WP Engine Reprieve
wordpress.org
wordpress.org
Edit: Oh I forgot about the part where all of these posts are being published on the .org, so they appear in the dashboard of every wordpress install (including WP Engine, until they disabled the news). I'd love to hear from a lawyers perspective on how this sabotage gets into unfair competition and tortious interference. I think that is going to make the trademark thing more difficult to take to court, knowing that WP Engine probably has good grounds to countersue for actual damages at this point.
Hmm. Matt (and at least one employee of Automattic) says "wp.org has nothing to do with the foundation, it's run benevolently by Matt"...
wp.org does live on the Foundation's IP space, though...
Also, why does he feel that WP Engine should pay licensing fees to Automattic?
Matt seems like he's far too comfortable with just picking and choosing whether he's acting on behalf of the Foundation, the .org site, Automattic (and the .com) completely interchangably depending on what his needs or messaging is to be (not to mention the fuzzy accounting that could easily be seen to be happening).
Reading this, the last thing I'd want to do is ever be in business with this person.
The WP Engine side seems much more reasonable to me. There are approaches where he could present the "low contributions" grievance, and even take some action on it, without seeming awful, but this isn't it. Even this "gesture," which could have been almost magnanimous, comes off as still awful because of the childish screed.
That seems unwarranted. Both parties can be shitty. One for "snide, petulant" communication, and the other for being a private equity leech.
Matt says that WPEngine doesn't contribute as much as he thinks they should (also, curious where he comes up with 8% of gross revenue as a licensing fee), but describing WPEngine as a "leech" is a little ... off.
Just a few weeks ago WPEngine donated $75,000 to the Foundation for their conference. And then were booted from the conference. Didn't hear about the Foundation returning the donation though.
And why were they booted from the conference? Because they are in dispute with wp.org (which remember, Matt, Automattic, insist wp.org is nothing to do with the Foundation, but a benevolent gift)?
I don't know - Matt is the one who comes off shitty. I also like how you quoted snide and petulant as if disagreeing - you should perhaps read his text messages to WPEngine that amount effectively to extortion. There's precious few ways to read some of those and his other communications as NOT snide, petulant, or both.
Conferences are generally sponsored, and not merely donated to.
I'm not at all familiar with Wordpress, the foundation or the company. If I look at the Foundation's financial report of 2023 [1] they expended $4,275,813 for their conferences, and got 88% of it covered by sponsorship – so there were a lot more or bigger sponsors. It doesn't seem that the development of Wordpress is covered by conference sponsorship.
In fact, there doesn't seem to be any money going into the development of Wordpress at the foundation at all. So again, I don't know much about Wordpress, but a quick glance seems to imply that much of the 'official' development is going on at Automattic.
[1] https://wordpressfoundation.org/about/financials/2023-financ...
Not at all. I consistently use double quotes for exact quotes, and single quotes for such emphasis.
I mostly agree to your original post about dumb communication and not wanting to do business like that. But I don't follow your conclusion at all that 'the other party' therefore seems more reasonable.
> extortion
> blackmail
Again, not sure about the details in this case or Wordpress, but businesses are generally allowed to withhold services or (threaten to) make (true) statements that put their competitors in bad light. Also in horrible "snide and petulant" communication style.
"Extortion" and "blackmail" are explicitly criminal acts, mostly against persons, that have a higher bar. It could be tortious interference. Another commenter raised that CA unfair business practices laws can be bad for Automaticc. In Europe perhaps as well (also around tort?), but no clue.
WP Engine also seems to do some other “not in good faith” things such as change the woocommmerce Stripe attribution from wordpress.org to their own Stripe account.
While the legal dispute is on trademark, I think it’s really on WP Engine profiting on wordpress.org without giving back. It’s not illegal, but blacklisting WP Engine isn’t illegal either.
Automattic is essentially subsidizing a private equity backed company. I’d be upset and frustrated too if I was in Matt’s position.
If you support WP Engine, you’re supporting Silver Lake Private Equity.
Their GitHub has over 1000 repos, likely all WP related. https://github.com/Automattic
I don’t doubt Automattic is not putting in their fair share into the WP community.
Nope. There goes Matt, muddying the waters. Contrary to many people (including myself's belief) wp.org is very explicitly, in his words, NOT the Foundation, just a benevolent gift of his to the community. You could be excused, given all the links to donate to the Foundation and accompanying text, or the fact that it lives on the Foundation's ASN, though.
