One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic. That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her team there in the meetings I posted here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.
However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
To be entirely blunt it's all damage control for us at this point when your name comes up, and it's because of that one singular mistake, if this was just WPE and Automattic duking it out in court no one would really care, but now the reliability of the WPOrg infrastructure is being questioned by a big chunk of the people who depend on WordPress and they will probably be inclined to walk away from your infrastructure and deeper into the arms of someone like WPEngine when they get the chance.
If you care about the broad perception of your efforts and your business practices I think you need to address this. Again I see that there are plenty of reasons to take issue with WPE's conduct but this singular decision you made has people calling for you to step aside and let someone else run WordPress. It's not going to go away on its own.
An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder) and others.
AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions:
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
— https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.
Making WordPress contact something other than api.wordpress.org requires altering the codebase. Making this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected:
> Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885
So according to Mullenweg:
- If WP Engine alters WordPress, even just to alter its configuration, they are “butchering” it.
- If WP Engine doesn’t alter WordPress and leaves it pointing at api.wordpress.org, they are unfairly using community resources.
– Huge numbers of people using api.wordpress.org is actually “great” and scales to tens of millions of servers.
As far as I can see, he doesn’t have a consistent position. He’s just grabbing hold of the nearest accusation that he thinks will harm WP Engine in the heat of the moment, regardless of what he has previously claimed or who else it hurts.
Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...
It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient.
Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time.
Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)
Edit: this guy said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827
Or maybe it is just fine for their use case and they are making already enough money with it...
Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them.
Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.)
So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really.
BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.
Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will also get access to those improvements. For sure it's disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time to Core.
Oh, I remember now. I was wondering why ACF didn't become part of the core.
We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.
It's a well-engineered product whether you want to accept it or not. Unlike more than half of the tech world that's unprofitable and is just a fart in the wind of tech memory.
WP is a well-delivered product that works well for its user base in most situations. Plenty of code is well-marketed, profitable, and fulfills users' needs, but not well-engineered.
By the way, I know the PHP gripe is contentious, but it's not the reason why I think WP is badly engineered, it's just the reason it was easier to engineer it badly.
See https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ for more details on PHP.
One excerpt from that page:
There is a whole lot of action at a distance. Consider this code, taken from the PHP docs somewhere.
@fopen('http://example.com/not-existing-file', 'r');
What will it do?
If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. (How? No idea.)
Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in php.ini.
Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
But not if the right error_reporting level isn’t set.
If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.
I can’t tell how this innocuous function call will behave without consulting compile-time flags, server-wide configuration, and configuration done in my program. And this is all built in behavior.
Although I think the exception there is security (and yes I know many will say clean and well engineered code is secure code). Security has to be solid or it will impact too many people negatively.
Yeah good luck with that. Something so deeply embedded in WordPress Core impossible to improve upon.
I do know they exist of course, Sony being one.
I’m coding up a little something that I feel is more modern and superior compared to WP, and I’d like to learn what their business requirements and use cases are that keep them on WP.
Thanks in advance!
Something that feels powerful and safe; like WP of 10 to 15 years ago.
It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted.
Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.
I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did.
Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."
This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.
But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)
According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with.
Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
They could have give a warning 20 months ago that this may happen and then this would not be a thing.
Or is the 20 months thing just completely irrelevant to the point that Automattic should've given a heads up before cutting off plug-in updates
I mean yeah, companies should have contingency plans for things that are extraordinarily rare but let's be reasonable about it. No one, including you, saw this coming.
I challenge you to find a single blog post, tweet or HN/Reddit comment that suggests Matt could one day shut off wp.org access to a single company running 1.5 million sites without any notice to that company, or the community members who will be affected. It's unconscionable. Or at least it was.
Be reasonable.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/#:~:text=If....
That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.
That would be Matt as the sole owner of wordpress.org, not a plural 'decision makers'
In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that as a result of his actions, WPE is now a “distressed asset,” worth just a “fraction” of what it was before, because “[c]ustomers are leaving in droves” – calling into question whether Defendants’ motivations extend beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE’s valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap
Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander and disrupt them so much that the company would become worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him, after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit too)
I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well. A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day. Being able to pull it locally saves all that. Also, it is faster and does provide some security.
