If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed | Hacker News Reader

If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed

joshcollinsworth.com

307 pointsgraeme242 comments

Given the age and ubiquity of Wordpress, I am shocked at the relative immaturity of Matt's communication skills.

He thinks the world has all the historical understanding and nuance of the situation. Why would they?

This looks like a world record speedrun attempt (any%) at destroying a legacy.

It's worth noting that WPEngine looked like this all the way back in 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110112043959/http://wpengine.c...

They have never pretended to be anything else.

Why now, Matt?

Exactly. This comes off as a totally unhinged and immature rant, unbecoming of the CEO of a company that likely has a 8 or 9 figure revenue.

I didn’t know (or really care) about this battle, but I’ve always passively seen Matt as one of the insightful grandfathers of the blogging era, having insights from the observations from his perch.

This blog post erased that.

>I’ve always passively seen Matt as one of the insightful grandfathers of the blogging era.

I've always felt he was an asshole but could never ground that to a concrete observation. Now I'm certain of it.

He's not an asshole, he's just "post-economic"

What does this mean ? That he doesn't have to care about earning a living any more, and so he's acting like... an asshole ?

In a Slack channel, "post-economic" was the term he used to describe his financial situation as a justification for his actions. So, yes?

https://x.com/sereedmedia/status/1839394786622722432?s=46

Dang, what an ass.

People don't have to make a living and now show who they really are

Something about these CEOs becoming or at least showing in public how unhinged they are. We’ve had quite a few in the last couple years. Almost like they think it’s cool.

> I didn’t know (or really care) about this battle

Then why comment on it?

I mentioned it’s because I have held Matt Mullenweg in higher regard as someone who’s been insightful about the evolution of the web.

According to his recent interview on Primeagen, he argues that WPEngine operations incur high costs to his company, due to the millions of installations consuming resources from Wordpress.org. And despite being a very large player, they contribute nothing back to the ecosystem. He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic. The fact that it took, apparently, so long for him to take some action can be interpreted in his favor, because he tolerated a lot along the years. Add the fact that they had somewhat good relations before WPEngine being taken over by private equity. So this is not about trademark, trademark is the best weapon he has to fight back against a very bad neighbor. And being the sole trademark holder, Automattic can enforce it arbitrarily, as it sees fit. Taking side with WPEngine I think is not only rationally baseless, but also immoral, since they put nothing and only take, which is in the very opposite of what Matt represents, whether or not you like Wordpress.

i think the point of TFA was that those allegations are a gross distortion of the record, and MM’s ultimate actions are grossly inappropriate and harm the community he is pretending to stand up for.

> He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic.

Which turned out to be blatantly false, quelle surprise

I'm currently asking @photomatt elsewhere what his plans are to help others lift the load from wp.org by way of supporting alternate plugin/theme repositories. I'll keep you posted.

Maybe banning wpengine customers from the official repo is exactly the push the community needs to create alternatives.

> he argues that WPEngine operations incur high costs to his company

To the foundation? Ok, then work with them to create a mirror and share the load. Even publicly shamed them into doing so.

Do what's good for the community and product rather than engaging in this embarrassing spat.

Actually no, trademark is a “use it or lose it” state, waiting so long will not be in their favor

Exactly. Statute of limitations is a factor here

Wordpress is using their trademark though… do you mean to say that you must enforce a trademark to keep it? That’s different, and a subject of some controversy; I’m not sure that it’s been decided conclusively.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here (in any way).

It's been decided conclusively, but it is also relatively rare in a practical sense. Trademark law requires the owner to protect their trademark to avoid dilution or genericide, which occurs when a trademark becomes so common it loses its distinctiveness (like what happened with "Aspirin" or "Escalator").

Not a lawyer, but talked about it at length with a trademark attorney when having to defend over the years. It was conveyed that if we aren't willing to legally defend a mark, we could potentially lose it.

Do you think WordPress is diluted? It definitely doesn’t seem to generically refer to blogging or website building software. It seems to me that even WP Engine isn’t diluting it, they’re hijacking it.

Agreed, but that goes back to defensibility. WP Engine has been doing their thing since 2011 without a peep from Matt. He should have been issuing cease and desists, etc. back then.

Maybe it’s that WP Engine operates differently now. They got a massive investment from Silver Lake, a terrible private equity firm with a track record of doing evil things. They probably have changed how they support Wordpress (the open source project), how they pollute the ecosystem, how they make it harder to leave, etc. In other words, they’re free riding on Matt’s creation and extracting all they can from it.

Oh yes, Matt's all about how evil Private Equity is and how they leech from communities and add zero value...

It's an interesting take, given that the three board members of the WordPress Foundation are Matt and a ... managing partner of a PE firm (the third is a retired coder, I believe).

As is their right, given the terms.

You need to look up nominative usage.

"We offer WordPress hosting" is a perfectly legal thing for people to say if they actually offer WordPress hosting, and no amount of trademarks can prevent that. This is specifically called out to try to avoid trademark fuckery.

Sure, everyone refers to the "Big Game" versus the "Super Bowl", but that's largely because the NFL can afford more lawyers than they can, and it's not worth the fight.

IANAL, but If they are making trademark licensing deals with other companies, and periodically pestering the infringer without taking it fully legal I think that counts as "using it". A judge is likely to be lenient since legal costs are pretty bad and a PITA

But who owns the trademark? The for-profit company, or the nonprofit foundation?

The foundation owns it - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=78826734&caseSearchType=U...

A claim I've heard is that the for-profit company has the exclusive commercial license (along with the right to grant sub-licenses).

> A claim I've heard is that the for-profit company has the exclusive commercial license (along with the right to grant sub-licenses).

That sounds about right, and is what's written on the WordPress Foundation's trademark page [1]:

> If you would like to use the WordPress trademark commercially, please contact Automattic, they have the exclusive license. Their only sub-licensee is Newfold.

I read something different [2] while reading up on this whole debacle:

> The WordPress Foundation was launched in January 2010. Automattic transferred the trademarks later that year in September. As part of the transfer, Automattic was granted use of WordPress for WordPress.com, but not for any future domains. Matt was granted a license for WordPress.org and WordPress.net.

I wonder if something changed along the way.

[1] https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

[2] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/

Part of the clusterfuck going on here is...

a) the nonprofit owns a trademark

b) gave an exclusive license with right to sublicense to a for-profit

c) which appears to be run by the same person

d) who is demanding of a competitor to sublicense the trademark

e) paying the money to the for-profit, not the nonprofit

f) when it's not clear that the competitor is infringing on the trademark in the first place.

The litigation here is not likely to go Wordpress or Automattic's way, I think.

According to elsewhere the for profit had the trademark first, and then handed it over to the nonprofit while remaining a licensee. (Automattic founded 2005, WordPress foundation founded 2010) That's a very above board move. And it makes sense for the for profit to take on the legal aspects, because the extraordinary spend won't ruffle donors feathers.

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning here. Either they are licensee or they're not. The history leading up to that doesn't convey any special rights or exceptions.

And referring to that transfer as "very above board" makes it sound like you're talking about the same thing as the commenter above when in fact you're talking about different things. Because however gracious you find that decision to be, that's a different subject than whether it's above board to, subsequently commingle those responsibilities. And whether or not you feel it's practical, in some sense, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. Either Automatic has The authority to collect licensing payments on behalf of WordPress or they don't and that should be reflected in a charter or something, somewhere.

I don't think referencing the history of Automatic previously owning the trademark has anything to do with anything in this context.

There's pretty broad license for for-profits to share IP with non-profits, e.g. Novartis + GNF, or generally speaking, any university and any spinoff (I refuse to call them startups) created by professors thereof. If you think what automattic is doing seems legally sketchy, you may want to recalibrate your expectation of what sketchy is and just how much the industrial complex of the US would simply not work (for better or worse -- i for one think it would be better, fwiw) if it adhered to your standards.

The issue here is that Mullenweg is on record everywhere (including on HN) saying that the "WP" is not the trademark problem; it's "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce".

But a cursory glance at Google results for "Wordpress hosting", "woocommerce hosting", or "managed wordpress hosting" will lead you to hundreds of results from a plethora of web hosting companies that have been doing this, many for more than a decade.

The Wordpress Foundation (that owns the "Wordpress" trademark) has not taken any legal action against any of these companies for precisely the same use it's accusing WPEngine of. A judge could well rule that they have not defended their trademark and this claim holds no water.

Again, IANAL, but it's generally not the case that you are required to go after all infringers of your trademark (I imagine because that would be overly burdensome requirement, as someone nefarious could spin up even a blatantly offensive use in some remote town in Alaska for example and go "ha-haw you failed to defend"). You just have to not never defend it.

it is absolutely the case that you are required to go after infringers if you want to be able to enforce your trademark. A trademark isn't just another word for copyright. It's a signifier of a brand with consistent quality. If you let thousands of sites slide for a decade+, then it no longer conveys a consistent level of quality and when you try to enforce it the judge is likely to shut you down.

