you forfeit your own license to it:
| "4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the
| Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any
| attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the
| Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights
| under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or
| rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses
| terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
|
| WordPress is itself a fork, with no copyright assignments, so
| Matt has no ability to change the license.
|
| Given this, is it legal for WordPress.com to continue using and
| distributing the WordPress software as we speak?
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| This is an excellent question! From my armchair, it would
| appear a valid reading, but IANAL and all.
| photomatt wrote:
| This was a separate agreement from their GPL license, which of
| course allows them to fork. Sorry it's not clear from the term
| sheet, but this was about them forking our Stripe extension to
| replace the attribution from us to them for WooCommerce sites
| hosted on WP Engine. Stripe is also looking into this, as it's
| spammy.
| DannyBee wrote:
| I think you missed the point.
|
| They (i know it's you but easier to not personalize it here)
| do not own all the rights to the software themselves. For the
| parts they do not own, they have no rights other than what
| they got through GPLv2.
|
| Those rights are conditioned upon them not trying to
| sublicense/etc the software in a way that conflicts with
| GPLv2.
|
| Which this term sheet purports to do.
| photomatt wrote:
| The agreement wasn't about their license to the code, it
| was about their license to the WordPress and WooCommerce
| trademarks. They could agree to not do things allowed under
| the GPL, like replacing our Stripe attribution, it's their
| right to. Or not.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "The agreement wasn't about their license to the code,"
|
| Maybe you misread it (or miswrote it i guess)?
|
| it says:
|
| "WP Engine will cease and desist from forking or
| modifying any of Automattic's, WooCommerce's, or its
| affiliates' software (including, but not limited to
| plugins and extensions) ..."
|
| It could not more plainly say that they cannot fork or
| modify _software_.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| "The agreement wasn't about their license to the [GPL]
| code,"
|
| And
|
| "WP Engine will cease and desist from forking or
| modifying [non GPL code]"
|
| You are misreading it.
| greyface- wrote:
| > License: GPLv3
|
| https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/woocommerce-
| gatew...
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| How can a plugin be GPLv3 when the core is GPLv2?
|
| //edit: apparently the core is v2 or later.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Correct, it's gplv2 or later. v2/v3 GPL compatibility is
| also sort of an abstract thing - it gets talked about a
| lot (IE do the terms have to actually conflict as applied
| to a given situation or only conflict in theory) , but
| you also can't file a lawsuit with a claim of "GPL
| incompatibility". You'd have to file a claim for breach
| of contract or infringement (or both).
|
| This matters because if, for example, your main
| incompatibility is around the patent pieces (that's one
| of them), and there are no patents anywhere involved, you
| may have a hard time convincing a judge that there is
| really a breach of contract.
| throwlicense wrote:
| I do not believe it is legally "GPL v2 or later" at all.
| The original b2 license was GPL v2. There was no or later
| version option in the original b2 license. Given that
| WordPress is a derivative work, it has to keep the same
| or compatible license. Which "GPL v2 or later" is not.
|
| Note how the original license is GPL v2 at [0], then the
| "or later" header is added much later at [1] seemingly
| out of nowhere.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blame/04c905
| 1a7d765cb...
|
| [1] - https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/8cbd9
| 2f9f8269a...
| DannyBee wrote:
| 1. Matt just claimed it wasn't about software at all. So
| we've now moved on to saying "well it's about code, but
| not GPL code".
|
| Progress, i guess?
|
| 2. The agreement does not limit it to non-GPL code in any
| way, so i'm really not sure where you are getting that
| from. The plain terms cover all of automattic (et al)
| software, which includes the stuff that has GPL code in
| it.
|
| The normal way such an agreement would be written to
| cover only non-GPL pieces would be to say it does not
| attempt to modify or change rights you get elsewhere,
| blah blah blah. It includes no such clause.
|
| If you've got meaningful parol evidence that it was meant
| to cover only non-GPL code, great, let's see it. (since
| the agreement is both badly written and not fully
| integrated, it would be valid to do so).
| Terretta wrote:
| > _fork or modify software_
|
| He mentioned "trademarks".
|
| This phrase is messy: "forking WooCommerce".
|
| There's a likely fracture between the two words.
|
| One might have a right to fork source, while one might
| not have a right to mark and trade what was changed under
| the same trademark.
|
| Similarly, a source license might require prominently
| disclosing changes made to source, such as redirecting an
| affiliate support stream from a trademark owner's account
| to one's own account, while it might be trademarks that
| decide whether one can still call this permissibly edited
| thing the same name or let users think it's the same
| thing.
|
| To be clear, _I have no idea_ what rights or agreements
| are at play in this particular situation, just noting
| these are not the same rights.
| kemayo wrote:
| I think what Matt's saying is that they absolutely had
| the GPL rights to fork and modify the code... but those
| rights don't include the right to use the trademark. So
| if they wanted to be able to market themselves as
| offering WooCommerce(TM), they had to agree to the
| license, in which they'd have to promise not to use the
| aforementioned GPL rights.
|
| I am nowhere near knowing enough about trademark law to
| say whether this is anything even approaching a
| reasonable use of trademarks.
| mort96 wrote:
| But that's not what the legal document says? "Cease and
| desist from using the trademark" is a different sentence
| from "cease and decist from forking and modifying code"
| kemayo wrote:
| I'm not defending his position, or talking about
| whatever's in the legal documents, I'm just trying to
| explain the distinction Matt seems to be drawing between
| the trademark license (and attached terms) and the
| software license in this thread.
|
| ( _Personally_ , I think it's a fairly bullshit
| distinction that's completely against the spirit of the
| GPL. It's probably legally allowed, though.)
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't understand how that's supposed to work. You can't
| use a trademark to prevent anyone from _forking_ a piece
| of software whose license allows forking. You _can_ say
| that other people can 't use your trademark in forks, but
| that doesn't seem to be what's going on here? "Cease and
| decist from forking or modifying the software" is, again,
| a different sentence from "cease and decist from using
| our trademark in your modified versions of the software"
| kemayo wrote:
| My understanding of Matt's position, and what that term
| sheet he posted is talking about, is that he feels that
| WP Engine needs a trademark license to cover what it's
| currently doing. He feels that their usage of the marks
| exceeds what's generally allowed under the "everyone can
| use it this way" terms that WordPress.org offers. His
| position isn't _just_ that they can 't use the trademark
| to apply to their forked version, it's that they can't
| use it as they currently are even if it wasn't forked.
|
| So Matt's now offering these terms: a license to use the
| trademarks as they currently are, in exchange for
| concessions. The concessions include that they'd agree to
| not use their GPL-granted right to fork the code. This
| sounds like an agreement that would hold up, assuming
| he's right about the trademark policy.
|
| Again, I have no idea about the actual legalities of
| trademark usage. It's _entirely_ possible that Matt is
| wrong about them not being allowed to do what they 're
| currently doing with the trademarks, but it sounds like
| lawyers will be arguing about that.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Let's be clear about who did what here. WP Engine didn't
| agree to anything. You _demanded_ that they not do these
| things.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Stripe is also looking into this, as it's spammy.
|
| Stripe thinks that an affiliate using their affiliate link is
| spammy, but that you, another affiliate, publishing yours
| with WordPress is not?
|
| Also, I'm sure you think they entirely agree with you, but
| maybe consider they may not (don't) want you to speak for
| them while you're being sued...
| DannyBee wrote:
| A few things:
|
| First, something general - one thing to keep in mind is that
| open source folks think of these things as license
| violations/etc, but that's not actually a thing, legally.
| Breach of contract and copyright infringement are. That is how
| a claim would be analyzed. Not as a "GPL violation".
|
| Why is this relevant? Well, you really have to think of this
| stuff as contracts to use a _given copy_ of software, and not
| as some abstract thing licensed or not.
|
| This is fairly relevant because:
|
| 1. The general view on GPLv2 is that you gain a shiny new
| license every time you receive a new copy from someone else. In
| other words, you have signed a new contract. So while your
| rights may have been terminated the existing contracted copy
| (and you would be liable for distributing or ... that one), if
| you just get a new copy from someone else, congrats, new
| contract.
|
| This is supported by the license: "6. Each time you
| redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program),
| the recipient automatically receives a license from the
| original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program
| subject to these terms and conditions."
|
| Let's assume this was not true
|
| 2. Wordpress is actually GPLv2 or later. GPLv3 has a notice and
| cure period. Under GPLv3, they would still be within the cure
| period (unless i screwed up the timeframe :P), and would have
| not lost a license yet.
|
| 3. GPLV3 has a more complex termination mechanism to try to
| deal with notice, cure, and the issue in #1.
|
| In short, worst case, if they are claiming to use it as
| licensed by GPLv2, it would be fairly easy to cure the ability
| to distribute new copies. They could do nothing about
| violations that exist in existing copies (and would not be
| allowed to continue distributing those). I realize how insane
| this sounds, since it's basically saying "These bits over here
| are red but these same exact bits over here are green", but
| that's life in the legal realm sometimes.
|
| For sure, if they do _nothing_ , explicitly, they would be in
| bad shape, legally, in the worst case.
|
| GPLv3 is a more complex question.
|
| Also: there are those that strongly disagree with the view in
| #1 and believe you lose all rights forever unless they are
| reinstated. Rather than try to say who is right or wrong, i
| tried to give you where general consensus seems to lie. That is
| not something you should take to court, it's closer to "if you
| surveyed 100 open source lawyers what would most think"
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Why is this relevant? Well, you really have to think of
| this stuff as contracts to use a given copy of software, and
| not as some abstract thing licensed or not.
|
| If you think about it in that way, copyright infringement is
| out of the picture completely because of the statutory
| exception.
|
| _17 U.S.C SS 117 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer
| programs (a)Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner
| of Copy.--
|
| Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an
| infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to
| make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of
| that computer program provided:
|
| (1)that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an
| essential step in the utilization of the computer program in
| conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other
| manner, or
|
| (2)that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes
| only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event
| that continued possession of the computer program should
| cease to be rightful._
| DannyBee wrote:
| Err, no.
|
| That statutory exemption was created to resolve one court
| case and one worry:
|
| 1. A holding that you can commit infringement simply by
| loading a program into memory even for maintenance
| purposes. This was MAI v. Peak, one of the earliest real
| court cases on software copyright infringement. It was
| unfortunately followed by lots of courts.
|
| 2. A worry that creating tape backups/etc of computers, and
| copies of software cd's (since they don't last forever) was
| copyright infringement independent of anything else.
|
| See the report for more details: https://www.copyright.gov/
| reports/studies/dmca/sec-104-repor...
|
| Neither would eliminate infringement in this case.
| duskwuff wrote:
| WRT #2, note that the relevant section of 17 USC SS117
| was written in 1980 - at the time, most software was
| distributed on media like floppy discs or tape which
| could easily be accidentally overwritten or damaged by
| faulty equipment. Creating personal backups of purchased
| software was already standard practice for many users; I
| think it's this sort of usage that the law was primarily
| meant to protect. Later applications like allowing users
| to backup computer hard drives with copyrighted software
| installed on them were a happy accident.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Oh, yes, you are right. I misread the dates. I knew it
| was not because of a case, that the worry was around
| archival copies of software, and that (to this day)
| nobody had actually ever been sued over making a backup
| (as far as anyone knows). I should have dug a little
| deeper back into the history.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| It would in the sense that mere use wouldn't count as
| infringement. Distribution is a different thing here and
| I agree there are more complex shenanigans there.
| throwlicense wrote:
| Would it be a valid for someone to take "GPL v2" (with no or
| later version) clause, and re-license a derivative work as
| "GPL v2 or later", and then another entity takes that
| derivative work and re-licenses it as the "GPL v3"?
|
| That seems to be what's happened here. The b2 software is a
| strict "GPL v2". There is no later clause. Then WordPress has
| re-licensed their derivative work as "GPL v2 or later". Now
| we are talking about a GPL v3 derivative work.
| immibis wrote:
| Obviously not. Everyone who contributed to WordPress now has
| the right to sue Automattic for 100% of its profits.
| photomatt wrote:
| Howdy, Matthew Charles Mullenweg from the lawsuit here.
|
| One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather
| Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic.
| That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her
| team there in the meetings I posted here:
| https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
|
| They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to
| be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a
| position that was held by Josepha.
| wging wrote:
| That's not what page 35 says at all. Check out page 36:
|
| > 92. Mullenweg's premise was false, as WPE's CEO had never
| interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To
| the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be
| interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
|
| (edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct
| to read page 35 as saying that)
| photomatt wrote:
| She was interviewing November 2023 to January 2024. She
| declined the WordPress.org role on January 26, 2024. I even
| invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text
| message she decided not to share.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Why you don't share it? You said there's much more emails
| and messages, but you never shared any. Why not?
| photomatt wrote:
| Why doesn't she share messages that prove she declined a
| WordPress.com job in 2022? You're holding me to a
| different standard. I'm here, I'm talking to journalists.
| They're not.
| spellsaidwrong wrote:
| The question you need to ask yourself is whether you
| _should_ talk to journalists during a legal matter,
| instead of trying to fight the court of public opinion.
| photomatt wrote:
| I'm very comfortable with the truth of everything being
| public, it's on our side. The legal case will drag out
| for years.
| spellsaidwrong wrote:
| You know legal case documents will eventually become
| public, right?
| chris_wot wrote:
| Literally everybody is telling you to STFU. The problem
| as I see it, is that you might feel incredibly confident
| in your case, but you are so close to things that you
| have convinced yourself of your own righteousness.
|
| That's not necessarily reality, and you are not as
| righteous as you believe. Even if you are - your words
| could be misconstrued.
|
| I cannot understand why your legal team is not advising
| you to stop making public comments. Or perhaps they are,
| and you aren't listening to them? Either way, you are
| being incredibly foolish.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Regardless, I'd take some time and go offline, instead of
| posting reactionary comments on HN right now.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| He seems rather level-headed to me. I would rather a CEO
| address this lawsuit candidly personally.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Have you ever been party to or close to an important
| legal proceeding?
|
| Anything said and documented prior to the hearing will be
| combed through. Even tiny inconsistencies will be cherry
| picked and entered as evidence to raise doubt of the
| claims made.
|
| I'm all for the sentiment behind a CEO addressing ongoing
| lawsuits candidly, but in reality its just a bad idea.
| Statements made without being fully vetted by council,
| with the context of all other statements already made,
| will inevitably have issues that could throw a wrench in
| the case.
| favorited wrote:
| Any lawyer would tell him it's a bad idea (as has
| happened in this thread!), but I'm glad you think it's a
| good idea.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| I don't think it's a good idea, but it is preferable for
| me as a bystander trying to understand his position on
| and the details of the case.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Oh I would much rather that because it is amusing.
| However if I used Wordpress I would definitely think
| differently.
| netsharc wrote:
| Sonewhere I saw the great comment regarding Matt: "It's
| like someone wrote Elon Musk in PHP"...
| re-thc wrote:
| Even Elon knows when to stop.