> They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
That depends on how you look at it. If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be a big problem for both DO and AWS.
They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros.
But then Amazon does have their own in-house Linux distro, which is/used to be somewhat associated with RedHat/ Centos https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023
I would expect AWs,Google etc have specific internal only distros that make up the foundation of their cloud business but that is just a guess.
I think it's obvious WPE wouldn't be in the clear with Matt even if they went and hosted a mirror/cache of the WP.org packages.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
Automattic's associate legal counsel begs to differ [1]:
> Let’s apply this to the WordPress trademarks (also called simply “marks”). The WordPress Foundation owns the right to use the WordPress marks for non-commercial purposes. It can also sublicense out this right for particular events (e.g., WordCamps) and to people supporting the WordPress project and community. The Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that facilitates access to WordPress-related software.
(Take it up with them, not me.)
[1] https://automattic.com/2024/10/02/wordpress-trademarks-a-leg...
"We could not get wordpress.org being part of the foundation approved by the IRS."
Automattic's legal team somehow considers it a non-profit though.
So like I said, at this point it's no different than RHEL's very stringent trademark protections, and restrictions on using their update servers (cdn.redhat.com) if you're not paying them. The only difference here is that if WP Engine was itself a non-profit, Matt wouldn't be going after them. RHEL is not as generous.
Apparently these are the new rules. If you're a for-profit entity advertising "Wordpress Hosting" instead of "Hosting with Wordpress installed" and want access to the infrastructure of wordpress.org (which costs millions of dollars a year) you now have to pay, either in cash or equivalent contributions.
Personally that seems fair. It should have come with a minimum 90 day public notice period, and the stuff about being a cancer etc. is pretty crazy. Changing marketing language and setting up your own plugin mirror like Bluehost did (https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror) is not the end of the world.
To be very specific about at least one of the issues:
* The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
* If WPE forks WordPress to fix that, and continues to say they host WordPress, IANAL but they probably have a trademark violation problem on their hands.
There are certainly workarounds which exist, but it's hard for us to conclude casually on Hacker News whether they can be deployed at WP Engine scale and in compliance with whatever agreements WP Engine is bound to.
So yeah you're right about what the right thing to do is. But frequently reality is not that simple. They needed time and maybe even assistance from wporg (in helping them to be free of wporg. errrr)
But they can be changed via filters. I do that all the time to manage when certain request are being made (and making sure it's in a cron job and not a user-request).
WP Engine does run their own plugin in the instances they host, though I assume it's not obligatory. Still, every site I ever had to look at that was on WPE had it installed and enabled.
WP does come with its own CA certs, but that file could be appended (or replaced, again via filter) as well. Since they're comfortable changing things like the revision settings, I doubt this would be something they wouldn't do.
I'm not saying Matt is reasonable, but "it's not an easy thing to do" isn't true.
It is a stupid hissyfit and some bad judgments. People make mistakes.
There are far better purely technical / code issues to turn people away from WordPress, but WordPress is spectacularly popular.
I'll admit that I'd already been looking for a modern alternative. I'm a web developer, I almost exclusively write in TypeScript, something running on Node just makes more sense for me. I recently built a project on PayloadCMS and NextJS -- Payload has since integrated directly into Next's server and has a really nice "website" template to get started. I'll be using that from now on.
I think the data schema in Wordpress is decent. With the addition of Pods it has become a lot more flexible. (There were other solutions that mostly cost $$)
Most of my issues with WP has to do with the front end.
yup. I'm about to make a new site and I dont care about the platform, I just want to write. but I'm not gonna use wordpress ever again now, probably. Matt seems friendly but this is evil CEO garbage
Correction: this is Evil CEO vs Evil CEO garbage. Casting WPEngine as some sort of saint is highly inaccurate.
I've long thought that the relationship between Automattic/WordPress.com and WordPress.org was not good for the community, and your behaviour here has put that beyond doubt.
I honestly don't know what's going through your head, but you need to try to wind back the clock a couple of weeks and put things right. You continue to lie and manipulate words (even in this thread!) to make it sound like you are in the right, but it's not working. You need to stop.
I watched Matt destroy friends' WordPress businesses by saying they violated the WP ethos while he and Automattic did the same thing in their businesses.
