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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

> The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. > Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.

> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.

> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.

Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?

And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?

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Were it to go to trial, legal discovery would be fun. How many internal conversations were had about, “Those jerks at WPEngine are eating our lunch”. Rather than, “I am truly concerned about how the trademark is being confused by this one specific successful company. Whatever can we do?”

I kind of want discovery to happen in this situation.

Civil discovery isn’t a public process. The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public, and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.

I was more thinking that this would be government intervention regarding the non-profit status. Discovery would still be secret, but probably a smoking gun there that the organization is not independent of the commercial entity.

As far as I am aware, the WP.org”s (or is it the foundation?) actions are distasteful, but they are allowed to ban whomever they like.

> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public

Well certainly.

> and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.

In this case that kind of sensitive information absolutely wouldn't be able to be redacted (successfully) because those conversations would be entirely germane.

> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public,

Not directly, but they can enter it as evidence into the lawsuit, in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it. Absolutely parties try to get embarrassing information exposed to the media in this way. They only can do that if it is plausibly relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit-but internal conversations in which executives are attacking the company suing them very likely are.

> in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it.

Motions to seal evidence are routinely granted by courts in civil matters. Parties can try to get embarrassing information entered into the public record, but they have to convince a judge, and that’s often an uphill battle. Courts don’t like to be used as a tool for private parties to air the others’ dirty laundry.

WP Engine could file a complaint with the IRS about tax exempt status abuse. But that would be a heck of an escalation, and even more damaging to the WordPress ecosystem than Matt’s ridiculous actions so far.

But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.

There is a standard, numbered IRS form for this exact purpose. Having once drafted a copy once, they do indeed require you to submit some kind of narrative and supporting documentation that there is some kind of impropriety in relation to their particular tax exempt status.

It’s not clear to me that WordPress.org has done that. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask WP Engine to pay WordPress.org some kind of fair compensation for the infrastructure demands they induce.

That's just it. WPEngine are not being asked to pay WordPress.org. They are being asked to pay Automattic.

Sure, if they put the same requirements to pay on everyone. But specifically targeting one major competitor to the for profit company that is controlled by the same person who controls the nonprofit?

That gets into a pretty.sticky situation real quick.

Does it?

The fundamental question is: is the non profit going outside the boundary of its status?

I’m not fully convinced that’s the case even in the context of the for profit disagreements with its competitor.

I agree. And whether or not Automattic gets the money or WordPress.org does matter, but so does the way any such transaction is structured.

If Automattic is an infrastructure vendor (in a technical sense at least) to WordPress.org, it’s still reasonable that Automattic doesn’t want to just give its competitors free infrastructure.

I own a hosting business that’s heavily built upon WordPress and even I — at a scale immensely smaller than WP Engine - CDN some of my critical plugins and themes myself. (For a lot of reasons.)

WP Engine is absolutely massive. The load they put on systems that they consume from isn’t trivial. Asking for remuneration from a competitor that is using your services, according to their means, isn’t anticompetitive.

I'm not fully convinced either, but it certainly raises eyebrows, and might attract an investigation to gather more facts.

Why is this standard being applied to only one user, and a competitor at that?

Should Automattic be compelled to subsidise their competitors?

If a8c wants WPE to mirror the plugin and theme repos, they maybe should have asked for that. MM led out of the gate with his now-well-worn "existential threat" rhetoric and actually managed to escalate it from there. As one reddit commentator put it, "you catch more flies with honey than with lighter fluid".

The WP ecosystem needs mirrors anyway, but at this point I think it needs outright alternate repos, not under control of a8c in any way. This could be an attractive proposition to plugin/theme devs, because in this case, MM has been poisoning his own well for some time now (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511). What are the odds that MM will accept a patch to WP core that allows alternate plugin/theme stores?

At the rate things are going though, a hard fork of the GPL'd core is looking more attractive every day. It just needs a catchy name. ClassicPress is already out there, but ... meh. How about FreePress?

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