Howdy, Matthew Charles Mullenweg from the lawsuit here.
One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic. That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her team there in the meetings I posted here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.
Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP Engine's conduct.
However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
To be entirely blunt it's all damage control for us at this point when your name comes up, and it's because of that one singular mistake, if this was just WPE and Automattic duking it out in court no one would really care, but now the reliability of the WPOrg infrastructure is being questioned by a big chunk of the people who depend on WordPress and they will probably be inclined to walk away from your infrastructure and deeper into the arms of someone like WPEngine when they get the chance.
If you care about the broad perception of your efforts and your business practices I think you need to address this. Again I see that there are plenty of reasons to take issue with WPE's conduct but this singular decision you made has people calling for you to step aside and let someone else run WordPress. It's not going to go away on its own.
> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning
AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
> 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.
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.
- 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.
> Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.
Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them.
Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.)
So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really.
BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.
Are you able to name of the publishers that you say run massive WP installs?
I do know they exist of course, Sony being one.
I’m coding up a little something that I feel is more modern and superior compared to WP, and I’d like to learn what their business requirements and use cases are that keep them on WP.
I don't want to discourage you...but there's so many WP alternatives out there that are supported by bigger companies, have a big ecosystem around them with agencies and developers for many years. Why would massive WP installs switch to "a little something"?
I just see the opportunity to provide developers and users a better experience using modern tooling, and feels open and simple enough for anyone to download and use without worrying about security vulnerabilities.
Something that feels powerful and safe; like WP of 10 to 15 years ago.
The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi language plugin on top and your site will be eating memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue at all
I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our open source project, and when you had problems with the revision system, instead of contributing improvements, you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?"
Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will also get access to those improvements. For sure it's disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time to Core.
WordPress is infamous for its terrible codebase. Everything is jammed into a single wp_posts table including revisions. The frontend code is just as bad. I'm sure they blame the need for backwards compatibility. The entire thing should be retired.
The entire thing makes money and serves the purposes of people using it even for free.
It's a well-engineered product whether you want to accept it or not. Unlike more than half of the tech world that's unprofitable and is just a fart in the wind of tech memory.
No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years as a professional software engineer), at least the portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are lack of data normalization (and not in a performance optimizing way), template includes that depend directly on order of inclusion and variables in other templates, very little code isolation, and PHP.
WP is a well-delivered product that works well for its user base in most situations. Plenty of code is well-marketed, profitable, and fulfills users' needs, but not well-engineered.
By the way, I know the PHP gripe is contentious, but it's not the reason why I think WP is badly engineered, it's just the reason it was easier to engineer it badly.
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.
I would argue that Wordpress is a great example of how something doesn't need to be "well-engineered" (when it comes to abstractions, maintainability, etc) to be widely useful for many.
Although I think the exception there is security (and yes I know many will say clean and well engineered code is secure code). Security has to be solid or it will impact too many people negatively.
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.
The idea that no one is allowed to criticize anything unless they can and have done better is one of the most perniciously stupid ideas out there that just won't go away.
If the parent poster is secretly Linus Torvalds, do you walk away in shame because he HAS done a project with better engineering? Or are the criticisms, perhaps, objectively valid or invalid, and worth engaging with regardless of the merits of the person making the criticisms?
Well when their whole argument boils down to "php sucks" and they back up their claims with a document that was invalid 12 years ago when it was written, they better have something to back up these criticism.
Perhaps you should engage with the claims rather than the person. As someone who doesn't frequently use PHP, the criticisms in the linked post from 2012 seem valid if the facts presented are true -- there's some pretty weird, and in a few cases, downright dangerous behavior presented there.
What is invalid, specifically, about that blog post?
To recap, every post is stored in the wp_posts table and revisions have a post_type of 'revision' and a post_status 'inherit' (attachments also inherit). There's no gradual improvement you can do to this. More, their codex does not discourage accessing the database directly at all rather points out there's a class to make it easy https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description so moving revisions to a separate table will break every plugin which wants to access revisions and uses the wpdb class to do so which is just not acceptable: "WordPress strives to never break backward compatibility. It’s one of our most important philosophies, and makes updates much easier on users and developers alike".
We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.
WPEngine has tons of developers working on the WordPress ecosystem. This contribution argument doesn't work with me. They're contributing plenty of hours into WordPress plugins that their competition also can use.
That's the amount of hours they contribute to the "Five for the Future" program which specifically refers to work on a subset of the WordPress project managed by Automattic. For example, WPEngine own and develop Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin used by hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites. The work they do on that isn't covered in the 40 hours. Likewise, WPEngine run the DE{CODE} conference but that isn't included in the 40 hours either.
I'm sorry but WP-ENGINE lost my vote when they started quoting evangelizing and ambassadorship events as "contributions". Everyone knows that's a 50/50 self-marketing and brand outreach. I don't understand why people are taking WP ENGINE's side, in the past 5 years, the evils and exploits of VC investments have been widely documented. This is a clear and present danger/example of what is wrong with VC in America. Look at VC in other parts of the world, they are heavily regulated for this particular reason. This industry has taken the premise of the movie "pretty woman" and escalated to new hights of corporate GREED.
I’m not really focusing on WP Engine’s service here. I’m pointing out that the constraints Mullenweg has voiced appear to be self-contradictory and unsatisfiable by any WordPress host.
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!)
Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that customers didn't lose service. Matt chose to surprise them.
It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted.
Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.
I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did.
Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."
This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.
But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)
Even without dragging the wordpress.org infrastructure into the mess, MM's blackmail campaign wouldn't have played well with the community. But it would have blown over as just more #wpdrama, whereas this ... I think we're likely to see the WordPress trademark invalidated. Even if it isn't, this case winning means every last WP host can just line up and cite it, making the trademark as good as generic anyway.
> Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about
According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with.
Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
Matt's behavior is inexcusable and shows that WordPress needs a complete restructuring without him. Too many sites rely on WordPress to endanger them because of one man's temper tantrum. I don't understand how you can defend this reckless behavior by him. Who cares what WPE could have should have done. He needs to step down immediately.
"WPEngine should have foreseen something that has never happened in the 20 years of the software's history".
I mean yeah, companies should have contingency plans for things that are extraordinarily rare but let's be reasonable about it. No one, including you, saw this coming.
I challenge you to find a single blog post, tweet or HN/Reddit comment that suggests Matt could one day shut off wp.org access to a single company running 1.5 million sites without any notice to that company, or the community members who will be affected. It's unconscionable. Or at least it was.
It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository, he could have told them so and given them a date. But cutting off access to updates without warning to all these sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option" without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.
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)
Because Canonical makes it easy to clone their entire repositories and host your own mirrors. You can change your ubuntu mirrors changing the configuration files themselves (or via graphical programs on desktop systems), unlike in WordPress where you'd need to "butcher it" (Matt's words, regarding disabling revisions by WPE) modifying the source code to point to another server.
> AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers
I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well.
A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day.
Being able to pull it locally saves all that.
Also, it is faster and does provide some security.
> They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
That depends on how you look at it.
If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be
a big problem for both DO and AWS.
They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros.
But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those distributions had set.)
That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.
A million people trusted WPE’s resources. WPE, in turn, relied on someone else’s. The real issue here is that WPE completely overlooked the fact that they haven’t done the work to maintain the availability of their apps. It’s like buying a fridge, stocking it with $200 worth of food, and forgetting to plug it in.
With the wrinkle that your landlord enthusiastically invited you to move in, and never made you sign a contract, but after your dog shed all over the place he started making ominous noises about how you'd better sign one equal to eight percent of your gross revenue, and every conversation with him is now very strained
The GPL, and WordPress's trademark policy, which up to a week ago stated " The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit."
On the other hand, the use of WordPress servers is in no way covered by the GPL. WP Engine can pay for their own servers the same way Bluehost used to.
wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. The actual non-profit [1] had expenses of $41k in 2022, which wouldn't come anywhere near paying for wordpress.org infrastructure and personnel. I guess Wordpress is going the RHEL route. You can clone it, but can't use their trademarks or infrastructure.
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.
They tried to set it up that way and were denied. Apparently the flip side of that is they no longer feel constrained to not "Us[e] the resources of the non-profit you control to kneecap a competitor to the for-profit you control."
So like I said, at this point it's no different than RHEL's very stringent trademark protections, and restrictions on using their update servers (cdn.redhat.com) if you're not paying them. The only difference here is that if WP Engine was itself a non-profit, Matt wouldn't be going after them. RHEL is not as generous.
Apparently these are the new rules. If you're a for-profit entity advertising "Wordpress Hosting" instead of "Hosting with Wordpress installed" and want access to the infrastructure of wordpress.org (which costs millions of dollars a year) you now have to pay, either in cash or equivalent contributions.
Personally that seems fair. It should have come with a minimum 90 day public notice period, and the stuff about being a cancer etc. is pretty crazy. Changing marketing language and setting up your own plugin mirror like Bluehost did (https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror) is not the end of the world.
This is 100% correct as a position of principle, but it's not a foregone conclusion that WPE was able to take the necessary steps here.
To be very specific about at least one of the issues:
* The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
* If WPE forks WordPress to fix that, and continues to say they host WordPress, IANAL but they probably have a trademark violation problem on their hands.
There are certainly workarounds which exist, but it's hard for us to conclude casually on Hacker News whether they can be deployed at WP Engine scale and in compliance with whatever agreements WP Engine is bound to.