I've seen them break legal agreements with theme creators and refuse to pay them despite contracts. They also use legal threats against small creators to force them to accept an agreement that pays far less.
I would never do business with Matt or Automattic. They have behaved unethically in my experience.
Matt has too much power and uses it to do whatever he wants. He should never have been allowed to be involved in WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
I'm not sure that last part makes sense. For starters, there's a chronological issue -- Matt co-created the open source WordPress project in mid 2003, founded Automattic in mid 2005, and founded the WordPress Foundation in 2010. But even setting that aside, who exactly would/should have prevented him from serving in roles in multiple organizations that he himself founded, and why?
If he's abusing the non-profit foundation in some blatantly for-profit way, then yes that would clearly be problematic -- but it doesn't seem clear-cut whether that has happened. The foundation owns the trademark, and the owner of a trademark must defend it in order to keep it. And as for the wordpress.org infrastructure, that appears to be totally separate from the foundation.
Alternatively, if the foundation had never been formed at all, would that have been a better outcome? I'm skeptical, since in the post-ZIRP world many VC-funded "single vendor open source" infrastructure software companies (whose projects lack separate non-profit foundations) are having their own relicensing dramas, and issues with insufficient contributions from large cloud vendors. This seems to be an industry-wide problem right now.
I know you gave some examples alleging bad behavior up-thread, but in those cases it isn't clear that the specific core problem related to a conflict of interest with Matt having dual roles at Automattic and the Foundation.
Or for instance, regarding "the good of WordPress": my impression is that Matt's various organizations are by far the largest contributors to WP core development, so it's hard to argue an overall trend of not acting in the best interest of WordPress. Stated another way, if Automattic were to go out of business, WordPress development would be significantly impacted. I think this means "the good of WordPress" and "the good of Automattic" are synergistic and intertwined.
At the end of the day, developing and maintaining a major open source project is very expensive. Someone needs to pay for it, and when a majority of that cost is paid by a single entity, that entity will naturally have disproportionate control. If major ecosystem members aren't contributing their share (as is alleged in WPE's case), I don't see how an entirely community-driven approach would be successful.
To be clear though, with respect to WP's situation, I don't have a dog in this fight and am neither condoning nor condemning the behavior of the parties involved.
Before this week I knew what wordpress was (of course), did not know either names WP Engine nor Matt Mullenweg, and had never happened to build a site with wordpress.
Now I know your name and will never build a site with wordpress.
You can choose to make that about me instead of recognizing any responsibility for that outcome, but it's never the less a fact. Do with this simple data what you will, but data it is.
Another comment by someone else in one of the severel conversations on this went something like:
"I don't know either of these companies and so far WP Engine hasn't said anything yet. So far I have only heard Wordpress's side of the story, and that has made me assume that Wordpress are the side in the wrong."
That is some galaxy brain stuff right there.
Some of his comments from the other day on reddit have already been used in this very lawsuit, you'd think he would know to shut the hell up at this point if it's #2.
Was that the hammers thing, or something else?
A. Legally, it cannot possibly help you (whatever happened, happened). However, it can hurt you (inconsistent statements, etc). This is particularly true in colloquial environments like HN.
B. While it may be useful reputation/press wise, because anything you do wil be evidence, you should be having someone else do that.
C. If you are part of a publicly traded company, you can run into SEC violations quickly from what you say, how you say it, and where you say it. Even moreso if you are CEO/an officer/etc
I could go on forever here - for example, you can also run yourself into trouble quickly if the people you are talking to are people you know may be witnesses in the case, etc.
There is a near infinite number of reasons lawyers tell people to STFU when you get sued.
Of course, if your company/you as CEO get sued, it can obviously be incredibly frustrating and difficult to sit there and watch a one-sided story take hold - not the least of reasons because people often take complaints as evidence rather than assertions, and the response rarely gets as much press, etc.
I think the closest lots of HNers come is when they love their company and see a legal complaint pop up on HN that they felt is just insane but can't say anything about it. It's like that, but like 100x worse :P.
But saying nothing is the most useful thing you can do - get away from it. Take a walk, meditate, whatever.
Get the people who are experts in handling it involved (lawyers, comms folks, whatever), and let them do their job.
