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. § 1030 et seq.;
(4) Attempted Extortion;
(5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code§ 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.The CFAA claim here is actually basically an extortion claim (plus other throwaway general claims) framed in CFAA terms.
See 18 U.S.C. § 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.
The real meat of the federal complaint is the request for a declaratory judgment.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Yes, agreed WooComm is new. Nonetheless, social media'ing has replaced "I got a website" and "I got a blog."
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
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.
Its not. Its used for everything from marketing websites to ecommerce. CNN, Reuters etc have their blogs run on it too.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously though, it's a freaking legacy. Sad to see it go this way.
My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
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.
This didn’t kill Mozilla in the end or really affect the OSS community for Firefox or Debian
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I adopted someone's node.js project once, overengineered and cost the company tons of money to run, I rebuilt it in Wordpress for a fairly large regional grocery chain and not only was it vastly cheaper, but the end product was also better and more reliable. So, I'm leery of anyone that writes something off, right off the bat. Pick the best tool for the job, not the ones that is suddenly in vogue to avoid judgement from random devs on HN or Reddit. You can't pigeonhole solutions, be it Wordpress or whatever you decide on.
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.
"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.
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:
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.
This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.
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.
Read the complaint before commenting any further, please.
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?
Source: Matt
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?
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.
It, at the very least, provides evidence you're into chickens.
Demanding 8% of a single competitor's revenue does a similar thing.
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?
Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.
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"?
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...
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.
I'm not even joking. Matt reposted it earlier today.
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.
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
Please get a lawyer.
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.
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?
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.
You did share their CEO's personal phone number to The Primagen though, did you not?
Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is gold. What a time to be alive.
> 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.
That can't be good for him.
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.
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)
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/caseviewer/assignments?caseId=7882673...
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.
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.
“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?
[0] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
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.
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.
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"...
See paragraphs 32 and 33
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't sound like. Most people are still confused.
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.
Did not know that.
You know comments here and on Twitter can end up as evidence in court as well, right?
All of WordPress's reputation and goodwill transformed into luxury cars and 3rd holiday chalets for lawyers...
---
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.
You’re a compulsive liar.
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?
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.
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.
And
"WP Engine will cease and desist from forking or modifying [non GPL code]"
You are misreading it.
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/woocommerce-gatew...
//edit: apparently the core is v2 or later.
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.
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/04c9051a7d765cb...
[1] - https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/commit/8cbd92f9f8269a...
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).
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.
I am nowhere near knowing enough about trademark law to say whether this is anything even approaching a reasonable use of trademarks.
(Personally, I think it's a fairly bullshit distinction that's completely against the spirit of the GPL. It's probably legally allowed, though.)
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.
The point is that including this stipulation (attempting to limit the GPL-granted right-to-fork) appears to be itself against the GPL, and voids Automattic's previously-granted GPL rights.
In other words, if you even attempt to get someone to sign away their GPL granted rights, you lose your own GPL granted rights.
GPLv2 is silent on the subject of trademarks, and is a bit vague about additional restrictions -- section 4 would apply to trying to restrict usage of the code, but trademarks are a separate thing. GPLv3 explicitly allows you to decline to license your trademarks (see section 7, the paragraph starting "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License", clause e). This isn't generally called out as one of the big differences between v2 and v3, so I think it's intended more as a legally-spelled-out clarification than a change.
I'm not a lawyer, but the GPLv3 in particular seems compatible with the idea that you can tell someone that they can only use your trademarks so long as they behave in a certain way... so long as you're still allowed to fork the code, strip out those trademarks, and continue using it. Which does seem to be Matt's position. (I mean, he also wants to restrict access to Wordpress.org services, but that's even less in the GPL's area.)
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...
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"
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 § 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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...
>> 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
The only thing you are doing right now is lessening your chances at getting justice, regardless of how objectively right you may be.
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?
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.
As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
It is a double edged sword though. Sometimes people talk and they are convincing and the independently verifiable facts support what they say. Sometimes they make themselves look like a fool.
Just because one side talks doesn’t mean they win. Just here the side which runs their mouth is comming through (to me, in my perception) at best unprofessional, if not perhaps even a tad bit vindictive and unhinged. Not a good look, even if they are right and legally win at the end.
