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Comment by supermatt | Hacker News Reader

WP Engine calls itself the worlds #1 wordpress hosting (with over 1.5m clients), but they aren't even in the top 10 material contributors to wordpress. Although they have pledged to support wordpress development, is is only to the tune of 40 hours a week. Their pledge is miniscule given their usage of wordpress and isn't even in the top 25 pledges made. It seems they were called out on this, and told to resolve it or it would get highlighted, and highlighted it was.

Sure, the license allows them to do whatever they want, but there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much in return. With over $400M ARR, thats something they could easily resolve.

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Nice try, Matt.

In all seriousness, if this whole thing is about some false marketing claim from WPE, then call them out specifically on that in a tweet or something. Why does it deserve the "scorched earth nuclear approach", which equates to blackmailing them into giving you millions to prevent you from disparaging them in all media outlets? The claims Matt made go far beyond WPE not contributing to WP development as much as they say they do.

This corporate mudslinging paints WP.com in a much worse light than WPE. IANAL but I think there's a case here for a defamation lawsuit at the very least, if not for outright blackmailing.

Publishing a blog on Wordpress.com is scorched earth nuclear and a tweet is fine? Why shouldn’t this get some actual publicity? What’s defamatory about it? Your response seems to be a better example of mudslinging than OP. At least OP pointed out some data to back their argument.

It wasn't just the blog post. Did you miss the keynote, numerous posts on Reddit and other outlets, as well as the threatening calls and text messages? I'm using his own definition of "scorched earth nuclear". This goes far beyond a single tweet.

> What's defamatory about it?

Oh, I don't know. Calling your competitors "cancer", their product a "cheap knock-off", and urging people to stop using them?

If my competitors are selling an inferior product, I would let that speak for itself, which should make my alternative shine in comparison. Going on a mudslinging crusade just reeks of desperation and immaturity, and the defamation and blackmailing could be illegal. If he really had a case against them, it would be resolved in court.

I'm not the target audience of either, but if I had to choose which one to use today, I would go with WP Engine based on this alone.

100%. WP is GPL and they can use it how they like. And others are also allowed to call them out if they want to.

Yeah but people don't like to be manipulated. He didn't want to call them out, he wanted them to pay his company millions for licensing and used the community as leverage.

Did you not read the post? He wanted them to stop calling their fork of wordpress "Wordpress".

They either continue to use their fork and call it something other than wordpress, or they use an unmodified version of wordpress and are permitted to call it "wordpress", or they pay for rights to use the mark for their modified version.

No doubt this has all stemmed from the issue of them taking and not giving back. If they aren't going to play nicely and pay proportionally for development as per the pledges, then they can pay for the right to use the mark for their fork. Why should automattic and dozens of others pledge thousands of hours of dev time per week when one of the biggest users pledges 40 hours? It may be permitted as per the GPL, but use of the mark is subject to fair use - and fair use doesn't cover them passing off a fork of wordpress as wordpress. Clearly that technicality is being used to force them to pay their share through licensing of the mark.

Is supporting wordpress development part of the license offered by wordpress that WP Engine agreed to?

No?

If you don't want people to use your stuff, don't give it away for free.

> there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much in return

That would be the case IF giving back was part of the deal which they are therefore reneging on. It was not. You are in the wrong.

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