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

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571–580 of 717 posts

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

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accurate if by landlord you mean "the person in whose house you have been squatting without paying rent or signing a lease."

Actually, it's the person who signed a contract with me to give me a free house.

Not a lawyer, but I think contracts require consideration to be enforceable.

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

#572
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

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

#573
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you think there are cases where the public perception of the conflict is more important than the outcome of the lawsuit?

Sure. 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 examp…

thank you for your thoughtful and humble response. i'll have to think about it

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

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#575

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…

I have not heard of anyone being turned off from using WordPress from this. That does not mean it does/has not happened, I am sure some folks got mad. It is a stupid hissyfit and some bad judgments. People make mistakes. There are far better purely technical / code issues to turn people away from WordPress, but WordPress is spectacularly popular.

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.

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

#577

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 ho…

>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?

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

#578

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.

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?

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 PH…

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

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be unsurprising if someone who named a company after themselves turned out to be a narcissist who couldn’t help themselves. https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/

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.

King Gilette
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