I'm going to do him the favor of not responding to anything else he writes in this thread for his own good.
Not a lawyer but have been at some major companies when legal stuff goes down. Most have told us:
"hey, there's a thing going on. Do not talk about it, don't reference it, don't 'correct' people. If anyone asks you for comment, send them to us"
I've been deposed and it sucks. It's exceptionally stressful, even if you're not the target in the situation.
The best case scenario here is that Rachel (or one of her associates more likely) takes every single sentence Matt has written here, or anywhere else, tonight, and cross-checks it against every other sentence or fact he's claimed before. Or that his company has claimed. or the foundation has claimed. or ....
Then at the deposition, they will then ask a lot of hard, uncomfortable questions about every single inconsistency, no matter how little. Because that is what they spend many hours preparing to do.
That's the best case.
Is there a point where it could switch from "a bunch of people running their mouths" to "a coordinated harassment campaign against WP Engine and its customers"?
Most lawyers in cases like this are not assholes (surprisingly), so they generally won't spend time/energy deposing people who can't produce useful evidence, even if they could.
As a result, you would generally stick to people who have relevant evidence, are capable of legally binding the company (often director or above) or speaking for it (various others), etc.
But - if you need to prove a coordinated campaign, and can't get evidence of it otherwise (emails, chats, etc), sometimes you just got to depose a lot of people.
Usually the path of least resistance is taken, however, and electronic evidence is often sufficient enough these days to not end up having to depose lots of employees. Judges (magistrate and otherwise) also are pretty careful in ensuring you aren't being malicious (IE just trying to harass employees)
Lawyering is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Lots of companies fall into the trap of letting lawyers make business decisions instead of being advisors of legal risk/etc to the business.
Done properly, they are advisors 99% of the time.
Which means, to answer your question, there are plentyof situations where the outcome of the lawsuit is not as valuable to the business as the narrative/etc.
For example, there are people/companies whose brand is their most valuable asset. "family friendly" celebrities are a common example, i think.
For them, the narrative and control of it may be way more important than winning or losing.
Now, i would still say - even in that case, the person going off and talking in public without someone helping them know what to say (not necessarily a lawyer) is still often a really bad idea. They are often too close to it, etc, to really be objective about what will make the most sense, even if the goal is "control the narrative" rather than 'win the lawsuit" or whatever.
But in those cases, working with a crisis manager or whatever, if the most important thing is the perception, have at it.
At the same time, people involved tend to be in a bit of a bubble. It often feels more critical, urgent, and well known than it really often is.
So for example, here, i'm sure to lots of employees/Matt it feels like a thing everyone is talking about. But in reality, uh, its not. It isn't carried by any major news site, and even among the general open source or developer community, i would bet 99% of people have no idea about any of this.
Even within their customer base i would imagine it still isn't widespread knowledge (though it likely will be over say the next week).
So in a case like this, you have time to catch your breath, engage your best people, and think about your response. Which you should take.
That isn't always the case mind you (it's like any incident response). But i think it's the case here.
Of course its possible that these posts are happening through consultation with a lawyer/PR or something but often it feels like someone using their “inside” voice in the outside, and reads like unforced errors.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these comments here make it to some of the legal documents we will be reading in the future.
I assume some ignore this advice either because they think they are right, or they are unhinged and they think they know better than everyone.
I’m here for it all, whichever may be the case.
https://m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/ftx-founder-keep...
> The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely causing Bankman-Fried's attorneys to scratch their heads, or worse. Prosecutors can use any statements, tweets or other communications against him at his trial, which is scheduled for October.
> Prosecutors love when defendants shoot their mouths off," said Daniel R. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor who is now a white-collar criminal defense attorney. If Bankman-Fried's public comments before trial can be proven false during the trial, it may undermine his credibility with a jury, he said.
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
(edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct to read page 35 as saying that)
That’s not necessarily reality, and you are not as righteous as you believe. Even if you are - your words could be misconstrued.
I cannot understand why your legal team is not advising you to stop making public comments. Or perhaps they are, and you aren’t listening to them? Either way, you are being incredibly foolish.
Anything said and documented prior to the hearing will be combed through. Even tiny inconsistencies will be cherry picked and entered as evidence to raise doubt of the claims made.