So yeah you're right about what the right thing to do is. But frequently reality is not that simple. They needed time and maybe even assistance from wporg (in helping them to be free of wporg. errrr)
> * The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
But they can be changed via filters. I do that all the time to manage when certain request are being made (and making sure it's in a cron job and not a user-request).
WP Engine does run their own plugin in the instances they host, though I assume it's not obligatory. Still, every site I ever had to look at that was on WPE had it installed and enabled.
WP does come with its own CA certs, but that file could be appended (or replaced, again via filter) as well. Since they're comfortable changing things like the revision settings, I doubt this would be something they wouldn't do.
I'm not saying Matt is reasonable, but "it's not an easy thing to do" isn't true.
It's academic now, the mirroring has been a done deal since Oct 1. WPE operates their own mirror and API server now. Matt of course did not help at all in this effort.
>However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
yup. I'm about to make a new site and I dont care about the platform, I just want to write. but I'm not gonna use wordpress ever again now, probably. Matt seems friendly but this is evil CEO garbage
Uhh. I am. I've launched probably 30 websites using WP over the last 10 years, a couple for household name brands. WordPress stopped being "cool" awhile ago (because "PHP sucks" and the like), I've defended my usage of it in plenty of past comments, despite it being long past "cool". The way MM talks about enforcing the trademark, the licensing distinction (i.e. the commercial use of "WordPress" to Automattic only) -- am I allowed to call myself a "WordPress" developer and charge people money for it anymore? Or do I have to worry about a trademark troll?
I'll admit that I'd already been looking for a modern alternative. I'm a web developer, I almost exclusively write in TypeScript, something running on Node just makes more sense for me. I recently built a project on PayloadCMS and NextJS -- Payload has since integrated directly into Next's server and has a really nice "website" template to get started. I'll be using that from now on.
Well said, I hope that there will be forum to discuss the ethos of these actions and see if there isn’t a better way to go about this, and how we can strengthen the community of open source.
An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder) and others.
To me, the military language used in a few of their execs messages was telling.... I have seen that more than once in anti competition lawsuits and Heather has as well
Hi Matt - long time WordPress user here, and I've been hosting and running a WordPress multisite for over 15 years now. In fact, I met you at a WordCamp here in NZ 15 or 16 years ago. Anyway, this whole episode has been the final nail in the coffin for me, and I no longer want to have anything to do with WordPress.
I've long thought that the relationship between Automattic/WordPress.com and WordPress.org was not good for the community, and your behaviour here has put that beyond doubt.
I honestly don't know what's going through your head, but you need to try to wind back the clock a couple of weeks and put things right. You continue to lie and manipulate words (even in this thread!) to make it sound like you are in the right, but it's not working. You need to stop.
I left WordPress ~8 years ago for a similar reason.
I watched Matt destroy friends' WordPress businesses by saying they violated the WP ethos while he and Automattic did the same thing in their businesses.
I've seen them break legal agreements with theme creators and refuse to pay them despite contracts. They also use legal threats against small creators to force them to accept an agreement that pays far less.
I would never do business with Matt or Automattic. They have behaved unethically in my experience.
Matt has too much power and uses it to do whatever he wants. He should never have been allowed to be involved in WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
> 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.
It was a conflict of interest when his policies at Automattic were in direct conflict with his role in the Org. The reality was he used them both to achieve his aims and as a dictator. The Org should have been run by the community for the good of WordPress, not the good of Matt or Automattic.
I suppose I'm just unconvinced about the severity of the "conflict of interest" claims, which have been said by quite a few people in these threads (I don't mean to single you out in any way!) but without concrete, unambiguous examples rising to the level of clear wrongdoing or malicious intent.
I know you gave some examples alleging bad behavior up-thread, but in those cases it isn't clear that the specific core problem related to a conflict of interest with Matt having dual roles at Automattic and the Foundation.
Or for instance, regarding "the good of WordPress": my impression is that Matt's various organizations are by far the largest contributors to WP core development, so it's hard to argue an overall trend of not acting in the best interest of WordPress. Stated another way, if Automattic were to go out of business, WordPress development would be significantly impacted. I think this means "the good of WordPress" and "the good of Automattic" are synergistic and intertwined.
At the end of the day, developing and maintaining a major open source project is very expensive. Someone needs to pay for it, and when a majority of that cost is paid by a single entity, that entity will naturally have disproportionate control. If major ecosystem members aren't contributing their share (as is alleged in WPE's case), I don't see how an entirely community-driven approach would be successful.
To be clear though, with respect to WP's situation, I don't have a dog in this fight and am neither condoning nor condemning the behavior of the parties involved.
It's obvious what you intend to accomplish, but here is what you've actually accomplished:
Before this week I knew what wordpress was (of course), did not know either names WP Engine nor Matt Mullenweg, and had never happened to build a site with wordpress.
Now I know your name and will never build a site with wordpress.
You can choose to make that about me instead of recognizing any responsibility for that outcome, but it's never the less a fact. Do with this simple data what you will, but data it is.
Another comment by someone else in one of the severel conversations on this went something like:
"I don't know either of these companies and so far WP Engine hasn't said anything yet. So far I have only heard Wordpress's side of the story, and that has made me assume that Wordpress are the side in the wrong."
Every once in a while there's someone who's smarter than everyone else and keeps talking. SBF from FTX famously was giving interviews to whoever would listen.
> 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 have seen a couple founders post to HN like this during legal action. Its embarrassing, even if I enjoy reading the content.
Of course its possible that these posts are happening through consultation with a lawyer/PR or something but often it feels like someone using their “inside” voice in the outside, and reads like unforced errors.
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.
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.
Does similar apply to some of the Automattic employees who have been talking everywhere?
Is there a point where it could switch from "a bunch of people running their mouths" to "a coordinated harassment campaign against WP Engine and its customers"?
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.
Right, this all feels like (and I'm not trying to be rude with this, I'm speaking from experience) a mental break. Or he's got some sort of vendetta that he feels burning everything down is worth it over.
Some of his comments from the other day on reddit have already been used in this very lawsuit, you'd think he would know to shut the hell up at this point if it's #2.
I don't even know if it's a vendetta about WP specifically or just the result of his general disposition. About a year ago he had an embarrassing public meltdown after some random Tumblr users talked shit about him because they didn't like his moderation policies. Banning people, then publicly shaming them, then replying to their posts on other social media sites...
There’s a whole-ass archetype among founder-owners of successful companies who stick with them long-term, that looks like this. It’s not all of them, by any means, but it’s definitely one sort. In ordinary circumstances it manifests as a preference for maintaining control over making moves that might, by some measures, be better (improving business success, or limiting liability, say) and a string of quiet and maybe fishy-seeming but not exactly red-flag dust-ups; when a big enough obstacle (especially to that whole “control” thing) shows up and throwing their weight around can’t make it go away, though, things can get real dicey.
My take is this is 100% someone sticking to a naive worldview because they are smart and logical (and I don't doubt that they are). But the world doesn't work like that. And as much as I hate to admit it, these WPE people are playing the game and just baiting and provoking a response from him. They're like schoolyard bullies that poke and wave hands inches from your face, then cry foul to principal Government when you rightfully retaliate. As much as a smart and "fair" person would think this is a reasonable and logical response, the principal does not think so. They will look at the rules, say "a ha, you broke rule 3(a) and hit someone", and then send you to detention. No amount of if, buts, and logical "reasons" will matter at that point.
honestly, just read this and his initial post about the whole issue (content is "sacred" or whatever) and it's clear he's semi-deluded himself into thinking he has massive support and/or more important in the grand scheme of things than he actually is. burned so many bridges and still won't concede anything.
Matt, with the greatest of respect - shut up, and get off the internet until this is over. You just keep digging the hole and making things worse for yourself.
In this instance, you are not the smartest guy in the room, and anything you say is just going to make the outcome of this whole saga that much more painful.
If I were in your position I'd be very carefully trying to figure out what the next step is, especially given whats going to come out about the Wordpress foundation's commercial licensing agreement with Automattic. That alone should be an exctremely worrying position for you personally, assuming your legal team have pointed out the issues on an international scale that you're about to be hit with.
That's not what page 35 says at all. Check out page 36:
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or
negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she
would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
(edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct to read page 35 as saying that)
She was interviewing November 2023 to January 2024. She declined the WordPress.org role on January 26, 2024. I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share.
> As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.
You really shouldn't, IMO.
For one thing, what parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy. I get that that's fun from the sidelines, but I certainly don't think we should encourage employers to violate other people's privacy.
For another, we have a court system with lots of rules around it for a reason. These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here. He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying here and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it. He could be bringing up totally irrelevant facts while not talking about the actual important things, with his counterparty correctly not talking about it, but leaving the impression that there is nothing there. Etc.
> parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy
As you say it is terrible, and they should not have done that. Irrespective of the legal outcome it taints them in my eye forever. That being said that particular horse has left the barn already. It is not like us third parties gigling from the sidelines will affect it.
> These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here.
Yeah sure. People on the internet can lie. It is not like we believe everything which comes out of the mouth of any party ever. That is not a reason for me wishing them to shut up.
It would be in their best interest to stop talking. But it is not our job as third parties to enforce that or even encourage it. We are not his legal representation, nor we are his fairy godmother.