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, I don't think he does.
| ErwinAI wrote:
| You're aware that the messages shown in that document (if
| authentic) can be interpreted as extortion, right?
| 3np wrote:
| What I think you don't realize is, the minor
| discrepancies in statements of facts are inconsequential
| in the court of opinon. Even if (which TBH don't find
| implausible at all) everything you said and posted is
| true and I agree in principle, that doesn't resolve the
| issues around CoI and they way you have been
| communicating over the last couple of weeks, including
| the WPConf bombshell and the abrupt discontinuation of
| service. The fallout of the drama and the way you have
| been playing your hand vastly overshadow whatever your
| motivations for "going nuclear" was.
|
| I don't believe you will gain anyone's sympathy by
| resolving a misunderstanding about who-said-what-when in
| some inconsequential matter somehow apparently also part
| of this drama. Some if it seems like pure distraction
| that I don't see why anyone outside of the individuals
| involved should have ever heard about in the first place.
|
| I second the sentiment that you don't appear healthy and
| could suggest maybe let someone else take a seat in one
| of the (3? 4?) chairs for a change? At least from the
| outside, you still seem free to choose your focus
| yourself. Maybe that window will be closing...
| ebcode wrote:
| hmm.. no, I don't think it is all on your side, sad to
| say. I was with you until I read this message you sent to
| Heather Brunner:
|
| >> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg
| Mondres: * Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve
| our conflict. * Your interviewing with Automattic over
| the past year. * I will possibly tell the press all of
| the above.
|
| That's just so obviously threatening and uncalled for.
| Even if Brunner were considering jumping ship, you
| shouldn't _threaten_ someone into accepting an offer.
|
| Now, you don't know me from Adam, but I want you to
| strongly, _strongly_ consider that this thing that you
| 've been afraid of happening, has actually already
| happened. And that is, that you have become _Evil_ Matt
| -- with the little horns on your head and everything. And
| to get back to being _Good_ Matt, you 're going to have
| to let some things go.
|
| "No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away
| from it." -- Charles Schulz
| pensatoio wrote:
| Have you spoken to a lawyer, Matt? That's a terrible
| course of action. It's like talking to the police. You
| never do so, no matter how innocent you are.
| wordofx wrote:
| lol I honestly can't wait for the world to crumble around
| you and reality to set in.
| angoragoats wrote:
| At least on this site, you may be "here" but you're not
| responding meaningfully to most of the questions/comments
| posed to you. This seems more like a weird approach to PR
| than any kind of attempt to clarify or justify your
| position.
| ChallengeEup237 wrote:
| What does her position have to do with the lawsuit? It
| could have been a developer position, it doesn't
| materially change anything.
| 9dev wrote:
| There's a German saying that goes: Being in the right and
| getting justice are two different things.
|
| The only thing you are doing right now is lessening your
| chances at getting justice, regardless of how objectively
| right you may be.
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| You're taking this very personally and in the public
| domain even though it will hurt your company.
|
| Maybe there gets a point you become so wealthy, that ego
| is all that matters. But you're supposedly a smart guy
| who cares about his products, community and company, why
| not take the practical and economically safe route of
| duking it out in court?
| DannyBee wrote:
| Matt - i'm not your lawyer, but you should shut up.
|
| Employers generally have an obligation to keep personal
| data confidential, especially sensitive information like a
| job application.
|
| Whether that applies in this particular case or not, i'm
| not going to offer an opinion, but you really should shut
| up.
|
| I get that it's particularly frustrating and hard to feel
| like you are being unfairly treated or whatever, but shut
| up anyway.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Just let the man speak, he probably didn't listen to his
| own lawyers why you think he will listen to you?
|
| As the audience, with no horse in this race, I'm glad he
| keeps talking.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I understand that. As an uninvolved outsider, this is a
| first-row seat I don't usually have. It's fascinating!
|
| But my better angel wants me to duck tape his mouth shut
| before he does himself dirty.
|
| Edit: Or if you're a WPE fan, my better angel says to
| keep talking! Explain it all away! Share it all!
| edanm wrote:
| > As the audience, with no horse in this race, I'm glad
| he keeps talking.
|
| You really shouldn't, IMO.
|
| For one thing, what parent poster is saying is that he
| might be violating someone's privacy. I get that that's
| fun from the sidelines, but I certainly don't think we
| should _encourage_ employers to violate other people 's
| privacy.
|
| For another, we have a court system with lots of rules
| around it for a reason. These threads help people form
| opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections
| in place in a courtroom apply here. He, or his opposite
| party, could literally be lying about everything they're
| saying here and there's no way for us to know or evaluate
| it. He could be bringing up totally irrelevant facts
| while not talking about the actual _important_ things,
| with his counterparty correctly _not_ talking about it,
| but leaving the impression that there is nothing there.
| Etc.
| krisoft wrote:
| > parent poster is saying is that he might be violating
| someone's privacy
|
| As you say it is terrible, and they should not have done
| that. Irrespective of the legal outcome it taints them in
| my eye forever. That being said that particular horse has
| left the barn already. It is not like us third parties
| gigling from the sidelines will affect it.
|
| > These threads help people form opinions, but the truth
| is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom
| apply here.
|
| Yeah sure. People on the internet can lie. It is not like
| we believe everything which comes out of the mouth of any
| party ever. That is not a reason for me wishing them to
| shut up.
|
| It would be in their best interest to stop talking. But
| it is not our job as third parties to enforce that or
| even encourage it. We are not his legal representation,
| nor we are his fairy godmother.
|
| > He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying
| about everything they're saying...
|
| Yes.
|
| > ... and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it.
|
| That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our
| logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely
| evaluate them. We don't have as strong tools as people in
| a court case do. For example we can't subpoena them, nor
| can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our
| interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage
| our critical faculties when it is about a court case.
| They have to be always engaged.
|
| And it is important to remember that the likely outcome
| of any such evaluation is that "there is not enough info
| for me to know for certain". That is not some weird edge
| case of critical thinking, but the default state of
| things.
| edanm wrote:
| > That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply
| our logic, look at the things presented and can
| absolutely evaluate them. We don't have as strong tools
| as people in a court case do. For example we can't
| subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is
| how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only
| have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a
| court case. They have to be always engaged.
|
| You're right, I spoke more strongly than warranted. I was
| getting at this distinction - in a court case, there are
| _real_ tools, both legal and investigative, that let you
| determine truth to a much higher degree than in random
| internet (or real life) conversations.
|
| What I highly dislike is that the person who is acting
| responsibly legally, and who is probably acting more
| responsibly by trusting the court system to determine
| what should happen, is always the party that _doesn 't_
| engage in this kind of talk. The side acting
| irresponsibly is trying to change public perception by
| sidestepping the actual legal mechanisms here, and we
| shouldn't usually let them.
|
| (I'm speaking generally, in this case I feel less
| strongly because a lot of this _is_ public knowledge.)
| pensatoio wrote:
| He has no self control. His interview on The Primeagen
| was especially telling. It's deeply personal for him. His
| interactions with the WPEngine staff are all spoken about
| like casual personal relationships. Nothing was handled
| professionally. No matter who's right, or to what extent,
| he's publicly digging himself a hole.
| vasco wrote:
| I mean not only he hopped on a live stream to babble
| before going to court, he bragged about it and said the
| WP Engine people are afraid to do the same. This is
| school yard level big brain moves.
|
| https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/
|
| > I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier
| today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking
| about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.
|
| > Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell
| phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can
| hop on or debate these points. As far as I've heard she
| hasn't responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to
| journalists live?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Yo real talk, big props to Primeagen for not calling and
| harassing Heather despite Matt giving him her number
| completely unprompted.
| lambda-dev wrote:
| Or maybe not. From the PDF:
|
| > For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an
| interview on the X platform during which he gave the
| CEO's personal cell phone number to the interviewer and
| encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted
| by the interviewer.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Were I her lawyer: "oh, so after you invited her to hang
| out in a private setting, she declined the job?"
|
| That does not help your position. IANAL, but stop talking.
| aimazon wrote:
| "she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for
| Automattic"
|
| But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as
| you've revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few
| weeks. I don't follow, how can Heather apply for a job with
| Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you
| personally own?
| photomatt wrote:
| Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on
| WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on
| WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.
| flutas wrote:
| > Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on
| WordPress.org. _I can appoint them into positions on
| WordPress.org_ , if I think that's appropriate.
|
| So are you now using company resources for personal
| projects (as they point out, you constantly have claimed
| that the .org domain is your personal domain) as well as
| for non profit org projects?
|
| Doesn't exactly sound... beneficial to investors interests.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Matt is leaving so much evidence against himself that
| he's practically doing opposing counsel's job for them.
| mthoms wrote:
| Why did you tell the community: _" the most central piece
| of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent
| from any company"_? That's objectively untrue. Period.
|
| That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community _for
| 14 years_.
| photomatt wrote:
| The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It
| transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the
| commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-
| license. The Foundation gave me a license to run
| WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree
| it's complicated and not widely understood.
| zambiboy wrote:
| Man you should just stop talking about this online, even
| less, posting this kind of sh*t that would be used in
| court. Arent there ANY people around you who can tell you
| to just keep silent?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I'm curious: what else _is_ there to a trademark? Nominal
| ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they've
| granted "irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in
| the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic" (as
| claimed in this lawsuit), what else _is_ there? Maybe
| there is something, I'm no lawyer or particularly deeply
| familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like,
| for all practical purposes, ownership belonging to the
| Foundation is a furphy
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy>.
|
| (This is an honest question.)
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I guess one difference is that if the company ceases to
| exist it falls back to the foundation and there might be
| classes around acquisition etc.
| mthoms wrote:
| I understand the workings of the trademark. The question
| I asked of you (that you avoided) is why did you claim
| that the trademark was "fully independent from any
| company" and that Automattic had "give[n] up control".
| [0]
|
| That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with
| the USPTO is clear:
|
| >WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public
| benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic
| Inc., an _exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual,
| irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license_
| to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in
| Exhibit A attached hereto...
|
| Why did you lie, Matt?
|
| [0] https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark/
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org.
|
| The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder
| (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one
| of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private
| Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?
|
| Weird that you never mentioned that this license was
| granted on the same day it was transferred.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > though I agree it's complicated and not widely
| understood
|
| He didn't say it was complicated or that he didn't
| understand it.
|
| He said it was un-true and it is.
| cdolan wrote:
| So wordpress.org is effectively for-profit
|
| Why did your legal officer today post in a blog post that
| its a non-profit?
| fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote:
| What blog was this?
|
| Matt's agents post in so many different places it's hard
| to keep track.
|
| Edit: found it. Wow. This guy has the worst lawyers.
| https://automattic.com/2024/10/02/wordpress-trademarks-a-
| leg...
| cdolan wrote:
| You start to wonder if they work for WPE
| function_seven wrote:
| I love how he explains that "consideration" was conjured
| from thin air.
|
| I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To
| accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises
| to let me use it on weekdays?
|
| Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this
| is a valid contract with "consideration" because I gave
| Jimmy my car and, "in return," he gave me my car back
| Monday-Friday.
|
| I'm no lawyer, but I can't imagine that it is illegal to
| donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit
| organization, without contracts and considerations coming
| into play. But if I'm wrong, and "consideration" is a
| required element of a transaction like this, I don't
| think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster
| anyway.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I also do not get it, I don't know why consideration is
| even relevant for a donation.
|
| I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a
| fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead,
| with them retaining commercial rights.
|
| Why would either side want to minimize the donation size?
| It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-
| profit doesn't care about income tax.
|
| I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to
| bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything
| immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a
| non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
| ChallengeEup237 wrote:
| There are so many legal entities here that appear
| completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation,
| Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support
| PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if
| they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Right. To me Matt is so so used to using them all almost
| synonymously that he seems oblivious to the ramifications
| thereof.
| jonnypants83 wrote:
| the statements about the non-profit situation seem
| especially bad. He'll obviously have his own side of the
| story, but I'm guessing they didn't misread the tax
| filings.
| infrawhispers wrote:
| You really should stop crashing out on HN - you are
| practically doing the opposing counsel's work for them!