I'm all for the sentiment behind a CEO addressing ongoing lawsuits candidly, but in reality its just a bad idea. Statements made without being fully vetted by council, with the context of all other statements already made, will inevitably have issues that could throw a wrench in the case.
I don't believe you will gain anyone's sympathy by resolving a misunderstanding about who-said-what-when in some inconsequential matter somehow apparently also part of this drama. Some if it seems like pure distraction that I don't see why anyone outside of the individuals involved should have ever heard about in the first place.
I second the sentiment that you don't appear healthy and could suggest maybe let someone else take a seat in one of the (3? 4?) chairs for a change? At least from the outside, you still seem free to choose your focus yourself. Maybe that window will be closing...
>> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres: * Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict. * Your interviewing with Automattic over the past year. * I will possibly tell the press all of the above.
That's just so obviously threatening and uncalled for. Even if Brunner were considering jumping ship, you shouldn't threaten someone into accepting an offer.
Now, you don't know me from Adam, but I want you to strongly, strongly consider that this thing that you've been afraid of happening, has actually already happened. And that is, that you have become Evil Matt -- with the little horns on your head and everything. And to get back to being Good Matt, you're going to have to let some things go.
"No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it." -- Charles Schulz
And honestly in the territory of being legally actionable.
The only thing you are doing right now is lessening your chances at getting justice, regardless of how objectively right you may be.
Maybe there gets a point you become so wealthy, that ego is all that matters. But you're supposedly a smart guy who cares about his products, community and company, why not take the practical and economically safe route of duking it out in court?
Employers generally have an obligation to keep personal data confidential, especially sensitive information like a job application.
Whether that applies in this particular case or not, i'm not going to offer an opinion, but you really should shut up.
I get that it's particularly frustrating and hard to feel like you are being unfairly treated or whatever, but shut up anyway.
As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.
But my better angel wants me to duck tape his mouth shut before he does himself dirty.
Edit: Or if you’re a WPE fan, my better angel says to keep talking! Explain it all away! Share it all!
You really shouldn't, IMO.
For one thing, what parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy. I get that that's fun from the sidelines, but I certainly don't think we should encourage employers to violate other people's privacy.
For another, we have a court system with lots of rules around it for a reason. These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here. He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying here and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it. He could be bringing up totally irrelevant facts while not talking about the actual important things, with his counterparty correctly not talking about it, but leaving the impression that there is nothing there. Etc.
As you say it is terrible, and they should not have done that. Irrespective of the legal outcome it taints them in my eye forever. That being said that particular horse has left the barn already. It is not like us third parties gigling from the sidelines will affect it.
> These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here.
Yeah sure. People on the internet can lie. It is not like we believe everything which comes out of the mouth of any party ever. That is not a reason for me wishing them to shut up.
It would be in their best interest to stop talking. But it is not our job as third parties to enforce that or even encourage it. We are not his legal representation, nor we are his fairy godmother.
> He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying…
Yes.
> … and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it.
That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely evaluate them. We don’t have as strong tools as people in a court case do. For example we can’t subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a court case. They have to be always engaged.
And it is important to remember that the likely outcome of any such evaluation is that “there is not enough info for me to know for certain”. That is not some weird edge case of critical thinking, but the default state of things.
You're right, I spoke more strongly than warranted. I was getting at this distinction - in a court case, there are real tools, both legal and investigative, that let you determine truth to a much higher degree than in random internet (or real life) conversations.
What I highly dislike is that the person who is acting responsibly legally, and who is probably acting more responsibly by trusting the court system to determine what should happen, is always the party that doesn't engage in this kind of talk. The side acting irresponsibly is trying to change public perception by sidestepping the actual legal mechanisms here, and we shouldn't usually let them.
(I'm speaking generally, in this case I feel less strongly because a lot of this is public knowledge.)
It is a double edged sword though. Sometimes people talk and they are convincing and the independently verifiable facts support what they say. Sometimes they make themselves look like a fool.
Just because one side talks doesn’t mean they win. Just here the side which runs their mouth is comming through (to me, in my perception) at best unprofessional, if not perhaps even a tad bit vindictive and unhinged. Not a good look, even if they are right and legally win at the end.
https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/
> I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.
> Afterward, I also privately shared with him 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?
