What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce enthusiasm for the OSS project.
Matt has made so many unforced errors in the last month, in addition to revealing, one way or another, that he basically considers WordPress, the .org, the .com, the Foundation, and Automattic, all to be synonymous, which is news to a significant portion of the community, let alone to the incorporation and other founding filings.
"May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email."
Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May. The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to them months ago.
WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
If you watch this stream with Theo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
He polls his audience and 54% of the thousand people watching thought WP Engine was an official thing, based on visiting their website that day. They have since updated their website a lot, including rewriting customer testimonial quotes without permission:
The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here for your own good) is context that makes those texts not look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
No one here is disputing that you might have been in the right until September. It's your actions in September that you need to account for.
This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.
Here are some of the texts it says Matt sent:
> I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk: "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
> I've got quotes from current and former employees, some may even stand up and speak as well.
There's the gasoline and matches. And then, while he's on stage:
> I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WordPress very easily
In isolation this sounds very much like "nice community goodwill you have there... would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." In the context of the other texts and phone calls WPE cites it sounds more like an explicit threat with no subtly.
Read the complaint before commenting any further, please.
I see many WordPress hosts use these trademarks in the same way WP Engine does.
How many of them are paying this typical 8% of monthly revenue fee?
Source: Matt
In reverse order:
1. Why on earth are other hosts obligated to contribute to Automattic, their competitor, just because Automattic also contributes to the open source project?
2. You have, on multiple recent occasions, spelt out unequivocally that WordPress.org is YOU, and not the Foundation. Again, why on earth are WordPress hosts obligated to contribute to you?
But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark, offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't give back to the community, and that's bad. I can understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I really don't understand why people are so against him here.
It, at the very least, provides evidence you're into chickens.
Demanding 8% of a single competitor's revenue does a similar thing.
I'm not 100% in the tank for Mullenweg, there's some inconsistencies I find troubling. But WordPress is an incredible, open project. Mullenweg's built an admirable community and business. There are so, so many WordPress hosting sites, and they're doing great. Mullenweg has outlined his issues w/ WP Engine (they turn off history). Does anyone honestly think a private equity firm would do better than he has? Does anyone in all these WordPress threads truly believe a good outcome here is PE firms can do as they like, giving back relatively very little to the community and slowly diluting the trademark? Who thinks this is sustainable? Who in his position would let this happen?
Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );
Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross revenue.
What other unspoken rules are there lurking behind "don't turn off revision tracking"?
I don't understand why this matters. You were asking for a reason, that's the reason. You can call it a "thin excuse", but Mullenweg's been upfront about his position.
> Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross revenue.
The 8% comes from the trademark licensing agreement [0]. They also offer to put them in the Five for the Future program if they do the contribution (they can also spend that 8% on people working on WordPress, which again enriches Mullenweg not at all, or some combo). This sounds pretty clearly like it's addressing the "you contribute very little back to the community" criticism Mullenweg has.
There's even more evidence in the "Forking" section, where they're basically like, "quit switching the attribution codes on our stuff".
Again, it sounds like WP Engine was being pretty uncool, and Mullenweg's trying to get them to be cooler.
[0]: https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
You've admitted a number of times in this thread that you consider the nonprofit organization to be just an extension of the for profit company. There are serious consequences for that for the organizations and you personally.
I'm not even joking. Matt reposted it earlier today.
Sure it’s in use by a large portion of websites (43% I think I saw last) but that doesn’t mean that 43% of people know what WordPress is.
That stream wasn’t on a WordPress-centric channel.
Matt you literally got that figure from a random person on Twitter early today. Remember? You re-tweeted it.
https://x.com/sandro_groganz/status/1841437394236489874
Please get a lawyer.
Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to use the trademark approach, I think your actions are going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have in time.
You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8% being typical? For what kind of franchise?
If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert", do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
If this wasn't open source they could ask for those fees but they decided to give away their software with an open license. Without that license they would have never grown into what they became. But Matt sees another company doing well and he gets jealous and demands a piece of their success and goes postal when he doesn't get his way.
I think he needs to step away from wordpress.org because the conflict of interest is too great.
You did share their CEO's personal phone number to The Primagen though, did you not?
My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
This is very relevant to anyone that cares about open source.
Companies being able to host any OSS without the threat of a trademark dispute is vital to the software industry.
This didn’t kill Mozilla in the end or really affect the OSS community for Firefox or Debian
That's why this matters to average developers. WordPress is the plugin ecosystem, and messing around with it does as much damage to the WordPress ecosystem as left pad did to npm—it's not unrecoverable, but it's a major setback that could quickly become unrecoverable.