> He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic.

From reviewing the code, this is not "attribution" in the sense of "here's who wrote this code" but specifically and literally an partner code.. aka an affiliate code or what we'd normally call "a setting"

As GPL'd software, they cannot prevent people from modifying this code and - if they do - Automattic's only counter is to complain about it.

Further, since it's a revenue-generating code, it should be disclosed in the README, etc of the plugin and changeable via the Admin. It doesn't appear either is true.

Ref: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-gateway-stripe/pu...

So it’s not illegal, but nonetheless an insult. Considering the pressure and shaming campaign against Matt, I’d say this may be even worse.

Changing a setting is not "an insult"

That 2011 snapshot actually makes the opposite point: the WordPress logo is prominently displayed next to the "WP Engine" title on the screenshot!

It does look like they fixed just a few months later, though: https://web.archive.org/web/20111001085943/http://wpengine.c...

(How fun to see the selling point "Digg-Proof Scalability")

> Digg-proof

What's the modern soon-to-be-obsolete equivalent?

Shitty-AI-crawler-proof

Your blog will be compatible with the blockchain!

reddit-proof

> the WordPress logo is prominently displayed next to the "WP Engine" title

Pretty sure that Wordpress logo is just the stock logo that came with every Wordpress installation. The name wp engine was the website name of that Wordpress installation.

It really does feel like Matt is saying "how dare you question me"

Giving Matt the benefit of the doubt, the answer to “Why now?” is that enough is enough. Why does Matt deserve the benefit of the doubt? Because his companies have been contributing to WordPress while WP Engine has not.

Matt claims he has been privately discussing with WP Engine for ~18 months about their level of contribution. Automatic contributes the equivalent of 75 full time employees to WordPress and WP Engine contributes 1, despite the companies being comparable in size.

Matt’s actions may have been bad for optics, but I do not fault him for using the resources at his disposal to correct what he sees as injustice.

> Matt’s actions may have been bad for optics, but I do not fault him for using the resources at his disposal to correct what he sees as injustice.

Of course, there are consequences to using said resources inappropriately.

Note the attempt to reframe bad actions as bad optics, to make it about perceptions instead of concrete actions.

But perceptions are downstream from actions in a smoke/fire kind of way, and it shouldn't be used as a way to get out of answering for actions.

No. Put me on the record as saying his actions are just. I’m not reframing or deflecting anything, I agree with Matt’s actions.

The public perception seems to be against him, and managing public perception is important.

Well as I said before, perception is downstream from the actions themselves. And attempting to reroute the conversation away from actions towards the phenomenon of how they're being perceived is, despite your protestation to the contrary, a way of reframing the conversation that focuses on something other than the merits of what he chose to do.

I really wonder what that mean contributing to WordPress... from the cybersecurity point of view in 2024, there is/were no contributions: it is common to be hacked when you use Wordpress (e.g. [1]).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProWordPress/comments/1cv15mt/would...

That discussion is largely about themes and plugins. Severe vulnerabilities in WP Core are quite rare.

I believe WP Core and plugins should not be viewed separately in terms of security. Plugins are omnipresent. Integrating security measures across both could create a more robust system overall.

Themes and plugins are the severe vulnerability of WP Core.

WordPress is secure enough that whitehouse.gov runs on it and zero-day vendors pay $100,000+ if you have an exploit for the core WordPress software. It's not "magically secure" though -- you wouldn't say that AWS is insecure because some people set it up wrong or use bad integrations.

I'm curious, do you have any information on how much whitehouse.gov spends on cybersecurity testing and customization? I imagine it's considerably more than the $100,000 you mentioned for a WordPress exploit. I work in this space and have experience with offensive security tests, including on Amazon itself.

Time for a Rust rewrite?

I don't think the first problem is about Rust or not but about having a security mindset to develop software. Even if it is PHP.

Why, then, is he asking for WP Engine to pay licensing fees to Automattic, which is not the open source project, nor the Foundation, but his for-profit competitor. Ostensibly, Automattic has no ability to license WordPress (an open source project that it does not own).

That sounds like an injustice to me. That sounds like someone who has been using Automattic and WP.com (and Pressable), WP.org, and the Foundation interchangeably, depending on what best fits his needs.

Elsewhere in this thread I'm seeing people say that Automattic is the exclusive commercial licensee with the ability to sub license.

So it's possible that that's the answer there.

The code is GPL, that's not even possible.

The dispute is about trademarks and use of the brand name, so the relevant issue is a trademark license, not a software license.

Up until a couple of days ago, when Matt retroactively changed (which is going to be hard to make stick) the trademark license explicitly permitted the use of "WP" by anyone and everyone.

The trademark license also cannot prohibit nominative usage - that's protected. If you actually, factually offer WordPress hosting, you can say so, in those exact words. You may need to call out somewhere (and WPEngine does) "WordPress is a trademark of the WPF", but no license can prohibit you saying so. What they can't (but don't) say, is anything that implies that they are WordPress - which is exactly why Matt is trying to make some big deal in his head that "my mom thought they were us" (while ignoring the elephant in the room of "Well, wordpress.COM isn't WordPress, either, it's just a licensee", because of course, nobody could be confused by that).

I was only responding to the statement about the GPL, which simply does not apply to this situation, since it is a trademark dispute and not a copyright dispute.

I wasn't expressing an opinion one way or the other, regarding the validity of the trademark infringement.

GPL applies insofar as it doesn't prevent commercial use of the code.

The dispute is a trademark dispute. It's not about use of the code at all.

Unrelated, but that site is so much better than their current one.

Now I finally know what they do and offer!

Consider that there are other hosting providers out there giving back to the community and he's not going after them. Reciprocity seems to be an issue along with proprietary jank that screws interoperability. Say what you want, but I'd question investing in anything that's built on a foundation that relies on reciprocity that doesn't put in their share. Healthy relationships involve creating more value than you capture. That's something that should resonate with the thickest of fountainheads. And if it doesn't, you can always turn off the tap, which seems to be the case.

> but I'd question investing in anything that's built on a foundation that relies on reciprocity that doesn't put in their share.

Look - I agree. However, there is not a single person that thinks twice about buying an Android or iPhone handset because it might not be contributing fully to upstream Linux or BSD. People don't care. They don't question it because this is the norm, and frankly neither should Matt if he's going to disagree with the terms of a license he's not qualified to change.

Even the Open Source community doesn't really care that much. Selling modified versions of a program is not inherently a violation of GPL, or even the intent of free software. Matt's disproportionately vocal uproar kinda proves that the only people who care in this instance are the ones trying to profit off Free Software. He's not being righteously cavalier, here - he's being courageously wrong.

There's a difference between picking up your ball and walking off the field and not dealing a hand to the empty seat at the table. Silverlake can buy the DVD.

I hope, for the good of the community, that Matt will choose either nonprofit leader or tech CEO. It’s become clear that both roles cannot live within one person.

If he were just the leader of the WordPress foundation, this whole thing would just be an embarrassing PR failure. As it is, I wonder if his actions will rise to the level of criminal.

After watching his interview with The Primeagen, it seems like he is mentally wearing the clothes of a righteous prophet…the misunderstood advocate of a disrespected organization.

Unfortunately, he’s ignoring the fact that he invested in WPE years ago, is CEO of a direct competitor, has publicly said he hopes WPE loses billions of dollars as a result, apparently has no proof in writing, and is pulling thousands of innocent developers into his petulant crusade.

"apparently has no proof in writing" sounds like there are emails and what not. But those should come out as the lawsuit progresses. Just because he didn't make any public now doesn't mean they don't exist.

We will see. He was asked in the interview twice and he _did_ respond and it wasn’t good. He pulled his calendar out and read out dates he met with their CEO.

Something for discovery imo (if it gets that far). He seemed put off that wp engine would release his texts, would be unfair of him to do the same? I'm not sure.

From Mullenwegs personal website (https://ma.tt)

> Afterward, I also privately shared with [ThePrimeagen] the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?

this is not normal.

The thing is that none of this matters. This is what happens when you get too zoomed in on the tiny little island you live on and make a total ass of yourself.

A sad but seemingly near-perfect example of the elitism / privilege that comes from living in a bubble and not knowing it.

This one really rubbed me the wrong way: https://ma.tt/2024/09/charitable-contributions/

> I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now.

> This is something I’ve tried to keep quiet, because true philanthropy isn’t about recognition.

...

> If Lee Wittlinger, who controls Silver Lake’s investments in the WordPress ecosystem, or Heather Brunner, the CEO of WP Engine, would like to publish their charitable contributions over the past 12 years, they are welcome to do so.

Is he trying to avoid turning charity into a pissing contest, or is he trying to use his affluence to shame a competitor? This guy literally can't keep his story straight over the course of a single blog post.