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on
| WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on
| WordPress.org, if I think that 's appropriate_
|
| So in other words you intermingle for-profit and nonprofit
| resources for your own private benefit?
|
| Maybe the IRS should be taking a deeper look at
| WordPress.org's finances?
| immibis wrote:
| IIRC you can get a substantial 5-figure reward for
| reporting this to them!
| threeseed wrote:
| So out of a 98 page document this is the part you chose to
| focus on.
|
| An aspect that literally no one could care less about. Bizarre.
| jonnypants83 wrote:
| to be fair I think it's the most damning part for him as a
| person
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Since you're trying to get WP Engine to pay for "WordPress"
| trademark, by contributing back to open-source, because you
| feel they should, since it made them rich, I was wondering how
| many open-source projects did Automattic contribute to
| financially? Aside from WordPress, I'm sure you stand on the
| shoulders of giants such as Linux, nginx, MySQL, JavaScript
| libraries (or maybe you should call it ECMAScript, because
| you're not paying any trademark fees), etc.?
|
| Just curious.
| dangrossman wrote:
| They're listed as a sponsor on the PHP Foundation website.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| Comical that contributing to the most used CMS on the
| planet isn't sufficient. They must contribute financially
| to all open source otherwise they don't have a claim
| against WPE
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| That alone should be a crime.
|
| (/s, PHP the language isn't so bad, it's spaghetti code
| like WP that gives it a bad name)
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| To be fair I bet a good chunk of them use, or have used,
| Wordpress.
| busterarm wrote:
| https://ma.tt/2024/09/charitable-contributions/
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Coincidentally, WPF is a 501(c)3.
| busterarm wrote:
| But not the one where his contributions went.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Your response to this complaint is going to look very
| interesting.
|
| Also, a note for the audience: Quinn Emanuel is one of the
| premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US.
| Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more.
| Associates cost almost $1000/hour. WPEngine apparently has deep
| pockets.
| photomatt wrote:
| Just wait!
| mplewis wrote:
| Hi Matt. I wanted to ask, do you think that the actions
| you've taken will improve the WordPress community in the
| long term? What do you think are the likely outcomes for
| WordPress users and contributors, regardless of how this
| conflict ends?
| dataspun wrote:
| I'm with you Matt! I like your strategy here.
| chx wrote:
| Not only that but the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian. As I
| noted elsewhere in the thread, she was lead counsel for
| Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was
| against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in
| search results being fair use.
| shabgzer wrote:
| That $1000+/hr apparently does not guarantee great
| proofreading. Already found two typos and am not even a
| quarter of the way through:
|
| - Page 12: "wordrpess.org"
|
| - Page 17: "fundamental principal"
| ec109685 wrote:
| At least we know a human wrote it :)
| cdolan wrote:
| I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my
| opponent was weak
|
| Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a
| red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is
| careless
| shabgzer wrote:
| > I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my
| opponent was weak
|
| Me too, I'm no longer the grammar nazi I used to be. It
| still comes across as sloppy though.
|
| > likely a red herring to make the defense think the
| plaintiff is careless
|
| That's interesting!
| neltnerb wrote:
| As I write many more things collaborating with people who
| do not speak English as a first language, it is more
| obvious than ever that grammar and spelling errors have
| absolutely no correlation with the quality of the
| argument when it comes to professional communication.
|
| At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page
| document in a few hours, they might have someone
| proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that
| went into writing it was far more serious than the
| thought that went into proofreading it.
| pc86 wrote:
| At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a
| typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I
| think about it the more I think that's exactly what
| someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might
| do.
| luckylion wrote:
| I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced
| law firm once for an investment in a company I had a
| small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple
| people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was
| pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some
| of the names a few versions later.
| blitzar wrote:
| Ahh they edited Lawsuit_v4_jimcomments_typos_v3.doc not
| Lawsuit_v4_4__2024_comments_fixed_typos_v2.doc
| pc86 wrote:
| Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80
| hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were
| going too fast to notice the error :)
| adolph wrote:
| Sounds like they could use a content management system
| that retains revisions.
| blitzar wrote:
| Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to
| distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away
| to draw their attention to something irrelevant?
| elorm wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm but it made me burst out
| loud and it's probably the funniest thing I've read all
| week.
|
| Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D
| chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to
| distract from facts ?
|
| Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who
| still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just
| eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos,
| you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.
| crummy wrote:
| that's how you can tell they didn't get chatGPT to write it
| blitzar wrote:
| You always add a few mistakes when you copy someone elese
| homework - no different with copying from chatGPT.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Typos don't really matter in legal complaints, except for
| looking unprofessional. It would be a waste if my
| $1000/hour lawyer spent their time proofreading, honestly.
| The typos also guarantee that I'm getting a real, logical
| human writing my complaint rather than someone faking it
| with ChatGPT.
|
| Typos in long-lived documents like contracts, patents, etc.
| matter quite a bit, by contrast. See _eg_ the second
| amendment, where billions of dollars have been spent over a
| few commas.
| vasco wrote:
| What proofreading? Just click the spellcheck button.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Because no message has ever had its meaning twisted by
| overzealous spellcheck. No ducking way.
| dooglius wrote:
| Spellcheck wouldn't catch either of these errors
| LordAtlas wrote:
| I hate spelling mistakes in professional work as much as
| anyone, but the spell-checker would not catch "principal"
| being used for "principle".
| boplicity wrote:
| This is actually one of my favorite uses for contemporary
| AI technology. It very much can (and does) catch this
| type of spelling error. Google Docs does this for me
| quite often. It's not always right -- but it often
| prompts me to review exactly this type of situation. It's
| pretty amazing, really.
| rafark wrote:
| Yeah several spell checkers are context aware like
| grammarly (I haven't used it in a long time though).
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Lawyers often don't spell check the same way you do, for
| fear that it changes the semantics of a sentence.
|
| This could be an AI tools market, although I think
| several companies are already in it.
| srmarm wrote:
| I'm always amazed at how many typos make it into legal docs
| that should be picked up by automatic spell checks. It
| seems to be a normal and accepted practice for legal types
| - interesting to see that's the case in the US as well as
| here in the UK.
| biccboii wrote:
| > WPEngine apparently has deep pockets.
|
| Yeah because they don't have to spend any money on R&D nor do
| they spend money contributing to the open source project :)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It is eternally surprising to me how much "hosted X"
| businesses can make. There are a lot of non-technical
| people ready to overspend by 10x just to have someone else
| be "responsible" for downtime.
| Loudergood wrote:
| Just look at Microsoft 365 and to lesser extent AWS.
| ecshafer wrote:
| DHH was talking about this in his recent rails world
| keynote. Hosting companies are getting huge margins
| because developers are afraid of using a computer.
| vundercind wrote:
| I do this all day long to avoid being the person in the
| hot seat when something breaks... when it's someone
| else's money, and when the org's dysfunctional or
| political enough for there to be a "hot seat" (nearly all
| large and medium orgs, at least half of small orgs).
|
| It's kinda comical because it's absolutely a principal-
| agent problem disguised as being in the best interest of
| the company. 10x costs and _in practice_ worse uptime &
| performance for internal-political insurance and on-call
| avoidance _for me personally_ , sold with a list of
| benefits that the company either doesn't need, or that
| only look like benefits due to very-partial accounting,
| or that have such lengthy footnoted caveats that no, they
| probably won't be a benefit in-fact.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Heather Brunner is an amazing person and leader. I know because
| I used to work with her. That's it. That's the comment.
| notamy wrote:
| I am stunned that you're _still_ posting publicly and
| aggressively about all of this. How have your lawyers okayed
| any of this?
| photomatt wrote:
| Yes.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Christ. Get new lawyers!
| ebcode wrote:
| I'll second that.
| tock wrote:
| Are you your own lawyer Matt? :p
| patmcc wrote:
| If this is true, you need a better lawyer.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Is this the Elon Musk yes, where they actually said no but
| you went ahead and did it anyway?
|
| Because if they actually did okay this you've got the least
| competent lawyers of any tech bro not named Elon Musk.
| angoragoats wrote:
| "_How_ have your lawyers okayed any of this?"
|
| "Yes."
|
| He's not actually reading the questions you ask, folks.
| ablation wrote:
| Holy shit.
| tm-infringement wrote:
| lol. lmao, even. put me in the court transcript.
| mandibles wrote:
| Now we're all part of the discovery :tada:
| Kye wrote:
| Don't lawyers usually advise their clients to stop talking
| about it when they're sued? Or is that one of those cliches
| that isn't true
| elicksaur wrote:
| Definitely true and all of his communication - this thread,
| he's given some interviews, etc. is very odd for a legal
| strategy.
| flutas wrote:
| Right, this all feels like (and I'm not trying to be rude
| with this, I'm speaking from experience) a mental break. Or
| he's got some sort of vendetta that he feels burning
| everything down is worth it over.
|
| Some of his comments from the other day on reddit have
| already been used in this very lawsuit, you'd think he
| would know to shut the hell up at this point if it's #2.
| riffic wrote:
| could even be a little from column A, a little from
| column B
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I don't even know if it's a vendetta about WP
| specifically or just the result of his general
| disposition. About a year ago he had an embarrassing
| public meltdown after some random Tumblr users talked
| shit about him because they didn't like his moderation
| policies. Banning people, then publicly shaming them,
| then replying to their posts on other social media
| sites...
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| > some random Tumblr users talked shit about him because
| they didn't like his moderation policies
|
| Was that the hammers thing, or something else?
| duskwuff wrote:
| That would be the infamous "car covered in hammers", yes.
| And it was from February this year - time flies (like a
| hammer).
| zo1 wrote:
| My take is this is 100% someone sticking to a naive
| worldview because they are smart and logical (and I don't
| doubt that they are). But the world doesn't work like
| that. And as much as I hate to admit it, these WPE people
| are playing the game and just baiting and provoking a
| response from him. They're like schoolyard bullies that
| poke and wave hands inches from your face, then cry foul
| to principal Government when you rightfully retaliate. As
| much as a smart and "fair" person would think this is a
| reasonable and logical response, the principal does not
| think so. They will look at the rules, say "a ha, you
| broke rule 3(a) and hit someone", and then send you to
| detention. No amount of if, buts, and logical "reasons"
| will matter at that point.
| vundercind wrote:
| There's a whole-ass archetype among founder-owners of
| successful companies who stick with them long-term, that
| looks like this. It's not all of them, by any means, but
| it's definitely one _sort_. In ordinary circumstances it
| manifests as a preference for maintaining control over
| making moves that might, by some measures, be better
| (improving business success, or limiting liability, say)
| and a string of quiet and maybe fishy-seeming but not
| exactly red-flag dust-ups; when a big enough obstacle
| (especially to that whole "control" thing) shows up and
| throwing their weight around can't make it go away,
| though, things can get _real dicey_.
| agrocrag wrote:
| It feels and looks very similar to when things weren't
| going well for SBF. Never really stopped talking to the
| press, giving interviews, etc.
| bagels wrote:
| It's probably not a legal strategy. Everything becomes
| evidence that your opponent can use. You don't want them to
| have more of that.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Lawyer here - we do. For very good reason.
|
| A. Legally, it cannot possibly help you (whatever happened,
| happened). However, it can hurt you (inconsistent statements,
| etc). This is particularly true in colloquial environments
| like HN.
|
| B. While it may be useful reputation/press wise, because
| anything _you_ do wil be evidence, you should be having
| someone _else_ do that.
|
| C. If you are part of a publicly traded company, you can run
| into SEC violations quickly from what you say, how you say
| it, and where you say it. Even moreso if you are CEO/an
| officer/etc
|
| I could go on forever here - for example, you can also run
| yourself into trouble quickly if the people you are talking
| to are people you know may be witnesses in the case, etc.
|
| There is a near infinite number of reasons lawyers tell
| people to STFU when you get sued.
|
| Of course, if your company/you as CEO get sued, it can
| obviously be incredibly frustrating and difficult to sit
| there and watch a one-sided story take hold - not the least
| of reasons because people often take complaints as evidence
| rather than assertions, and the response rarely gets as much
| press, etc.
|
| I think the closest lots of HNers come is when they love
| their company and see a legal complaint pop up on HN that
| they felt is just insane but can't say anything about it.
| It's like that, but like 100x worse :P.
|
| But saying nothing is the most useful thing _you_ can do -
| get away from it. Take a walk, meditate, whatever.
|
| Get the people who are experts in handling it involved
| (lawyers, comms folks, whatever), and let them do their job.
|
| I'm going to do him the favor of not responding to anything
| else he writes in this thread for his own good.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| ^ THIS.
|
| Not a lawyer but have been at some major companies when
| legal stuff goes down. Most have told us:
|
| "hey, there's a thing going on. Do not talk about it, don't
| reference it, don't 'correct' people. If anyone asks you
| for comment, send them to us"
|
| I've been deposed and it sucks. It's exceptionally
| stressful, even if you're not the target in the situation.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Right.
|
| The _best case_ scenario here is that Rachel (or one of
| her associates more likely) takes every single sentence
| Matt has written here, or anywhere else, tonight, and
| cross-checks it against every other sentence or fact he
| 's claimed before. Or that his company has claimed. or
| the foundation has claimed. or ....
|
| Then at the deposition, they will then ask a lot of hard,
| uncomfortable questions about every single inconsistency,
| no matter how little. Because that is what they spend
| many hours preparing to do.
|
| That's the best case.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Does similar apply to some of the Automattic employees
| who have been talking everywhere?
|
| Is there a point where it _could_ switch from "a bunch
| of people running their mouths" to "a coordinated
| harassment campaign against WP Engine and its customers"?
| DannyBee wrote:
| Yes.
|
| _Most_ lawyers in cases like this are not assholes
| (surprisingly), so they generally won 't spend
| time/energy deposing people who can't produce useful
| evidence, even if they could.
|
| As a result, you would generally stick to people who have
| relevant evidence, are capable of legally binding the
| company (often director or above) or speaking for it
| (various others), etc.
|
| But - if you need to prove a coordinated campaign, and
| can't get evidence of it otherwise (emails, chats, etc),
| sometimes you just got to depose a lot of people.
|
| Usually the path of least resistance is taken, however,
| and electronic evidence is often sufficient enough these
| days to not end up having to depose lots of employees.
| Judges (magistrate and otherwise) also are pretty careful
| in ensuring you aren't being malicious (IE just trying to
| harass employees)
| saagarjha wrote:
| Hmm, you didn't say the magic words so I am going to treat
| your words as if you were representing me. Thanks for your
| service
| DannyBee wrote:
| See now i would go copy paste one of those 73 page email
| signature disclaimers but it would push everything off
| the page.
| kragen wrote:
| do you think there are cases where the public perception of
| the conflict is more important than the outcome of the
| lawsuit?
| DannyBee wrote:
| Sure.
|
| Lawyering is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.
| Lots of companies fall into the trap of letting lawyers
| make business decisions instead of being advisors of
| legal risk/etc to the business.
|
| Done properly, they are advisors 99% of the time.
|
| Which means, to answer your question, there are plentyof
| situations where the outcome of the lawsuit is not as
| valuable to the business as the narrative/etc.
|
| For example, there are people/companies whose brand is
| their most valuable asset. "family friendly" celebrities
| are a common example, i think.
|
| For them, the narrative and control of it may be way more
| important than winning or losing.
|
| Now, i would still say - even in that case, the person
| going off and talking in public without someone helping
| them know what to say (not necessarily a lawyer) is still
| often a really bad idea. They are often too close to it,
| etc, to really be objective about what will make the most
| sense, even if the goal is "control the narrative" rather
| than 'win the lawsuit" or whatever.
|
| But in those cases, working with a crisis manager or
| whatever, if the most important thing is the perception,
| have at it.