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?
> 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.
You're meaning apart from the active law suit yeah? ;)
That does not help your position. IANAL, but stop talking.
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?
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.
That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community for 14 years.
(This is an honest question.)
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?
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.
He didn't say it was complicated or that he didn't understand it.
He said it was un-true and it is.
Why did your legal officer today post in a blog post that its a non-profit?
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...
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.
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.
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?
An aspect that literally no one could care less about. Bizarre.
Just curious.
(/s, PHP the language isn’t so bad, it’s spaghetti code like WP that gives it a bad name)
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.
- Page 12: "wordrpess.org"
- Page 17: "fundamental principal"
Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless
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!
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.
Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system
Optimistic locking might work better, as long as the underlying data can be automatically diffed and merged reliably well.
Git generally does well using this approach, though it's pretty easy to diff text.
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.
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.
This could be an AI tools market, although I think several companies are already in it.
Yeah because they don't have to spend any money on R&D nor do they spend money contributing to the open source project :)
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.
Because if they actually did okay this you've got the least competent lawyers of any tech bro not named Elon Musk.
“Yes.”
He’s not actually reading the questions you ask, folks.
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.
Was that the hammers thing, or something else?
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder) and others.
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.
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.
Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
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
Or maybe it is just fine for their use case and they are making already enough money with it...
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.
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.
Oh, I remember now. I was wondering why ACF didn't become part of the core.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What is invalid, specifically, about that blog post?
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.
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.
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!
Something that feels powerful and safe; like WP of 10 to 15 years ago.
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. :)
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
They could have give a warning 20 months ago that this may happen and then this would not be a thing.
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
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.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/#:~:text=If....
That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.
That would be Matt as the sole owner of wordpress.org, not a plural 'decision makers'
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)
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.
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.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
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...
"We could not get wordpress.org being part of the foundation approved by the IRS."
Automattic's legal team somehow considers it a non-profit though.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I think the data schema in Wordpress is decent. With the addition of Pods it has become a lot more flexible. (There were other solutions that mostly cost $$)
Most of my issues with WP has to do with the front end.
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
Correction: this is Evil CEO vs Evil CEO garbage. Casting WPEngine as some sort of saint is highly inaccurate.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
I'd say they're very happy to have you continue talking. They couldn't buy better PR.
You need to do a lot of growing up, and fast, because this isn't fucking Tumblr, dude.
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.
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. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks.
2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first.
3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way.
I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.
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.
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.
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._GilletteMakes 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.
The CEO of Cloudflare already offered to host it for free:
Fun fact: WPEngine is a Cloudflare customer. Automattic is not.
In 2015 a similar project: https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/blog/drupal.org-migrates-co...
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.
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.
If so, that's deeply sad.
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?
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.
> 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.
Green names = new account
Yes, I thought the same when I was new.
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”.
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.
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.
I have to assume by stable you mean "maintain an unchanging 'api' for plugins" as opposed to meaning that the plugin system is reliable.
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.
https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/ does not seem to indicate any resignation.
Is lawsuit language usually so... dramatic? The tone of this document is weird...
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.
By the way, the "champion" language I mentioned could actually be trademark-specific language that I'm not aware of.
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.
I don’t know what people are actually paying for.
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.
There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
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).
you didn't read the filing and it shows
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.
I'm speechless.
2. Rich corp says no.
3. Rich dude has public meltdown.
4. Rich corp sues rich dude.
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.
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...
The Foundation doesn't actually manage anything though, does it? WordPress.org is managed and owned by Mullenweg personally.
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.
> 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.
But on "Automattic sponsors" that sentence is true, but not only Automattic, WordPress has more sponsors as well as voluntaries. So it is not all under Matt, even if he is the director of the Foundation.
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?
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 On With Theo / T3.gg
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.
[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-us...
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....
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In comparison to other companies like Pressable that simply use marketing copy like:
"WordPress Hosting that Means Business"
https://pressable.comThough this is also confusing, because Automattic acquired majority equity stake in Pressable. So Pressable is Automattic.
https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/
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There's so much happening with this story that I feel like I don't understand what the root issue is.
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.
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.
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.