I'm also very curious, given his other statements and how he seems to conflate actions of the foundation, automattic, his own person, and wordpress.org, whether these contributions are his or one of theirs. And to what causes, at that; can you give to your own foundation, I wonder?

The contributions are legit. Despite his claim to have never spoken publicly about his contributions before, he has spoken about them (when it was convenient to make a point about his moral superiority). He donated hundreds of thousands per year to the Apache Foundation, for example. Additionally the WordPress Foundation’s financials are public, they don’t receive many donations (tens of thousands per year).

Huh, that's very interesting - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...

I though part of Matt's point was that Automattic "gave back" to the foundation?

The WordPress Foundation is irrelevant to WordPress itself, it just holds events. The WordPress project is owned by Matt and that’s what Automattic donates to (in the form of Automattic employees working roughly 4k hours per week on the WordPress project). There’s also the money spent on running WordPress.org by Automattic but that’s entirely opaque (nobody knows how much it is, although it’s claimed to be millions).

What if Trinidad changed residency requirements for its TLD? ...

At least give Heather a few days to respond/engage, given the big-ass-drama that Matt created.

She shouldn't be engaging with or responding to ThePrimeagen at all, he is a jackass who solely appeals to ignorant young developers: https://youtube.com/@ThePrimeagen/videos

He is not even close to a journalist, he is a dumb tech bro. I hope Heather blocked his number. This is insanely scummy and stupid behavior from Mullenweg.

With nearly half a million followers, it does make him a journalist in the sense of "wielder of the 4th power". (But perhaps this only makes matters worse, depending on how he uses that power.)

Yeah. A journalist like Andrew Tate.

I looked through that list of videos and nothing jumps out as me. It seems to be run-of-the-mill tech content. Not very useful, not really damaging either

Calling Prime a journalist even by implication is hysterically funny.

Very informative article. Matt is definitely in the wrong here.

I also loved how this was formatted, it was quite long but easy to read with a nice font.

Hmm. Maybe this is a bit of an outlandish take, but although his decisions do seem at least superficially sus, I have a hard time agreeing with Josh's take. He chooses to make a lot of highly agreeable comparisons, but to me it seems more like a city (or some level) of government severely turning up the temperature on a particularly egregious contingent of landlords, landlord, or demographic, who've been abusing the system we've all been chill with until it's just not cool anymore. You could crank up property tax by double or triple the next year, and not offer the ability to vote on the issue of zoning anymore, or you could do the thing that no politician has the balls or the power to do and fundamentally change the system in a way that takes those issues off the table entirely, making the whole system more equitable in the future. The repercussions could be dire for some people, but it is what it would take to give a giant fuck you to the people who hold the reins. If the landlords can always hold the poor vulnerable freelancers that live in their basement suite over the heads of anyone who could otherwise theoretically change the rules, nothing will ever really change, and the people who've been along for the profitable ride won't want it to. But if you don't do it, you might risk your future hypothetical economy.

Now, I know that's all a bit of a reach, but it's hard for me to not think asking for Matt to be removed for this reason is just like all those people who ostensibly would want public transit to be funded for all those other people who can't afford cars, until they finally got around to ripping up the street you use to drive to work every day and jacked up your taxes by $50.

But, all that said, I've also never liked WordPress at all and don't have a dog in the fight, this is just a thought experiment. However, if I had to move because my landlord eventually got screwed for not reporting my rent on their income tax, I'd be like "well sometimes that happens, was nice while it lasted but my place was a shithole, they weren't competing fairly, and they were constantly showing up to city council meetings trying to block a mid-rise from going up while I was at work paying their mortgage".

The general consensus of commentators seems to be that Matt is wrong in the way he approached this matter. Going by the wisdom of the crowds, maybe that's true.

However, my question is this: has WPE given a factual rebuttal to Matt's claims? Especially, considering that their entire business is dependent on WordPress?

I am concerned that in the eagerness to judge Matt's conflict of interest, we should not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Matt hasn’t made any claims that need a rebuttal. Matt’s claims are factually correct. The issue is that they’re immaterial. Matt has demanded that WPEngine pay 8% of their revenue to Matt’s company (Automattic). Matt has retroactively changed the terms of use of the WordPress trademark to create a violation by WPEngine. Matt has engineered the situation, we can’t separate the claims from the conduct because they’re one and the same.

Matt’s position is (ostensibly) based on his hard line views about the moral obligation to contribute created through the use of open-source. The trademark sideshow is based on Matt’s understanding that a moral argument isn’t going to convince a private equity backed company to spend money they don’t need to spend. Matt believes WPEngine has a moral obligation to contribute and the trademark licensing fee is the easiest tool he has to force action.

Matt is making a moral argument. WPEngine don’t care because they’re driven by money not morals.

I think those final 8% demands we’ve heard about have been after months of stalled conversations with WP Engine.

Given the lack of reliable information right now, I’m going to believe the individual that has a decades-long track record indicating that they care about open source over the private company that is legally obligated to pursue profit as its only objective.

What are you choosing to believe? The 8% isn’t disputed. Matt has acknowledged it is true. Matt has acknowledged his actions are because he believes WPEngine are not fulfilling their moral obligation. The facts are settled, the question is whether you side with Matt’s belief about WPEngine’s obligations and how you feel about Matt’s actions (in the context of Matt operating a competitor).

I’m saying that his 8% demand sounds like the last line in a long conversation with an interlocutor acting in bad faith, trying to slow walk the inevitable demise of the relationship.

If WP Engine had acted in good faith, Matt wouldn’t have had to come up with terms unilaterally.

I do not think it appropriate to believe the individual who is in two roles and is trying to use his position in one role to benefit his other role, especially while trying to muddy in which role he is acting.

> I think those final 8% demands we’ve heard about have been after months of stalled conversations with WP Engine.

Who gives a shit, it doesn't matter. Why would he think WP Engine would pay anything they're not contractually obligated to pay?

This has all played out similarly elsewhere, e.g. to the point that some companies have started to carve out a new types of licensing so that all of the "open source revenue" doesn't just get vacuumed up by the big clouds/hosting providers (e.g. see the "Fair Source" movement being promoted by Elastic and others).

Matt could have gone down that route. I could easily imagine a million ways he could have handled this better and gotten the community on his side. Instead he's acting like a collosal asshole.

Are contracts everything? Matt created Wordpress. I think he’s more deserving of the spoils than some company whose owner is Silver Lake, one of the most evil PE firms.

Reminder: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/skype-silver-lake-evil/

Again, who gives a shit? I'm in no way saying WP Engine is some sort of angelic organization, and I don't care. All I see is childlike behavior from someone who definitely should not be in control of both Automattic and the WordPress Foundation, and my guess is that if the board doesn't force his ouster that WPF will have serious issues with the IRS.

Also, the whole point of open source is that you don't "own it" after it's open sourced. If you don't like those terms, license them under different ones, which exactly what the whole recent "Fair Source" movement is about and what other companies like Sentry have handled in a much more dignified fashion.

Maybe, the newcomers have learnt the lessons from the travails of the old open source projects? That doesn't mean that the oldies should just suck it and keep quiet.

Accept it, it is the deal with opensource. It's also the basis that people should be using when debating OSS versus other models. People should not be making business or policies or economic decisions based on some unenforceable honor system

Agreed, WP Engine shouldn’t have left their customers wellbeing up to the whims of an organization they were antagonizing.

WP Engine was banking on the free stuff from Wordpress.org, and they got burned because they bit the hand that was feeding them.

That's the entire reason people are so pissed, and what TFA is about. WordPress.org is supposed to be part of the foundation, one that has a charitable purpose to support the WordPress community. It's fine to argue WP Engine was a bad community member, but cutting off access to WPE customers (after demanding payment to Automattic) looks exactly like extortion.

Matt has shown he simply can't be trusted to keep his roles as head of WordPress Foundation and Automattic CEO independent.

>shouldn’t have left their customers wellbeing up to the whims of an organization they were antagonizing.

The point of the article is that it's precisely these actions that have damaged the integrity of WordPress for everybody, because we can now no longer look at WordPress as having stable stewardship, but as something ready to whimsically descend into unpredictable retaliatory actions, without any rhyme or reason or structure.

Once you start talking that way, it seems to me you've completely lost sight of what it is to be the healthy steward of a norms driven foundation. The reason you work out things in charters, and in terms of service and so on is precisely to avoid situations like this, where there are spirals of escalation all hinging on subjective interpretations of everything.

Matt hates PE firms so much, the only other active member of the WordPress Foundation board, as appointed by Matt is...

... the Managing Partner of one of those evil PE firms.

That is exactly why he cut them off. They aren’t contractually obligated to pay. The only “contract” is the implied social contract of building your company on open source.

If they want to play hardball about what’s required instead of acting generously, like Matt has done for decades, then they are getting their just deserts.