> He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying…
Yes.
> … and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it.
That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely evaluate them. We don’t have as strong tools as people in a court case do. For example we can’t subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a court case. They have to be always engaged.
And it is important to remember that the likely outcome of any such evaluation is that “there is not enough info for me to know for certain”. That is not some weird edge case of critical thinking, but the default state of things.
> That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely evaluate them. We don’t have as strong tools as people in a court case do. For example we can’t subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a court case. They have to be always engaged.
You're right, I spoke more strongly than warranted. I was getting at this distinction - in a court case, there are real tools, both legal and investigative, that let you determine truth to a much higher degree than in random internet (or real life) conversations.
What I highly dislike is that the person who is acting responsibly legally, and who is probably acting more responsibly by trusting the court system to determine what should happen, is always the party that doesn't engage in this kind of talk. The side acting irresponsibly is trying to change public perception by sidestepping the actual legal mechanisms here, and we shouldn't usually let them.
(I'm speaking generally, in this case I feel less strongly because a lot of this is public knowledge.)
He has no self control. His interview on The Primeagen was especially telling. It’s deeply personal for him. His interactions with the WPEngine staff are all spoken about like casual personal relationships. Nothing was handled professionally. No matter who’s right, or to what extent, he’s publicly digging himself a hole.
I mean not only he hopped on a live stream to babble before going to court, he bragged about it and said the WP Engine people are afraid to do the same. This is school yard level big brain moves.
> 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.
Why doesn't she share messages that prove she declined a WordPress.com job in 2022? You're holding me to a different standard. I'm here, I'm talking to journalists. They're not.
The question you need to ask yourself is whether you _should_ talk to journalists during a legal matter, instead of trying to fight the court of public opinion.
hmm.. no, I don't think it is all on your side, sad to say. I was with you until I read this message you sent to Heather Brunner:
>> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres:
* Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict.
* Your interviewing with Automattic over the past year.
* I will possibly tell the press all of the above.
That's just so obviously threatening and uncalled for. Even if Brunner were considering jumping ship, you shouldn't threaten someone into accepting an offer.
Now, you don't know me from Adam, but I want you to strongly, strongly consider that this thing that you've been afraid of happening, has actually already happened. And that is, that you have become Evil Matt -- with the little horns on your head and everything. And to get back to being Good Matt, you're going to have to let some things go.
"No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it." -- Charles Schulz
What I think you don't realize is, the minor discrepancies in statements of facts are inconsequential in the court of opinon. Even if (which TBH don't find implausible at all) everything you said and posted is true and I agree in principle, that doesn't resolve the issues around CoI and they way you have been communicating over the last couple of weeks, including the WPConf bombshell and the abrupt discontinuation of service. The fallout of the drama and the way you have been playing your hand vastly overshadow whatever your motivations for "going
nuclear" was.
I don't believe you will gain anyone's sympathy by resolving a misunderstanding about who-said-what-when in some inconsequential matter somehow apparently also part of this drama. Some if it seems like pure distraction that I don't see why anyone outside of the individuals involved should have ever heard about in the first place.
I second the sentiment that you don't appear healthy and could suggest maybe let someone else take a seat in one of the (3? 4?) chairs for a change? At least from the outside, you still seem free to choose your focus yourself. Maybe that window will be closing...
Have you ever been party to or close to an important legal proceeding?
Anything said and documented prior to the hearing will be combed through. Even tiny inconsistencies will be cherry picked and entered as evidence to raise doubt of the claims made.
I'm all for the sentiment behind a CEO addressing ongoing lawsuits candidly, but in reality its just a bad idea. Statements made without being fully vetted by council, with the context of all other statements already made, will inevitably have issues that could throw a wrench in the case.
Have you spoken to a lawyer, Matt? That’s a terrible course of action. It’s like talking to the police. You never do so, no matter how innocent you are.
Literally everybody is telling you to STFU. The problem as I see it, is that you might feel incredibly confident in your case, but you are so close to things that you have convinced yourself of your own righteousness.
That’s not necessarily reality, and you are not as righteous as you believe. Even if you are - your words could be misconstrued.
I cannot understand why your legal team is not advising you to stop making public comments. Or perhaps they are, and you aren’t listening to them? Either way, you are being incredibly foolish.
You're taking this very personally and in the public domain even though it will hurt your company.
Maybe there gets a point you become so wealthy, that ego is all that matters. But you're supposedly a smart guy who cares about his products, community and company, why not take the practical and economically safe route of duking it out in court?
At least on this site, you may be “here” but you’re not responding meaningfully to most of the questions/comments posed to you. This seems more like a weird approach to PR than any kind of attempt to clarify or justify your position.
"she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic"
But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as you've revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few weeks. I don't follow, how can Heather apply for a job with Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you personally own?
Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.
> Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.
So are you now using company resources for personal projects (as they point out, you constantly have claimed that the .org domain is your personal domain) as well as for non profit org projects?
Doesn't exactly sound... beneficial to investors interests.
I love how he explains that “consideration” was conjured from thin air.
I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises to let me use it on weekdays?
Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this is a valid contract with “consideration” because I gave Jimmy my car and, “in return,” he gave me my car back Monday–Friday.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine that it is illegal to donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit organization, without contracts and considerations coming into play. But if I’m wrong, and “consideration” is a required element of a transaction like this, I don’t think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster anyway.
I also do not get it, I don't know why consideration is even relevant for a donation.
I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead, with them retaining commercial rights.
Why would either side want to minimize the donation size? It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-profit doesn't care about income tax.
I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
There are so many legal entities here that appear completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation, Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.
the statements about the non-profit situation seem especially bad. He'll obviously have his own side of the story, but I'm guessing they didn't misread the tax filings.
Why did you tell the community: "the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company"? That's objectively untrue. Period.
That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community for 14 years.
The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-license. The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood.
I’m curious: what else is there to a trademark? Nominal ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they’ve granted “irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic” (as claimed in this lawsuit), what else is there? Maybe there is something, I’m no lawyer or particularly deeply familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like, for all practical purposes, ownership belonging to the Foundation is a furphy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy>.
Man you should just stop talking about this online, even less, posting this kind of sh*t that would be used in court. Arent there ANY people around you who can tell you to just keep silent?
I understand the workings of the trademark. The question I asked of you (that you avoided) is why did you claim that the trademark was "fully independent from any company" and that Automattic had "give[n] up control". [0]
That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with the USPTO is clear:
>WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic Inc., an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in Exhibit A attached hereto...
> The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org.
The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?
Weird that you never mentioned that this license was granted on the same day it was transferred.
Your response to this complaint is going to look very interesting.
Also, a note for the audience: Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour. WPEngine apparently has deep pockets.
At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I think about it the more I think that's exactly what someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might do.
I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.
Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80 hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were going too fast to notice the error :)
As I write many more things collaborating with people who do not speak English as a first language, it is more obvious than ever that grammar and spelling errors have absolutely no correlation with the quality of the argument when it comes to professional communication.
At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page document in a few hours, they might have someone proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that went into writing it was far more serious than the thought that went into proofreading it.
Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away to draw their attention to something irrelevant?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but it made me burst out loud and it's probably the funniest thing I've read all week.
Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to distract from facts ?
Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos, you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.
Typos don't really matter in legal complaints, except for looking unprofessional. It would be a waste if my $1000/hour lawyer spent their time proofreading, honestly. The typos also guarantee that I'm getting a real, logical human writing my complaint rather than someone faking it with ChatGPT.
Typos in long-lived documents like contracts, patents, etc. matter quite a bit, by contrast. See eg the second amendment, where billions of dollars have been spent over a few commas.
This is actually one of my favorite uses for contemporary AI technology. It very much can (and does) catch this type of spelling error. Google Docs does this for me quite often. It's not always right -- but it often prompts me to review exactly this type of situation. It's pretty amazing, really.
I'm always amazed at how many typos make it into legal docs that should be picked up by automatic spell checks. It seems to be a normal and accepted practice for legal types - interesting to see that's the case in the US as well as here in the UK.
Not only that but the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian. As I noted elsewhere in the thread, she was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.
Hi Matt. I wanted to ask, do you think that the actions you've taken will improve the WordPress community in the long term? What do you think are the likely outcomes for WordPress users and contributors, regardless of how this conflict ends?
It is eternally surprising to me how much "hosted X" businesses can make. There are a lot of non-technical people ready to overspend by 10x just to have someone else be "responsible" for downtime.
I do this all day long to avoid being the person in the hot seat when something breaks… when it’s someone else’s money, and when the org’s dysfunctional or political enough for there to be a “hot seat” (nearly all large and medium orgs, at least half of small orgs).
It’s kinda comical because it’s absolutely a principal-agent problem disguised as being in the best interest of the company. 10x costs and in practice worse uptime & performance for internal-political insurance and on-call avoidance for me personally, sold with a list of benefits that the company either doesn’t need, or that only look like benefits due to very-partial accounting, or that have such lengthy footnoted caveats that no, they probably won’t be a benefit in-fact.
DHH was talking about this in his recent rails world keynote. Hosting companies are getting huge margins because developers are afraid of using a computer.
Matt, thanks for engaging here and for all you’ve done with WordPress. My college internship was working on “Standard Theme” in 2009. We haven’t met but I’m Stephen.