To pitch a tantrum, cut them off with no notice, then gloat about it online... oof. I can't understand why anyone would want to be in business with someone like that.
While you can disagree with Matt's approach, it actually feels like this dispute is more between WP Engine and the WordPress project than it is between WP Engine and Automattic. WP Engine not contributing to the project hurts Automattic a little, but the largest, most profitable companies in the WordPress ecosystem not contributing to the project are an existential threat to the sustainability of the Open Source project.
Companies will always optimize for profits, and contributing to an Open-Source project is only profitable when you are in it for the long run. And we all know that PE firms (which play an important role in our economy) are not in the game for long-term gains. Silver Lake is doing what they are meant to do — maximize profits in the short-term so that they can turn around and sell WP Engine for as much as possible.
Matt is using the leverage he has to ensure Silver Lake is forced to do something that is good for the WordPress project but will never happen because it cuts into WP Engine's P&L.
Oh. Wait. He can’t. Because that’s not his call.
If you want to use the trademark, you have to contribute to the success of the project.
There are plenty of Open Source projects that billion-dollar companies completely rely on without contributing back, and this situation puts those projects and companies at risk. An imperfect analogy might be what happened with the XZ Utils backdoor in Linux. The person maintaining the utility seemed overwhelmed, so he was pressured into accepting malicious actors as maintainers. They were able to introduce a backdoor into the utility. If more of these companies would have contributed to help with the maintenance and development of the utility, this would not have been possible.
If WP Engine starts contributing 5% of their revenue to the WordPress project, it helps protect the project that their entire business is built around.
So I think the questions really should be, "Why does Matt feel like this was necessary in the first place? Why wasn't WP Engine contributing more than 40 hours a week to the project?"
Furthermore, you stealthily edited your trademark policy to make it appear as if the name "WP Engine" was violating it, when in fact you specifically called out (with no caveats) that the "WP" initials were okay to use for a decade. This demonstrates bad faith on your part.
If your company is harmed from these actions, then the blame will be squarely on your shoulders, and I hope your board of directors does the right thing and fires you.
Edit: To be crystal clear, and to address the rest of your comment directly, the only way I would consider Wordpress for anything of my own or recommend it to my clients at any point in the future is if you issued an unconditional apology and resigned from your position.
Besides, that’s BS and if you don’t already know it you need to speak with a competent attorney. Trademarks must be defended in a timely manner to be maintained, and they’ve been using those terms for years. That ship has sailed.
Stop digging yourself a deeper hole and start thinking about what you can do to repair the goodwill you’re burning.
[0] This is nominative trademark fair use. Please don’t sue me, Matt!
Careful what you wish for.
> It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.
He blocked IPs with no warning, that's why they're impacted.
> WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access
He doesn't say ~"we warned them we could could remove access" and speaks that volumes.
> Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk.
I very much doubt they choose to take this risk.
> We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00.
The timing of this is designed to have maximum impact on WordPress users hosting on WP Engine. They now have to work the weekend to update their site and this tyrant can say he restored access just long enough to negate any security impact.
In this current case, it looks like Matt is thankfully trying to ensure end customers don’t get unreasonably affected. But nonetheless, it certainly appears WP.org should at least be relationally more of an independent entity with a separate leadership, or at least appear to be so.
* https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-identifies-godaddy-as-a-...
No, WordPress' lawyers almost certainly told Matt he was committing tortious interference of contract, and opening up WordPress, Automattic, and himself to tens of millions in damages claims from WP Engine and their affected customers.
Given his behavior in prior such tantrums, it's clear that the decision to be reasonable was not Matt's choice. It was an ultimatum given to him by others.
I'm not sure "We have given you 72 hours (starting on a Friday afternoon) to figure out how to mirror everything you need, and to have completed the mirroring process, and then the block is back. And updates? Sucks to be you." qualifies as "reasonable" in any sense of the word, though.
So, the original draft (which you saw/see?) clearly came from Matt; the reasonable version that's now on their website almost certainly came from Legal/the rest of the board.
I believe the person you're responding to was creatively summarizing Matt's sentiment, not providing a direct quote from the post.