Matt isn’t obligated to be nice to dick heads. WordPress.org isn’t obligated to provide service for free.

WP Engine decided that they would only do what’s good for them. Fine. If they piss in the pool, they can’t be mad when everyone else gets out. It is irrational for WordPress to continue acting like there isn’t an extractive entity in their midst.

>If they want to play hardball about what’s required instead of acting generously, like Matt has done for decades, then they are getting their just deserts.

I can't help but notice that once it gets to the question of whether there's any actual authority to demand a licensing fee, the conversation stops being about what is or isn't legal, who is authorized to do what, considerations of proportionality or collateral damage or any of that, and just start slipping into this mode of speaking like mobsters from the 1920s. If that's the cadence you find yourself slipping into it might be an indicator of whether you're the good guy.

> Matt isn’t obligated to be nice to dick heads.

Well, in some sense, he is, at least as it relates to his leadership of WordPress Foundation. As a charity with a mission to support the WordPress community, his actions over the past week look like a singular attack on the community in order to benefit the for-profit Automattic.

This comment on a previous post puts it better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661086

I believe that we should give a shit, and it does matter. The "balkanization" of open-source licensing into more restrictive versions is ultimately going to adversely impact all of us.

And, if Matt had not chosen to be an asshole, would this issue have gotten the prominence that it has got?

Also, WPE could easily have taken the wind out of Matt's sails by declaring their (direct or indirect) commercial support for WordPress.org while reducing to pay money to Automattic. As far as I know, they have chosen to not do so.

For all I know, Matt may lose the battle; but, open source would lose the war if companies and individuals continue to use the kind of arguments that WPE and it's defenders are making - that, they are legally not obligated to care two bits about the open source software on which their entire businesses are built, leave apart what is moral.

The whole point of contracts and licenses is to explicitly spell out what is allowed and expected. I mean, who is to say "how much" support is expected if it's not written down. Matt wanted 8%. Why not 15%, or 1%?

The idea that users of open source software "owe" something back to the original developers is revisionist history, and if you don't like how users are using your software, why did you open source it with a permissive license in the first place? There are plenty more restrictive licenses (e.g. GPL) that support a more "if you take you have to give" model. Saying "well, we wanted to open source it but not that kind of open source" is BS.

> And, if Matt had not chosen to be an asshole, would this issue have gotten the prominence that it has got?

The issues here are precisely the actions by Matt, so it is reasonable to conclude that had Matt not caused those issues by acting as he has, the issues would not exist.

> open source would lose the war if companies and individuals continue to use the kind of arguments that WPE and it's defenders are making - that, they are legally not obligated to care two bits about the open source software on which their entire businesses are built

I don't believe this to be true, but if it is, the responsibilities lies with Matt for allowing it with permissive licensing and trademarks. Neither WPEngine, nor you or I, are obliged to care about what Matt wants us to care about, or to obey Matt's decrees, and the sole reason is Matt's actions.

> the individual

The same guy running a for profit company?

I have, often, come across comments on HN threads that corporations that are driven only by money are evil. For example, many threads with Google, Facebook, et al have expressed such sentiments.

If we agree that to be true, then WPE should also be considered evil, shouldn't it? Then, why so much defence for them and all vitriol for Matt?

And, if we accept that WPE are right to focus only on the legality of their action, then should we not apply the same logic to all corporations when they focus on maximizing their revenues and profits?

If we agree that to be true, then Matt should be considered in the same light, as his demands to pay his corporation are driven by money.

All corporations are driven by money. Some are just shittier than others. And right now, in this instance, WPEngine is the lesser of the two. By, like, a lot.

>However, my question is this: has WPE given a factual rebuttal to Matt's claims?

I mean... The article talks about this extensively. And the article is my first exposure to the issue but presumably it's not the first place where these points have been presented. The authority or obligation to give back isn't a legal one, the authority to demand 8% raises all kinds of conflict of interest issues and appears dubious if not outright illegal, the global message posted to admin dashboards was an abuse of power, and the banning from using plugins doesn't even pretend to have a legitimate pretense.

Apparently part of the backstory here is there's a dizzying context, and there might be some subjectivity involved in surfacing these as the pertinent issues, but I wasn't left with the impression that the ball is in WPE's court to explain any kind of smoking gun that hasn't been accounted for by the discussion in the article.

> The article talks about this extensively.

The article is trying to manufacture consent with vague authority: "Most reasonable and knowledgeable people seem to share this opinion." While it is someone who is not impartial. He claimed that he worked in WPE before and than 'extensively' writes why it shouldn't matter - without telling anything.

I'm not saying that what 'Matt' did is OK. Seems to me no party here is in right. But that is not my point. My point is that these kind of articles - especially lengthy vague ones - are just increasing the drama.

I understand that part of hn policy is that comment through should be getting more nuanced over time, but this seems like a bunch of zoomed out fuzziness that barely touches on any details.

The author makes all kinds of specific arguments that don't have anything to do with consensus, and the structure of the arguments is grounded on the inherent rightness or wrongness of interpretation of various rules, the existence are non-existent of copyright, the disproportionate and escalatory choices Matt has made, a whole host of specific arguments that don't have anything to do with where the consensus falls.

They do mention that Matt has appeared to have turned many in the community against him, but the arguments are pretty freestanding even if you want to set that aside, and there's also another interpretation other than manufacturing consent which is simply that it's a legitimate observation about what's really happening.

I can't say for sure, but there's so much more going on here that's more specific to the issue of right and wrong within zooming out and saying "gosh this sure is a lot of drama". I think if that's the level at what you're engaging in the conversation it's just making everything fuzzier.

Many techies hate it when CEOs are boring and only say comms that are vetted by their companies PR and legal teams...

But this whole debacle is what happens when a CEO doesn't do that. There can be unexpected, company-ending results.

There's... a bit of a spectrum from completely blandified corporate comms to what Matt's doing there.

It is perfectly possible to have a distinct voice without setting the house on fire. There is a middle ground.

I don't really think so. CEOs are still people. Eventually they're going to mess up and since they are constantly scrutinized it will be blown up.

There are plenty of people who have their own voice that is between "soulless corporation" and "watch it all burn"…

There are mitigating techniques to work around that.

Another set of eyes, not to rewrite it into safe corporate speech, but just as a safety guard to say “hold up there bud… Stop and count to 10”

Talking about “counting to 10”, you don’t hit the publish button right away, save it as a draft and leave it a few hours/over night and come back to it when your not as fired up. Hitting publish when your fired up is rarely a good thing.

If you want to vent, swear and shout. Write that angry post, but then select all and delete it, take a breath, and start again. 9 times out of 10 you are going to be a lot less fired up the second time around.

Granted the last two require some self control, but that’s what the first one is for.

As you said, CEOs are human too, and as humans we all need a helping hand every once and awhile, nothing wrong about that.

This was a really good article, something that jumped out at me was that there might be a serious legal issue with the IRS.

WordPress, the for-profit company, may be too intertwined with WordPress the 501c3 foundation. I'm not a lawyer, but a nonprofit is supposed to be very careful about how it operates. Matt's post on wordpress.org is clearly crossing the line by blending the for-profit company, with the nonprofit foundation. Perhaps it's not illegal, but it is certainly unethical.

I watched the video/stream he did, and have very little good to say about it. while he may be right about it, cool; trademark infringement, yeah, they didn't give back, there's a feud; I'm sure it goes deep.

He disabled millions of wordpress sites from being able to update/access things. Plugins.. functionality.. Sure, they don't deserve to get free API access and all that; none of that matters.

What about non-profits for animal shelters, programs like st judes, things where livelihoods depend on it and they don't even know what an API or domain name is let alone what all this stuff is about and their whole stream of operations comes crumbling down because they paid somebody to set it all up for them and all they know to do is long in to wp-admin and press 'update' and make blog posts and check their 'payments' etc and modify/add things like their woo commerce plugins?

We're smart, we know what all this means, a lot of people I come across in the real world can utilize wordpress because it's easy for them, but if I explain in depth how things work they look at me like I'm speaking a foreign language.

He doesn't care.

I don't need that question answered. I already know.

I don't have an opinion on it, but when 75% of the internet is running wordpress, have some tact.

If they don't know, now they know

The Notorious B.I.G. and all his homies hate WordPress

WordPress, HTML, CSS, When I was dead broke, man, I couldn't picture this

As far as I know any WP instance is able to upload plugins/themes.

Well, first, your website won't explode just because you can't update the plugins. If it's running just fine now, it can probably keep running just fine for months.

Second, WP Engine can create their own repository of plugins to update their customers' plugins instead of relying on Wordpress.org.

Third, WP Engine customers can just leave to another host if WP Engine can't actually provide the service they are selling.

I think the big issue is there was basically no warning and Matt is harming a LOT of innocent people/businesses because of a temper tantrum, rather than being responsible, giving 90 day notice to everyone (I mean this has been de facto status for 10+ years) and give them a chance to adjust. Instead he just tried to do the table clothe pull, wreck all the glassware on the table and act like he’s on the moral high ground.