Unless WordPress, both the open source codebase and the plugin/theme publishing/distribution channels, are completely free of Matt's influence - they are now a serious risk any business using Wordpress needs to address and mitigate.
What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big creative agencies) need to be concerned?
Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
I agree it might not have much effect on random people using or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that depresses that investment can depress the overall project trajectory.
In WP Engine's own complaint they say that they've "invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community", and nothing about contributing to the project itself. Which to me indicates that they indeed have contributed very little to the project they've made a huge amount of money from.
You can argue WPE doesn't need to and that this is a feature (not a bug) of open source. But Matt Mullenweg seems to disagree and wants to use the fact that they are also capitalizing on a trademark they have no license to in order to press the issue.
From my perspective, however, it seems unlikely Automattic will win this. Automattic seems to only be enforcing their trademark as a response to WPE not contributing back to Wordpress, which is not something WPE is legally obligated to do. Trademarks need to be defended universally and without reservation.
I expect long-term effects for both entrepreneurs and enterprise.
Companies that would’ve started in the ecosystem just got a clear signal that success comes with a tax.
And the risk-management department of every enterprise will use this* as their logical basis for choosing something with a better license.
* Matt unilaterally turning off WP updates for millions of WordPress sites is a major risk signal.
Sometimes you don't need a complex solution for various projects, this thought process reminds me of people building highly scalable configurations for projects that just don't need it then overrunning in costs and overengineering it all.
Exactly. That's not a large scale enterprise CMS. WordPress is fine for that.
But if you wanted to do something that requires fine-grained access control, publishing control, audit logs etc, you're not going to use WP, or you're building a CMS on top of WP. I'm doing that all day because I work in an industry that loves WP and everybody knows WP, so it's easy to collaborate. I've built dozens of plugins to accommodate for our various needs because you will hit some hard walls if you scale to large amounts of URLs, and you will run into problems with the code quality in popular plugins when you're going beyond "I just want it to look nice and work okay".
I don't hate WP. I'd consider myself a WP veteran, I've worked a lot with WP over the years, I've contributed code to core, I've found various bugs. I wouldn't ever consider it for anything that I'd call "enterprise" or "large". It's like when somebody talks about building an enterprise data management system and then says "the fact that the inventor of the CSV format liked pineapple of pizza will make sure that I won't consider CSV as the data store for my system". If they considered CSV before finding that out, they really shouldn't be making decisions in that type of project.
I adopted someone's node.js project once, overengineered and cost the company tons of money to run, I rebuilt it in Wordpress for a fairly large regional grocery chain and not only was it vastly cheaper, but the end product was also better and more reliable. So, I'm leery of anyone that writes something off, right off the bat. Pick the best tool for the job, not the ones that is suddenly in vogue to avoid judgement from random devs on HN or Reddit. You can't pigeonhole solutions, be it Wordpress or whatever you decide on.
When I hear "large enterprise CMS", I don't hear "a CMS that can be used by large enterprises" (because everything could, even if it's based on manually editing HTML files), I hear "a CMS suited to be used in large environments with complex requirements and no room for error".
"Enterprise" as an adjective is something that is tailored to the needs of very large entities that, due to the nature of their size, activities and legal environment, have very complex needs, and who also need to deal with things that normal website owners rarely do: legal compliance, different threat levels, audit-logs, fine-grained access privileges, publishing workflows etc.
WordPress isn't the right fit for that. WordPress isn't, and doesn't claim to be, an Enterprise CMS or targeting very large installations. Similarly: while you can manage data in WordPress, if someone suggested building a banking system on top of WordPress, I'd shake my head just the same. But that doesn't mean you can't set up a few post types and add some fields with ACF and have something you can use to organize and document your gardening efforts. They are just _very_ different requirements, and WP doesn't meet (and doesn't aim to meet) those that you associate with "enterprise" (adjective).
Like I said, I don't hate WP, I use it all the time and I know it very well. And for the vast majority of the internet, it's perfectly fine and usually the right choice because it guarantees that you'll always find somebody who can take over maintenance for your project, you'll find plenty of editors that are already familiar with your system, and there's a bajillion themes you can use and be done with it.
But if you need much more than that, you really shouldn't be using WP. Yes, you can (and I do), but you will build so much custom logic on top of it and wrestle it into behaving appropriately, that you'd be better off just not using WP. But 99% of WP sites never hit that ceiling, so for them WP is a fine choice.
Seriously though, it's a freaking legacy. Sad to see it go this way.