|
| At the same time, people involved tend to be in a bit of
| a bubble. It often feels more critical, urgent, and well
| known than it really often is.
|
| So for example, here, i'm sure to lots of employees/Matt
| it feels like a thing _everyone_ is talking about. But in
| reality, uh, its not. It isn 't carried by any major news
| site, and even among the general open source or developer
| community, i would bet 99% of people have no idea about
| any of this.
|
| Even within their _customer_ base i would imagine it
| still isn 't widespread knowledge (though it likely will
| be over say the next week).
|
| So in a case like this, you have time to catch your
| breath, engage your best people, and think about your
| response. Which you should take.
|
| That isn't _always_ the case mind you (it 's like any
| incident response). But i think it's the case here.
| kragen wrote:
| thank you for your thoughtful and humble response. i'll
| have to think about it
| rtpg wrote:
| I have seen a couple founders post to HN like this during
| legal action. Its embarrassing, even if I enjoy reading the
| content.
|
| Of course its possible that these posts are happening through
| consultation with a lawyer/PR or something but often it feels
| like someone using their "inside" voice in the outside, and
| reads like unforced errors.
| knowitnone wrote:
| they do and smart people listen
| ookblah wrote:
| honestly, just read this and his initial post about the whole
| issue (content is "sacred" or whatever) and it's clear he's
| semi-deluded himself into thinking he has massive support
| and/or more important in the grand scheme of things than he
| actually is. burned so many bridges and still won't concede
| anything.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I believe they do, but in the end it's on the client to
| decide what they do.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if some of these comments here make
| it to some of the legal documents we will be reading in the
| future.
|
| I assume some ignore this advice either because they think
| they are right, or they are unhinged and they think they know
| better than everyone.
|
| I'm here for it all, whichever may be the case.
| vasco wrote:
| Every once in a while there's someone who's smarter than
| everyone else and keeps talking. SBF from FTX famously was
| giving interviews to whoever would listen.
|
| https://m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/ftx-founder-
| keep...
|
| > The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely
| causing Bankman-Fried's attorneys to scratch their heads, or
| worse. Prosecutors can use any statements, tweets or other
| communications against him at his trial, which is scheduled
| for October.
|
| > Prosecutors love when defendants shoot their mouths off,"
| said Daniel R. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor who is now
| a white-collar criminal defense attorney. If Bankman-Fried's
| public comments before trial can be proven false during the
| trial, it may undermine his credibility with a jury, he said.
| malthaus wrote:
| given the previously disclosed communication style, do you
| think he cares?
| rpgbr wrote:
| Some people are so arrogant they believe to know better than
| anyone and start screwing everything by themselves.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I think common decency should have been considered here
| regardless of what a lawyer would say to do or not to do.
| Yuck.
| ddoolin wrote:
| Even if the initial allegations outlined in the introduction
| are only half-true, I would be too ashamed to continue posting
| like this. Yikes.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Have your lawyers not advised you to stop talking at this
| point?
| JimDabell wrote:
| Even if that were true, what relevance does it have to the
| trademark dispute? It just seems like you want to hurt her
| personally.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Why on earth are you making public comments during a court
| case?
| iambateman wrote:
| Matt, thanks for engaging here and for all you've done with
| WordPress. My college internship was working on "Standard
| Theme" in 2009. We haven't met but I'm Stephen.
|
| I don't expect you to take questions from an internet stranger,
| but since you asked... What rules does Automattic enforce for
| all companies who operate businesses built on WordPress? In
| other words...when does a business owe 8%? There are thousands
| of businesses wondering if they're next on the list.
| pensatoio wrote:
| Check out his interview on The Primeagen. They couldn't pry a
| direct answer to that exact question out of him.
| safety1st wrote:
| Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly
| supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP
| Engine's conduct.
|
| However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million
| enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting
| down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and
| consequently reducing the security of their websites.
|
| To be entirely blunt it's all damage control for us at this
| point when your name comes up, and it's because of that one
| singular mistake, if this was just WPE and Automattic duking it
| out in court no one would really care, but now the reliability
| of the WPOrg infrastructure is being questioned by a big chunk
| of the people who depend on WordPress and they will probably be
| inclined to walk away from your infrastructure and deeper into
| the arms of someone like WPEngine when they get the chance.
|
| If you care about the broad perception of your efforts and your
| business practices I think you need to address this. Again I
| see that there are plenty of reasons to take issue with WPE's
| conduct but this singular decision you made has people calling
| for you to step aside and let someone else run WordPress. It's
| not going to go away on its own.
| prox wrote:
| Well said, I hope that there will be forum to discuss the
| ethos of these actions and see if there isn't a better way to
| go about this, and how we can strengthen the community of
| open source.
|
| An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder)
| and others.
| astockwell wrote:
| Link?
| chuckadams wrote:
| https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
|
| Good thread on reddit too: https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordp
| ress/comments/1fup9gb/solving_...
| mike_d wrote:
| > make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one
| weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with
| zero warning
|
| AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and
| do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is
| a hosted service and could make very simple changes to
| download updates from their own servers.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple
| changes to download updates from their own servers.
|
| This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of
| "butchering" WordPress for disabling revisions:
|
| > What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it's something
| that they've chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like
| WordPress, but actually they're giving you a cheap knock-
| off and charging you more for it.
|
| -- https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
|
| Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the
| simplest possible change you could make, and it's
| unacceptable in his eyes.
|
| Making WordPress contact something other than
| api.wordpress.org requires altering the codebase. Making
| this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected:
|
| > Why would I build that? The built-in source works great,
| for tens of millions of servers.
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885
|
| So according to Mullenweg:
|
| - If WP Engine alters WordPress, even just to alter its
| configuration, they are "butchering" it.
|
| - If WP Engine _doesn't_ alter WordPress and leaves it
| pointing at api.wordpress.org, they are unfairly using
| community resources.
|
| - Huge numbers of people using api.wordpress.org is
| actually "great" and scales to tens of millions of servers.
|
| As far as I can see, he doesn't have a consistent position.
| He's just grabbing hold of the nearest accusation that he
| thinks will harm WP Engine in the heat of the moment,
| regardless of what he has previously claimed or who else it
| hurts.
| jamespo wrote:
| I don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a
| fork
| shabgzer wrote:
| Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-)
|
| Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordP
| ress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
| spyke112 wrote:
| So in your opinion what's wrong with that code? To me it
| seems to be nicely documented and everything.
| shabgzer wrote:
| That it is - it better be.
|
| It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility
| WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content
| generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often
| this gets very chatty and very inefficient.
|
| Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like
| a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always
| with much forethought. Part of it's due to the
| limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's
| inherent with projects of this size, but there are
| varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of
| a project that started out too messy and only became more
| messy over time.
|
| Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of
| continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I
| write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that
| just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal
| with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is
| WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)
|
| Edit: this guy said it better:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827
| darkwater wrote:
| So even better, WP engine could rewrite it from scratch
| in a better way. Maybe even use another language.
|
| Or maybe it is just fine for their use case and they are
| making already enough money with it...
| safety1st wrote:
| > Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is
| the simplest possible change you could make, and it's
| unacceptable in his eyes.
|
| Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant
| WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this
| constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the
| sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back
| on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to
| get a _limited_ version of it re-enabled by them.
|
| Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type
| of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for
| example who has built an extensive publishing workflow
| around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how
| massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the
| world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on
| WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the
| water.)
|
| So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became
| a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The
| customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a
| free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting
| contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really.
|
| BTW this is documented at
| https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you
| can see on that page that they limit their environment in
| many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge
| problem, hosts have costs and security and various
| limitations to think about. In my personal experience
| there are limitations which are not listed on that page
| and those are more frustrating.
| dncornholio wrote:
| The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it
| for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of
| queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi
| language plugin on top and your site will be eating
| memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual
| usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue
| at all
| safety1st wrote:
| I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes
| sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our
| open source project, and when you had problems with the
| revision system, instead of contributing improvements,
| you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an
| enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?"
|
| Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements
| to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will
| also get access to those improvements. For sure it's
| disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time
| to Core.
| dncornholio wrote:
| WPEngine has tons of developers working on the WordPress
| ecosystem. This contribution argument doesn't work with
| me. They're contributing plenty of hours into WordPress
| plugins that their competition also can use.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Is there a list ?
| biccboii wrote:
| No they don't. They contribute 40 hours a week.
| aimazon wrote:
| That's the amount of hours they contribute to the "Five
| for the Future" program which specifically refers to work
| on a subset of the WordPress project managed by
| Automattic. For example, WPEngine own and develop
| Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin used by hundreds of
| thousands of WordPress websites. The work they do on that
| isn't covered in the 40 hours. Likewise, WPEngine run the
| DE{CODE} conference but that isn't included in the 40
| hours either.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/reflecting-
| on-two-...
|
| Oh, I remember now. I was wondering why ACF didn't become
| part of the core.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Is there a list of wordpres plugins WPEngine actively
| maintain ?
| chx wrote:
| To recap, every post is stored in the wp_posts table and
| revisions have a post_type of 'revision' and a
| post_status 'inherit' (attachments also inherit). There's
| no gradual improvement you can do to this. More, their
| codex does not discourage accessing the database directly
| at all rather points out there's a class to make it easy
| https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description so
| moving revisions to a separate table will break every
| plugin which wants to access revisions and uses the wpdb
| class to do so which is just not acceptable: "WordPress
| strives to never break backward compatibility. It's one
| of our most important philosophies, and makes updates
| much easier on users and developers alike".
|
| We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the
| right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is
| and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.
| remoroid wrote:
| WordPress is infamous for its terrible codebase.
| Everything is jammed into a single wp_posts table
| including revisions. The frontend code is just as bad.
| I'm sure they blame the need for backwards compatibility.
| The entire thing should be retired.
| delfinom wrote:
| The entire thing makes money and serves the purposes of
| people using it even for free.
|
| It's a well-engineered product whether you want to accept
| it or not. Unlike more than half of the tech world that's
| unprofitable and is just a fart in the wind of tech
| memory.
| Communitivity wrote:
| No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years
| as a professional software engineer), at least the
| portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely
| remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are
| lack of data normalization (and not in a performance
| optimizing way), template includes that depend directly
| on order of inclusion and variables in other templates,
| very little code isolation, and PHP.
|
| WP is a well-delivered product that works well for its
| user base in most situations. Plenty of code is well-
| marketed, profitable, and fulfills users' needs, but not
| well-engineered.
|
| By the way, I know the PHP gripe is contentious, but it's
| not the reason why I think WP is badly engineered, it's
| just the reason it was easier to engineer it badly.
|
| See https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-
| design/ for more details on PHP.
|
| One excerpt from that page:
|
| There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider
| this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere.
|
| @fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');
|
| What will it do?
|
| If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it
| won't work. (Docs don't say what "won't work" means;
| returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was
| removed in PHP 5.2.5.
|
| If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still
| won't work. (How? No idea.)
|
| Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file
| won't be printed.
|
| But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in
| php.ini.
|
| Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
|
| But not if the right error_reporting level isn't set.
|
| If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on
| display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.
|
| I can't tell how this innocuous function call will behave
| without consulting compile-time flags, server-wide
| configuration, and configuration done in my program. And
| this is all built in behavior.
| northhanover wrote:
| Can you posted your most widely used project so we can
| see an example of good engineering? It would be
| interesting to contrast with WP.
| Hasu wrote:
| The idea that no one is allowed to criticize anything
| unless they can and have done better is one of the most
| perniciously stupid ideas out there that just won't go
| away.
|
| If the parent poster is secretly Linus Torvalds, do you
| walk away in shame because he HAS done a project with
| better engineering? Or are the criticisms, perhaps,
| objectively valid or invalid, and worth engaging with
| regardless of the merits of the person making the
| criticisms?
| joshmanders wrote:
| Well when their whole argument boils down to "php sucks"
| and they back up their claims with a document that was
| invalid 12 years ago when it was written, they better
| have something to back up these criticism.
| angoragoats wrote:
| Perhaps you should engage with the claims rather than the
| person. As someone who doesn't frequently use PHP, the
| criticisms in the linked post from 2012 seem valid if the
| facts presented are true -- there's some pretty weird,
| and in a few cases, downright dangerous behavior
| presented there.
|
| What is invalid, specifically, about that blog post?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| No it wouldn't be 'interesting'.
|
| For _years_ , wordpress stored user session data in
| 'wp_options'. Moderately trafficked sites needed to come
| up with regular purging hacks to 'clean' their wp_options
| table. Why? Session data is not an 'option', it's...
| session data. Make a database table called 'wp_sessions'.
| Transient 'cached' data also... in 'wp_options'. This was
| not an example of 'good engineering'.
|
| This is just one of many examples of suboptimal tech
| decisions. Some have been mitigated, updated or otherwise
| 'fixed' over the years, so they may not be relevant any
| longer. It's a very popular and widely used platform
| despite some poor development and engineering choices,
| and perhaps even in some cases _because_ of these poor
| choices, but that doesn 't make them good engineering.
| atonse wrote:
| I would argue that Wordpress is a great example of how
| something doesn't need to be "well-engineered" (when it
| comes to abstractions, maintainability, etc) to be widely
| useful for many.
|
| Although I think the exception there is security (and yes
| I know many will say clean and well engineered code is
| secure code). Security has to be solid or it will impact
| too many people negatively.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Ah yes, the infamous 12-year-old fractal of bad design
| article which is almost entirely obsolete.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Are you able to name of the publishers that you say run
| massive WP installs?
|
| I do know they exist of course, Sony being one.
|
| I'm coding up a little something that I feel is more
| modern and superior compared to WP, and I'd like to learn
| what their business requirements and use cases are that
| keep them on WP.
|
| Thanks in advance!
| dewey wrote:
| I don't want to discourage you...but there's so many WP
| alternatives out there that are supported by bigger
| companies, have a big ecosystem around them with agencies
| and developers for many years. Why would massive WP
| installs switch to "a little something"?
| hoofhearted wrote:
| I just see the opportunity to provide developers and
| users a better experience using modern tooling, and feels
| open and simple enough for anyone to download and use
| without worrying about security vulnerabilities.
|
| Something that feels powerful and safe; like WP of 10 to
| 15 years ago.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| "A third party will complain" is not a valid reason to
| provide poor service to your customers.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I'm not really focusing on WP Engine's service here. I'm
| pointing out that the constraints Mullenweg has voiced
| appear to be self-contradictory and unsatisfiable by any
| WordPress host.