I don’t expect you to take questions from an internet stranger, but since you asked…
What rules does Automattic enforce for all companies who operate businesses built on WordPress? In other words…when does a business owe 8%? There are thousands of businesses wondering if they’re next on the list.
Matt, you have been criticised here for speaking openly but it is quite refreshing to hear you be so candid and not hide behind PR consultants issuing generic press releases.
Matt. You are rich. What is behind your motivations here? You seem to be very candid and passionate about this but I must be missing something. Why spend your time doing this? What’s your end goal?
Hi Matt! I appreciate the transparency. Reading about this has been interesting to say the least.
I am curious about your desired outcome. If you win, WP Engine pays 8% going forward? If you lose, will it be business as usual? Fewer open source offerings?
Obviously this could take years to resolve, but developers do have very real concerns over what the landscape may look like in a few years.
Hey Matt. This has no relevance to anything but is a fun story I wanted to share. 15-20 years ago I discovered a "UX bug" on default Wordpress installs, which was that all you needed to impersonate someone in a Wordpress comment section was know their email address. I used your guessable email address while writing a comment on the official Wordpress.org blog and it pulled your gravatar etc. Sorry. I was a child at the time. lol
This boils down to something quite simple. WPEngine wants money. Matt wants money too. It’s zero sum.
Matt, free advice. If you really think your commercial product is better (maybe it retains more post history or whatever the case), spend more time selling it.
Since you're trying to get WP Engine to pay for "WordPress" trademark, by contributing back to open-source, because you feel they should, since it made them rich, I was wondering how many open-source projects did Automattic contribute to financially? Aside from WordPress, I'm sure you stand on the shoulders of giants such as Linux, nginx, MySQL, JavaScript libraries (or maybe you should call it ECMAScript, because you're not paying any trademark fees), etc.?
Comical that contributing to the most used CMS on the planet isn't sufficient. They must contribute financially to all open source otherwise they don't have a claim against WPE
[Edit 2: could you kindly take some time to explains where you disagree as you downvote this so I can learn? Reading documents like this for the first time pointing out where things don't make sense to me.]
> 89. Defendants’ extortion campaign included levying personal attacks against the CEO of WPE for not capitulating to his demands. For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
[Edit: Ignore this paragraph, see JimDabell and lolinder comments below] I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening, ChatGPT also doesn't seem to think so based on its transcript. During the interview Matt did ask at one point if Theo would talk to Lee and Heather on stream, it was about giving everyone a fair chance to tell the story and I doubt that anyone can characterise it as extortional in nature.
Even it was Matt who gave the number away during stream (if it was cut out of the YouTube version) or off stream, it's a huge stretch to claim that as "personal attacks" as part of an "extortion campaign"...
> 90. Defendants’ attacks against WPE’s CEO have also continued in private. First, on September 28, 2024, Mullenweg attempted to poach her to come and work for Automattic, and falsely suggested that WPE’s investor was making her do something she did not want to do.
They screen capped just Matt's message without any context about what was said prior to that message? By September 28, 2024 they have already met many times in-person, too. I think it's just insane for Matt to send a text like but that just seems very out of context in isolation. If absolutely nothing compelled Matt to send that message then I guess it's possible that he's either extremely naive or he is a psychopath.
> 91. After WPE’s CEO did not immediately respond, Mullenweg threatened her the following day. Specifically, on September 29, 2024 Mullenweg gave her until midnight that day to “accept” his job “offer” with Automattic. If she did not accede to his demand, Mullenweg threatened to tell the press, and WPE’s investor, that she had interviewed with Automattic:
> 93. WPE’s CEO did not respond to Mullenweg’s September 29 threat
91 has very interesting wording: "After WPE's CEO did not *immediately* respond". In contrast to 93, they also don't claim that Heather didn't respond to the messages on September 28.
The screenshot of Matt's message on September 29 begins with this:
> Heather, after our extensive discussions about you joining Automattic, the offer you negotiated with me is still on the table.
So... there was definitely a conversation between the screenshots on September 28 and September 29 that lead Matt to think that they presumably didn't include?
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
92 feels like an assertion that's deliberately placed between 90, 91 and 93 to potentially make their claim seem more valid? I suppose "had never interviewed" depends what kind of evidence Matt can produce at this point if he's not lying; if it's all in-person and there are no records at all, which he pointed out in the interview with Theo, then it's unfortunate.
The "[had never] negotiated" part doesn't make sense at all if something was indeed discussed between September 28 and September 29.
> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres:
> - Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict
> - your interviewing with Automattic over the past year
> - I will possibly tell the press all of the above
I feel like the minority on HN that wants to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. Even so, that's a sure-fire way to get someone who may have been listening to you to turn on you.
If you're not going to call your lawyers, at least call Theo since he offered.
> > during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
> I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening
He admits it here:
> Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?
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".
This is referencing a different livestream than the one with Theo, they refer to that one separately as a livestream on YouTube. It's confusing because of where the footnote is placed, but if you trace the 46 back up to the top you'll see it refers to a different quote:
> On September 28, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview to the author of the “This
might be the end of WordPress” video blog. Among other statements, Mullenweg acknowledged
his retaliatory and vindictive intentions, saying: “They could make this all go away by doing a
license. Interesting question is whether, now … you know, maybe more than 8% is what we would
agree to now.”46
The X interview is a different one. Matt's been busy.
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.
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?
This was a separate agreement from their GPL license, which of course allows them to fork. Sorry it's not clear from the term sheet, but this was about them forking our Stripe extension to replace the attribution from us to them for WooCommerce sites hosted on WP Engine. Stripe is also looking into this, as it's spammy.
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.
The agreement wasn't about their license to the code, it was about their license to the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. They could agree to not do things allowed under the GPL, like replacing our Stripe attribution, it's their right to. Or not.
"The agreement wasn't about their license to the code,"
Maybe you misread it (or miswrote it i guess)?
it says:
"WP Engine will cease and desist from forking or modifying any of Automattic’s,
WooCommerce’s, or its affiliates' software (including, but not limited to plugins and extensions) ..."
It could not more plainly say that they cannot fork or modify software.
1. Matt just claimed it wasn't about software at all. So we've now moved on to saying "well it's about code, but not GPL code".
Progress, i guess?
2. The agreement does not limit it to non-GPL code in any way, so i'm really not sure where you are getting that from. The plain terms cover all of automattic (et al) software, which includes the stuff that has GPL code in it.
The normal way such an agreement would be written to cover only non-GPL pieces would be to say it does not attempt to modify or change rights you get elsewhere, blah blah blah.
It includes no such clause.
If you've got meaningful parol evidence that it was meant to cover only non-GPL code, great, let's see it.
(since the agreement is both badly written and not fully integrated, it would be valid to do so).
Correct, it's gplv2 or later.
v2/v3 GPL compatibility is also sort of an abstract thing - it gets talked about a lot (IE do the terms have to actually conflict as applied to a given situation or only conflict in theory) , but you also can't file a lawsuit with a claim of "GPL incompatibility". You'd have to file a claim for breach of contract or infringement (or both).
This matters because if, for example, your main incompatibility is around the patent pieces (that's one of them), and there are no patents anywhere involved, you may have a hard time convincing a judge that there is really a breach of contract.
I do not believe it is legally "GPL v2 or later" at all. The original b2 license was GPL v2. There was no or later version option in the original b2 license. Given that WordPress is a derivative work, it has to keep the same or compatible license. Which "GPL v2 or later" is not.
Note how the original license is GPL v2 at [0], then the "or later" header is added much later at [1] seemingly out of nowhere.
I think what Matt's saying is that they absolutely had the GPL rights to fork and modify the code... but those rights don't include the right to use the trademark. So if they wanted to be able to market themselves as offering WooCommerce(TM), they had to agree to the license, in which they'd have to promise not to use the aforementioned GPL rights.
I am nowhere near knowing enough about trademark law to say whether this is anything even approaching a reasonable use of trademarks.
But that's not what the legal document says? "Cease and desist from using the trademark" is a different sentence from "cease and decist from forking and modifying code"
I'm not defending his position, or talking about whatever's in the legal documents, I'm just trying to explain the distinction Matt seems to be drawing between the trademark license (and attached terms) and the software license in this thread.
(Personally, I think it's a fairly bullshit distinction that's completely against the spirit of the GPL. It's probably legally allowed, though.)
I don't understand how that's supposed to work. You can't use a trademark to prevent anyone from forking a piece of software whose license allows forking. You can say that other people can't use your trademark in forks, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on here? "Cease and decist from forking or modifying the software" is, again, a different sentence from "cease and decist from using our trademark in your modified versions of the software"
My understanding of Matt's position, and what that term sheet he posted is talking about, is that he feels that WP Engine needs a trademark license to cover what it's currently doing. He feels that their usage of the marks exceeds what's generally allowed under the "everyone can use it this way" terms that WordPress.org offers. His position isn't just that they can't use the trademark to apply to their forked version, it's that they can't use it as they currently are even if it wasn't forked.
So Matt's now offering these terms: a license to use the trademarks as they currently are, in exchange for concessions. The concessions include that they'd agree to not use their GPL-granted right to fork the code. This sounds like an agreement that would hold up, assuming he's right about the trademark policy.
Again, I have no idea about the actual legalities of trademark usage. It's entirely possible that Matt is wrong about them not being allowed to do what they're currently doing with the trademarks, but it sounds like lawyers will be arguing about that.
