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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

#261

Post by busterarm »

andruby wrote: post #193
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…

> 2 developers, a PM, 20-30 content writers and $5B ARR Please tell me that these 30 people weren't the full company generating $5B in annually recurring revenue?

No we had an army of call center folks, case managers, etc. But given the nature of the business there is no sales, only marketing generating revenue.

Basically, no our marketing team didn't turn the coal into diamonds, but obtaining the coal was our team's primary function and 100% our output. We spent several hundred million annually on advertising (roughly the GDP of Tonga!).

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

#262

Post by arp242 »

mthoms wrote: post #260
arp242 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt's message reads: > They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above. So they could have "paid" by just hiring a few WordPress devs to work on it. That is: not necessarily by transferring dollars to Automattic. IMHO this is an important bit of nuance missing in…

Right. But who gatekeeps the project focus, direction and spending? Automattic does. This would be a different conversation if there was an independent and accountable foundation driving things.

They do the majority of the work, so they get to decide. That's how it works everywhere. If WP Engine wants to decide they should invest the same 4,000 hours/week.

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

#263

Post by jaredthirsk »

keane wrote: post #217
ptx wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then let's say someone renamed their CNET site FFXSource. This is addressed on page 5, where they quote the trademark policy[0], which until a few days ago said: "The abbreviation 'WP' is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit". The current policy[1] has since been modified to specifically mention WP Engine and make seemingly irrelevant accusations towards them, bu…

That is what they did, their actual current advertising includes: "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider", "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". They also have service plans on offer explicitly branded by them Core WordPress, Essential WordPress and Enterprise WordPress.

If they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", that implies there is more than one platform. That implies that none of them are first party WordPress. So I don't buy that. (Regarding their plans, I think they would be safer to put the word 'Plan' at the end of their plan names.)

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

#264

Post by _smfg »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #119
riffic wrote: post #75

in the court of public opinion I think I know who I'm going to side with.

I'm going to side with chaos: let both fail, let new products come up.

same tbh I'm so sick of Wordpress and I don't like how complex SSGs can be

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

#265

Post by Matticus_Rex »

mthoms wrote: post #208
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's the thing. Guess who is the head of the WordPress Foundation? Matt Mullenweg. CEO of Automattic. Now guess who The WordPress Foundation granted sole rights to sub-license their trademarks? You guessed it. Automattic. Yeah, it gets worse the more you look at it.

How does that look worse?

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

#266

Post by Matticus_Rex »

FireBeyond wrote: post #182
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and they're the party who can claim to be aggrieved, if it violates some duty Automattic has to WPF Tortious interference - where one party (Automattic) interferes with a contractual relationship between two parties (WPengine, their customers), in this case by means of disparagement pushed to the dashboard of WPengine instances.

Tortious interference requires that the interfering party induce the party to the contract to a breach of the contract. Where's that element?

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

#267

Post by echoangle »

mrwyz wrote: post #248
echoangle wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I’ll be ready to watch the lawsuit for trademark infringement then. Except there won’t be one because there’s no chance that’s trademark infringement. All the statements on the website of WP engine (as I currently see it of course) don’t imply any affiliation with the Wordpress trademark owners and are pretty factual. Do you have some more explicit reasoning for statements on the website that you find infringing…

Exhibit B, C: https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-... Put some money on those 0% odds.

Let’s see how it goes. I still can’t imagine that Automattic would win a suite, but maybe WP engine complies with the Cease and desist.

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

#268

Post by terrycody »

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…

Wp engine is not cheap at all, instead its expensive, my websites hosted on Namecheap for years, and never touched even 1 second, and everything is stable, the price? I would tell you, around $45 per year hosting price for 3 sites...

You definitely were ripped off.

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

#269

Post by 3np »

deepfriedchokes wrote: post #250
slouch wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this guy is having some sort of legit mental health crisis.

The "next week means 'no'" really stands out.

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

#270

Post by keane »

mthoms wrote: post #259
keane wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automattic originally registered the trademark WordPress. They donated it to the WordPress Foundation while retaining a commercial license to the marks. https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/

Some important nuance is lost here. Matt Mullenweg transferred the trademark to the WordPress Foundation (which he is head of) and the foundation (again... Matt himself) in turn granted Automattic the exclusive ability to sub-license the name commercially . This is the important bit. What this means is that any "licensing fee" would be paid to Matt's private, for-profit, VC-backed company (and direct competitor to WP…

The trademark policy sounds like it falls somewhere between the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation model and the Red Hat/Fedora Project model. This is how open source in practice works.
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