Are their websites up? Yes. Move to another host.

So much drama.

In the Prime interview it sounded like there were attempts in the past to ensure the trademark was not violated and he expressed the feeling like they were stringing him along. If he had only hired lawyers, not made that talk with his accusations, and let the lawyers handle it would more people be on his side?

I think that was a major take away from this article. There was a right way to navigate it, but by navigating it in a harmful way you also become an actor capable of, and accountable for, the way you've chosen to respond.

I think it probably would have been quieter, but people would be accusing him of not being transparent instead. I think it’s kind of nuts to not give Matt the benefit of the doubt while more information comes out. He is the party with a past that demonstrates good behavior and intentions.

He obliterated his past when he fired the Death Star (blocking access to the repository for all WP Engine sites). That's the whole point of the article!

WP Engine, a for profit company, should be providing what their customers need, not relying on free services from a foundation for required functionality.

Especially if they have a fraught relationship with the provider of those free services.

System76 provides the PopOS repos that are based on Ubuntu. They don’t freeload.

Canonical provides the Ubuntu repos that are based on Debian. They don’t freeload.

WP Engine is freeloading, no doubt about it.

Were they ever asked to run a mirror of the plugin repo for use with their customers?

If the bandwidth/infra costs to support all of WPEngines customers were so much, then they must have, right?

If they were asked and refused that's certainly one thing. If they were never asked, and then when they refused the demands for money.. then it looks like matt was just looking for a wrench to hit them with and this one came to mind.

> Were they ever asked to run a mirror of the plugin repo for use with their customers?

No need to ask someone with common sense who is already doing it.

> Canonical provides the Ubuntu repos that are based on Debian. They don’t freeload.

At least for Ubuntu, the packages they distribute generally don't have the same checksum as Debian, so they're not the same packages (at least as binaries).

Also, "wordpress.org" is hard-coded as the plugin repo source all over WordPress.

I'm pretty sure automattic, a for-profit company, uses the free plugin hosting service from wordpress.org too.

It is like Matz founding a Heroku competitor and disabling ruby gems just for them. How is that not a dick move. It basically proves that Wordpress.org is not an independent foundation but Matt’s plaything.

> He is the party with a past that demonstrates good behavior and intentions.

Go talk to other people who've had dealing with Matt and you’ll find plenty who don’t agree with that statement

Did you read the blog posts he posted on WordPress.org? That information, alone, direct from his mouth, is enough to remove any doubt. He's unhinged and dangerous and no one should feel safe with him in their supply chain.

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

https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

Did you?

If any of this is true why is it so surprising that wpe was cut off?

> 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. The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own. Why should WordPress.org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

Author assumes contribution data from wp engine is distorted simply because they don't agree with Matt's communication / response from the trademark dispute. That doesn't seem to fair?

If they worked there for that long perhaps they can provide insight into the upstreaming of issues strategy or if it was an org focus or an afterthought?

Distorted because both companies are very different and putting resources in helps Automaticc in different ways. Having 47 people working on specific things is a strategic thing where the other company is just hosting.

Fair point.

@photomatt answers to some questions in this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676411

This man is having a breakdown disguised as a legal battle.

This definitely screams mental health.

Matt is just using WordPress and the WordPress foundation to justify his personal vendetta, the same way Musk uses Twitter against people he doesn't like.

And this is not the first time he does it, so this is nothing new and he is not the only one.

Rich people and big companies do this all the time, but Matt is doing in public.

"WordPress powers 43.5% of all websites as their CMS. Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress" Thanks to Matt Mullenweg's leadership and now you want him removed because he has flaws?

Let me guess you want another Mark Zuckerberg in there?

What's wrong with you people? He needs a stern talking to, not complete removal. This is another re-occuring case of "create hero, destroy hero" where the public likes to build someone up, find a flaw with them, act like they are irredemable, act like you're so distraught and hurt by their behavior, cry your tears, and destroy the hero you once celebrated.

> He needs a stern talking to, not complete removal.

He's getting one from his customers.

A CEO who takes 43.5% and reduces it to 25% should be asked to leave. He may have gotten to 75% (now down to 43.5%) but even Jobs was fired.

You could just as easily say that that is true _despite_ his leadership, instead of _because_ of it.

Is that why it's named "Automattic", because the founder's name is "Matt"? Cute.

EDIT: Yep - https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/19/automattic-tc1-origin/

Matt has effectively threatened the businesses of companies whose web presence is hosted via WPE/FW.

He’s got to go.

Lightly off-topic, but:

>Five for the Future asks that if you benefit from WordPress, you give back 5% of your time directly to that open-source project

As someone that semifrequently has to support WP installs, I would definitely make a case for it not being a benefit in my life

The fact that he invoked Primeagen, even without the appalling context of the conversation, tells me everything I need to know. And already suspected.

In this thread nervous freeloaders trying to calm their nerves about shaky foundations by panicking in choir.

Let it die.

All the cool PHP kids use Laravel anyway.

I use Laravel at work. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I like Symfony better.

It’s also just about a Rails clone for PHP.

You would think that a company as invested in WordPress as WP engine is would invest more in the community and contribute to the software and also want to contribute to get features that would help it save money.

Do all the WordPress plugins that they maintain not count?

Or the sponsorships of WordCamp?

If wordpress is to survive it needs to not be wordpress

I've had some personal issues with Matt and Automattic and I would say there's nothing new in his attitude. But he's not so much different than DHH, Linus Torvalds, and Stallman - he's done a lot, a lot more than most of us, so, he's entitled to strong opinions. And all this looks worse than it is because he's a public figure. We all do stuff like this in our lives, it's just not getting public, but this doesn't mean any of us is so much better and smarter than Matt! And he is right that WP Engine is NOT WordPress.

The word 'press' in wordpress suddenly got another meaning, what a mattfia....

Own the community hate, and change the name to WorstPress?

WordPress will survive all of us.

And that's a shame

.org or .com?

On this issue, there's been a lot of discussion along the lines of "the trademark for an open-source project should work the way I prefer which is…" or "if I was in a decision making position I would simply…" or "in a perfect world…". Others, like this post, unwisely include appeal to motive. It would be better for us to stick to discussion that is able to limit itself to the substance of both parties' claims.

The first thing I think cannot be neglected to be mentioned in posts about the dispute is that (1) Matt created the project (yes, a fork counts), (2) his friend coined the name, (3) Matt's company originally registered the trademark. Then (4) Matt's company donated the mark to a foundation to make it widely available for noncommercial use while they retained the exclusive commercial license to the mark. No mention of this in this presentation.

To be fair to commentators, part of the trickiness surrounding this dispute is an old issue regarding open source projects: do the open source software licenses imply a trademark license? The answer is generally understood to be: no. Having a license to software does not grant you a license to a trademark. For more on this I found illuminating the 2009 article in the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review by Tiki Dare JD (Director of Trademarks at Sun Microsystems, Inc.) and Harvey Anderson JD (General Counsel of the Mozilla Corporation) titled "Passport Without A Visa: Open Source Software Licensing and Trademarks": https://www.jolts.world/index.php/jolts/article/view/11/37

As one is not given a license to the trademark, a common understanding is that one can:

– limit one's use of the trademark to nominative or descriptive fair use (A)

– use the mark under supplemental guidelines from the trademark owner (B)

– acquire a dedicated license to the trademark (C)

At https://wpengine.com/plans (take your screenshots now) they have titled services they offer simply "Core WordPress", "Essential WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It could be claimed this branding exceeds nominative use. It is far beyond the mentioned descriptive use of a "managed WordPress hosting company". If this branding exceeds fair use, it needs to comply with justifications (B) or (C). It very clearly does not comply with the published guidelines, both before and after recent modifications, that read "All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name…". You can also see examples of use (current/cached and perhaps somewhat inadvertent) of "WordPress Engine" itself at https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awpengine.com+%22wordp...

Many commentators seem hung up on the fact that using the letters 'WP' was and remains an allowed practice according to (B). However, with regard to any trademark guidelines it could safely be assumed that a mark owner is not suggesting that one may use protected marks in ways that cause confusion as this is counter to the purpose of trademarks. Commentators are likewise hung up on the idea that the guidelines were subject to change or are despairing about the recent edits that clarified that the use of 'WP' under (B) must avoid uses that could imply the product or service were synonymous with WordPress itself. For similar open source software trademark guidelines and as a useful point of comparison, I think commentators should take a look at Red Hat's public guidelines, which explicitly remind users that guidelines like these can be changed: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/trademark-guidelines-and-pol...