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.
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"
Would it be a valid for someone to take "GPL v2" (with no or later version) clause, and re-license a derivative work as "GPL v2 or later", and then another entity takes that derivative work and re-licenses it as the "GPL v3"?
That seems to be what's happened here. The b2 software is a strict "GPL v2". There is no later clause. Then WordPress has re-licensed their derivative work as "GPL v2 or later". Now we are talking about a GPL v3 derivative work.
> Why is this relevant? Well, you really have to think of this stuff as contracts to use a given copy of software, and not as some abstract thing licensed or not.
If you think about it in that way, copyright infringement is out of the picture completely because of the statutory exception.
17 U.S.C § 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.
WRT #2, note that the relevant section of 17 USC §117 was written in 1980 - at the time, most software was distributed on media like floppy discs or tape which could easily be accidentally overwritten or damaged by faulty equipment. Creating personal backups of purchased software was already standard practice for many users; I think it's this sort of usage that the law was primarily meant to protect. Later applications like allowing users to backup computer hard drives with copyrighted software installed on them were a happy accident.
Oh, yes, you are right. I misread the dates.
I knew it was not because of a case, that the worry was around archival copies of software, and that (to this day) nobody had actually ever been sued over making a backup (as far as anyone knows). I should have dug a little deeper back into the history.
It would in the sense that mere use wouldn't count as infringement. Distribution is a different thing here and I agree there are more complex shenanigans there.
I've been a long Wordpress user and proponent for a long time. Until a week ago I had never heard the name Mullenweg.
Regardless of who's in the right or wrong here (I have my opinions), my perception of Wordpress flipped a switch overnight. It went from this quiet, reliable, refreshingly boring open source platform to yet another cult of personality tech fiefdom.
Likewise. I used it for my personal website before I learned how to use nginx. I guided my wife through the process of moving her personal site from Wix to WP and it's been a massive improvement. I really had no idea all this insanity was going down.
Above a certain size all communities sooner or later turn into cults, most of the time around one or a few persons. The ones that you don't perceive as such you just haven't looked into close enough. I wish it were different but so far I have yet to find a community that doesn't fit that description. Not just open source, not just software, any community.
I'm in basically the same boat, but aside from a bit of eye rolling I think I've convinced myself I can just ignore this and safely continue to download wordpress.org/latest.zip when I need it and hack it into whatever shape is convenient - which is what I've always liked doing with it anyway.
Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.
> WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people
You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good technical and architectural direction until this person was appointed, which is honestly just laughable.
In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes are not just made, but embraced and defended.
Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it our way is better".
For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a statement for multiple executions the way native prepared statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has had built-in support for prepared statements (including parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
Yeah, I agree. While Wordpress itself is impressively functional software it would surprise many people just how shaky the foundations its built on are.
The PHP ecosystem has never had a strong reputation for quality engineering, and Wordpress originates from a time when quality in that ecosystem was at its lowest. Ironically Wordpress's failure to modernise is actually key to its success - not making changes has allowed its plugin system to be very stable and maintain a lot of momentum.
By comparison Drupal, which has done its level best to drastically improve its code base over time, picking up best practices like composer and using Symphony, has completely fallen to the wayside because its module ecosystem couldn't keep up.
I disagree with the idea that they don't matter, but that isn't the point of my reply.
Whether those flaws matter or not is irrelevant to the point the parent comment made, suggesting that a prior standard of architecture has been lost apparently due to the hiring of someone non technical for a leadership role.
It's like if someone claimed that McDonalds food is barely food, and doesn't meat the standards of fine dining because the Chairman and President are a lawyer and an MBA rather than trained chefs.
I have never seen a more reckless case of CEO behaviour in a long time. I have no idea how the discussions with streamers and now Hacker News, is going to fare for Mullenweg, but I don't think it's good.
He did let WP fuck it up with React too. Writing WP themes lets you experience the worst templating solution ever, especially post that. Crazy dude that one.
I don’t know about that, it’s normal to name a business after the founder. For example JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Disney, Boeing, Wells Fargo. The reference is also quite oblique.
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.
I hope Matt can supply his legal team with conversations that would somehow justify his behaviour. From my (incomplete) reading of the complaint, he (Matt) does indeed look very "petulant". It's almost like he's intentionally self-destructing, which is why I hope for his sake that he has more tangible evidence to share, especially after reading section 201.
Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad, while not addressing the core issue of their trademark violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about their bad behavior.
As someone who had to handle four websites that suddenly stopped getting Wordpress security updates and updates for plugins because of how you handled this I don’t very much care to hear about “their” bad behavior.
You have no checks and balances so we paid the price. I hope people stop using Wordpress in droves. I hope you have to worry about your business the same way you suddenly made people have to worry about theirs.
> How is it even legal for wordpress.org (a public nonprofit) to take these actions on behalf of a for profit?
There are three (or more) entities using the WordPress name now and confusing the heck out of a bunch of commenters, all of them controlled by Matt:
- The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the owner of the WordPress trademark.
- WordPress.com/Automattic is the company suing and being sued, and the exclusive commercial licensee of the trademark. They also pay people to work on the Foundation, and on WordPress.org.
- WordPress.org is a website personally run by Matt [1], through another company he owns called Mobius Ltd.
Man... You are still talking on the internet publicly, obviously without any lawyer checking out what you say before you post comments. You will inevitably end up posting a lot of things that can make you look bad or sink the case for your side. Just stop talking about this anywhere online and offline. Let the lawyers talk.
I'm sorry, _their_ smear campaign? That's rich, considering you've been the one on the "scorched earth nuclear" crusade to get rid of a "cancer" from the WP community.
They didn't have to cherry-pick anything to make you look bad. You did that by yourself. While also making a criminal case for extortion.
And regarding their trademark violation: WP Engine was founded in 2010. You've been OK with the trademark violation for 14 years, and suddenly decided to take legal action just now? C'mon. The optics of this don't put you in a good light no matter how you spin it.
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.
It seems less like they're cherry-picking and more like you've attached one of those giant tree-shaker machines to your cherry tree and all they are doing is just standing underneath it catching everything.
Do you think your ego may have gotten in the way of doing what was best for your business and users here? How was harming so many sites and the WP name justifiable here?
Of course -- and he should keep his temper tantrums to his poor behavior on that platform (like he's done in the past), because it's obvious he can't handle being grown up and handling Wordpress.
So they're "cherry picking" things that you said which make you look bad, which are true and accurate - and that's a "smear campaign".
While you are telling lies about trademark violations and extorting money specifically from WPEngine and have publicly admitted you're not doing that to anyone else that provides Wordpress hosting? And you've used terms like "war" and "nuclear option" when threatening the lies you subsequently told?
And somehow you still think _you're_ the good guy here?
:boggle:
Just resign. Make the WordPress Foundation into everything you've pretended it is over the years, including rightful and permanent owner of the trademarks and .org domain, and complete seperate from you personally and Automattic and it's related businesses. _Maybe_ that'll save WordPress. Maybe...
What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce enthusiasm for the OSS project.
I’m an arm length removed from all this drama having not used Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I’d use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that happens between corporations all the time
My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
One of the two entities completely controls the plugin ecosystem and wielded that control against the other entity (the largest WordPress host except, possibly, Automattic itself) to block them and all of their customers out of the ecosystem over this dispute.
That's why this matters to average developers. WordPress is the plugin ecosystem, and messing around with it does as much damage to the WordPress ecosystem as left pad did to npm—it's not unrecoverable, but it's a major setback that could quickly become unrecoverable.
Note that one of the most popular plugins, to the point many WordPress people suggest it's the only plugin that should be part of core, is acf. Which is a plugin contributed by wp engine.
I believe WPEngine is actually larger than Automattic. This is an attempt to get the bigger (and likely better) company to pay the bills of a company that took a bit too much VC money and now needs the revenue to support it.
The more you press the nuclear button, the more you damage your reputation. I’m of the opinion that the circumstances here are exceptional and rationality will prevail
The damage to your reputation comes because pressing the nuclear button even once is an unhinged thing to do. The reputational damage is because once you've pressed it once we consider it more likely that you'll press it again because you've shown yourself to be the kind of person who presses that button.
Yep. We no all know not to trust anything that Matt or any of his businesses or non-profits are involved with.
Unless WordPress, both the open source codebase and the plugin/theme publishing/distribution channels, are completely free of Matt's influence - they are now a serious risk any business using Wordpress needs to address and mitigate.
Matt seems to have jumped on WP Engine essentially because they were making a lot of money. So now, any other company that is making a lot of money (or hoping to make a lot money) with Wordpress may wonder whether Matt will target them too.
What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big creative agencies) need to be concerned?
Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
I agree it might not have much effect on random people using or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that depresses that investment can depress the overall project trajectory.
You’re welcome to your opinion, but my company is in the market for a large enterprise CMS management contract, and this situation has taken every WordPress option off the table due to uncertainty about the business and technical stability of the ecosystem. I highly doubt we’re the only ones feeling that way.
Can you explain your reasoning? Wordpress is pretty scalable, if done right. Even Microsoft uses Wordpress in some of its microsites. I know some of the new federal government sites even use it (for instance whitehouse.gov as part of the USDS project). It's highly supported and has been tested vigorously for decades now. It can at least be considered for various projects, even large ones.
