WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

A PHP version is vulnerable. If you upgrade it, some plugin breaks. If you manually upgrade the offending plugin, the pesky developer now wants a subscription. Just a nono. I build on Hugo.

I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."

I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.

The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.

I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.

The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.

I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."

He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.

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 the middle where they describe Mullenweg's keynote speech. It makes, according to WPE, these claims (numbers mine):

1. Claiming that WP Engine is a company that just wants to “feed off” of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back.

2. Suggesting that WP Engine employees may be fired for speaking up, supporting Mr. Mullenweg, or supporting WordPress, and offering to provide support in finding them new jobs if that were to occur.

3. Stating that every WP Engine customer should watch his speech and then not renew their contracts with WP Engine when those contracts are up for renewal.

4. Claiming that if current WP Engine customers switch to a different host they “might get faster performance.”

5. Alleging that WP Engine is “misus[ing] the trademark” including by using “WP” in its name.

6. Claiming that WP Engine’s investor doesn’t “give a dang” about Open Source ideals.

Under a US defamation analysis, claims (1), (3), and (6) appear to be statements of opinion. Statements of opinion, even when persuasively worded and authoritative, are generally not actionable as defamation. It might depend on the wording; in corner cases, an opinion can be actionable if it directly implies a conclusion made from facts known to the speaker and not disclosed to the audience --- but the facts involved have to be specific, you can't just imagine that I've implied I have secret facts (or my audience expects me to) because I'm Matt Mullenweg.

Claim (4) seems like it's probably just a fact? Is WPE assuredly the fastest possible provider at any given price point? The "might" also seems pretty important there.

That leaves (5) the allegation about the trademark dispute, which doesn't sound like an especially promising avenue for a lawsuit, but who knows? and (2) the bit about employee and former employee reprisals. The thing about (2) is if there's a single example of a disgruntled WPE employee who thinks they missed a promotion because they stuck up for the WordPress Foundation or whatever, WPE might have a hard time using that claim.

You'd think that before WordPress/Automattic started directly demanding funds from the board of WPE, they probably had some kind of counsel review this stuff and figure out what they could and couldn't safely say?

Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").

This is one of those times where I'm saying a lot of stuff in the hopes that someone much more knowledgeable will set me straight. :)