Other commentators are focusing on the length WP Engine had 'WP' in their name. With use since 2010, some have implied that a statute of limitations has passed but the Lanham Act has no such time limit. These commentators don't seem to be considering Automattic's confusion claim. WP Engine has claimed in their materials that they are "The most trusted WordPress platform" and "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company". 'Trusted' can be read with the meaning 'seen as trustworthy' rather than the meaning 'utilized' which could be found to be creating confusion. The most [seen as trustworthy] platform would presumably be the project itself (in an expansive understanding of 'platform' that a non-technical user might perceive). If CNET started calling itself "The Most Trusted Firefox Source" I would expect The Mozilla Foundation to ask them to stop. Many commentators appear to be suggesting there should be no enforcement of the WordPress mark, which seems an unusual position, or otherwise seem to take issue with Automattic's original trademark registration in the first place.

Regardless, if WP Engine's uses of the marks exceeded rationales (A) and (B), they needed a license. This is what Matt was seeking, even allowing such a license to be paid in kind. At this point, a court will likely decide if their use exceeded (A) and (B). Calling for Matt to have a role change is one thing but to likely libel Matt with the term extortion, a criminal offense, especially after only moments before admitting "maybe there's validity there" (regarding infringement of Automattic's WooCommerce mark) is absolutely reckless and it's disappointing to see this unserious blog post promoted here. To see uncareful defamation coming from someone who made their living for many years off the software their target of ire created is especially bleak.

We seem to live in an age of narrative over strict substance, unfortunately, and I think the author captured the narrative quite well, with a weakness or two on detail that you pointed out, so I appreciate your attempt to elevate the precision of the discussion.

I don't think people using the word extortion understand how it is defined in a legal sense and the gravity of the criminality. The word extortion as people use it could be replaced with 'threat' or 'ultimatum', with some sentiment of unethicality or unfairness added back in. Legally, it may be fine for Matt to make ultimatums: "contribute in one of the ways I demand, or my free WordPress.org API that I provide is no longer accesible to you", but as a community steward, it seems unfair to the many users of WPE who were not given that ultimatum with any notice (initially), or enough notice after the "reprieve" (Oct 1 still isn't enough notice.)

The only argument of Matt's I find compelling is that WPE's plan names look like a potential misuse of the WordPress mark. If I was WPE, that would be the only thing I would be worried about, and consider changing (though to do it right now might look like an admission of guilt.) If I was a judge, I would consider slapping WPE's wrist on that point, and considering WPE at most 1% at fault in this entire debacle based on facts available. I don't find the overall trademark confusion argument compelling (especially in light of WordPress.org vs WordPress.com confusion, and WordPress.org as Foundation vs WordPress.org as Matt the CEO of a competitor to WPE confusion), though if Matt wants me to believe his own mom is clueless, I will let him have that point.

After fault finding regarding acts of harm is done, then I'd be willing to consider which companies, including WPE, are leeching in a way that makes them not healthy members of the community, but only after all this is sorted out.

Putting aside all legal arguments, I agree with the directionality of Josh Collinsworth's main point regarding the health of the ecosystem. To put in my own words: Matt's behavior with banning a host's customers from security and feature plugin updates from WordPress.org without sufficient warning (or clear enough reason) has damaged trust in a core single point of failure in the WordPress ecosystem -- I see no excuse for this -- and it is important for the ecosystem to restore this trust as soon as possible.

It's an unacceptable situation to begin with, that something that powers 43% of all sites on the Internet can have security updates degraded on the whim of one individual, no matter how much he contributed to the software in the past.

The most direct way to repair trust would seem to be at the very least to put WordPress.org's update server in the ownership and operation of someone else, preferably a functioning board who was bound to serve the community/ecosystem in a way that included minimizing ecosystem disrupting events like this one, and who established transparent guidelines on what sort of behavior can get a company banned from using these servers (and few mention they are also banned from future conferences). That this event came without warning to many users seems outrageous.

Another thing Josh has right: I and virtually all people hate, to a high degree, greedy ownership of corporations that intentionally lets quality rot as pricing is jacked up and money is squeezed out, so it is very remarkable that so many people think the more critical infraction to the community here is what Matt has done. This isn't about the greedy private equity firm or trademarks right now. It's about a bigger and more urgent problem. We have plenty of time to get back to corporate greed after the current emergency is resolved.

While Matt comes looking "not good" and his apparent impulsiveness and "less than optimal" communication skills are doing more damage than good, I find it "interesting" most of the people attacking him either choose to ignore of gloss over the absolute trash WPEngine management people are.

It's rich coming from people demanding a high standard for Matt but not for the WPEngine people.

In the end all of it will get "solved" because there's way too much money in this to go any other way.

As Danny Glover famously said: "I'm too old for this shit"

Honest question: what am I supposed to be demanding from WPEngine? They’re not the ones out there posting unhinged rants.

That's not an honest question.

If you are completely fine with WPEngine's commercial practices, trademark violations in their marketing materials ( like it or not ) and moral OK for them not picking up part of the bill of what they consume ( talking about infra resources, not even talking about code ), then.. why the f** are you so bothered by an unhinged rant from some guy? It's GPL after all.. Don't you see the irony? or you just want to see it because Matt is kind of an unlikable dbag? Is that the level of depth we are at when cheerleading for this stuff?

How are you allowed to tell me if that's an honest question or not? Do I have some hidden WP Engine shill comments in my history or something? Can you read my mind?

I don't have a strong opinion on WP Engine's behavior, because I'm not convinced by Matt's arguments. I do have an opinion on Matt's behavior though. I think it's unhinged.

Feel free to respond but I'm done with this conversation, given how unpleasant I feel it's going to be given the incredibly uncharitable tone in your response. I recommend taking a walk or something.

Please, for the love of god, let it die. WordPress's horrible security, annoying maintenance, and cookie cutter sites have filled the internet with malware and garbage content. It's so annoying to maintain that we have to find these managed hosting places that provide very little value. And despite them, you still need to add a bunch of extra stuff to make a reliable site. Time to create something modern.

>Time to create something modern.

The track record of "modern" would suggest Wordpress is the second coming of Jesus, so no thanks. Wordpress is fine compared to "modern" software.

Let me guess, you are a web programmer?

Because for those of us that are not, WordPress is a pretty easy and pretty capable way to self host something. Without it, lots more stuff would be centralized with Big Tech.

If WordPress didn't exist there would be other blogging software.

WP has emerged as a de facto standard, but there were alternatives before, and there will be alternatives to come.

If you can self-host something, you can run a SSG*-based blog platform (Hugo, Jekyll, etc). And static webpages are even simpler to self-host. If you are willing to bend a little bit for big tech, you can just host them dropping generated files in any S3-like object storage.

*Static Site Generator

> S3-like object storage

They are not web programmers maybe not even in devops. So It is easier to just buy basic shared hosting wit button 'install wordpress' in hosting-admin.

Statically generated site would be better (especially for readers of the site) but they still need some CMS.

...and replace it with what, exactly?

I mean, I liked Drupal, still do, but the business for custom Drupal sites dried up and moved onto WordPress with (insert builder of choice here). Teaching anything on Drupal was like pulling teeth, even in the D7 and D8+ eras. And I'm not aware of any demand for Backdrop / Concrete5 / whatever sites. WordPress even ate up whatever demand there was for Magento (good riddance IMO).

Everyone moved to WordPress because it's easy to teach clients on, the dev costs are reasonable, and there's a really good plugin ecosystem to counter the platform's faults. You can absolutely build unique sites on WordPress and lock them down too.

If WordPress dies, everyone moves to SquareSpace (which is proprietary) or socials (in other words, doesn't have a web presence).

I have some hopes for Drupal's Starshot Initiative. Tho it now bears the crushingly drab sobriquet of "Drupal CMS" :-P

lol 10 years ago I worked with a shop that used expression engine for everything. It was certainly more flexible, more pleasant to write plugins for, and less of a security nightmare at the time.

The community was significantly smaller, but many of the plugins that existed were very well maintained, there was a small but healthy set of developers with paid plugins.

I don't want anything to do with that industry anymore, whenever I want to put up a little site I just use a static site generator (hugo). I think there is an interesting potential market for a wp admin like UI that could be used to create hugo posts/etc and manage the theming configuration. Then you click publish, it fires off a hugo container that generates the static site and updates the host... maybe such a thing exists.

This guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Well, you've certainly convinced me with your well reasoned argument.

You're welcome.

I realise it's high drama o'clock, and therefore time for everyone to jump in and try to get in on that sweet drama traffic, but this is the epitome of an article that really could just have been a Tweet.

There's not really any new information here, nor does the article offer some unique third-party take that hadn't been explored before. It's a lot of armchair psychology, third-hand anecdotes, and unfounded sweeping generalisations. TMZ: Tech Bros.

I like Matt, he's both a caring guy and a sensitive guy. As a sensitive and caring guy myself who tried the CEO thing, I think sadly, those are not particularly useful "top qualities" for that job.

There are plenty of caring and sensitive CEOs.