Sometimes you don't need a complex solution for various projects, this thought process reminds me of people building highly scalable configurations for projects that just don't need it then overrunning in costs and overengineering it all.
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 don't think there was ever any expectation that the Firefox/Iceweasel trademark dispute would "kill" either organization. About the most serious it got, IIRC, was some heated discussions on the Debian bug tracker; there were never any legal threats involved, and the situation was ultimately resolved to everyone's satisfaction by the name change.
Matt is usually the lead developer at WP.org you can find his references in almost all changelogs. I still think, attention and resources will be diverted.
And what is more sad is that it really appears that the WordPress figurehead is to blame.
Matt has made so many unforced errors in the last month, in addition to revealing, one way or another, that he basically considers WordPress, the .org, the .com, the Foundation, and Automattic, all to be synonymous, which is news to a significant portion of the community, let alone to the incorporation and other founding filings.
He claimed in an interview there's context to the texts that makes it look better, but he hasn't actually released that context, just said that it exists and he wishes WP Engine would [0]. I'm having a hard time imagining context that would make this not extortion, and if there really is context that makes it better I'm unsure why he's not releasing it himself. He's certainly not gone into no-comment-on-legal-matters mode, so his silence there speaks volumes to me.
What would you like me to answer? I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. I've only been releasing things I've said or sent.
"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.
Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
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:
If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.
The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here for your own good) is context that makes those texts not look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
No one here is disputing that you might have been in the right until September. It's your actions in September that you need to account for.
That's a weird analogy. It'd be more like your natural gas provider trying to negotiate a deal and then when you don't reach an agreement they turn off the valve to your house.
I'm not talking about him cutting them off from WordPress.org (that's problematic for other reasons), I'm talking about the repeated texts and phone calls threatening to launch a smear campaign against them if they don't sign a deal. That is what looks like extortion.
>” If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.”
This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.
> 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.
Since when did relaying employee experience constitute an existential threat to a businesses ability to operate? This forum is littered with people who engage in "threats" as a mode of business every single day.
Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be defended against all not just one. Do you really believe they are the only ones? Are you going to go after everyone next?
Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to use the trademark approach, I think your actions are going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have in time.
Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years, in a variety of arrangements. None have abused the WordPress and WooCommerce trademark as much as WP Engine has, hence our C&D against them.
> Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years
In reverse order:
1. Why on earth are other hosts obligated to contribute to Automattic, their competitor, just because Automattic also contributes to the open source project?
2. You have, on multiple recent occasions, spelt out unequivocally that WordPress.org is YOU, and not the Foundation. Again, why on earth are WordPress hosts obligated to contribute to you?
A couple posts up is claiming Mullenweg's singling out WP Engine, and here you're claiming he runs a protection racket against anyone who wants to make money running WordPress sites. Which is it?
This argument is pretty tedious. If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more chickens.
But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark, offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't give back to the community, and that's bad. I can understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I really don't understand why people are so against him here.
I mean, a protection racket tends to start that way. Give someone prominent a thumping with relative impunity, use the threat of that to get everyone else to comply
Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
I'm not 100% in the tank for Mullenweg, there's some inconsistencies I find troubling. But WordPress is an incredible, open project. Mullenweg's built an admirable community and business. There are so, so many WordPress hosting sites, and they're doing great. Mullenweg has outlined his issues w/ WP Engine (they turn off history). Does anyone honestly think a private equity firm would do better than he has? Does anyone in all these WordPress threads truly believe a good outcome here is PE firms can do as they like, giving back relatively very little to the community and slowly diluting the trademark? Who thinks this is sustainable? Who in his position would let this happen?
> Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.
All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--either directly or through insinuation like you're doing here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?
The obvious unanswered question is “why just WP Engine?” Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and service providers would be wise to at least be anxious about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.
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.
You continue to suggest I’ve insinuated he is extorting others and I have done no such thing. Please stop that. A protection racket does not need a quorum of victims to be distasteful or illegal.
It does need to be a protection racket though. Mullenweg didn't walk up to WP Engine and say, "sure would be a shame if you somehow lost access to the plugins repo, if you pay me some $$$ I'll make sure that doesn't happen." He wrote a public blog post about how they turn off features he considers essential to WordPress. I'm not him, but it seems like if they just flipped that feature on (which would enrich him not at all) he'd be cool.
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 was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the chat replay before deciding whether the results of any poll taken during that stream are credible.
I have to wonder how many people that voted even know what WordPress is or even use it. It’s easy to click a button on the screen to vote one way or another during a stream while being completely uninformed.
Sure it’s in use by a large portion of websites (43% I think I saw last) but that doesn’t mean that 43% of people know what WordPress is.
That stream wasn’t on a WordPress-centric channel.
>>>WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8% being typical? For what kind of franchise?
If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert", do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
A new car dealership pays 3-8% back to their parent company plus a 1-2%
marketing fee, upto 500,000 as an initial fee. They get logo rights and inventory.
If this wasn't open source they could ask for those fees but they decided to give away their software with an open license. Without that license they would have never grown into what they became. But Matt sees another company doing well and he gets jealous and demands a piece of their success and goes postal when he doesn't get his way.
I think he needs to step away from wordpress.org because the conflict of interest is too great.
The Stripe attribution stuff that WPEngine is accused of sounds potentially illegal.
I don't think Automattic's trademark claims are fundamentally going to hold up. From the complaint:
"WPE’s nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source software platform and plugin used for its clients’ websites are fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines and the practices of nearly all businesses in this space."
I dont know what the settled trademark law is, but this seems like common sense to me.
Everyone says 'WordPress' to refer to the software platform. Just seems like extortion, plain and simple.
I get Matt's upset that WPEngine is making all this money, but that's par for the course when you release something open source. You simply need a better product if you want to beat WPEngine in the marketplace.
Sounds like something that WooCommerce should have in their license or something. idk sounds like a pitfall to me. Why would anyone pay WooCommerce anything then? Just fork it and change the attribution code.
They can’t. All Wordpress plugins are required to be GPL, like Wordpress itself, and like the software Wordpress itself was forked from. The viral license they agreed to is working as intended.
The ELI5 of why this is so complicated is what everyone thought was "Wordpress" was actually a cluster of shady self-serving business dealings by Matt Mullenweg.
The Wordpress Foundation does not actually own the name "Wordpress". The name is essentially owned by Matt Mullenweg and he licenses it out to the Foundation and other organizations which he approves of.
Matt Mullenweg was personally displeased with certain aspects of WPEngine's business, asked for money from them, and then cut off all of WPEngine's customers from accessing shared Wordpress resources. And the justification he is using was WP Engine's infringement of the copyright.
I am not sure what the Sherman act has to do with it.
The more pressing problems for Mullenweg is that he is directly extorting another company, and potentially using his Wordpress non-profit organizations as a tax-fraud scheme.
It's about disabling revisions. Or private equity. Or not contributing back to core. Or trademarks. Or freeloading on w.org infrastructure. Or hacking Stripe plugins. Or whatever else might stick to the wall in this 18-hour period...
Now begins the portion of the proceedings where lots of dirty laundry gets aired, discovery feels like a visit to the proctologist, and absolutely nothing good comes of it for either side but for the attorneys.
Makes Matt look like just another guy with money throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get what he demanded. Sad because many thought highly of him before he went off the reservation.
This lawsuit seems to be the prophesized exploding car covered in hammers [1]. The astounding part to me is that it's Matt's behavior itself that's making the car explode multiple times, sending hammers flying everywhere.
> 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.
Ignoring the executive drama (on both sides) it is in bad taste to build WPEngine off an Open Source project and barely contribute back to it.
It's probably a case where their version is so heavily customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals. But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well. Relationships are important in business.
It's so funny seeing on this board how much people hop up and down screaming about big cloud providers are stealing from open source creators and how we should switch to non-open licenses that prevent companies from profiting from other companies' open source projects...
...and then exactly when a company is profiting from someone's open source project and that person is crying foul, the whole board is piling on the creator of that project primarily because they don't like _his tone_.
WPEngine contributed a lot to WordPress. It was, in fact, one of the biggest sponsors of the conference it was just banned from participating in. It also wrote the most popular plugin.
When Matt says "contribute" he means monetarily. Probably (speculation) because his company is about to be bankrupt without finding a way to get more money.
Matt shouldn't have made his thing "open source" [1], just like Elastic and other vendors shouldn't have allowed Amazon to set up shop and steal their work.
Unrelated organizations coming in, soaking up all the profit, and not contributing back is horrible. "Open source" needs to be amended to prevent this.
Something like MAU, MRR, or market% seems like a healthy way to limit big time corporations from taking over.
Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with everything I have.
Matt, I mean this sincerely: get yourself checked out. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector in your house? You're behaving so manically that it's hard to come up with a reason for this sort of behaviour unless there's something medical going on. The barely-veiled threats to take down WordPress.org (did you forget Cloudflare offered to host it for free?) aren't a rallying cry, they're a last gasp. WordPress is your life's work, don't ruin your meaningful contributions to the world. Go to a 10 day silent retreat, or buy a ranch in Montana and host your own Burning Man... anything but this. You're making a bunch of anti-establishment nerds side with Private Equity, that's how bonkers your behaviour is.
Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. Co2 where I'm at is 572.
