WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org | Hacker News Reader

WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org

wordpress.org

156 pointslambda-dev58 comments

The exaggerations in the post are crazy, that WP engine "broke" websites by disabling the news in the admin dashboard? If I recall that is like a one line code change. They disabled it because Matt published a disparaging post about WP Engine, knowing that it would show up in the admin dashboards of every wordpress install. That post was about them not being "real" wordpress because they disable post revisions (which apparently they have done for a decade). His own competing managed WordPress service (confusingly named Wordpress.com) disables features as well, unless you upgrade to a higher plan. What a mess. This should have continued to be handled by lawyers and not by using the foundation to disable updates for thousands of sites. What happens to vulnerabilities as a result of this move?

> His own competing managed WordPress service (confusingly named Wordpress.com) disables features as well

They are allowed to do this because Automattic owns the trademark along with WordPress Foundation

Correct, but his argument that WP Engine is confusing customers is strange when he runs the most confusing part about WordPress (.com vs .org). This tells me it is not really about reducing confusion, but him wanting to get paid because WP Engine is not contributing. Keep in mind Automattic was an early investor in WP Engine and they, along with countless other hosting and plugin businesses, have been using the WordPress name. Failing to go after any of them for over a decade can make it difficult to enforce the trademark. However, this may be the most valid legal avenue he has.

Something I also find interesting is the WordPress foundation trademark terms were changed a couple days ago. Using "WP" was okay, to now calling out "WP Engine" specifically as being confusing: https://www.diffchecker.com/tJ29tGIn/

> Using "WP" was okay, to now calling out "WP Engine" specifically as being confusing

That’s the most childish thing out of this whole debacle. It is extremely clear that you cannot just change your terms 10 years after a company has been created in order to exclude it. Any judge would throw that case out of the window in 10 seconds.

You’re conflating two posts. He didn’t change any terms until they took legal action against them. If my neighbor came over to my house everyday and made a sand which, then sued me… then I’d lock the front door

Though I don’t know how much merit his original post had.

No this is more like city hall saying “you can’t build here” 10 years after watching you build. Too late, the house was built and you implicitly gave permission for it.

If WP engine has taken legal action against Matt, that is extremely disrespectful, and not gracious; he even tried so do it softly via the dashboard;

"WP Engine accused Automattic and Mullenweg of not keeping their promises to run WordPress open-source projects without any constraints and giving developers the freedom to build, run, modify and redistribute the software."

What promises? People make and release software using the GPL "copyleft" license because they enjoy doing so. Everybody is free to cease doing that if they no longer enjoy it. If it no longer brings them joy. And if it is costing measurable quants of money for the non-profit .org to provide back-end services to the $100 billion dollar corporation who is profiting from using the core plugins and themes etc.

Perhaps 8% of gross is a bit much, but I don't see them counter offering 1% and a way to work up over time. They were purchased for $250 million in 2018 so they have plenty o' cash. Bad faith wpengine for trying to strip-mine WordPress like that.

Has anyone actually been confused about the hosted service and the software?

I struggle with this argument because so much SaaS follows this model with self-hosted community editions. It's not like .com is trying to sell you a proprietary self-hosted version.

The .com and .org user forums get a steady stream of posts from people who mixed them up.

So many people get confused between .com and .org. It’s a sticky on the WordPress reddit and less technical people definitely think going to Wordpress.com to sign in is somehow their install’s login. Which makes his point about people being confused about WP Engine so silly when he runs the most confusing part of WordPress.

Yes, WordPress.org and WordPress.com are mixed up all the time, so much so that /r/WordPress on Reddit has had a sticky for years linking to a page on WordPress.org that explains the difference. According to WordPress.org itself:

> People are often confused about the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org because they sure sound similar. This workshop highlights the key differences between .Org and .Com.

— https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/what-is-the-difference-...