In fact good leadership demands high amounts of empathy, sensitivity and emotional intelligence.

Either way he is not demonstrating those qualities now.

I very specifically used the words "top qualities" - I'm not disputing they are quite important, but being overly caring about certain things or overly sensitive about certain things are not what should be number 1 or 2. In all the CEO's I've invested in over the years, I find when they get in sticky situations, it tends to be they're over expressing these two qualities in a situation, they are caring tooo much about something or being overly sensitive about something. I think right now, he is caring too much about something about being too sensitive about others, and having seen matt thru the years and dealing with Automattic at DigitalOcean, can't say I'm surprised. Like I said, I like matt, he's just not always the most.. level headed dude in my experience.

Matt just needs to let copyright and license go. A long walk could cure him of his blindless.

Then Wordpress will be fine.

In general, anyone who doesn't wake up to E=T/A! will go extinct.

Copyrights are for cons. Patents are for parasites. Licenses are for losers.

You can only ignore nature for so long.

What about this situation is the undeniable force of nature?

There are 2 groups of businesses: those like in this Wordpress battle that are fighting over copyrights, patents, and trademarks & those that have realized these things are retarded and make them innovate at <1% the speed of those who embrace the public domain.

Empirically we have been seeing this for a while (look at the dominance of open source programming languages, for example. Even Microsoft open sourced C# b/c they saw it was dead otherwise), but now we have a simple undeniable formula which explains this which is roughly E = T/A! [0]

You can keep your head in the sand and pretend that things aren't going to change, but the bottom line is if you stick to (c) and patents you retard your own development and will be driven to extinction by your competitors.

[0] https://breckyunits.com/eta.html

“So this post might be a lot of things, but I can assure you it’s not me defending my old company just because I used to work for them. I’ve got literally no reason to do that.”

by all means this guy is not the best one to call removal of Matt. this also reminds me those VC that got rid of the founders because founders have some flaws, and VC forgot that,without those flawed founders there will be nothing to start with.

Yeah. The author starts by giving all the reasons he is biased. And still expects us to take their argument at face value? Come on…

I think the author is being open with their conflicts of interest.

Which is a bit of a contrast to what Matt is doing.

There’s a difference between being awkward and being wrong; being persuasive and being right.

> I haven’t really been involved in WordPress for about five years now....Yes, I used to work for WP Engine. I even kinda liked them, for a while (mostly while they just kinda left us alone for the first year or so). But I wouldn’t say my time at the company left a good taste in my mouth.

> We don’t need to dredge up a bunch of old and buried stuff that isn’t really important anyway, but suffice to say: I really don’t have any reason to be a WP Engine cheerleader. Most of the people I knew there have left, and I’ve watched from the sidelines as the company has implemented a bunch of scummy policies and shady sales tactics to squeeze money from their customers and make it harder to leave.

If this isn't good enough for you then you're not being honest, you are just desperately looking for any excuse to defend Mullenweg.

If he didn’t have a financial stake in his former company, WP Engine, he would have put it at the top of his list of disclaimers. His company was acquired by WP Engine, it would be crazy if he didn’t get stock as part of that deal.

The omission of that suggests that he does have a financial stake.

Being transparent about one's potential conflicts of interest is exactly what you are supposed to do.

Contrast that with Matt's original tirade where he didn't mention the licensing deal he put in front of WP Engine that they turned down.

But being transparent does not change the fact.

But it does mean we're empowered to proceed and consider his claims on the merits and not just go into a shutdown and disregard which I would suggest is an intellectually lazy cop out, and not at all in nuanced way of bringing consideration of potential biases to bear on the merit of the arguments. If the effect of encountering that information is that you refuse to consider any arguments on their merits then I think there's a kind of information literacy issue at play, because the correct assessment would be to assess the extent to which they do or don't mitigate the severity of the claims, rather than to brush them aside wholesale.

In general you’re correct. But this is a political matter. Putting intellectual principles above common sense is just naive.

I don't understand what for you are the pertinent intellectual principles or what for you counts as common sense in this context.

I don't understand what it means for those principles to be in conflict and I'm not sure that I would agree, upon clarification, that one is being put above the other or that the nature of the relationship between them is such that you choose between them with mutual exclusivity.

I also noticed in his list of disclaimers he did not say whether he has a financial stake in either party. I assume he does own stock in his old employer, WP Engine, given that his company was acquired.

If he's an idiot maybe. Or at least desperately in need of a competent financial planner. Who the hell would hold onto the stock of a (still relatively small) acquiring company a decade plus after the acquisition?

This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson.

Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial stake in the company he used to work for, WP Engine, after his company was acquired. He merely claims that he isn’t a “fan of either party”, so we should value his opinion and trust that it is impartial.

As for myself, I’ve never used WordPress or any CMS, I’m a lowly embedded software engineer. If Matt, the progenitor and steward of one of the most successful open source products in the world, asserts that an entity in the ecosystem is a leech, I’m inclined to believe him.

> asserts that an entity in the ecosystem is a leech

By that definition, TinyMCE should be able to disable all textareas in Wordpress, since the product has used it freely for years without contributing anything.

And Lodash should be able to disable TinyMCE.

And QUnit should be able to disable Lodash.

It's open source. Should every Linux user be -required- to contribute? I'd bet the OS quality would degrade if that were so.

I am left with the question: why, after 13 years of WP Engine doing the exact same thing, is Matt now willing to burn down the house?

I partially agree with you that this could be a slippery slope, but there is a difference here. TinyMCE is not burning through API and CDN resources of the dependencies it is using.

Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide.

And he also mentioned that they can host these services on their own, since the code is GPL2. They don't do this because they don't want to pay these costs themselves.

Perfectly acceptable to make that claim, which would be a ToS violation. Why couch it as something else?

if WP Engine contributed to source, would they suddenly be allowed to rack up API and CDN bills?

Where's the pricing page? Where's the terms that say "once your customers use our service enough you have to pay"? Where's the option in WordPress to switch to another backend?

The converse of this is where’s the contract or terms that says WP has to keep providing API access for free? It’s open source software after all, almost all of which comes with some form of “no warranty or guarantees” of any kind. Certainly I’ve never seen one offering contractual access to any and all future updates or patches.

Nahhhh that's not how that works at all. Real users are now not getting security updates or features that they had expected before they invested in the WP ecosystem. There's literally no way for a user to pay for API access. Instead, the onus is on the company they're paying for servers from to pay tens of millions of dollars (with no rhyme or reason for that amount). There's no passive "well we never guaranteed this!" from WordPress, they're actively going out of their way to break installations.

This wasn't an issue of "it's abusive traffic"—and how could it be, being the code that Automattic wrote!—it's an issue of Matt Mullenweg throwing a temper tantrum and turning unsuspecting WordPress users into collateral damage. There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure (you might even argue that it's not feasible, as it's never been done before by someone other than Automattic!). WordPress isn't just "not providing updates", they're actively blocking these users for purely political reasons. The users have been turned into cannon fodder.

The problem with these sorts of discussions is both sides always want to have it both ways. When the complaint is they aren't doing something and that's against the spirit of the thing, the response is "show me the contract that says I have to do it". But when it comes to talking about how their opponent is being unfair, the words of the contract don't matter anymore. That's just not how things work, either the contract is all controlling, or the relative behaviors and non-contractual expectations matter.

Matt might well be throwing a temper tantrum, and almost certainly causing brand damage, and the result of the conflict might be actual harm to end users. BUT WP Engine doesn't get to hide behind the limits of their obligations under the open source licenses and then shift the blame they should rightfully be taking onto Matt because of his temper tantrum. Real users are not getting security updates or features they expected because the company / vendor they are buying their product from did not do due diligence to secure their supply chain. Matt could decide tomorrow to stop releasing new WP versions, or change the license (modulo CLA stuff). It's not like sudden, fundamental changes to the upstream licensing / sourcing hasn't been a constant source of headlines and conflicts for the last few years now. CentOS, Redis, HashiCorp, Akka, CockroachDB, and many more projects have fundamentally "altered the deal" and downstream customers relying on them have been caught in the crossfire. Heck, even the GPL2 vs GPL3 debate is an example of this. Are all the projects that switched to GPL3 for anti-TiVoization clauses guilty of throwing temper tantrums? Plenty of real world users were harmed by moves to GPL3, for example, Bash on macOS is stuck at 3.2 and users were forced to migrate to zsh over this move.

> There's no way to operate these features without WordPress infrastructure

Is WordPress not open source? What stops WPEngine from doing it themselves, they have the source. If its too hard, well that might explain then why their upstream vendor wants some compensation for the work. We (rightfully) criticize commercial companies for not putting resources into the huge numbers of open source projects and labor that underpins their very existence. Well this is another example of that. If an upstream source is so critical to your business that its loss would cripple you or your customers... maybe consider spending some money on securing and retaining access to that source.