| bzmrgonz wrote:
| I'm sorry but WP-ENGINE lost my vote when they started
| quoting evangelizing and ambassadorship events as
| "contributions". Everyone knows that's a 50/50 self-
| marketing and brand outreach. I don't understand why
| people are taking WP ENGINE's side, in the past 5 years,
| the evils and exploits of VC investments have been widely
| documented. This is a clear and present danger/example of
| what is wrong with VC in America. Look at VC in other
| parts of the world, they are heavily regulated for this
| particular reason. This industry has taken the premise of
| the movie "pretty woman" and escalated to new hights of
| corporate GREED.
| safety1st wrote:
| Sure, but to do that they'd need to _know they are about to
| be cut off,_ something which they were given zero warning
| about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that
| customers didn 't lose service. Matt chose to surprise
| them.
|
| It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very
| different today. There would have been very little pushback
| against Matt's crusade if he'd just _thought about making
| sure service to users was uninterrupted._
|
| Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of
| this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.
|
| I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt
| will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot
| mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made
| the choice he did.
|
| Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to
| handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something
| like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the
| better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused
| problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not
| a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are
| changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will
| discuss them with the community and announce them well in
| advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable
| for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."
|
| This type of statement would go over well with a lot of
| people including the big enterprise customers who are
| depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are
| constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup
| messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open
| source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.
|
| But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars
| worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those
| big M's. :)
| mike_d wrote:
| > Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about
| to be cut off, something which they were given zero
| warning about
|
| According to Automattic they had been in discussions for
| 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking
| your money while knowing full well their service depended
| on servers ran by a company they were on (best case)
| shaky terms with.
|
| Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid
| hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with
| no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
| nicce wrote:
| > According to Automattic they had been in discussions
| for 20 months.
|
| They could have give a warning 20 months ago that this
| may happen and then this would not be a thing.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Yea, WPE should have done that.
| jantissler wrote:
| Matt's behavior is inexcusable and shows that WordPress
| needs a complete restructuring without him. Too many
| sites rely on WordPress to endanger them because of one
| man's temper tantrum. I don't understand how you can
| defend this reckless behavior by him. Who cares what WPE
| could have should have done. He needs to step down
| immediately.
| mort96 wrote:
| Did Automattic tell WPEngine that they'd cut off plug-in
| updates 20 motnhs ago?
|
| Or is the 20 months thing just completely irrelevant to
| the point that Automattic should've given a heads up
| before cutting off plug-in updates
| mthoms wrote:
| "WPEngine should have foreseen something that has never
| happened in the 20 years of the software's history".
|
| I mean yeah, companies should have contingency plans for
| things that are extraordinarily rare but let's be
| reasonable about it. No one, including you, saw this
| coming.
|
| I challenge you to find a single blog post, tweet or
| HN/Reddit comment that suggests Matt could one day shut
| off wp.org access to a single company running 1.5 million
| sites without any notice to that company, or the
| community members who will be affected. It's
| unconscionable. Or at least it was.
|
| Be reasonable.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Even without dragging the wordpress.org infrastructure
| into the mess, MM's blackmail campaign wouldn't have
| played well with the community. But it would have blown
| over as just more #wpdrama, whereas this ... I think
| we're likely to see the WordPress trademark invalidated.
| Even if it isn't, this case winning means every last WP
| host can just line up and cite it, making the trademark
| as good as generic anyway.
| jdub wrote:
| But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make
| mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network
| of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other
| distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say
| that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those
| distributions had set.)
|
| That is something the WordPress community (albeit
| centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could
| have been doing for decades.
| lsaferite wrote:
| > WordPress.org decision makers
|
| That would be Matt as the sole owner of wordpress.org,
| not a plural 'decision makers'
| arielcostas wrote:
| Because Canonical makes it easy to clone their entire
| repositories and host your own mirrors. You can change your
| ubuntu mirrors changing the configuration files themselves
| (or via graphical programs on desktop systems), unlike in
| WordPress where you'd need to "butcher it" (Matt's words,
| regarding disabling revisions by WPE) modifying the source
| code to point to another server.
| jantissler wrote:
| It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt
| acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository,
| he could have told them so and given them a date. But
| cutting off access to updates without warning to all these
| sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option"
| without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress
| and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of
| websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.
| nchmy wrote:
| From the lawsuit:
|
| In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that
| as a result of his actions, WPE is now a "distressed
| asset," worth just a "fraction" of what it was before,
| because "[c]ustomers are leaving in droves" - calling
| into question whether Defendants' motivations extend
| beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a
| thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE's
| valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap
|
| Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander
| and disrupt them so much that the company would become
| worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to
| blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him,
| after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit
| too)
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| > AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers
|
| I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well. A hell
| of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every
| day. Being able to pull it locally saves all that. Also, it
| is faster and does provide some security.
|
| > They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
|
| That depends on how you look at it. If for some odd reason
| Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be a big problem
| for both DO and AWS.
|
| They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the
| distros.
|
| But then Amazon does have their own in-house Linux distro,
| which is/used to be somewhat associated with RedHat/ Centos
| https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023
|
| I would expect AWs,Google etc have specific internal only
| distros that make up the foundation of their cloud business
| but that is just a guess.
| moneylotion wrote:
| A million people trusted WPE's resources. WPE, in turn,
| relied on someone else's. The real issue here is that WPE
| completely overlooked the fact that they haven't done the
| work to maintain the availability of their apps. It's like
| buying a fridge, stocking it with $200 worth of food, and
| forgetting to plug it in.
| None4U wrote:
| More like buying a fridge and then the landlord stops
| paying for electricity suddenly
| austhrow743 wrote:
| This is accurate if by landlord you mean "the person in
| whose house you have been squatting without paying rent
| or signing a lease."
| immibis wrote:
| Actually, it's the person who signed a contract with me
| to give me a free house.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| What is the contract that gives WP Engine the free house?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The GPL, and WordPress's trademark policy, which up to a
| week ago stated " The abbreviation "WP" is not covered by
| the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in
| any way you see fit."
| commoner wrote:
| On the other hand, the use of WordPress servers is in no
| way covered by the GPL. WP Engine can pay for their own
| servers the same way Bluehost used to.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| That someone gives you the right to use their code
| doesn't mean they're required to be a free hosting
| provider for you.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Using the resources of the non-profit you control to
| kneecap a competitor to the for-profit you control makes
| that a bit more complicated.
|
| I think it's obvious WPE wouldn't be in the clear with
| Matt even if they went and hosted a mirror/cache of the
| WP.org packages.
| phonon wrote:
| wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. The actual
| non-profit [1] had expenses of $41k in 2022, which
| wouldn't come anywhere near paying for wordpress.org
| infrastructure and personnel. I guess Wordpress is going
| the RHEL route. You can clone it, but can't use their
| trademarks or infrastructure.
|
| [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizati
| ons/205...
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name._
|
| Automattic's associate legal counsel begs to differ [1]:
|
| > Let's apply this to the WordPress trademarks (also
| called simply "marks"). The WordPress Foundation owns the
| right to use the WordPress marks for non-commercial
| purposes. It can also sublicense out this right for
| particular events (e.g., WordCamps) and to people
| supporting the WordPress project and community. The
| Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-
| profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that
| facilitates access to WordPress-related software.
|
| (Take it up with them, not me.)
|
| [1] https://automattic.com/2024/10/02/wordpress-
| trademarks-a-leg...
| phonon wrote:
| The man himself goes into copious detail otherwise!
|
| "We could not get wordpress.org being part of the
| foundation approved by the IRS."
|
| https://youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU?t=342
| ValentineC wrote:
| I think if we're being pedantic about this, we can agree
| that WordPress.org itself is not a 501(c)(3) entity or
| similar, or run under such an entity.
|
| Automattic's legal team somehow considers it a non-profit
| though.
| phonon wrote:
| They tried to set it up that way and were denied.
| Apparently the flip side of that is they no longer feel
| constrained to not "Us[e] the resources of the non-profit
| you control to kneecap a competitor to the for-profit you
| control."
|
| So like I said, at this point it's no different than
| RHEL's very stringent trademark protections, and
| restrictions on using their update servers
| (cdn.redhat.com) if you're not paying them. The only
| difference here is that if WP Engine was itself a non-
| profit, Matt wouldn't be going after them. RHEL is not as
| generous.
|
| Apparently these are the new rules. If you're a for-
| profit entity advertising "Wordpress Hosting" instead of
| "Hosting with Wordpress installed" and want access to the
| infrastructure of wordpress.org (which costs millions of
| dollars a year) you now have to pay, either in cash or
| equivalent contributions.
|
| Personally that seems fair. It should have come with a
| minimum 90 day public notice period, and the stuff about
| being a cancer etc. is pretty crazy. Changing marketing
| language and setting up your own plugin mirror like
| Bluehost did (https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror)
| is not the end of the world.
| fastball wrote:
| WordPress definitely did not sign a contract with WPE to
| provide free electricity.
| recursive wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but I think contracts require consideration
| to be enforceable.
| safety1st wrote:
| With the wrinkle that your landlord enthusiastically
| invited you to move in, and never made you sign a
| contract, but after your dog shed all over the place he
| started making ominous noises about how you'd better sign
| one equal to eight percent of your gross revenue, and
| every conversation with him is now very strained
| safety1st wrote:
| This is 100% correct as a position of principle, but it's
| not a foregone conclusion that WPE was able to take the
| necessary steps here.
|
| To be very specific about at least one of the issues:
|
| * The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on
| wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
|
| * If WPE forks WordPress to fix that, and continues to say
| they host WordPress, IANAL but they probably have a
| trademark violation problem on their hands.
|
| There are certainly workarounds which exist, but it's hard
| for us to conclude casually on Hacker News whether they can
| be deployed at WP Engine scale and in compliance with
| whatever agreements WP Engine is bound to.
|
| So yeah you're right about what the right thing to do is.
| But frequently reality is not that simple. They needed time
| and maybe even assistance from wporg (in helping them to be
| free of wporg. errrr)
| luckylion wrote:
| > * The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on
| wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
|
| But they can be changed via filters. I do that all the
| time to manage when certain request are being made (and
| making sure it's in a cron job and not a user-request).
|
| WP Engine does run their own plugin in the instances they
| host, though I assume it's not obligatory. Still, every
| site I ever had to look at that was on WPE had it
| installed and enabled.
|
| WP does come with its own CA certs, but that file could
| be appended (or replaced, again via filter) as well.
| Since they're comfortable changing things like the
| revision settings, I doubt this would be something they
| wouldn't do.
|
| I'm not saying Matt is reasonable, but "it's not an easy
| thing to do" isn't true.
| chuckadams wrote:
| It's academic now, the mirroring has been a done deal
| since Oct 1. WPE operates their own mirror and API server
| now. Matt of course did not help at all in this effort.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I have not heard of anyone being turned off from using
| WordPress from this. That does not mean it does/has not
| happened, I am sure some folks got mad.
|
| It is a stupid hissyfit and some bad judgments. People make
| mistakes.
|
| There are far better purely technical / code issues to turn
| people away from WordPress, but WordPress is spectacularly
| popular.
| marpstar wrote:
| Uhh. I am. I've launched probably 30 websites using WP over
| the last 10 years, a couple for household name brands.
| WordPress stopped being "cool" awhile ago (because "PHP
| sucks" and the like), I've defended my usage of it in
| plenty of past comments, despite it being long past "cool".
| The way MM talks about enforcing the trademark, the
| licensing distinction (i.e. the commercial use of
| "WordPress" to Automattic only) -- am I allowed to call
| myself a "WordPress" developer and charge people money for
| it anymore? Or do I have to worry about a trademark troll?
|
| I'll admit that I'd already been looking for a modern
| alternative. I'm a web developer, I almost exclusively
| write in TypeScript, something running on Node just makes
| more sense for me. I recently built a project on PayloadCMS
| and NextJS -- Payload has since integrated directly into
| Next's server and has a really nice "website" template to
| get started. I'll be using that from now on.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| To me, the military language used in a few of their execs
| messages was telling.... I have seen that more than once in
| anti competition lawsuits and Heather has as well
| Spastche wrote:
| >However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5
| million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by
| shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero
| warning and consequently reducing the security of their
| websites.
|
| yup. I'm about to make a new site and I dont care about the
| platform, I just want to write. but I'm not gonna use
| wordpress ever again now, probably. Matt seems friendly but
| this is evil CEO garbage
| caeril wrote:
| > but this is evil CEO garbage
|
| Correction: this is Evil CEO vs Evil CEO garbage. Casting
| WPEngine as some sort of saint is highly inaccurate.
| lancewiggs wrote:
| Thanks for participating here.
|
| While others are stating that you should not, the court of
| public opinion delivers results (including to Wordpress) a lot
| faster than the formal court system. So get ahead.
|
| In general it's better better the hear authentic voices than
| none or lawyered-up PR consultants, and this site has hammered
| companies that do so in the past.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This boils down to something quite simple. WPEngine wants
| money. Matt wants money too. It's zero sum.
|
| Matt, free advice. If you really think your commercial product
| is better (maybe it retains more post history or whatever the
| case), spend more time selling it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| He's too busy trying to shore up the money pit that is
| Tumblr, that Automattic bought.
| fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote:
| We're way into "negative sum" territory by now.
| wise_young_man wrote:
| Matt. You are rich. What is behind your motivations here? You
| seem to be very candid and passionate about this but I must be
| missing something. Why spend your time doing this? What's your
| end goal?
| h4ny wrote:
| [Edit 2: could you kindly take some time to explains where you
| disagree as you downvote this so I can learn? Reading documents
| like this for the first time pointing out where things don't
| make sense to me.]
|
| > 89. Defendants' extortion campaign included levying personal
| attacks against the CEO of WPE for not capitulating to his
| demands. For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an
| interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO's
| personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged
| him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the
| interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
|
| [Edit: Ignore this paragraph, see JimDabell and lolinder
| comments below] I watched the whole interview they linked to
| and don't recall that happening, ChatGPT also doesn't seem to
| think so based on its transcript. During the interview Matt did
| ask at one point if Theo would talk to Lee and Heather on
| stream, it was about giving everyone a fair chance to tell the
| story and I doubt that anyone can characterise it as
| extortional in nature.
