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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

#171

Post by nottorp »

busterarm wrote: post #160
nottorp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen. So they weren't web sites but spam. What I'm curious about though is if your former workplace still exists or is now AI generating the spam...

Not spam at all. I just don't want to be so obvious about what the business was, even though I've mentioned it in the past. Think top 10 keywords space and spanning about 4-5 of them. It's the largest business in its space and a major national advertiser both digitally and traditionally. You have seen their ads on the street, on TV, on websites and on Youtube. Even internationally, you have seen their ads on TV. Big…

:) I don't watch TV and run ad blockers online, sorry.

When you're using terms like marketing, leads and content writers, it sounds like a content mill with zero substance. Even if it's "top 10 keywords".

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

#172

Post by vundercind »

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 need to add an image gallery”

“I need to add and edit multistep forms that send an email to me”

“I need to change one of our social media links”

That can be mostly or entirely self-serve for marketing folks on Wordpress, with all the work happening in their browser. Plus tons of other stuff.

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

bravetraveler wrote: post #157
akerl_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty likely that there’s communications internal to Automattic or the Wordpress Foundation where they talked about their objectives and plans, assuming the details in the claim are accurate. That’s what they’re talking about preserving.

I can see that, I'm saying it's superfluous

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by nottorp »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #110
nottorp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen. So they weren't web sites but spam. What I'm curious about though is if your former workplace still exists or is now AI generating the spam...

That’s pretty unfair. Most of the work I do can be considered “marketing” since it’s corporate sites and portfolios. Businesses need to have an online presence of some sort and someone has to create one for them. Not everything is SEO spam.

> it’s corporate sites and portfolios

Oh wait. You used "corporate sites and portofolios". The OP used the generic "content" though. There's a difference.

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

#175

Post by slouch »

chuckadams wrote: post #165
mintplant wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, the extortion is the most serious allegation, but WPE isn't providing a lot of background in terms of what and how much Mullenweg was demanding, only texts that came well after the demand was made. My guess is if there's a really damning email, WPE's lawyers served them a legal hold privately rather than make it public. Alexa, order ten cases of popcorn...

Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/comment/...

He posted this after receiving the C&D.

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

#176

Post by x0x0 »

philistine wrote: post #51
Aloha wrote: post #13

Disclaimer WP Engine Customer - I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece. I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself. I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they…

Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off, as Automattic offers.

They offered many features that wordpress.com copied (staging sites with one-button cloning; easy backup and restores; automated updates of php and wp code; tweaks to prevent security issues; automatic cdn) and others like serious engineers answering support tickets to help you sort out whatever fragile, insecure wordpress crap your marketing team, or their wordpress contractors, installed on your site.

We shouldn't overrate a lot of those features, because I think they were pretty obvious things to want. But WPEngine was, afaik, the first to market with all of the above in a pretty-cheap and seamless package.

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

#177

Post by slouch »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #162
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…

Maybe my view into the Wordpress community (mostly via Twitter) isn't representative, but it does not seem like WPE represents the community's views from what I'm seeing.

Take a look at the votes on Matt's reddit comments https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/

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

#178

Post by x0x0 »

_hmry wrote: post #17
CPLX wrote: post #7

Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive. Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.

There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406

Seems unlikely though? Matt wrote a post on the web, ie he had unlimited length available to him. If the dispute is over employee contributions, then he should have made that the focus of his complaint.

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

#179

Post by gnu8 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #35
bsder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato. The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime." Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely d…

Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it. I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT s…

> He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I would quit the moment I was spoken to in that way, if not sooner.

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

#180

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").

This is the big one to me, actually. If Matt used the announcement feature in the WP.org codebase to place an announcement in WPEngine customers consoles telling them they should not support WPEngine, but instead his for-profit competitor, WP.com, it's pretty hard to argue that that is anything but tortious interference.

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