> Real users are not getting security updates or features they expected because the company / vendor they are buying their product from did not do due diligence to secure their supply chain.

It's not WPE's supply chain, it's the end users' supply chain. There's no way they could have seen this coming. Targeting WPE was essentially arbitrary. Users are affected because WPE was cut off, not because they did anything wrong.

> BUT WP Engine doesn't get to hide behind the limits of their obligations under the open source licenses

I'm curious to know what you think they should have done, because other then just heap money on a literal direct competitor, I can't imagine what they could have done.

> Is WordPress not open source? What stops WPEngine from doing it themselves, they have the source.

How are they supposed to have a copy of all the updates if they're blocked? This is such a nonsense suggestion. Of course they could run the servers, but those are empty servers with no data.

> If an upstream source is so critical to your business that its loss would cripple you or your customers... maybe consider spending some money on securing and retaining access to that source.

You're only just defending Automattic's literally extortion tactics. Should I as a user be worried that Linode or Hetzner will be blocked next because they aren't paying a tithe to WordPress?

> I'm curious to know what you think they should have done, because other then just heap money on a literal direct competitor, I can't imagine what they could have done.

I suppose not pissing off their single and sole supplier of the product they're reselling to their customers might have been a smart move. If you buy your product from your competition, you probably need to stay on their good side. Maybe not re-selling a product when their continued access to the product was controlled by a competitor might also have been a good idea.

> Of course they could run the servers, but those are empty servers with no data.

Do they not have the source? Probably time to start hiring some developers and make their own patches for security issues in the product they're selling. No warranty express or implied is exactly that. They get the software, they get the source. Everything else is a bonus. Especially if the defense of their conduct is that there's no obligation for them to have done anything more than the license required of them.

> Should I as a user be worried that Linode or Hetzner will be blocked next because they aren't paying a tithe to WordPress?

Yes, you probably should be. Any time you're reliant on a single source of failure for a critical component of your business you should be worried about it. Sometimes you accept the risk and nothing happens. And sometimes you accept the risk and something does happen and you learn why redundancy is important.

I would think that having the update server hardcoded into the application might be an implicit expectation that you're going to use that update server instead of another one.

Possibly, but when the owner of that server comes around and starts playing hardball, you probably need to figure out real quick how to mollify them or get out from under them. And if you're going to just point to the software license and say "it doesn't say I have to do anything to give back to you", then you probably shouldn't be surprised when the owner of the software points right back at the license and says "it doesn't say I have to give you access to the hard coded URLS either"

Except, as far as I understand this (not being a WPE customer or a WP user, just an observer), MM isn't cutting off WPE, he's cutting off anyone that uses WPE to host WP sites. The whole situation stinks and innocent customers are being caught in the crossfire as a result. No one comes out of this looking good and the WP community as a whole takes a hit as a result.

> Matt mentioned it's costing them millions per year to provide them with automatic updates and other services they provide.

A single hosted plugin repository is a huge multiplier towards ecosystem growth, but WordPress always had the option of distributing the load by asking others to set up mirrors, and offering a selection of mirrors. Y'know, redundancy. They've never done so.

There's also no option in the WordPress core to easily point towards a different repository URL.

Maybe this whole debacle would lead to slightly more decentralisation of WordPress, which might be a good thing for the long-term health of the project and community.

There's discussions on this https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1frd37p/its_time...

1. Provide proof of your claim that they don’t contribute, or a request for them to do so. I suspect Matt and his companies have contributed to many of their dependencies.

2. All those products have no marginal cost for users, WordPress.org does.

3. Just because bad behavior has been tolerated for a time doesn’t mean it must be tolerated forever.

> It's open source. Should every ... user be -required- to contribute?

No, not every user. Only entities that make millions of $$$ directly with that free software. They should be required to contribute!

Either donate directly or contribute hours proportional to your dependency on the project.

Also note that the author doesn’t disclaim any financial stake in the company he used to work for

It would hardly be shocking if he had some stock or whatever, given how prevalent that is for tech workers' comp.

However, if it were me, and I did have a financial stake in WPE, I would not/could not write either of these sentences from TFA under my personal view of honesty:

I really don’t have any reason to be a WP Engine cheerleader.

I can assure you it’s not me defending my old company just because I used to work for them. I’ve got literally no reason to do that.

If it were you and you did have a financial stake, would you make a post like this?

I doubt it, and it would be wrong to do so.

If he didn’t have a financial stake, he would have listed it in his myriad reasons to trust him.

It's worth noting that Matt Mullenweg invested in WP Engine's Series A.

I think the quotes you choose arguably are not even the strongest, because the author also said:

>I’ve watched from the sidelines as the company has implemented a bunch of scummy policies and shady sales tactics to squeeze money from their customers and make it harder to leave.

And

>On most days, if you wanted to have a conversation about how much WP Engine sucks, frankly, I’d be a happy participant.

The author goes to pretty great lengths to be transparent about his background and employment history.

More to the point, he lays out a ton of specifics about how Matt acted like a Grade A Asshat. If you have any issue with those specifics, you can and should state your objections.

But your comment here is just nebulous BS. Saying "This reads like part of the smear campaign predicted by Matt in his interview with Michael Paulson" sounds exactly to me like when Elizabeth Holmes gave her now infamous retort "first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world". Both are equally vacuous statements that don't address the specific criticisms put forth.

I will concede that my remark about a “smear campaign” is worthless or detrimental to the discussion.

1. The author claims dozens of other companies behave similarly and claims that Matt has not taken any action against them. However, the author makes no claim of what level of contribution to WordPress, cost to Wordpress.org, or any contractual agreements those companies may have with WordPress entities. Multiple companies do pay for trademark licenses. Scale is also an important factor here. Estimates are in the hundreds of millions of revenue for WP Engine. They are one of the largest companies in the ecosystem, of course they should be contributing more than smaller players.

2. The author claims that Matt attempted “extortion” and refused to give WP Engine more time to address his demands. It does seem true that Matt refused to give them more time. However, Matt claims this conversation has been going on for more than a year. A deadline seems appropriate if your counterparty keeps delaying.

3. The author claims that trademark confusion between WordPress and WP Engine is an unfounded concern, citing confusion Shopify and Spotify. This is ludicrous on its face, those companies serve completely different market needs, compared to the WP Engine literally offering the product produced by the trademark holder. The author claims that WordPress.com and WordPress.org is confusing the trademark, but doesn’t state whether WordPress.com has a license to use the trademark.

4. The author claims that Matt’s dissatisfaction with WP Engine’s contribution is unreasonable because there aren’t terms and conditions or a contract. This is missing the point entirely. The point is that good members of the community shouldn’t need to be forced to contribute. If they want to play by the letter of the law, Matt isn’t obligated to provide the free services that their business relies on, just as they aren’t obligated to give back. It cuts both ways, and if they won’t operate in good faith, it is self destructive to continue to enable them.

I’m out of energy to continue, so I’ll stop here.

>2. The author claims that Matt attempted “extortion” and refused to give WP Engine more time to address his demands. It does seem true that Matt refused to give them more time. However, Matt claims this conversation has been going on for more than a year. A deadline seems appropriate if your counterparty keeps delaying.

What would "seem appropriate" would be some form of terms and conditions, or contract, or legal authority that would warrant any of this business about imposing any deadlines or demands of any kind whatsoever, in the first instance. The time isn't Matts to give or not give to begin with.

>The point is that good members of the community shouldn’t need to be forced to contribute.

I think the author was at pains to emphasize through the beginning middle and end of the article that there was such a thing as a right way to make this case. And the problem is weaponizing certain levers at WordPress in ways that raise all kinds of conflict of interest issues, have the potential to cause all kinds of collateral damage, and undermining credibility and integrity of WordPress as a long-term project.

I agree that there is a right way to make this case, but we don’t know if it was already made behind closed doors.

The ultimatum Matt made in the texts highlighted by WP Engine appears short, but it seems unlikely this was the first time Matt brought up these issues.

Even assuming the best was done behind closed doors, isn't it reasonable to WP Engine customers to give them notice of at least a few weeks or months that "unless your host complies, you will lose access to WordPress.org updates"?

If Matt can pull the rug on one host's customers without notice, he can do it again. He has been on streams saying no other host is in the doghouse with Matt, but a week ago almost nobody knew WPE was on thin ice.

If Matt didn't do the reasonable thing to warn WPE customers, what other unreasonable things is he capable of doing in the future?

The "reprieve" of a new Oct 1 deadline is still far from reasonable in my opinion to the point that it is further infuriating that he is using it to virtue signal, though it is at least a tiny start of an implicit acknowledgement that he screwed up. But it's a matter of rebuilding trust in the ecosystem now, and I think Matt is still digging a hole, and this can't be fixed until he apologizes, and the governance of the WordPress.org update server is clarified (best case: out of Matt's hands), or somebody more neutral creates a competing update server, fracturing the ecosystem.

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