|
| Even it was Matt who gave the number away during stream (if it
| was cut out of the YouTube version) or off stream, it's a huge
| stretch to claim that as "personal attacks" as part of an
| "extortion campaign"...
|
| > 90. Defendants' attacks against WPE's CEO have also continued
| in private. First, on September 28, 2024, Mullenweg attempted
| to poach her to come and work for Automattic, and falsely
| suggested that WPE's investor was making her do something she
| did not want to do.
|
| They screen capped just Matt's message without any context
| about what was said prior to that message? By September 28,
| 2024 they have already met many times in-person, too. I think
| it's just insane for Matt to send a text like but that just
| seems very out of context in isolation. If absolutely nothing
| compelled Matt to send that message then I guess it's possible
| that he's either extremely naive or he is a psychopath.
|
| > 91. After WPE's CEO did not immediately respond, Mullenweg
| threatened her the following day. Specifically, on September
| 29, 2024 Mullenweg gave her until midnight that day to "accept"
| his job "offer" with Automattic. If she did not accede to his
| demand, Mullenweg threatened to tell the press, and WPE's
| investor, that she had interviewed with Automattic:
|
| > 93. WPE's CEO did not respond to Mullenweg's September 29
| threat
|
| 91 has very interesting wording: "After WPE's CEO did not
| *immediately* respond". In contrast to 93, they also don't
| claim that Heather didn't respond to the messages on September
| 28.
|
| The screenshot of Matt's message on September 29 begins with
| this:
|
| > Heather, after our extensive discussions about you joining
| Automattic, the offer you negotiated with me is still on the
| table.
|
| So... there was definitely a conversation between the
| screenshots on September 28 and September 29 that lead Matt to
| think that they presumably didn't include?
|
| > 92. Mullenweg's premise was false, as WPE's CEO had never
| interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To
| the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be
| interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
|
| 92 feels like an assertion that's deliberately placed between
| 90, 91 and 93 to potentially make their claim seem more valid?
| I suppose "had never interviewed" depends what kind of evidence
| Matt can produce at this point if he's not lying; if it's all
| in-person and there are no records at all, which he pointed out
| in the interview with Theo, then it's unfortunate.
|
| The "[had never] negotiated" part doesn't make sense at all if
| something was indeed discussed between September 28 and
| September 29.
|
| > If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres: > -
| Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict > -
| your interviewing with Automattic over the past year > - I will
| possibly tell the press all of the above
|
| I feel like the minority on HN that wants to give Matt the
| benefit of the doubt. Even so, that's a sure-fire way to get
| someone who may have been listening to you to turn on you.
|
| If you're not going to call your lawyers, at least call Theo
| since he offered.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is referencing a different livestream than the one with
| Theo, they refer to that one separately as a livestream on
| YouTube. It's confusing because of where the footnote is
| placed, but if you trace the 46 back up to the top you'll see
| it refers to a different quote:
|
| > On September 28, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview to the
| author of the "This might be the end of WordPress" video
| blog. Among other statements, Mullenweg acknowledged his
| retaliatory and vindictive intentions, saying: "They could
| make this all go away by doing a license. Interesting
| question is whether, now ... you know, maybe more than 8% is
| what we would agree to now."46
|
| The X interview is a different one. Matt's been busy.
| h4ny wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out, I can see where it's
| referenced now (and 90 doesn't actually reference any
| source)!
| JimDabell wrote:
| > > during which he gave the CEO's personal cell phone number
| to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was
| in fact contacted by the interviewer.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
|
| > I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't
| recall that happening
|
| He admits it here:
|
| > Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone
| for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or
| debate these points. As far as I've heard she hasn't
| responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists
| live?
|
| -- https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/
|
| (With the slight discrepancy that he says he did it _after_
| the interview, not _during_ , which I'm not sure is a
| meaningful distinction.)
| h4ny wrote:
| That makes sense now! Thanks!
|
| I agree that after or during isn't a meaningful
| distinction. I honestly don't understand how anyone
| characterise that as "personal attack" and link it to
| "extortion".
| _rm wrote:
| What are you hoping to achieve?
| pxeboot wrote:
| Hi Matt! I appreciate the transparency. Reading about this has
| been interesting to say the least.
|
| I am curious about your desired outcome. If you win, WP Engine
| pays 8% going forward? If you lose, will it be business as
| usual? Fewer open source offerings?
|
| Obviously this could take years to resolve, but developers do
| have very real concerns over what the landscape may look like
| in a few years.
| tommica wrote:
| Good luck in the court! Hope you win!
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Matt, you have been criticised here for speaking openly but it
| is quite refreshing to hear you be so candid and not hide
| behind PR consultants issuing generic press releases.
| amanzi wrote:
| Hi Matt - long time WordPress user here, and I've been hosting
| and running a WordPress multisite for over 15 years now. In
| fact, I met you at a WordCamp here in NZ 15 or 16 years ago.
| Anyway, this whole episode has been the final nail in the
| coffin for me, and I no longer want to have anything to do with
| WordPress.
|
| I've long thought that the relationship between
| Automattic/WordPress.com and WordPress.org was not good for the
| community, and your behaviour here has put that beyond doubt.
|
| I honestly don't know what's going through your head, but you
| need to try to wind back the clock a couple of weeks and put
| things right. You continue to lie and manipulate words (even in
| this thread!) to make it sound like you are in the right, but
| it's not working. You need to stop.
| bwb wrote:
| I left WordPress ~8 years ago for a similar reason.
|
| I watched Matt destroy friends' WordPress businesses by
| saying they violated the WP ethos while he and Automattic did
| the same thing in their businesses.
|
| I've seen them break legal agreements with theme creators and
| refuse to pay them despite contracts. They also use legal
| threats against small creators to force them to accept an
| agreement that pays far less.
|
| I would never do business with Matt or Automattic. They have
| behaved unethically in my experience.
|
| Matt has too much power and uses it to do whatever he wants.
| He should never have been allowed to be involved in
| WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
| evanelias wrote:
| > He should never have been allowed to be involved in
| WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
|
| I'm not sure that last part makes sense. For starters,
| there's a chronological issue -- Matt co-created the open
| source WordPress project in mid 2003, founded Automattic in
| mid 2005, and founded the WordPress Foundation in 2010. But
| even setting that aside, who exactly would/should have
| prevented him from serving in roles in multiple
| organizations that he himself founded, and why?
|
| If he's abusing the non-profit foundation in some blatantly
| for-profit way, then yes that would clearly be problematic
| -- but it doesn't seem clear-cut whether that has happened.
| The foundation owns the trademark, and the owner of a
| trademark must defend it in order to keep it. And as for
| the wordpress.org infrastructure, that appears to be
| totally separate from the foundation.
|
| Alternatively, if the foundation had never been formed at
| all, would that have been a better outcome? I'm skeptical,
| since in the post-ZIRP world many VC-funded "single vendor
| open source" infrastructure software companies (whose
| projects lack separate non-profit foundations) are having
| their own relicensing dramas, and issues with insufficient
| contributions from large cloud vendors. This seems to be an
| industry-wide problem right now.
| bwb wrote:
| It was a conflict of interest when his policies at
| Automattic were in direct conflict with his role in the
| Org. The reality was he used them both to achieve his
| aims and as a dictator. The Org should have been run by
| the community for the good of WordPress, not the good of
| Matt or Automattic.
| evanelias wrote:
| I suppose I'm just unconvinced about the severity of the
| "conflict of interest" claims, which have been said by
| quite a few people in these threads (I don't mean to
| single you out in any way!) but without concrete,
| unambiguous examples rising to the level of clear
| wrongdoing or malicious intent.
|
| I know you gave some examples alleging bad behavior up-
| thread, but in those cases it isn't clear that the
| specific core problem related to a conflict of interest
| with Matt having dual roles at Automattic and the
| Foundation.
|
| Or for instance, regarding "the good of WordPress": my
| impression is that Matt's various organizations are by
| far the largest contributors to WP core development, so
| it's hard to argue an overall trend of not acting in the
| best interest of WordPress. Stated another way, if
| Automattic were to go out of business, WordPress
| development would be significantly impacted. I think this
| means "the good of WordPress" and "the good of
| Automattic" are synergistic and intertwined.
|
| At the end of the day, developing and maintaining a major
| open source project is very expensive. Someone needs to
| pay for it, and when a majority of that cost is paid by a
| single entity, that entity will naturally have
| disproportionate control. If major ecosystem members
| aren't contributing their share (as is alleged in WPE's
| case), I don't see how an entirely community-driven
| approach would be successful.
|
| To be clear though, with respect to WP's situation, I
| don't have a dog in this fight and am neither condoning
| nor condemning the behavior of the parties involved.
| sureIy wrote:
| I thought WordPress was just a tool, but that's not the only
| tool in the house.
| kragen wrote:
| glad to see you here. i hope you're able to resolve this crisis
| quickly
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It's obvious what you intend to accomplish, but here is what
| you've actually accomplished:
|
| Before this week I knew what wordpress was (of course), did not
| know either names WP Engine nor Matt Mullenweg, and had never
| happened to build a site with wordpress.
|
| Now I know your name and will never build a site with
| wordpress.
|
| You can choose to make that about me instead of recognizing any
| responsibility for that outcome, but it's never the less a
| fact. Do with this simple data what you will, but data it is.
|
| Another comment by someone else in one of the severel
| conversations on this went something like:
|
| "I don't know either of these companies and so far WP Engine
| hasn't said anything yet. So far I have _only_ heard Wordpress
| 's side of the story, and that has made me assume that
| Wordpress are the side in the wrong."
|
| That is some galaxy brain stuff right there.
| 55555 wrote:
| Hey Matt. This has no relevance to anything but is a fun story
| I wanted to share. 15-20 years ago I discovered a "UX bug" on
| default Wordpress installs, which was that all you needed to
| impersonate someone in a Wordpress comment section was know
| their email address. I used your guessable email address while
| writing a comment on the official Wordpress.org blog and it
| pulled your gravatar etc. Sorry. I was a child at the time. lol
| esskay wrote:
| Matt, with the greatest of respect - shut up, and get off the
| internet until this is over. You just keep digging the hole and
| making things worse for yourself.
|
| In this instance, you are not the smartest guy in the room, and
| anything you say is just going to make the outcome of this
| whole saga that much more painful.
|
| If I were in your position I'd be very carefully trying to
| figure out what the next step is, especially given whats going
| to come out about the Wordpress foundation's commercial
| licensing agreement with Automattic. That alone should be an
| exctremely worrying position for you personally, assuming your
| legal team have pointed out the issues on an international
| scale that you're about to be hit with.
| mikeyinternews wrote:
| I hope Matt can supply his legal team with conversations that
| would somehow justify his behaviour. From my (incomplete) reading
| of the complaint, he (Matt) does indeed look very "petulant".
| It's almost like he's intentionally self-destructing, which is
| why I hope for his sake that he has more tangible evidence to
| share, especially after reading section 201.
| photomatt wrote:
| Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last
| C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad,
| while not addressing the core issue of their trademark
| violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about
| their bad behavior.
| bigiain wrote:
| So they're "cherry picking" things that you said which make
| you look bad, which are true and accurate - and that's a
| "smear campaign".
|
| While you are telling lies about trademark violations and
| extorting money specifically from WPEngine and have publicly
| admitted you're not doing that to anyone else that provides
| Wordpress hosting? And you've used terms like "war" and
| "nuclear option" when threatening the lies you subsequently
| told?
|
| And somehow you still think _you're_ the good guy here?
|
| :boggle:
|
| Just resign. Make the WordPress Foundation into everything
| you've pretended it is over the years, including rightful and
| permanent owner of the trademarks and .org domain, and
| complete seperate from you personally and Automattic and it's
| related businesses. _Maybe_ that'll save WordPress. Maybe...
| nikcub wrote:
| Matt - that's their job. They're making a complaint against
| you and Automattic.
|
| The onus is on you now to respond. The best venue for that is
| the courts, not online forums and social media (that was 2
| weeks ago).
| zambiboy wrote:
| Man... You are still talking on the internet publicly,
| obviously without any lawyer checking out what you say before
| you post comments. You will inevitably end up posting a lot
| of things that can make you look bad or sink the case for
| your side. Just stop talking about this anywhere online and
| offline. Let the lawyers talk.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Matt, stop writing online.
|
| You are giving them more options and a bigger legal attack
| surface by writing online. If it turns out not to be a smear
| campaign and a court decides that, that alone is an attack
| surface for you getting surely convicted of slander.
|
| The legal game is a different one. Get a lawyer and don't
| write online. Otherwise you will learn to lose everything
| you've built in your life over some stupid comments online.
|
| Again, get a lawyer. Now. Stop writing. Now. Everything you
| will write or say will be used against you in the court of
| law.
|
| There is a damn good reason this is mandatory for every cop
| to tell you if they arrest you.
|
| You are mounting up the evidence for them. For free. They
| ragebaited and played you like a fool. Don't be that guy.
| Play the smart move.
| wise_young_man wrote:
| How can you use the trademark defense after over a decade of
| non enforcement? They and others in the space are highly
| likely covered under fair use.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm sorry, _their_ smear campaign? That's rich, considering
| you've been the one on the "scorched earth nuclear" crusade
| to get rid of a "cancer" from the WP community.
|
| They didn't have to cherry-pick anything to make you look
| bad. You did that by yourself. While also making a criminal
| case for extortion.
|
| And regarding their trademark violation: WP Engine was
| founded in 2010. You've been OK with the trademark violation
| for 14 years, and suddenly decided to take legal action just
| now? C'mon. The optics of this don't put you in a good light
| no matter how you spin it.
| closewith wrote:
| > They want me to stop telling their customers about their
| bad behavior.
|
| I'd say they're very happy to have you continue talking. They
| couldn't buy better PR.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Please stop talking, for your own sake.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Matt, you equally have some pretty bad if not toxic behavior.
|
| You need to do a lot of growing up, and fast, because this
| isn't fucking Tumblr, dude.
| cjbprime wrote:
| Though amusingly, you are writing to the person who owns
| Tumblr.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Of course -- and he should keep his temper tantrums to
| his poor behavior on that platform (like he's done in the
| past), because it's obvious he can't handle being grown
| up and handling Wordpress.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| As someone who had to handle four websites that suddenly
| stopped getting Wordpress security updates and updates for
| plugins because of how you handled this I don't very much
| care to hear about "their" bad behavior.
|
| You have no checks and balances so we paid the price. I hope
| people stop using Wordpress in droves. I hope you have to
| worry about your business the same way you suddenly made
| people have to worry about theirs.
| glzone1 wrote:
| How is it even legal for wordpress.org (a public nonprofit)
| to take these actions on behalf of a for profit?