I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day. I have not threatened to take down WordPress.org. WPE's preservation requests do complicate things, legally, though, for the Slack and forums that W.org offers.
Both Cloudflare and Fastly have reached out offering CDN services to W.org, which we're considering. Cloudflare also serves a lot of WP Engine. We do like controlling our infrastructure, though, for a variety of reasons, and have run it without problems or downtime for 21 years. Currently the only outside vendor we use is Slack/Salesforce, which donates free Slack Pro accounts for 49k users. (I think that would cost ~5M/yr.) We also use some Github, which is free for open source.
You do realise just how guilty people sound when complaining about preservation requests for discovery during lawsuits?
If you're "right" and "on the side of good and freedom", what are you worried about in Slack/forums/whatever?
Because everything made public so far in their filing is pretty fucking bad (for you), I can only assume that discovery is gonna reveal some even worse behaviour on your part - or you'd have responded in public with some of that instead of whining about "preservation requests complicating thing"...
Yeah. I foresee a possible hilarious outcome here.
Matt wins this case, having the court determine the trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10 billion value.
The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars of assets between a non profit and a for profit company without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been involved with.
WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.
WPEngine isn't just one out of thousands of WP hosting companies. They're an absolute juggernaut dwarfing everyone else.
It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers. The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of the WordPress community does not even know that they exist.
I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, so licensing money wouldn’t be transferred to a non-profit foundation.
Yeah, but according to the filing, Matt had Automattic transfer the ownership of the trademarks to the foundation, they had the foundation grant the exclusive licence back to Automattic.
If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions, there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for both the ownership transfer and the licence grant agreement.
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.
And the WordPress Foundation isn't being sued either. So the trademark wouldn't be up for grabs either way. It's just a bunch of laymen LARPing lawyers.
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'm not going to engage with brand new accounts on this thread. It's nothing personal, but there are way too many of them posting here and it's too hard to distinguish sincere questions from sock puppets.
If you're legitimately new to HN, welcome! I hope to see you around engaging with other topics.
I don't think folks want you to provide those free services, is the thing. I think most folks want those housed inside a foundation that can seek industry support in the normal ways. A lot of people seem to have thought they already were.
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.
First, stop talking about this publicly for the love of god.
Second, consider that you may be going through a midlife crisis, and projecting it onto this issue as a struggle for your LIFE's work. This midlife transition and maturing is perfectly normal, its largely hormonal and psychological, and it provides a chance for a person to review his or her life, making some people properly do that and making some people react strongly by rejecting to do that. It does feel like you are doing the latter by identifying yourself with Wordpress and taking this incident as an assault on your persona.
You are not Wordpress. You are a person called Matt, who has infinite facets in him like any other person and like any other person, you just cant be simplified and described by any singular thing, including things like open source projects, like Wordpress. So stop identifying yourself with Wordpress and calling it your 'life's work'. You are just 40 years old for f*ck's sake. Based on the statistics today, your generation has another 50 to go.
Indeed, you have put a lot of time and effort into Wordpress and succeeded in making great positive change with much, much impact. This is great, it is a big success and all of us are grateful for it. But stop identifying yourself with it and projecting your persona onto it and entering into personal fights over it - for that is what this is starting to look like. You will keep existing as who you are with or without Wordpress. Hopefully, you will straighten things up and sort out this matter, learn a few things in the process and do even more contributions to Open Source and Wordpress.
But for now, just stop talking publicly about this, let your lawyers talk, and take some time to reflect on what is written above.
lmfao my dude stop acting like a pariah, it's pathetic. You 100% brought this on yourself. Never thought anyone could be so reckless when extorting people.
To go to Matt’s for profit entity, for his for profit entity to direct as they wish.
“I demand you give resources to your for profit competitor for them to use as they wish. And I’ll pretend to be wearing my non-profit, independent hat while demanding it.”
And they demanded full auditing while also making them agree to not fork GPL licensed software. No CEO with even the most basic of business educations would sign this agreement. It's a total farse, he's trying to shut the company down and either doing so for his own benefit or for the benefit of his buddies at Newfold or Blackrock.
The term sheet is here [0], the money option offered was only to Automattic. The other choice was 8% of developer time to WordPress itself, which is arguably under the control of the non-profit, but no one is quite sure at this point what the distinction between the two even is.
Given Mullenweg's behavior I wish WP Engines and their very capable litigation attorneys nothing but the best of luck, which I doubt very much they will need. Jeez, how to torch a brand's reputation.
Oh this is good info to know! I never had a desire to create an HN account but i've been using it more frequently since this whole thing started and finally made an account.
Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn’t follow what happened. The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me who know nothing about the case
Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on WordPress as a whole.
WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging comments.
In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP Engine customers from the theme and plugin repositories hosted at WordPress.org — which until recently people had believed to be under the control of the WordPress Foundation, but is actually under the personal control of Mullenweg.
Now this lawsuit has been filed.
Edit: Characters for the unaware:
Matt Mullenweg: The "top" person in WordPress in its various forms, including the non-profit WordPress Foundation, and the for-profit company Automattic (whichs runs the for-profit WordPress.com host, among other things).
- 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]
Yeah... I did this in a hurry (about 15min) before work, and HN doesn't allow edits after some time so let me complement the information.
AFAIU:
1/ The WordPress Foundation is a proper non-profit and has as mission guarantee the "open sourceness" and ensures all WordPress projects are under the GPL license.
2/ The Foundation holds the trademarks to WordPress, WordCamp, BuddyPress, WP-Cli and they define the rules of its usage.
This is relevant because part of this fight is related to WordPress licenses. Also because Matt is using both hats as CEO of Automattic and President of the Foundation to press WP Engine and this is why, as I understand, WP Engine is accusing Automattic of unfair competition.
Also the other action against WP Engine is related to the trademarks.
--
On your points:
> The Foundation doesn't actually manage anything though, does it?
It does have responsibilities about the open source licenses and holds the trademarks to WordPress, plus has a team that is paid by the Foundation to seek these interests as a non-profit.
> WordPress.org is managed and owned by Mullenweg personally
Not necessarily, he did start it and is the main director, but the Foundation serves WordPress and, in theory, as a non-profit could have a different director.
> 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.
>Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking plugin updates from WP Engine
Also someone who is late to the party, but the "breaking plugin updates from WP Engine" wording confuses me. From the wording in [6] it seems like WP Engine was using plugins hosted by wordpress.org, which all broke when wordpress.org blocked WP Engine's access to those plugins. Did I get that right?
Yeah... I did this in a hurry (about 15min) before work, and HN doesn't allow me to edit so let me rectify:
WP Engine is banned from accessing Wordpress.org assets, this way all WP Engine clients were unable to get updates for their plugins, posing a considerable security risk. WP Engine is working on a solution for their users, I don't know right now if this is solved.
This one irks me, it should be something done in phases, not just blocking the access overnight. Lots of websites are getting attacked in this crossfire, really irresponsible move.
I readily admit that I have no knowledge about WPE’s internal affairs and I have no animus against them.
That said a company above a certain size can have multiple issues that could cause a person to consider leaving; such as internal politicking, the private equity firm making management decisions that are distasteful, or even just a loss of the company’s original tight-knit community of employees turning into “another corporate entity”.
> One such company that relied on Defendants’ promises was WPE, founded in 2010. WPE is a true champion of WordPress, devoting its entire business to WordPress over other similar open source platforms. In reliance on Defendants’ many promises, WPE invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community—only to see the petulant whims of Mullenweg inflict harm to its business and the community that has embraced it.
Is lawsuit language usually so... dramatic? The tone of this document is weird...
Complaints usually are, yes. I'm not a lawyer, but each one I've read has been a bit over the top and it feels like they're written as much for public consumption as they are for the judge. Maybe it's with the jury in mind?
The jury doesn't usually read the complaint. However, a lot of the words you see as dramatic have specific legal meanings. In this case "relied on promises" is in the language of the tort he is suing over. I don't think the "true champion" sentence has a specific meaning, but it is definitely written to imply that WPE enhanced the value of the WordPress brand.
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.
Interesting. This might be the first one I've ever read. Makes sense though and that was the vibe I got from sections: that this is more like an opening statement in ways.
This whole situation is a negative sum game, everyone is going to come out worse off - Matt/WP/WP Engine, the project and all the end users. It's such a shame.
If there's a solid legal argument from either side, let dispassionate legal teams deal with it in a dignified manner.
As someone who defaults to wordpress as the bedrock of new projects, this instability is a massive turn off.
I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a separate issue.
Not a lawyer, it likely becomes an issue, because a) by Matt's own words wordpress.org is operated and maintained by Automattic employees and thus b) the blocking essentially leads to competitive disadvantage and a general conflict of interest.
But maybe there's also some law that can be leverage, that you can't just block one company, especially if it's some common good or so.
Not a lawyer, but I assume WP.org can ban whomever they like. Now, if they did it because WP.com asked them to, the non profit status becomes a question. Furthermore, WP hardcodes the URL for the resource, meaning you cannot self host the plugins even if you wanted.
In the real world, if you tell people X and insist that X is true, X becomes something of a binding promise on you. In this case X is "you can use the letters WP to imply WordPress in your branding."
There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
What I find crazy is we the people are taking sides and investing emotion into two corporations, neither of which have the best interests of their customers at heart. At the end of the day the only winner is who makes more money from this, we as users will continue to lose no matter the outcome. We have all become corporatists.