> For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer.
You're meaning apart from the active law suit yeah? ;)
That does not help your position. IANAL, but stop talking.
But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as you've revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few weeks. I don't follow, how can Heather apply for a job with Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you personally own?
So are you now using company resources for personal projects (as they point out, you constantly have claimed that the .org domain is your personal domain) as well as for non profit org projects?
Doesn't exactly sound... beneficial to investors interests.
That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community for 14 years.
(This is an honest question.)
That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with the USPTO is clear:
>WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic Inc., an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in Exhibit A attached hereto...
Why did you lie, Matt?
The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?
Weird that you never mentioned that this license was granted on the same day it was transferred.
He didn't say it was complicated or that he didn't understand it.
He said it was un-true and it is.
Why did your legal officer today post in a blog post that its a non-profit?
Matt’s agents post in so many different places it’s hard to keep track.
Edit: found it. Wow. This guy has the worst lawyers. https://automattic.com/2024/10/02/wordpress-trademarks-a-leg...
I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises to let me use it on weekdays?
Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this is a valid contract with “consideration” because I gave Jimmy my car and, “in return,” he gave me my car back Monday–Friday.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine that it is illegal to donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit organization, without contracts and considerations coming into play. But if I’m wrong, and “consideration” is a required element of a transaction like this, I don’t think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster anyway.
I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead, with them retaining commercial rights.
Why would either side want to minimize the donation size? It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-profit doesn't care about income tax.
I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
So in other words you intermingle for-profit and nonprofit resources for your own private benefit?
Maybe the IRS should be taking a deeper look at WordPress.org's finances?
Also, a note for the audience: Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour. WPEngine apparently has deep pockets.
> A static site that is 100% free and open-source, competing with several businesses operating scammy subscription models.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30295629
Is this a competitor to Wordpress? Can you elaborate more about how the competition in this space uses scammy subscription models? It might help to illustrate the issues in the industry for outsiders like me.
Off topic, but I'm a bit of an amateur musician myself. I try to check out other musicians that I encounter, but I wasn't able to find anything about you or your music online. Do you have a bandcamp or something similar? The contrabass trombone is a really interesting instrument.
You surely know that scammy subscription models are rife in every space. That's why open-source champions like Matt are an inspiration. But nobody's perfect, so have a little grace.
- Page 12: "wordrpess.org"
- Page 17: "fundamental principal"
Then you learn its not important and in fact its likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless
Me too, I'm no longer the grammar nazi I used to be. It still comes across as sloppy though.
> likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless
That's interesting!
At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page document in a few hours, they might have someone proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that went into writing it was far more serious than the thought that went into proofreading it.
Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system
Optimistic locking might work better, as long as the underlying data can be automatically diffed and merged reliably well.
Git generally does well using this approach, though it's pretty easy to diff text.
Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to distract from facts ?
Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos, you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.
Typos in long-lived documents like contracts, patents, etc. matter quite a bit, by contrast. See eg the second amendment, where billions of dollars have been spent over a few commas.
This could be an AI tools market, although I think several companies are already in it.
Yeah because they don't have to spend any money on R&D nor do they spend money contributing to the open source project :)
It’s kinda comical because it’s absolutely a principal-agent problem disguised as being in the best interest of the company. 10x costs and in practice worse uptime & performance for internal-political insurance and on-call avoidance for me personally, sold with a list of benefits that the company either doesn’t need, or that only look like benefits due to very-partial accounting, or that have such lengthy footnoted caveats that no, they probably won’t be a benefit in-fact.
In this instance, you are not the smartest guy in the room, and anything you say is just going to make the outcome of this whole saga that much more painful.
If I were in your position I'd be very carefully trying to figure out what the next step is, especially given whats going to come out about the Wordpress foundation's commercial licensing agreement with Automattic. That alone should be an exctremely worrying position for you personally, assuming your legal team have pointed out the issues on an international scale that you're about to be hit with.
I don’t expect you to take questions from an internet stranger, but since you asked… What rules does Automattic enforce for all companies who operate businesses built on WordPress? In other words…when does a business owe 8%? There are thousands of businesses wondering if they’re next on the list.
I am curious about your desired outcome. If you win, WP Engine pays 8% going forward? If you lose, will it be business as usual? Fewer open source offerings?
