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Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

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Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#441

Post by eXpl0it3r »

shabgzer wrote: post #288

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…

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.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#442

Post by senadir »

duskwuff wrote: post #182
rideontime wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A8C is still a for-profit company, if it's sold in the future, and the new owners aren't behaving correctly, the trademark can be revoked.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#443

Post by chiefalchemist »

pier25 wrote: post #35
chiefalchemist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Alo…

> blogging is out of sytle OTOH maybe the majority of WP users are not blogging. It's anecdotal but I know about a dozen WP users first-hand (and maintain a couple of those installations) and none of them use it for blogging. It's mostly for marketing websites and shops with WooCommerce.

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.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#444

Post by robjwells »

dgellow wrote: post #392

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).

WP Engine: A separate for-profit WordPress host.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#445

Post by delfinom »

remoroid wrote: post #424
safety1st wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#446

Post by arielcostas »

mike_d wrote: post #346
safety1st wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

> 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.

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.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#447

Post by jeanlucas »

dgellow wrote: post #392

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

Long post, writing this for myself as well:

The players

- WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011;

- WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010 with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director;

- Automattic is a private company that owns and runs WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles Mullenweg;

- WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that makes money by hosting WordPress since 2010;

- WP Engine and Wordpress.com are direct competitors;

- WordCamp is a conference run by volunteers that happens regularly, this year it happened between 17-24 of September

--

What happened, afaik:

- Sept 23: Matt calls WP Engine "the cancer of WordPress" on his blog [1][2][3] and says that it profits from the open source without contributing enough

- Sept 24: WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic to “retract false, harmful, and disparaging statements”, after Matt Mullenweg called it a “cancer” [4]

- Sept 25: Automattic sends a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, alleging unauthorized use of the WordPress trademark [5] and I quote "If you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine."

- Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking plugin updates from WP Engine

- Same day: Matt on his personal blog says Automattic has "been attempting to make a licensing deal" with WP Engine "for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along" [7] and doubles down that this is about WP Engine's disrespecting WordPress trademarks

- Oct 1st: Automattic made public [8][9] a seven-year agreement proposed to WP Engine in exchange for 8% of their revenue, the document has the sign date of Sept 20 (during WordCamp?) that could be paid in royalties and/or employees to contribute to WordPress.org; the document also states no forking of WordPress allowed

- Oct 2nd (you are here): WP Engine sues Automattic AND Matt, Matt is here on this thread generating more evidence against himself in the comments [10]; the document has tweets, conversations, everything... And if it goes to a public trial more dirt will come up for sure;

--

Extra facts (not necessarily related)

- Automattic has invested on WP Engine in 2011 [11]

- Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019 for 3MM USD [12], and in Aug this year announced it was moving it to WordPress [13]

- Drupal creator gives some insight on this feud and how Drupal deals with that [14]

[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912

[5] https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-...

[6] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

[7] https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/

[8] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656

[11] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-series-a-...

[12] Auttomatic + Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tum...

[13] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blog...

[14] https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#448

Post by chippiewill »

stephenr wrote: post #397
safety1st wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#449

Post by paulryanrogers »

luckylion wrote: post #405
fhfhfhjfnfnfmf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were considering Wordpress for a "large enterprise CMS", you shouldn't be making those kinds of decisions.

Why?

Re: Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

#450

Post by angoragoats »

photomatt wrote: post #170
notamy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am stunned that you're still posting publicly and aggressively about all of this. How have your lawyers okayed any of this?

Yes.

“_How_ have your lawyers okayed any of this?”

“Yes.”

He’s not actually reading the questions you ask, folks.

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