The complaint says Matt has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing. Is this a legal maneuver by Rachel Kassabian to have Matt lose the WordPress trademark?
Why is it sad? If he is self-dealing between wordpress.org and Automattic, that's a big no-no. It sure looks from his comments here like he sees the two as one entity.
Also, the man outright said "use 'WP' since we think 'WP' is generic" and then cried "brand confusion" years later. If you want to avoid brand confusion, maybe don't tell people they can use your trademark?
You make it sound like it's a black eye against Kassabian.
In fact, many people believe that absolutely, if he has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing his way into a $400M net worth, then absolutely he deserves to lose the license to that trademark.
I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, partly because they owned the trademark before the WP foundation was created.
100% in support of photomatt on this. Matt, many of your critics are speaking loudly but everyone still loves you for what you've given to the open source community. Hopefully the differences will be resolved.
> 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.
The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint, the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track, but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.
You can buy a lot of web hosting for $400M. And with everything here, it also seems like quite a deliberate and calculated move to make sure he personally maintains ownership of WP.org (or else why was it not transferred to the Foundation (also him) when all the trademark stuff was being done?)
The alleged extortion of the WP Engine CEO seems absolutely inexcusable regardless of what you think of the trademark dispute. Impossible to imagine a valid justification for telling someone you'll tattle to their investors and the press if they don't accept a job offer.
After some seriously bad experiences with them I hope WPEngine loses their shirt. WRT their headless tooling the advertising versus the reality is insane. They held one of our clients hostage asking for $10k/month, we left for Kinsta for low hundreds per month and have had nothing but performance improvements and great support. I frankly don't like WordPress at all and don't really care about this lawsuit, but was burned so bad by WPEngine I can't help but stop by and say bad things about them.
Same. Work hosts a bunch of client sites on WPEngine. We only ever had one problematic client who uploaded a heap of high bandwidth video and blew out their disk and bandwidth allocations by over 10x - WPEngine didn't cut them off, and worked with us/them to move their large media assets off the WP install (for reasons, the client went with AWS S3/CloudFront).
We know WPE aren't the cheapest way to host WP, but if a client argues about the difference between a $5/month GoDaddy hosting plan and the $20/month starter plan on WPE - that's a pretty good indicator that they're not a right fit client for us. We have a few smaller agencies we'll hand them over to who are a better fit for them.
If you ported an already working app then you missed out on the unmitigated disaster of Atlas Content Modeler, which was advertised as production ready but slowly became abandonware without them ever really acknowledging it. I hope you never need to consume your content via GraphQL, because they absolutely can't handle it at reasonable traffic loads.
Is it just me who took a double take at the very first name?
WPE called the heavy cavalry -- Rachel Kassabian from Quinn Emanuel? oh boy. Remember Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc which found thumbnail versions of copyrighted images for search engine purposes is fair use? That was originally against Google and she was Google's lead counsel.
It's hard to even imagine what a best-case scenario looks like for Matt at this point. Putting aside the matter of righteousness, his business is pretty much chalked for professional applications at this point. B2B partnerships are done - anyone with lawyers on-staff are going to get shoulder-tapped and asked to find another hosting solution. Smaller customers have all the more reason to bleed out to competitors, and the plugin/theme ecosystem is going to see the writing on the wall better than anyone else. Qui bono? Who is Matt "protecting" from harm, really?
I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here. On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would be a shockingly wasteful decision.
If it's any three things, it's about money, money, and money.
Zooming out a bit, Automattic acquired Tumblr and like all those before it seems to be choking on it.
Competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow and Shopify are all nipping at WordPress' marketshare.
I don't know what WordPress.com's stats look like, but blogging is out of sytle. New cool kids want the new black. That is to be social media influencers. Along the same lines, the WordPress Community is "aging out". Events online or off there's too little "youth" engaged and excited about the product.
In shoet, the pie isn't what it once was. Matt looked around the room, saw deep pockets (i.e., WP Engine) and made a go for it. That was a poor decision. Seeing himself as a cult leader who would get unwavering support from his cult (aka The WordPress Community) was another mistake. People are fatigued and enough them have stopped drinking his Kool Aid. There are pockets of support but certainly not what it used to be. Many WP people are anxious to move on from the Mattopoly.
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.
Work has about 25 clients who use WordPress. Not a single one of them "blogs". WordPress is a decent-enough CMS, all those clients are just running websites they can edit themselves. The big advantage of offering them WordPress if having a huge talent pool of people they can contract or employ who know how to publish using it, and a huge wealth of readily available tutorials and training material for them too learn how to do that themselves.
Do they have News that gets updated as the voice of the brand? That's a blog.
Do they have a portfolio of work that gets updated as the work of the brand? That's a blog.
What about case studies?
Any ongoing activity that's add to the site in a "social update" sort of way is effectively the blog.
That's been WP original idenity. As you noted, that's not a priority any more. Now tools like Shopify, WebFlow, etc *in the eyes of the market* have parity. And while Matt went all in on Gutenberg / Blocks there were already a number of page builders. Blocks is not gaining traction. It was a *horrible* product rollout.
So what's WP's and Automattic's identity now? Extortionist?? Certainly looks that way. Ugly but true.
Whatever else may be going on, your observations contain errors. Automattic has been on an insane revenue growth tear for years. WordPress install growth out in the wild has been flat for two years but not ticked down, when 43% of the Internet runs your software there are probably a lot of reasons it's hard to grow that number.
In general, companies in this vertical are not really hurting.
I'm pretty sure CNN and Reuters are actually on WPVIP, which is basically the enterprise version of .com and belongs to the same parent company as .com.
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.
Yup. There is a lack of faith in the leadership, and it's spreading. Still plenty of Kool Aid drinking, but far less fear about speaking out
People took time off and spent money to go to WordCamp US. MM used his keynote to shit on a prominent entity in the ecosystem. And entity many people know, use and love. There was no need to go nuclear at that event, using that keynote.
Either someone said "No Matt, this isn't a good time" and he ignored them. Or no one close to him stood up to say anything. Both of these scenarios are ugly.
I can hardly imagine anyone being in cult with WP. People use it because of the huge ecosystem around it and the accessible talent pool. One can hardly be impressed by the tech itself - in fact almost everyone thinks it sucks.
"What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that
very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands."
Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is gold. What a time to be alive.
Of these, the ones that are interesting are basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10.
The CFAA claim here is actually basically an extortion claim (plus other throwaway general claims) framed in CFAA terms.
See 18 U.S.C. § 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.
Yeah but at least they bother to plead the exceeding authorization portion.
I actually think they want more than just the trademark issue resolved.
I agree it is sort of the minimum they want resolved (but i flag it as non-interesting because i don't think they will have a lot of trouble winning unless there is something amazing in the response)
But i think they bothered to include the CFAA claim and unfair competition claim because losing access to those services worried them
(and because the unfair competition claim enables them to air a whole bunch of evidence of conflicts/etc in front of a jury when it would otherwise be irrelevant)
> Mullenweg failed to disclose this exclusive licensing arrangement between his nonprofit (the WordPress Foundation) and his for-profit (Automattic) in the WordPress
Foundation’s tax filings with the California government, claiming that there were no “contracts ... between [WordPress Foundation] and any officer, director or trustee ... or with an entity in which any such officer, director or trustee had any financial interest”.
It certainly sounds so, but I went looking for the source and I'm not sure what to look for besides the allegation itself. In particular, I did not find a date for that particular claim.
There are also several holes in adjacent statements - for example, ignoring the fact that the Foundation was "paid" in the form of being given the trademark in the first place. And the fact that trademarks can change value over time.
Is there any practical difference between transferring ownership of the trademark to Automattic vs. granting them an exclusive license that they're able to sublicense?
The only major difference I can think of would be that the license to A8C could be revocable. But that doesn't make any practical difference, especially since A8C / WPOrg have a hand-in-glove relationship.
Um this seems pretty horrendous (from a moral PoV, no idea about legal), at the time Mullenweg apparently said
> Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress
> Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related
> open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity,
> its name, is now fully independent from any company."
But then the complaint says:
> What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were
> publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private
> company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred
> irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that
very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants
> had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands."
Again, no idea about the legality of saying you've done one thing in public, but functionally ensuring that the actual result is the opposite, but morally that's pretty gross.
Also, I saw on X earlier today, someone posted that the agreement WP Engine was being asked to agree to included verbiage that WPE would not be allowed to fork WordPress. Is not forkability one of the keys to OSS? Shady.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
HN has reached a point where if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you will be treated worse than if you were simply doing bad stuff by default. WPEngine is not some mom and pop shop. The courts will decide whether WPEngine or Automattic is in the wrong here. But Automattic's contribution to Wordpress and the ecosystem simply dwarf WPEngine. Now for their crime of being champions of Open Source they will be judged in the eyes of HN.
This is like HN praising MSFT for all small things and bashing Google for doing strictly less evil stuff than whatever Microsoft does (Bing in China censored vs dragonfly, windows full of ads, Edge with tons of shady features, Azure with the worst security).
This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome, whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it.
It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few extra dollars. He knew going in that this would cost him a lot. He'll spend a ton on lawyers and courts, but he'll do it for reasons that some people cannot comprehend. I would fight to the death if someone threatened my child. Some may not even agree with on that.
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.
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