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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

#161

Post by Matticus_Rex »

chrisandchris wrote: post #139
malermeister wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sell my aspirin in your shop, you will have to accept what I put on the packaging or stop carrying my product.

That's true, but does not apply to this situation. Automattic is not the owner of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation is. Even though many employees of Automattic work (maybe full-time) on WordPress [1]. So I sell your aspirin in my shop, and a friend of yours helped you package your aspirins and while doing that put some stickers onto your aspirin. [1] https://www.df.eu/blog/wer-steckt-hinter-wordpress-ueber-die...…

Does WPF take issue with this operational decision by Automattic? If so, they have the avenues to deal with it, and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF. I seems more like this, from my understanding:

You sell a brand of aspirin in your shop. The brand has outsourced most of the production and decision-making to another company. That company puts messages on the bottle. If those messages bother me, I can bring it up with the brand and see if they'll address it, or stop carrying the brand, but the question of whether they've overstepped is for the brand owners rather than me.

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

#162

Post by Matticus_Rex »

aimazon wrote: post #44
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…

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.

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

#163

Post by busterarm »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #109
busterarm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's on the customers. I used to work at a shop that used WP and it was a huge force multiplier. We were WP Engine customers and at some point we moved to Pantheon.io and then we moved to a static site with an internal-only WP frontend for content editors. We had 2 developers, a PM, 20-30 content writers and $5B ARR. Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen. Even when we switched to building a static site, we s…

> That's on the customers No that’s on the various design agencies that sell “custom websites” and instead they just slap together a 59$ theme and a dozen plug-ins. Most customers don’t know shit about the web and they just trust the agency to do a professional job. And in my 10+ years of experience as a freelancer I’ve seen plenty of agencies taking advantage of clients.

Supply and demand.

These businesses exist and operate the way they do because of customer desires. The customers could hire better agencies but for a number of reasons don't.

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

#164

Post by jarito »

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?…

8% of revenue in perpetuity seems like a licensing deal, not payment for services. WP is arguing that they don't need a license deal to deliver their service which seems to be true? Therefore, the 8% just seems like a shakedown to get money - good old blackmail.

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

#165

Post by chuckadams »

mintplant wrote: post #144
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.

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...

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

#166

Post by mmarian »

anonzzzies wrote: post #50
firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

> as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL me neither but it pays; when we get called, bad things already happened, so it's always an emergency which means we can ask for 400-500$/hr to fix it. And there are so many bad wp sites that we can retire on that alone. But let me tell you about OpenCart, Drupal, etc which also are all lovely targets and more niche so higher hourlies! As someone with a formal verification and…

Any recommendations on how you can find that kind of work? I'd personally enjoy it, but I don't know how to break into it without working as a WP dev at an unsustainably-low wage.

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

#167

Post by trvr »

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.

Where does it say that the money he is asking them to contribute would go to Automattic?

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

#168

Post by akerl_ »

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

Why?

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

#169

Post by BobaFloutist »

Kye wrote: post #155
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.

Agreed. I'm confused by a lot of the discourse in this thread. The extortion seems like the important thing. I would think (paraphrasing) "I'm going to destroy your business if you don't pay me" is extortion regardless of the merits of the claims used in carrying out the threat.

I mean if a business if built on top of your business, is it actually illegal to say "Pay me if you want continued access?" Is it the wording that makes it illegal?

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

#170

Post by Kye »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #169
Kye wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm confused by a lot of the discourse in this thread. The extortion seems like the important thing. I would think (paraphrasing) "I'm going to destroy your business if you don't pay me" is extortion regardless of the merits of the claims used in carrying out the threat.

I mean if a business if built on top of your business, is it actually illegal to say "Pay me if you want continued access?" Is it the wording that makes it illegal?

Who built what business on whose business? It's not clear what you're referring to.
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