He's lost his mind! Customising the admin dashboard has been something WordPress multisite hosts have been doing for 15+ years! There are tons of plugins on WordPress.org that provide this specific feature. And if you don't want a plugin, you can develop it yourself using supported WordPress-provided dashboard hooks: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/wp_dashboard...

Same with post revisions - you can download plugins to customise this, or you can do it yourself with WordPress-supported functionality: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/revisions/

Where is the contract that WP Engine signed, that says they must display posts from their competitors calling them a cancer in their customer's websites? I'm really lost for words - I have no explanation for what's going on in Matt's head.

> Where is the contract that WP Engine signed, that says they must display posts from their competitors calling them a cancer in their customer's websites?

There isn't one. Just like there isn't one that says they can download plugins et al from their competitors' website.

This is open source. They're free to fork WordPress, set up a competing app store, etc.

WordPress.org is not a competitor to WP Engine.

Despite Matt claiming that WP Engine is a "cancer", WP Engine have supported WordPress for a long time, both through financial contributions and code contributions - even sponsoring the same WordCampUS conference where Matt launched his attack.

Competitor? How is wordpress.org a competitor?

> What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.

Since when has WP Engine been threatening litigation against WordPress.org or the WordPress Foundation? Their C&D letter [0] was only addressed to Automattic Inc.

Perhaps it has to do with the claims of trademark infringement in the counter-C&D letter [1]? But that letter was sent only in the name of Automattic Inc. and WooCommerce, Inc., despite the WordPress Foundation being the ultimate owner of the trademark.

[0] https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...

[1] https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist.pdf

We don't have evidence there is anyone else in the Foundation with any power. WordPress.org is owned personally by Matt.

Yeah, the practical situation there would seem pretty clear. I'm just wondering what theory Mullenweg is trying to express here in support of this action.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41641864

Of course the claim of trademark infringement has some plausible iota of basis to it. But I question whether WP Engine is really pursuing legal claims against WordPress.org as Mullenweg says they are, which would be a surprise to me. (Well, except for new claims as a consequence of this action.)

He’s just trying to cause as much damage to WP Engine as possible and I guarantee that he will forced to pay for this tomfoolery by a judge.

An update from this morning: WP Engine have said that they hadn't filed any litigation against WordPress.org [0].

[0] https://x.com/wpengine/status/1839246341660119287

I have no horse in this race, but this blog post seems like the hot-blooded vitriolic ramblings of a crazy person that can’t mentally separate their commercial and open-source endeavours.

The outrage definitely feels at least somewhat ‘put on’ for the sake of publicity. Who cares!?

No kidding. I have never seen a news article from a large serious organisation that had the word "bastardized" in it before.

Yeah - even without much context this blog post reads like an embarrassing mess. I hope the author thinks it was worth tarnishing the Wordpress brand so they could enjoy their king-for-a-day meltdown.

The author is Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress!

This sets a very dangerous precedent - that this software "sold" as free and open source, free as in free beer and free as in speech is not really free at all. This only exposed the fact that the plugin repository was all along centrally managed and Wordpress has never been truly free all along. That if you tick off the overlords, then you can be banned from this critical central repository of plugins. All this for someone customising the way their admin panel looks like and making some changes they had the right to, in the first place.

I think someone should use this as an opportunity to build a better Wordpress clone. You know what, I'm going to do it. I don't care about adoption and market share. I care about freedom. This is not freedom.

It reminds me of the WURFL saga that happened a few decades ago for the exact reason.

And you know what? Even for such a large, mature product, it is full of security issues, bug and has absolutely poor code quality and poor development experience. Did I mention it doesn't even scale without throwing tons of money at it? I will update you guys soon.

/endrant

Thanks.

Crazy Matt woke up one day at 40 years old and just decided to ruin his entire reputation and company that he spent over a decade building up.

