Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wpengine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 717 posts

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

#621

Post by joshmanders »

vasco wrote: post #370
pensatoio wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/ > 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 s…

Yo real talk, big props to Primeagen for not calling and harassing Heather despite Matt giving him her number completely unprompted.

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

#622

Post by camgunz »

tky wrote: post #605
camgunz wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#623

Post by barryrandall »

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

A taker sued a maker for calling out their taking, and the maker cut the taker off from free services they were providing.

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

#624

Post by ceejayoz »

camgunz wrote: post #618
ceejayoz wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He wrote a whole blog post about it: they disable history.

So can WordPress Core. It's an explicit option:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross revenue.

What other unspoken rules are there lurking behind "don't turn off revision tracking"?

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

#625

Post by ceejayoz »

camgunz wrote: post #620
ceejayoz wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't every protection racket start with a first victim/customer?

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,…

> 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.

It, at the very least, provides evidence you're into chickens.

Demanding 8% of a single competitor's revenue does a similar thing.

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

#626

Post by johnchristopher »

dncornholio wrote: post #388
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…

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.

Is there a list of wordpres plugins WPEngine actively maintain ?

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

#627

Post by ValentineC »

phonon wrote: post #619
ValentineC wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. 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. Th…

The man himself goes into copious detail otherwise! "We could not get wordpress.org being part of the foundation approved by the IRS." https://youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU?t=342

I think if we're being pedantic about this, we can agree that WordPress.org itself is not a 501(c)(3) entity or similar, or run under such an entity.

Automattic's legal team somehow considers it a non-profit though.

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

#628

Post by johnchristopher »

aimazon wrote: post #479
biccboii wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't. They contribute 40 hours a week.

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 incl…

> https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/reflecting-on-two-...

Oh, I remember now. I was wondering why ACF didn't become part of the core.

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

#629

Post by evanelias »

bwb wrote: post #466
amanzi wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 woul…

> 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.

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

#630

Post by lambda-dev »

joshmanders wrote: post #621
vasco wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/ > 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 s…

Yo real talk, big props to Primeagen for not calling and harassing Heather despite Matt giving him her number completely unprompted.

Or maybe not. From the PDF:

> 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.

Post reply on HN