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _How is it even legal for wordpress.org (a public
| nonprofit) to take these actions on behalf of a for
| profit?_
|
| There are three (or more) entities using the WordPress
| name now and confusing the heck out of a bunch of
| commenters, all of them controlled by Matt:
|
| - The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and
| the owner of the WordPress trademark.
|
| - WordPress.com/Automattic is the company suing and being
| sued, and the exclusive commercial licensee of the
| trademark. They also pay people to work on the
| Foundation, and on WordPress.org.
|
| - WordPress.org is a website personally run by Matt [1],
| through another company he owns called Mobius Ltd.
|
| [1] https://x.com/photomatt/status/1840980359673995362
| chuckadams wrote:
| Tempted to upvote this just to keep it from disappearing out
| of evidence.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Yeah opposing council is popping popcorn, none of these
| posts will disappear.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Do you think your ego may have gotten in the way of doing
| what was best for your business and users here? How was
| harming so many sites and the WP name justifiable here?
| lolnotreally wrote:
| It seems less like they're cherry-picking and more like
| you've attached one of those giant tree-shaker machines to
| your cherry tree and all they are doing is just standing
| underneath it catching everything.
| chx wrote:
| Is it just me who took a double take at the very first name?
|
| WPE called the heavy cavalry -- Rachel Kassabian from Quinn
| Emanuel? oh boy. Remember Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc
| which found thumbnail versions of copyrighted images for search
| engine purposes is fair use? That was originally against Google
| and she was Google's lead counsel.
| nikcub wrote:
| I noticed her name in the original C&D, too (amateur tech legal
| nerd).
|
| For those curious:
|
| https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/kassabian-rachel-herr...
|
| She's done a lot of notable copyright work for Google, Yandex,
| Vimeo, Cloudflare and (ironically) Tumblr - amongst others.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| The CEO is WPEngine is a highly respected business woman. She
| has friends in high places. Extorting her was not smart.
| spellsaidwrong wrote:
| I have never seen a more reckless case of CEO behaviour in a long
| time. I have no idea how the discussions with streamers and now
| Hacker News, is going to fare for Mullenweg, but I don't think
| it's good.
| enjikaka wrote:
| He did let WP fuck it up with React too. Writing WP themes lets
| you experience the worst templating solution ever, especially
| post that. Crazy dude that one.
| brokenodo wrote:
| It would be unsurprising if someone who named a company after
| themselves turned out to be a narcissist who couldn't help
| themselves.
|
| https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/
| zarzavat wrote:
| I don't know about that, it's normal to name a business after
| the founder. For example JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer,
| Disney, Boeing, Wells Fargo. The reference is also quite
| oblique.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| King Gilette
| adolph wrote:
| Amazing: Gillette was also a Utopian
| Socialist.[16] He published a book titled The Human Drift
| (1894)[17] which advocated that all industry should be
| taken over by a single corporation owned by the public,
| and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city
| called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette
| jkestner wrote:
| Taco Bell
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Bell
| tky wrote:
| Now begins the portion of the proceedings where lots of dirty
| laundry gets aired, discovery feels like a visit to the
| proctologist, and absolutely nothing good comes of it for either
| side but for the attorneys.
|
| Makes Matt look like just another guy with money throwing a
| tantrum because he didn't get what he demanded. Sad because many
| thought highly of him before he went off the reservation.
| shabgzer wrote:
| The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint,
| the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on
| WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track,
| but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has
| very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The
| hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance
| can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for
| instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.
|
| The CEO of Cloudflare already offered to host it for free:
|
| https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
| Arcuru wrote:
| Sure now that it's in the news and can give them good PR, but
| a week ago they weren't the ones paying for it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| You can buy a lot of web hosting for $400M. And with
| everything here, it also seems like quite a deliberate and
| calculated move to make sure he personally maintains
| ownership of WP.org (or else why was it not transferred to
| the Foundation (also him) when all the trademark stuff was
| being done?)
| mthoms wrote:
| Don't celebrate yet. It looks more like he's just trying to
| help Matt out rather than support the community -
| https://imgur.com/a/6isRMCv
|
| Fun fact: WPEngine is a Cloudflare customer. Automattic is
| not.
| justin66 wrote:
| "Generously," perhaps, but "selflessly" is a poor way to
| characterize any of his behavior.
| chx wrote:
| They didn't need to fund it, either fastly or cloudflare
| would've taken it on long ago if they needed to.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726759
|
| In 2015 a similar project:
| https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/drupal.org-migrates-co...
| felizuno wrote:
| After some seriously bad experiences with them I hope WPEngine
| loses their shirt. WRT their headless tooling the advertising
| versus the reality is insane. They held one of our clients
| hostage asking for $10k/month, we left for Kinsta for low
| hundreds per month and have had nothing but performance
| improvements and great support. I frankly don't like WordPress at
| all and don't really care about this lawsuit, but was burned so
| bad by WPEngine I can't help but stop by and say bad things about
| them.
| Aloha wrote:
| I moved to WPEngine from a self hosted job, money well spent.
|
| I've never had a lick of trouble, and even though I'm pretty
| proficient at hosting LAMP apps, it's much less effort than
| self-hosting.
| felizuno wrote:
| If you ported an already working app then you missed out on
| the unmitigated disaster of Atlas Content Modeler, which was
| advertised as production ready but slowly became abandonware
| without them ever really acknowledging it. I hope you never
| need to consume your content via GraphQL, because they
| absolutely can't handle it at reasonable traffic loads.
| bigiain wrote:
| Same. Work hosts a bunch of client sites on WPEngine. We only
| ever had one problematic client who uploaded a heap of high
| bandwidth video and blew out their disk and bandwidth
| allocations by over 10x - WPEngine didn't cut them off, and
| worked with us/them to move their large media assets off the
| WP install (for reasons, the client went with AWS
| S3/CloudFront).
|
| We know WPE aren't the cheapest way to host WP, but if a
| client argues about the difference between a $5/month GoDaddy
| hosting plan and the $20/month starter plan on WPE - that's a
| pretty good indicator that they're not a right fit client for
| us. We have a few smaller agencies we'll hand them over to
| who are a better fit for them.
| hashim-warren wrote:
| The complaint says Matt has been lying to the IRS and self-
| dealing. Is this a legal maneuver by Rachel Kassabian to have
| Matt lose the WordPress trademark?
|
| If so, that's deeply sad.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Why is it sad? If he is self-dealing between wordpress.org and
| Automattic, that's a big no-no. It sure looks from his comments
| here like he sees the two as one entity.
|
| Also, the man outright said "use 'WP' since we think 'WP' is
| generic" and then cried "brand confusion" _years_ later. If you
| want to avoid brand confusion, maybe don 't tell people they
| can use your trademark?
| psyopsy wrote:
| Why sad? If he defrauded the government, he's got bigger
| problems than losing a trademark.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Matt doesn't own the trademark, the Wordpress Foundation does.
| Losing a lawsuit to WP Engine would not change that.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the
| commercial trademark rights, partly because they owned the
| trademark before the WP foundation was created.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| You make it sound like it's a black eye against Kassabian.
|
| In fact, many people believe that absolutely, if he has been
| lying to the IRS and self-dealing his way into a $400M net
| worth, then absolutely he deserves to lose the license to that
| trademark.
| tock wrote:
| Who pay's for this legally? Automattic or Matt personally?
| dmix wrote:
| Lists defendants as:
|
| > AUTOMATTIC INC., a Delaware corporation; and MATTHEW CHARLES
| MULLENWEG, an individual
|
| Considering he controls Automattic as chairman and probably
| most voting rights he could probably make that choice himself.
| Besides maybe some legal filings he has to do personally
| paperwork-wise, maybe with his own lawyer.
|
| It's up to you how much effort you spend defending yourself. As
| long as the board/investors aren't too bothered by it.
| isiahl wrote:
| For the record, since I'm seeing it a lot in this thread:
|
| Green names = new account
| happyxpenguin wrote:
| Oh this is good info to know! I never had a desire to create an
| HN account but i've been using it more frequently since this
| whole thing started and finally made an account.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Lol I used to think it was mods
| dopamean wrote:
| I cant imagine why in a million years Heather would consider
| leaving WPE to work for Automattic. It makes literally no sense.
| nailer wrote:
| Likewise. Leadership role at successful business versus less
| important role at less successful business.
| shrubble wrote:
| I readily admit that I have no knowledge about WPE's internal
| affairs and I have no animus against them.
|
| That said a company above a certain size can have multiple
| issues that could cause a person to consider leaving; such as
| internal politicking, the private equity firm making management
| decisions that are distasteful, or even just a loss of the
| company's original tight-knit community of employees turning
| into "another corporate entity".
| tock wrote:
| It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress
| project, has resigned.
|
| https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825
| safety1st wrote:
| Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg
| cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source
| foundations which have appointed non technical people to their
| top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and
| architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops
| valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical
| vision should hold the top post and fix that.
| stephenr wrote:
| > WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural
| direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the
| tech and the tech people
|
| You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good
| technical and architectural direction until this person was
| appointed, which is honestly just laughable.
|
| In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that
| was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes
| are not just made, but _embraced_ and _defended_.
|
| Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't
| look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor
| mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it
| our way is better".
|
| For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how
| Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it
| as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a
| statement for multiple executions the way native prepared
| statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and
| then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has
| had built-in support for prepared statements (including
| parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years
| ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
| chippiewill wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. While Wordpress itself is impressively
| functional software it would surprise many people just how
| shaky the foundations its built on are.
|
| The PHP ecosystem has never had a strong reputation for
| quality engineering, and Wordpress originates from a time
| when quality in that ecosystem was at its lowest.
| Ironically Wordpress's failure to modernise is actually key
| to its success - not making changes has allowed its plugin
| system to be very stable and maintain a lot of momentum.
|
| By comparison Drupal, which has done its level best to
| drastically improve its code base over time, picking up
| best practices like composer and using Symphony, has
| completely fallen to the wayside because its module
| ecosystem couldn't keep up.
| stephenr wrote:
| > allowed its plugin system to be very stable
|
| I have to assume by stable you mean "maintain an
| unchanging 'api' for plugins" as opposed to meaning that
| the plugin system is reliable.
| francisofascii wrote:
| For how popular and successful WordPress has been, maybe
| its architectural flaws don't really matter as much as you
| would expect.
| stephenr wrote:
| I disagree with the idea that they don't matter, but that
| isn't the point of my reply.
|
| Whether those flaws matter or not is irrelevant to the
| point the parent comment made, suggesting that a prior
| standard of architecture has been lost apparently due to
| the hiring of someone non technical for a leadership
| role.
|
| It's like if someone claimed that McDonalds food is
| barely food, and doesn't meat the standards of fine
| dining because the Chairman and President are a lawyer
| and an MBA rather than trained chefs.
| kubectl_h wrote:
| > One such company that relied on Defendants' promises was WPE,
| founded in 2010. WPE is a true champion of WordPress, devoting
| its entire business to WordPress over other similar open source
| platforms. In reliance on Defendants' many promises, WPE invested
| hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work
| building a successful business to serve that community--only to
| see the petulant whims of Mullenweg inflict harm to its business
| and the community that has embraced it.
|
| Is lawsuit language usually so... dramatic? The tone of this
| document is weird...
| lolinder wrote:
| Complaints usually are, yes. I'm not a lawyer, but each one
| I've read has been a bit over the top and it feels like they're
| written as much for public consumption as they are for the
| judge. Maybe it's with the jury in mind?
| kubectl_h wrote:
| Interesting. This might be the first one I've ever read.
| Makes sense though and that was the vibe I got from sections:
| that this is more like an opening statement in ways.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The jury doesn't usually read the complaint. However, a lot
| of the words you see as dramatic have specific legal
| meanings. In this case "relied on promises" is in the
| language of the tort he is suing over. I don't think the
| "true champion" sentence has a specific meaning, but it is
| definitely written to imply that WPE enhanced the value of
| the WordPress brand.
| lolinder wrote:
| What about "petulant whims"?
|
| I don't think it's just legal language--I've read plenty of
| court opinions too, some dramatic, some not. Complaints
| seem particular prone to the dramatic.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I don't think "petulant whims" is legal language (not a
| lawyer, though). I'm assuming that's dramatization for
| the judge and the other side.
|
| By the way, the "champion" language I mentioned could
| actually be trademark-specific language that I'm not
| aware of.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| The Stripe attribution stuff that WPEngine is accused of sounds
| potentially illegal.
|
| I don't think Automattic's trademark claims are fundamentally
| going to hold up. From the complaint:
|
| "WPE's nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source
| software platform and plugin used for its clients' websites are
| fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent
| with WordPress' own guidelines and the practices of nearly all
| businesses in this space."
|
| I dont know what the settled trademark law is, but this seems
| like common sense to me.
|
| Everyone says 'WordPress' to refer to the software platform. Just
| seems like extortion, plain and simple.
|
| I get Matt's upset that WPEngine is making all this money, but
| that's par for the course when you release something open source.
| You simply need a better product if you want to beat WPEngine in
| the marketplace.
| fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote:
| They forked an open source plugin and changed the affiliate
| code in it along with their other changes. How could that be
| illegal?
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Sounds like something that WooCommerce should have in their
| license or something. idk sounds like a pitfall to me. Why
| would anyone pay WooCommerce anything then? Just fork it and
| change the attribution code.
| shabgzer wrote:
| I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how
| much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the
| WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law
| tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert
| rights from something that's provided for free, let alone
| something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is
| related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a
| separate issue.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Yeah well in the real world circumstances are what matters.
| Something that may be benign is no longer so following his sad
| attempt at extorting them.