His reputation wasn't exactly sterling before: https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com

Earlier this year, Matt chased a popular Tumblr user he banned under Tumblr's weirdly transphobic TOS to Twitter to harass her publicly. He immediately took a "sabbatical" from Tumblr after this.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

Please point out where Tumblr’s TOS is “weirdly transphobic”. Users who post pornography are banned regardless of gender identity.

Matt’s sabbatical from Automattic was already underway when this incident occurred.

Disclaimer: I work for Automattic but I am speaking personally.

are all of you called Matt over there?

That’s why it’s called AutoMATTic

Wait, is Automattic really called that because Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic? I never realized that

Odd that user got singled out, it seems pretty average for Tumblr

Looking forward to them taking a similar action against Wordpress.com for upselling access to the core wordpress feature of plugins.

This is not what ceasing and desisting looks like. If Automattic doesn’t fire MM within a week then we know who wears the pants there. A fork backed by real money is starting to look more likely.

The fork has a name; it's called ClassicPress!

I've been casually keeping track of this - I wasn't sure that it would last. But perhaps it's time for me to take another look at this.

> A fork of WordPress without the block editor (Gutenberg)

That seems to be a major technical (and UX) difference that has nothing to do with the leadership of Wordpress.org

> WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

Sounds a lot like Android and Google: you can have the source, but good luck without our services!

While I agree with Matt's thoughts on Wordpress I don't like this sort of public shaming. If you post this kind of thing, it burns bridges that you can't mend later. How can the two organizations reconciliate after this?

Wordpress wants WP Engine to contribute to the source code because it makes money off Wordpress and uses its servers. I think this is very reasonable.

I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim. Distros have been doing this since forever. This isn't much different from a Youtuber getting banned from Youtube. If you build your entire business upon a single point of failure, this kind of thing can happen.

But I'd rather there was a path forward for them. Right now it's either 1) Matt gets fired as CEO so WP Engine can continue leeching off Wordpress, or 2) WP Engine has to support its own weight fragmenting the Wordpress ecosystem.

Although I use Wordpress I have no idea what people think Wordpress is supposed to be. I love Gutenberg, but everyone hates it, and some hate it because they compare it to site builders instead of WYSIWYG HTML editors. The point is that Wordpress is used by so many websites, both big and small, as a site builder, blogging platform, news platform, and even as a database and shopping platform sometimes, that it's impossible to say how it's supposed to be used.

I think if Wordpress.org makes it clear what are the costs of WP Engine to the project compared to their contributions, it will be easier for people who use Wordpress to understand their side because numbers are neutral.

> I'm pretty sure WP Engine could patch Wordpress to use its own infrastructure, so this isn't a really as much of a security risk as people claim.

Patching core WordPress is straightforward, but there's also tens of the thousands of plugins and themes on WordPress.org. Until WP Engine can create a mirror of the plugin and theme repos, there will be security risks.

Mirroring is not difficult, I've done it in order to perform code analysis on plugins at scale.

Well, it definitely becomes harder when you cannot (officially) access any of the WP infra, including themes and plugins.

The cost of providing free ice-cream to WPengine is $218,685 or 7.9% of wordpress.org total income! ($2,768,057). But if the people eating up all the ice-cream you give them for free take you to court.... then you gotta cut off that ice-cream. WPengine should apologise and starting slinging cash to Automattic.

    WordCamp expenditures: $2,159,747 (82.81% of total expenses)
    Meetup expenditures: $229,571 (8.80% of total expenses)
        Total Meetup.com dues: $224,249
        Total Meetup Venue rental & exp: $5,322
    Operations: $218,685 (8.39% of total expenses) <------ HOSTING PLUGINS/THEMES ETC

WordPress supports ActivityPub now, so this is also a spat between two massive AP platforms with apocalyptic potential. Someone needs to get follower migration from WordPress to anything else on the AP fediverse done quick.

It's inter-instance conflict at incredible scale.