Not surprised to see more of the same from him, and this farce that WordPress is granting WP Engine a "reprieve" when it's really the case that WordPress is doing this to avoid a lawsuit that would result in the loss of its nonprofit status.
WordPress is run primarily for the benefit of Matt. The IRS regards that as "private inurement" and it has bad consequences for both the organizations at the individual(s) receiving those benefits.
Furthermore, does WordPress even support custom resource registries?
https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/
If so, I'd imagine creating a mirror of the registry would start there.
Does Matt really want to risk creating alternative repositories and losing the central role wp.org is providing (yes, free of charge)? What about plugin authors who want to ensure their stuff is available on all WordPress hosts, what will they have to do to push to all stores? WPEngine acquired some pretty popular plugins (acf, deliciousbrains), it'd be a shame to see them exclusively available outside of the wordpress.org ecosystem as a retaliation.
Don't worry, though, Matt has generously given them 72 whole hours to figure out exactly how to do it, and complete the whole mirroring process, too! Oh, he did that on a Friday afternoon, just before the weekend? Extra generous!
It would be one thing if WPEngine had an API key so that customers on its servers could access wordpress.org. Even then, it would be a slimy move to cut off access by surprise as part of this dispute rather than offering 30 days to migrate away.
But Matt is offering this free service to the world to encourage growth of WordPress, and now that he's in this dispute with WPE, he's acting as if WPE is a client who's not paying.
Meanwhile, Matt designed WordPress so that it takes a hard dependency on wordpress.org and doesn't make plugin servers configurable. If it's such a burden on Matt to serve traffic to WPE customers, why is there zero support for mirroring the repository or pointing WordPress instances at third-party mirrors?
https://core.svn.wordpress.org/ https://themes.svn.wordpress.org/ https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/
but rest if the infrastructure is needed https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/s/bU4EzLozho
1. https://wordpress.org/support/topic/non-commercial-license-a...
> escalate my concerns to management staff
On one side automatic algorithms are often unreasonably unfair but entitlement of that user for free service seems pretty strange.
Will you be resigning from one or more of these roles?
You've proven yourself to be too much of a central point of failure and the longer this position is maintained, the more risk-conscious customers will feel forced to start thinking about their options.
If they are in violation of trademark why not just file a case against them?
Why the selective enforcement of your trademark? Doesn't that essentially void your trademark?
If wpengine renamed would you leave them alone or is the trademark dispute just a form of leverage?
What entity is at the heart of this dispute? Wordpress foundation, automattic, wp.org, or you personally? Is there any difference between those entities or are they essentially the same when it comes to this dispute?
I am a wpengine user. Why should I trust my building needs to the wordpress ecosystemgoing forward if access can be revoked for what appears to be any reason?
Importantly, also his complete and utter inability to separate soldiers from civilians. You can't even be safe knowing that you haven't personally offended Matt—if you do business with anyone who has or with anyone who does business with anyone or...
There's no way for a rational company to keep Matt in their supply chain anymore, he's too volatile.
I started using Wordpress last year, in 2023. The first version of WP came out in 2003. Someone had to make sure this project stayed alive for 20 years just so I could use it. I think you're trying to make sure it stays alive for another 20 so someone like me could pick it up in the future. I think that's very noble.
I hope your efforts bear fruit :-)
With Wordpress and Tumblr as well.
This has turned into a legal situation and I'd have to guess it's making people very uncomfortable. From the outside, it seems to have happened so suddenly that anyone employed at Automattic wouldn't have time to consider their options beforehand. Some people I really respect and enjoyed working with are in a tough spot right now and there's no way they can be fully honest with you given the circumstances.
Yes. Saying "We have generously decided to give you 72 hours to figure out how to mirror all this content, actually mirror it, and then plug it in, before we reinstate a block affecting your end users again. Oh, yes, I do realize it's 3pm PT on Friday afternoon and the clock is ticking, no, not 3 business days, we're turning the block back on at 4pm PT on Monday afternoon" is entirely positive, empathetic to those users, and shows genuine care for the community...
Or maybe not.
> WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist to WP.org
Despite you saying so in multiple places here, WPEngine did not fire the first shots in this shitshow.
As an aside, I’m curious if Wordpress.org are bound to allow WP Engine access to their plugin SVN under some sort of estoppel theory in U.S. law? 72 hours seems like it’d be too short notice for WP Engine to mirror everything, no?