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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

#71

Post by tptacek »

bastawhiz wrote: post #45
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…

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…

"Abuse of position" is not generally an actionable claim.

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

#72

Post by stvltvs »

theyknowitsxmas wrote: post #33
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

Yeah I run wp2static on clients, cancel the hosting then push the files to vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages. 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.

There are other plugins that generate static sites. Not sure if they would work for your use case, but worth looking into if you haven't.

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

#73

Post by theyknowitsxmas »

stvltvs wrote: post #72
theyknowitsxmas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I run wp2static on clients, cancel the hosting then push the files to vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages. 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.

There are other plugins that generate static sites. Not sure if they would work for your use case, but worth looking into if you haven't.

Must clarify: not wp2static, but a random plugin breaking on php upgrade, sometimes requiring a subscription in new versions.

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

#74

Post by ufmace »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #8
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

I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress. For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish? PHP and Apache come up a lot too.

I run my own Wordpress server for a blog, and IMO it's basically fine if you use reasonable deployment management practices and don't install 500 random crap plugins and themes. The basic install is about as bulletproof as it gets in the mainstream web software business.

I don't particularly love PHP, but you don't need to touch it if you don't try to write any plugins. Yes, some of its practices are pretty wacky, like every plugin has full access to the filesystem and database to do basically anything, and the system expects to be able to update code files in place from web requests, but meh, just give it it's own $5 server and let it do its thing, and definitely be very careful which plugins you use and how you get them.

What you get in return for this is a perfectly fine CMS that anyone with basic computer skills can run. Yeah, static site generators are cool and all that from a tech expert's perspective, but nobody who isn't a tech expert can actually do anything with them, and oh, by the way, the ability to make any changes at all typically involves at the very least SSH access to the host server with full write permissions.

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

#76

Post by seydor »

This reads more like a blog post than a cease and desist. Why do they take so long to get to the point of their demands. Matt is entitled to have opinions , and they should stick to the opinions they find unlawful instead of rambling on about everything he said

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

#77

Post by patmcc »

mrwyz wrote: post #69
jmull wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The policy says, ...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.” It sounds like "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond" would be allowed.

To me, it seems they have been using the mark to describe a product and the policy says clearly: > but they cannot use them as part of a product I mean, just go to wpengine.com and look at the first menu item: Products --> WordPress Hosting.

>>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services

I think the policy is somewhat vague on this; does 'Wordpress Hosting' refer to and explain the offered service? Clearly. Is 'Wordpress Hosting' a "product" WP Engine is selling? Kind of, yah?

My understanding of trademark is also that "we've been doing this for ages and you didn't say anything" is a pretty solid defense, and "Wordpress Hosting" is about the most generic hosting service offered on the internet at this point, everyone and their dog offers it.

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

#78

Post by sureIy »

mrwyz wrote: post #58

I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

You’re making no sense. Those words are just marketing, they’re not shitting on Automattic like Automattic is doing.

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

#79

Post by busterarm »

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

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 still had our content editors write markdown in WordPress because it was easier to do that and pull all of the content from the database on deploy than train them.

The absolute worst part of being a WP Engine customer was being on Linode and the yearly Christmas Eve DDOS.

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

#80

Post by Spivak »

This is a pretty bad look for Matt, it comes off as yet another CEO who's mad that there's no first-party advantage to hosting OSS. Thanks to the GPL and no CLA he can't take it proprietary like others before him. When you're mad at someone for using their freedom-to-run and freedom-to-modify it doesn't come off as pro-OSS as you think.

Weaponizing the trademark that's more strongly associated with the software itself than the company Wordpress is a pretty low blow. WP Engine is hosting Wordpress, full-stop. There's maybe a discussion to have about when modifications constitute a fork that warrants a different name but we're about as far away from that as you can be.

I honestly don't know why Matt cares. His competitor is owned by PE, just wait for them to eat the business and offer a one-click migration. Play the long game.

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