Whatever happens, WordPress isn't going anywhere. At worst, someone will fork and rebrand it, just like Mike and Matt forked and rebranded b2/cafelog to create WordPress. (There are already successful forks like ClassicPress.)

> ClassicPress

Never heard of it before, but it constantly surprises me how much effort people are willing to put in just to keep “the old version” of something.

I think it says a bit about how dubious 'new and improved' can be

Security updates, features? Perhaps yay. Redesign, boo. I already use the thing.

Yeah, exactly. Do you really want to put that much effort because “redesign boo”? Makes no sense. Put the effort learning the new UI and move on.

Every single “bring the old X back” project ends badly, you’re just extending your own pain by using those projects because they’ll slowly fall out of date.

The only way to successfully “bring the old X back” is to convince the original vendor, like it happened for the Metro UI in Windows 8.

You've changed my mind on this a bit! I was generally more in the mindset of: "sure, maintain the old copy". Granted, Wordpress isn't the best choice for this. Vulnerabilities abound.

It's funny we still agree, coming from different approaches :) To your point, it doesn't make much sense to fork and actually maintain the code. I more meant the installation/deployment. I'm not that afraid with things like SELinux policies and network boundaries in place.

One could learn the new thing, find something more suitable, or run the old thing until the wheels fall off. We're spoiled for choice!

Creating more fragmentation/choice extends the challenge. We see this with Linux distributions. Outside of like four root distributions, we have N derivatives re-packaging for slightly different themes and configs.

Given enough time and caffeine I could replace the entire ISO ecosystem with YML and Linux from Scratch... but I use something more traditional because I value my time/effort.

If it were just a matter of a new admin UI, that would be one thing. A quick peek under the covers reveals how howling-at-the-moon-insane the Gutenberg block format is, how brittle it is when working with filters and other low-level things, and that's been the real source of pushback from developers.

TBH I kind of liked Metro back when it was used for XP Media Center. Win8 just did a crap job at integrating it with the rest of the system (and arguably repeating the same crap job with win10/11)

Someone please fork WordPress to e.g. WebPublish and sed -i 's/WordPress/WebPublish/' the whole thing and let both of these companies duke it out while we can continue in peace.

Much good could come from this.

Won’t solve problems. Web Publish still needs to run all the infrastructure that Wordpress dot org does.

Not really.

WordPress continues to function in airplane mode with the airplane mode plugin.

And besides, you have to start somewhere. There could be a bunch of independant plugin and theme registries just like there are with Minecraft mods and resource packs. GitHub already serves this purpose for me with WordPress.

I've been paying attention to this drama, is this the correct timeline? Please correct any mistakes.

1. Wordpress.org is a not for profit blogging platform that's widely used, a crazy figure like 50% of websites are created using this platform. It was created in 2003 and Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder. It's community driven and developed and open source (meaning that the source code is freely available for anyone to modify and redistribute).

2. Wordpress.com is a for profit website which offers managed WordPress hosting. Wordpress.com is owned by Matt's company autoMATTic. Their main competitor is WPEngine.com which is not affiliated with Matt. Wordpress.com was created in 2005, WPEngine.com in 2010.

3. Matt used to be a major investor in WPEngine.com, but that's no longer the case. In 2024 Matt demands 8% of WPEngine.com's revenue for leveraging Wordpress.org (which is, as previously stated, free and open source software). He says the name WPEngine.com is confusing to customers, as they may confuse it with the non-profit Wordpress.org (his own for-profit website is Wordpress.com). What's more, instead of paying Wordpress.org they must pay autoMATTic, Matt's for-profit company.

4. When WPEngine refuse to pay, he delivers a speech at the main WordPress conference publicly shaming WPEngine, saying they don't give back. They frack the WordPress eco-system, and urges customers not to use their platform.

5. WPEngine issue a cease and desist letter to Matt. Matt sends one back demanding WPEngine stop using Wordpress.org due to trademark violation, and bans them from the platform.

but wordpress.org was built on wp engine

source?

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