Obviously this could take years to resolve, but developers do have very real concerns over what the landscape may look like in a few years.
An aspect that literally no one could care less about. Bizarre.
Just curious.
(/s, PHP the language isn’t so bad, it’s spaghetti code like WP that gives it a bad name)
Matt, free advice. If you really think your commercial product is better (maybe it retains more post history or whatever the case), spend more time selling it.
Because if they actually did okay this you've got the least competent lawyers of any tech bro not named Elon Musk.
“Yes.”
He’s not actually reading the questions you ask, folks.
> 89. Defendants’ extortion campaign included levying personal attacks against the CEO of WPE for not capitulating to his demands. For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
[Edit: Ignore this paragraph, see JimDabell and lolinder comments below] I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening, ChatGPT also doesn't seem to think so based on its transcript. During the interview Matt did ask at one point if Theo would talk to Lee and Heather on stream, it was about giving everyone a fair chance to tell the story and I doubt that anyone can characterise it as extortional in nature.
Even it was Matt who gave the number away during stream (if it was cut out of the YouTube version) or off stream, it's a huge stretch to claim that as "personal attacks" as part of an "extortion campaign"...
> 90. Defendants’ attacks against WPE’s CEO have also continued in private. First, on September 28, 2024, Mullenweg attempted to poach her to come and work for Automattic, and falsely suggested that WPE’s investor was making her do something she did not want to do.
They screen capped just Matt's message without any context about what was said prior to that message? By September 28, 2024 they have already met many times in-person, too. I think it's just insane for Matt to send a text like but that just seems very out of context in isolation. If absolutely nothing compelled Matt to send that message then I guess it's possible that he's either extremely naive or he is a psychopath.
> 91. After WPE’s CEO did not immediately respond, Mullenweg threatened her the following day. Specifically, on September 29, 2024 Mullenweg gave her until midnight that day to “accept” his job “offer” with Automattic. If she did not accede to his demand, Mullenweg threatened to tell the press, and WPE’s investor, that she had interviewed with Automattic:
> 93. WPE’s CEO did not respond to Mullenweg’s September 29 threat
91 has very interesting wording: "After WPE's CEO did not *immediately* respond". In contrast to 93, they also don't claim that Heather didn't respond to the messages on September 28.
The screenshot of Matt's message on September 29 begins with this:
> Heather, after our extensive discussions about you joining Automattic, the offer you negotiated with me is still on the table.
So... there was definitely a conversation between the screenshots on September 28 and September 29 that lead Matt to think that they presumably didn't include?
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
92 feels like an assertion that's deliberately placed between 90, 91 and 93 to potentially make their claim seem more valid? I suppose "had never interviewed" depends what kind of evidence Matt can produce at this point if he's not lying; if it's all in-person and there are no records at all, which he pointed out in the interview with Theo, then it's unfortunate.
The "[had never] negotiated" part doesn't make sense at all if something was indeed discussed between September 28 and September 29.
> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres: > - Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict > - your interviewing with Automattic over the past year > - I will possibly tell the press all of the above
I feel like the minority on HN that wants to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. Even so, that's a sure-fire way to get someone who may have been listening to you to turn on you.
If you're not going to call your lawyers, at least call Theo since he offered.
> On September 28, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview to the author of the “This might be the end of WordPress” video blog. Among other statements, Mullenweg acknowledged his retaliatory and vindictive intentions, saying: “They could make this all go away by doing a license. Interesting question is whether, now … you know, maybe more than 8% is what we would agree to now.”46
The X interview is a different one. Matt's been busy.
> I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening
He admits it here:
> Afterward, I also privately shared with him 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?
— https://ma.tt/2024/09/on-theprimeagen/
(With the slight discrepancy that he says he did it after the interview, not during, which I’m not sure is a meaningful distinction.)
I agree that after or during isn't a meaningful distinction. I honestly don't understand how anyone characterise that as "personal attack" and link it to "extortion".
While others are stating that you should not, the court of public opinion delivers results (including to Wordpress) a lot faster than the formal court system. So get ahead.
In general it’s better better the hear authentic voices than none or lawyered-up PR consultants, and this site has hammered companies that do so in the past.