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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

#41
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…

I assume the real goal here is to have the letter exist and be public, as a counterpoint in customer conversations.

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

#42
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato. The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime." Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely d…

Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it. 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 s…

This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.

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

#43
post #20

Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text messages are so much worse.

It's not uncommon for a license being required to use a registered trademark. WPE denies they need one. Matt apparently disagrees.

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

#44
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 down within a few weeks, and a few years from now, this will be seen as a pivotal moment enabling WPE to dominate Wordpress.com. Matt could not have played this worse.

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

#45
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…

The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have a chance of winning such an argument). If Automattic was purely producing open source software with no vested interest in profit, that would be a different story perhaps.

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

#47
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you taken a look at wpengine.com? The name WordPress is everywhere with them declaring they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider" and that "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". The WP Engine C&D insists they're allowed to use 'WP' (as you echo) but the dispute could be partly related to this broader marketing, which possi…

WordPress’s own trademark policy states: > For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering WordPress consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The WordPress Consulting Company.” Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.” If…

> Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense

It probably isn't you.

There is a short timeout of a few minutes on the Reply link in a thread. I think this to discourage hasty and unthoughtful arguments.

But if you click the timestamp on the comment, it takes you a page where you can reply immediately.

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

#48
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

I'd love to get your feedback on https://hub.scroll.pub/. Create new sites in 0.1 seconds. No signup required.

It's a new stack, but it's pretty revolutionary foundation, and as we get some good templates and imrpove the UX, I think it should bring a lot of joy to people who currently suffer with wordpress. It's all open source/public domain. Having started my programming career in Wordpress ~17 years ago, I have been able to take my favorite parts from it and get rid of all the annoying parts (like requiring a database, php/javascript hybrid, etc).

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

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that marketing wants a website that ... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress. Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.

No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions without IT involvement for obvious security and stability reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job and why the dept exists.

Those concerns are kinda the raison d'être for WPEngine.

For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department, or so large and where the IT department has effectively become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let them do their thing.

I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized businesses do not have an IT department, and also that there are people and departments in their own organisations who's IT needs are real but are not considered a priority by the IT Department.

(Often understandably not the IT departments priority, the people in a bank IT department who're securing financial systems from continuous attacks almost certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_ frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things" they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)

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

#50
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 static typing background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is very good business.

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