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| Not a lawyer, it likely becomes an issue, because a) by Matt's
| own words wordpress.org is operated and maintained by
| Automattic employees and thus b) the blocking essentially leads
| to competitive disadvantage and a general conflict of interest.
|
| But maybe there's also some law that can be leverage, that you
| can't just block one company, especially if it's some common
| good or so.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In the real world, if you tell people X and insist that X is
| true, X becomes something of a binding promise on you. In this
| case X is "you can use the letters WP to imply WordPress in
| your branding."
|
| There are several torts around this sort of thing, like
| promissory estoppel.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but I assume WP.org can ban whomever they like.
| Now, if they did it because WP.com asked them to, the non
| profit status becomes a question. Furthermore, WP hardcodes the
| URL for the resource, meaning you cannot self host the plugins
| even if you wanted.
| syradar wrote:
| I have not used WP in a while but will recommend clients to not
| use WP Engine. The more I read about them the more they sound
| like grifters.
| dramm wrote:
| Given Mullenweg's behavior I wish WP Engines and their very
| capable litigation attorneys nothing but the best of luck, which
| I doubt very much they will need. Jeez, how to torch a brand's
| reputation.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| HN has reached a point where if you do good deeds, you better be
| flawless or else you will be treated worse than if you were
| simply doing bad stuff by default. WPEngine is not some mom and
| pop shop. The courts will decide whether WPEngine or Automattic
| is in the wrong here. But Automattic's contribution to Wordpress
| and the ecosystem simply dwarf WPEngine. Now for their crime of
| being champions of Open Source they will be judged in the eyes of
| HN.
|
| This is like HN praising MSFT for all small things and bashing
| Google for doing strictly less evil stuff than whatever Microsoft
| does (Bing in China censored vs dragonfly, windows full of ads,
| Edge with tons of shady features, Azure with the worst security).
| usernamed7 wrote:
| > if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else
|
| you didn't read the filing and it shows
| legitster wrote:
| I've been a long Wordpress user and proponent for a long time.
| Until a week ago I had never heard the name Mullenweg.
|
| Regardless of who's in the right or wrong here (I have my
| opinions), my perception of Wordpress flipped a switch overnight.
| It went from this quiet, reliable, refreshingly boring open
| source platform to _yet another_ cult of personality tech
| fiefdom.
| trog wrote:
| I'm in basically the same boat, but aside from a bit of eye
| rolling I think I've convinced myself I can just ignore this
| and safely continue to download wordpress.org/latest.zip when I
| need it and hack it into whatever shape is convenient - which
| is what I've always liked doing with it anyway.
| MaxMatti wrote:
| Above a certain size all communities sooner or later turn into
| cults, most of the time around one or a few persons. The ones
| that you don't perceive as such you just haven't looked into
| close enough. I wish it were different but so far I have yet to
| find a community that doesn't fit that description. Not just
| open source, not just software, any community.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Next up: Substack?
| tasuki wrote:
| I've barely used WordPress and am far from its proponent, but
| have heard of Matt Mullenweg many times.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Likewise. I used it for my personal website before I learned
| how to use nginx. I guided my wife through the process of
| moving her personal site from Wix to WP and it's been a massive
| improvement. I really had no idea all this insanity was going
| down.
| tock wrote:
| Also Matt, care to address this:
| https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c...
|
| I'm speechless.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Why would you be speechless? This is 100% on brand based on
| what I've been reading (ironically most of it written by him).
| dgellow wrote:
| Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn't follow what happened.
| The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the
| parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me
| who know nothing about the case
| chillfox wrote:
| 1. Rich dude wants other rich corp to give him money.
|
| 2. Rich corp says no.
|
| 3. Rich dude has public meltdown.
|
| 4. Rich corp sues rich dude.
| robjwells wrote:
| Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does
| not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress
| project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and
| that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on
| WordPress as a whole.
|
| WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a
| cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging
| comments.
|
| In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP Engine customers from the
| theme and plugin repositories hosted at WordPress.org -- which
| until recently people had believed to be under the control of
| the WordPress Foundation, but is actually under the personal
| control of Mullenweg.
|
| Now this lawsuit has been filed.
|
| Edit: Characters for the unaware:
|
| Matt Mullenweg: The "top" person in WordPress in its various
| forms, including the non-profit WordPress Foundation, and the
| for-profit company Automattic (whichs runs the for-profit
| WordPress.com host, among other things).
|
| WP Engine: A separate for-profit WordPress host.
| dgellow wrote:
| Thanks!
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Long post, writing this for myself as well:
|
| The players
|
| - WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011;
|
| - WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010
| with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director;
|
| - Automattic is a private company that owns and runs
| WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles
| Mullenweg;
|
| - WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that
| makes money by hosting WordPress since 2010;
|
| - WP Engine and Wordpress.com are direct competitors;
|
| - WordCamp is a conference run by volunteers that happens
| regularly, this year it happened between 17-24 of September
|
| --
|
| What happened, afaik:
|
| - Sept 23: Matt calls WP Engine "the cancer of WordPress" on
| his blog [1][2][3] and says that it profits from the open
| source without contributing enough
|
| - Sept 24: WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter to
| Automattic to "retract false, harmful, and disparaging
| statements", after Matt Mullenweg called it a "cancer" [4]
|
| - Sept 25: Automattic sends a cease-and-desist letter to WP
| Engine, alleging unauthorized use of the WordPress trademark
| [5] and I quote "If you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation,
| you'd be a bigger donor than WP Engine."
|
| - Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking
| plugin updates from WP Engine
|
| - Same day: Matt on his personal blog says Automattic has "been
| attempting to make a licensing deal" with WP Engine "for a very
| long time, and all they have done is string us along" [7] and
| doubles down that this is about WP Engine's disrespecting
| WordPress trademarks
|
| - Oct 1st: Automattic made public [8][9] a seven-year agreement
| proposed to WP Engine in exchange for 8% of their revenue, the
| document has the sign date of Sept 20 (during WordCamp?) that
| could be paid in royalties and/or employees to contribute to
| WordPress.org; the document also states no forking of WordPress
| allowed
|
| - Oct 2nd (you are here): WP Engine sues Automattic AND Matt,
| Matt is here on this thread generating more evidence against
| himself in the comments [10]; the document has tweets,
| conversations, everything... And if it goes to a public trial
| more dirt will come up for sure;
|
| --
|
| Extra facts (not necessarily related)
|
| - Automattic has invested on WP Engine in 2011 [11]
|
| - Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019 for 3MM USD [12], and in
| Aug this year announced it was moving it to WordPress [13]
|
| - Drupal creator gives some insight on this feud and how Drupal
| deals with that [14]
|
| [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
|
| [2] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-
| en...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912
|
| [5] https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-
| wp-...
|
| [6] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
|
| [7] https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/
|
| [8] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-
| sheet...
|
| [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485
|
| [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656
|
| [11] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-
| series-a-...
|
| [12] Auttomatic + Tumblr
| https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tum...
|
| [13] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-
| blog...
|
| [14] https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
| dgellow wrote:
| Thanks so much for this, the timeline is really helpful
| isabelc wrote:
| Regarding: _" WordPress is managed by the WordPress
| Foundation"_
|
| The Foundation doesn't actually manage anything though, does
| it? WordPress.org is managed and owned by Mullenweg
| personally.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Yeah... I did this in a hurry (about 15min) before work,
| and HN doesn't allow edits after some time so let me
| complement the information.
|
| AFAIU:
|
| 1/ The WordPress Foundation is a proper non-profit and has
| as mission guarantee the "open sourceness" and ensures all
| WordPress projects are under the GPL license.
|
| 2/ The Foundation holds the trademarks to WordPress,
| WordCamp, BuddyPress, WP-Cli and they define the rules of
| its usage.
|
| This is relevant because part of this fight is related to
| WordPress licenses. Also because Matt is using both hats as
| CEO of Automattic and President of the Foundation to press
| WP Engine and this is why, as I understand, WP Engine is
| accusing Automattic of unfair competition.
|
| Also the other action against WP Engine is related to the
| trademarks.
|
| --
|
| On your points:
|
| > The Foundation doesn't actually manage anything though,
| does it?
|
| It does have responsibilities about the open source
| licenses and holds the trademarks to WordPress, plus has a
| team that is paid by the Foundation to seek these interests
| as a non-profit.
|
| > WordPress.org is managed and owned by Mullenweg
| personally
|
| Not necessarily, he did start it and is the main director,
| but the Foundation serves WordPress and, in theory, as a
| non-profit could have a different director.
| ValentineC wrote:
| I understand some points differently:
|
| > _It does have responsibilities about the open source
| licenses and holds the trademarks to WordPress, plus has
| a team that is paid by the Foundation to seek these
| interests as a non-profit._
|
| The Foundation hires no employees directly. Automattic
| sponsors some people to work on Foundation stuff.
|
| > _> WordPress.org is managed and owned by Mullenweg
| personally_
|
| > _Not necessarily, he did start it and is the main
| director, but the Foundation serves WordPress and, in
| theory, as a non-profit could have a different director._
|
| The WordPress.org domain and website, including the
| centralised plugin and theme repositories used by
| millions of sites, are not run by the California public
| benefit corporation known as the WordPress Foundation.
|
| Instead, they are allegedly run by another of Matt's
| companies named Mobius Ltd.
| bookaway wrote:
| >Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking
| plugin updates from WP Engine
|
| Also someone who is late to the party, but the "breaking
| plugin updates from WP Engine" wording confuses me. From the
| wording in [6] it seems like WP Engine was using plugins
| hosted by wordpress.org, which all broke when wordpress.org
| blocked WP Engine's access to those plugins. Did I get that
| right?
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Yeah... I did this in a hurry (about 15min) before work,
| and HN doesn't allow me to edit so let me rectify:
|
| WP Engine is banned from accessing Wordpress.org assets,
| this way all WP Engine clients were unable to get updates
| for their plugins, posing a considerable security risk. WP
| Engine is working on a solution for their users, I don't
| know right now if this is solved.
|
| This one irks me, it should be something done in phases,
| not just blocking the access overnight. Lots of websites
| are getting attacked in this crossfire, really
| irresponsible move.
| barryrandall wrote:
| A taker sued a maker for calling out their taking, and the
| maker cut the taker off from free services they were providing.
| zackerist wrote:
| This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When
| corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome,
| whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has
| the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress
| is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it.
|
| It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few
| extra dollars. He knew going in that this would cost him a lot.
| He'll spend a ton on lawyers and courts, but he'll do it for
| reasons that some people cannot comprehend. I would fight to the
| death if someone threatened my child. Some may not even agree
| with on that.
| fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote:
| He's neglecting his child to have a fight with his neighbour.
| Loudergood wrote:
| Not just neglecting the child, but using it as a weapon.
| Havoc wrote:
| There is no way this ends well for Matt. Not with that giant
| paper trail about going nuclear and leveraging audience.
| password4321 wrote:
| Did not see a link yet to the previous brief discussion about an
| interview 3 days ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 On With Theo /
| T3.gg
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| What I find crazy is we the people are taking sides and investing
| emotion into two corporations, neither of which have the best
| interests of their customers at heart. At the end of the day the
| only winner is who makes more money from this, we as users will
| continue to lose no matter the outcome. We have all become
| corporatists.
| srmarm wrote:
| This whole situation is a negative sum game, everyone is going to
| come out worse off - Matt/WP/WP Engine, the project and all the
| end users. It's such a shame.
|
| If there's a solid legal argument from either side, let
| dispassionate legal teams deal with it in a dignified manner.
|
| As someone who defaults to wordpress as the bedrock of new
| projects, this instability is a massive turn off.
| paxys wrote:
| Not everyone. The lawyers on both sides are going to get rich.
| trickyager wrote:
| This lawsuit seems to be the prophesized exploding car covered in
| hammers [1]. The astounding part to me is that it's Matt's
| behavior itself that's making the car explode multiple times,
| sending hammers flying everywhere.
|
| [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-
| us...
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| it's sad to see people taking sides in this thread. Ultimately,
| this issue boils down to two corporations fighting over money
| alberth wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 this whole topic?
|
| Is the crux of the issue that WPE website use to say things like:
| "Start creating on WordPress today"
|
| or "Power your creativity on the #1 platform for
| WordPress"
|
| Which might have implied that WPE was official Wordpress?
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220105010059/https://wpengine....
|
| ---
|
| In comparison to other companies like Pressable that simply use
| marketing copy like: "WordPress Hosting that
| Means Business"
|
| https://pressable.com
|
| Though this is also confusing, because Automattic acquired
| majority equity stake in Pressable. So Pressable _is_ Automattic.
|
| https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/
|
| ---
|
| There's so much happening with this story that I feel like I
| don't understand what the root issue is.
| chuckadams wrote:
| It's about disabling revisions. Or private equity. Or not
| contributing back to core. Or trademarks. Or freeloading on
| w.org infrastructure. Or hacking Stripe plugins. Or whatever
| else might stick to the wall in this 18-hour period...
|
| Start with this:
| https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/
|
| Then read the complaint: https://wpengine.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... (also the post's link).
| It's highly readable, not dense legalese at all.
| legitster wrote:
| The ELI5 of why this is so complicated is what everyone
| _thought_ was "Wordpress" was actually a cluster of shady
| self-serving business dealings by Matt Mullenweg.
|
| The Wordpress Foundation does not actually own the name
| "Wordpress". The name is essentially owned by Matt Mullenweg
| and he licenses it out to the Foundation and other
| organizations which he approves of.
|
| Matt Mullenweg was personally displeased with certain aspects
| of WPEngine's business, asked for money from them, and then cut
| off all of WPEngine's customers from accessing shared Wordpress
| resources. And the justification he is using was WP Engine's
| infringement of the copyright.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Do individuals/nonprofits have different rules in the Sherman
| act?
| legitster wrote:
| I am not sure what the Sherman act has to do with it.
|
| The more pressing problems for Mullenweg is that he is
| directly extorting another company, and potentially using
| his Wordpress non-profit organizations as a tax-fraud
| scheme.
| mikemitchelldev wrote:
| 100% in support of photomatt on this. Matt, many of your critics
| are speaking loudly but everyone still loves you for what you've
| given to the open source community. Hopefully the differences
| will be resolved.
| presspot wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation
|
| Just saying
| mrlatinos wrote:
| Matt Mullenweg is a hypocritical troll who hides his greed behind
| a false defense of open source.
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(page generated 2024-10-03 23:02 UTC)