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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

#81

Post by sureIy »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #9
CPLX wrote: post #7

Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive. Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.

It’s kind of perverse of Matt considering: A. He accuses “WP Engine” for being confusing branding. He literally owns WordPress.com; which confuses tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. (“Are you on the WordPress login page?” “I swear that I am!”) B. He complains about the post revisions not being limitless. But until recently, WordPress.com had a limit of 25. C. If post revisions matter, surely plugins matter…

You hit the nail on the head. Who knows what put a chili up his, but this debacle has started out of nowhere and he’s not the good party here.

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

#82

Post by ufmace »

_hmry wrote: post #17
CPLX wrote: post #7

Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive. Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.

There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406

That, and the whole thing about Matt M going on a scathing rant about how bad WPEngine supposedly is[0], supposedly because they don't support WP page revision control as well as he'd like. Seems a bit over-the-top and breathless to me.

I figure the whole thing is a corporate whine-fest over who makes more money from actually hosting Wordpress sites.

[0] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/

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

#83

Post by joe_g_young »

smt88 wrote: post #65
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server. Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.

I think your response can be said of any application made before now.

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

#84

Post by bawolff »

jmull wrote: post #67
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/

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.

Not to mention, wouldn't this be allowed generally? Like you are allowed to use trademarks if it is the correct description of the products you sell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

[Ianal]

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

#85

Post by bsder »

bigiain wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: 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…

> 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.

> Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue

Please reread. I said the website brought zero revenue.

The website for our company never broke 5 digits in total views. I could almost precisely correlate who was looking at our website with who marketing was currently talking to. Scaling was useless. Dynamism was useless. etc.

All resource spent on the website was worse than useless as it took marketing away from doing anything else which would could result in revenue.

A lot of businesses are in the same boat where the website brings in zero revenue. A static website would be more than good enough but somebody in mangement chain has a "Must Keep Up With The Joneses" streak. And then you wind up on WordPress.

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

#86

Post by theyknowitsxmas »

anonzzzies wrote: post #55
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.

Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.

Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as a CMS.

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

#87

Post by bongodongobob »

bigiain wrote: post #49
bongodongobob wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'll just ignore the "IT pushback comments", as if we don't have real actual reasons for pushing back against the stupid shit people with no experience think is a good idea.

The main problem, security aside, is when shit goes south (and it will at some point), IT will be asked to handle something they didn't set up, don't know anything about, and will be looked down upon when they can't get it working quickly.

As long as there is ownership of any problems by whomever set it up, yeah, go nuts, but experience also tells me that's never how it works.

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

#88

Post by uudecoded »

tptacek wrote: post #71
bastawhiz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Generally, but also especially when the position is "WordPress".

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

#89

Post by bongodongobob »

johng wrote: post #42
bongodongobob wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

* yes the images would be an easy fix

* their CRM plugins did not support Salesforce

* even if it did, they didn't realize that was like an extra $1500/month for API connection (something like that), which was also balked at, but just a plain fact

* they already built everything out and changing plugins was not an option

* I have almost no experience with WordPress and 0 time to figure it out alongside the myriad of other projects on my plate

* 0 thought went into authentication and that was also something I couldn't change

* this was not built by a team with WordPress experience, or any technical experience

They said "it's set up like this, make it work". I couldn't, not without dropping everything and hiring someone to do it, and managing a contractor(s) which was also not an option.

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

#90

Post by anonzzzies »

theyknowitsxmas wrote: post #86
anonzzzies wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.

Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as a CMS.

Yes, I know, I use it too. But github is hardly usable by non technical users , nor is markdown. We are talking about marketing deps of billion$ companies.
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