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WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

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Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#141

Post by justinclift »

camgunz wrote: post #132
bastawhiz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have…

Isn't this completely fine? If you and I both make aspirin, but we both put a little something extra in it (me vanilla, you salt) and I put banners on my web page saying "bastawhiz's salty aspirin puts the ass in aspirin", doesn't this just seem like typical rivalry? My point here is that defamation is defamation no matter the scale. I think scale is relevant re: damages, but not as to whether or not rivalry escalate…

Nah. Putting disparaging claims directly on the dashboard of my customers seems pretty abusive, and if it happened to me I'd be looking at legal options too.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#142

Post by mrkramer »

markx2 wrote: post #138
mrkramer wrote: post #136

Automattic invested in WP Engine in the early days, why didn't they acquire it, or WP Engine didn't want to sell. But why did Matt choose the open source license that he chose, it seems like that at the end of the day he only cares for money and not the WordPress community.

The fact that he wants money for Automattic suggests that Automattic are now hurting financially in some way.

They are both "hurt" financially but that's the competition which is normal and which should drive more innovation and lower the prices for customers.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#143

Post by torginus »

I'm just confused about the whole thing. Aren't WP hosts a dime a dozen? And if you don't like how they conduct their business, just set up one yourself. I set up one for a friend on AWS, and while it requires some tech savvy, it's not exactly hard for someone with basic tech literacy and ability to follow instructions.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#144

Post by mintplant »

tptacek wrote: post #39

I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for. I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue). The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards th…

People in this thread seem to be focused on the defamation angle, but is the more important allegation not the alleged demand for large amounts of money to not destroy WP Engine's business? Matt sounds like a wannabe mob boss in the screencapped texts, sending photos of the crowd before his keynote and talking about how he could still "very easily" make it just a Q&A session if WP Engine agrees to pay up.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#145

Post by aimazon »

onli wrote: post #124
aimazon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt is predictable. WPE wrote this letter for the community. They knew Matt would throw a fit and they would be able to take the high ground while also releasing an assassination of Matt’s character. The Wordpress community doesn’t care about Wordpress.com, Matt just blew what little credibility he had left. Worthless as a legal letter, brilliant as a response for the Wordpress community. Matt will inevitably step d…

Matt has no reason to step down. He will explain where the monetary claim is coming from - probably the development time promised and not delivered, or the use of the trademark - and then you have two competing narratives. One by the Foss software maker, one by a big enterprise. Why would a relevant part believe wp engine? And even if, how would that harm internal automattic structures in a way that he loses control?…

Automattic benefits greatly from their close relationship to Wordpress. Using the power they have to threaten a commercial competitor that has a good reputation in the community will push the Wordpress community to reevaluate that relationship. The contributions Automattic makes to Wordpress are valuable but valuable contributions do not excuse bad behaviour. Souring the relationship between Automattic and Wordpress is a major blunder, which Matt will be responsible for. If Automattic lose their preferential treatment and are forced to compete with WPE based only on service then they will be crushed because Automattic’s offerings are not as good — there’s a reason Matt is so sensitive about WPE. Automattic are just as dependent on venture capital as WPE, even more so because of how their business has been losing focus. Automattic’s value is based on its relationship with Wordpress, whereas WPE’s is entirely based on the service. Matt is threatening Automattic’s most valuable asset, removing him may be seen as the only option to rescue the relationship.

As an aside, people don’t usually act like this when things are going good. Perhaps Matt is lashing out because of pressure he is already under.

edit: and to close the loop, Matt is demanding benevolence from WPE that Automattic themselves don’t engage in. Automattic own the Wordpress.com domain and promote their hosting service through Wordpress.org (which causes the exact confusion Matt accuses WPE of benefiting from). The money Automattic spend on supporting Wordpress project is not a donation, it’s quid pro quo. Would WPE pay $10m a year to own all that? Of course, any rational company in the space would… but that’s not what Matt is offering.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#146

Post by joenot443 »

theyknowitsxmas wrote: post #86
anonzzzies wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.

Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as a CMS.

I think your question answers itself if you look from the perspective of a non-technical marketing person who's used to WYSIWYG tools, rather than a programmer who's reading a site called Hacker News.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#147

Post by __jonas »

bastawhiz wrote: post #45
tptacek wrote: post #39

I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for. I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue). The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards th…

The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have…

Sorry could you expand on this, how can they "put a banner in [...] WordPress instances hosted by WPE"?

I was under the assumption that WordPress is OSS, and WPEngine is running this software on their platform, so there was an update to this software, contributed by Automattic developers which included a banner denouncing WPE, and the WPE people decided to just deploy that update to their platform?

I don't think that means they "put the banner on their instance" does it? If they are unhappy with the management of the open source software they are using on their platform they presumably could fork it, or decide to not deploy the version that includes this banner, no?

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#148

Post by bravetraveler »

tptacek wrote: post #39

I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for. I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue). The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards th…

There is simply no need to preserve documents given how public this was. If pressed the grievance can be corroborated externally.

The letter in entirety is a warning of potential legal action. That is the next action if the other party neither ceases or desists.

Maybe this is normal, but we're glorified animals trying to find justice out of a made up process. It's arbitrary, hence arbitration. Not a lawyer either. You probably know more terminology than I do; I just deal with them a lot :/

edit: I think it's a little strange to be placing judgements at this stage. We'll hear the facts if this goes to court. There's enough to know several are upset. Another consideration: by placing the numbers you're kind of trying to make their argument. Why? Let them.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#149

Post by pluc »

__jonas wrote: post #147
bastawhiz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have…

Sorry could you expand on this, how can they "put a banner in [...] WordPress instances hosted by WPE"? I was under the assumption that WordPress is OSS, and WPEngine is running this software on their platform, so there was an update to this software, contributed by Automattic developers which included a banner denouncing WPE, and the WPE people decided to just deploy that update to their platform? I don't think that…

There's a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his rant, making it show up everywhere.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#150

Post by mk89 »

When I read the title I was wondering "strange, wasn't Automattic the company behind wordpress? Who knows maybe they split and now they sued them for XYZ". Crazy.

Instead of going through all this, can't Automattic do like what most companies are doing now? Dual License (e.g., Redis, etc).

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