Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by nickff » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:13 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #101

photomatt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/ WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress. If you watch this stream…

If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion. The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, y…

>” If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.”

This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:13 AM UTC

metamichael wrote: post #311

lolinder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going to fight this with everything I have. Your chance to do that was before you threw a grenade into the WordPress ecosystem and injured hundreds of thousands of innocent WordPress developers over a {trademark|giving back|general bad vibes} dispute. No one here is buying your attempts to pawn responsibility for your actions off onto WP Engine. They may have legitimately been the bad guys until a month ago, but yo…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by curiousgal » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:16 AM UTC

photomatt wrote: post #52

DataDive wrote: post #20

That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg found out. Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.

Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with everything I have.

lmfao my dude stop acting like a pariah, it's pathetic. You 100% brought this on yourself. Never thought anyone could be so reckless when extorting people.

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

#354

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:18 AM UTC

safety1st wrote: post #277

tock wrote: post #255

It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825

Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by curiousgal » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:20 AM UTC

shabgzer wrote: post #288

I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort…

Yeah well in the real world circumstances are what matters. Something that may be benign is no longer so following his sad attempt at extorting them.

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

#356

Post by JimDabell » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:22 AM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #346

safety1st wrote: post #198

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…

> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.

> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.

This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions:

> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

— https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/

Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.

Making WordPress contact something other than api.wordpress.org requires altering the codebase. Making this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected:

> Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885

So according to Mullenweg:

- If WP Engine alters WordPress, even just to alter its configuration, they are “butchering” it.

- If WP Engine doesn’t alter WordPress and leaves it pointing at api.wordpress.org, they are unfairly using community resources.

– Huge numbers of people using api.wordpress.org is actually “great” and scales to tens of millions of servers.

As far as I can see, he doesn’t have a consistent position. He’s just grabbing hold of the nearest accusation that he thinks will harm WP Engine in the heat of the moment, regardless of what he has previously claimed or who else it hurts.

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

#357

Post by safety1st » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:25 AM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #346

safety1st wrote: post #198

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…

> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.

Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that customers didn't lose service. Matt chose to surprise them.

It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted.

Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.

I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did.

Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."

This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.

But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)

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

#358

Post by curiousgal » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:27 AM UTC

tock wrote: post #348

Also Matt, care to address this: https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c... I'm speechless.

Why would you be speechless? This is 100% on brand based on what I've been reading (ironically most of it written by him).

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

#359

Post by jamespo » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:29 AM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #356

mike_d wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.

> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers. This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions: > What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for i…

I don't understand why wp engine don't just maintain a fork

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

#360

Post by safety1st » Thu, Oct 03, 2024, 6:35 AM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #356

mike_d wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.

> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers. This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions: > What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for i…

> Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.

Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them.

Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.)

So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really.

BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.