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Comment by photomatt | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/

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:

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1841644271939604628

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If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.

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.

>” If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.”

This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.

Did you read the allegations in the complaint?

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.

Since when did relaying employee experience constitute an existential threat to a businesses ability to operate? This forum is littered with people who engage in "threats" as a mode of business every single day.

When you demand money in return for not relaying those experiences? That is when it becomes extortion.

Thats a reductive read. I thought this forum was supposed to encourage a higher minded discourse?

Seriously, read the complaint before commenting. What the parent says isn't "a reductive read", it's literally what WP Engine is alleging (with extensive documentation) and Matt is pointedly not denying.

Read the complaint before commenting any further, please.

That's a weird analogy. It'd be more like your natural gas provider trying to negotiate a deal and then when you don't reach an agreement they turn off the valve to your house.

I'm not talking about him cutting them off from WordPress.org (that's problematic for other reasons), I'm talking about the repeated texts and phone calls threatening to launch a smear campaign against them if they don't sign a deal. That is what looks like extortion.

Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be defended against all not just one. Do you really believe they are the only ones? Are you going to go after everyone next?

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.

>8% is typical for a franchise fee

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

https://imgur.com/a/L9OrWct

Please get a lawyer.

> 8% is typical for a franchise fee

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?

Narrator: Zero

Source: Matt

Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years, in a variety of arrangements. None have abused the WordPress and WooCommerce trademark as much as WP Engine has, hence our C&D against them.

I didn’t ask about “a variety of arrangements” though, I asked about the terms you describe as “typical”.

> Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years

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?

The more Matt tries to explain himself, the more this looks like a protection racket.

A couple posts up is claiming Mullenweg's singling out WP Engine, and here you're claiming he runs a protection racket against anyone who wants to make money running WordPress sites. Which is it?

I said no such thing.

It's hard for me to believe your idea of a racket is pressuring a single business. You can't have it both ways.

Doesn't every protection racket start with a first victim/customer?

This argument is pretty tedious. If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more chickens.

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.

> If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more chickens.

It, at the very least, provides evidence you're into chickens.

Demanding 8% of a single competitor's revenue does a similar thing.

I don't dispute that, only the equivalence you and others are trying to make.

I mean, a protection racket tends to start that way. Give someone prominent a thumping with relative impunity, use the threat of that to get everyone else to comply

Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?

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?

> Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?

Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.

All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--either directly or through insinuation like you're doing here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?

The obvious unanswered question is “why just WP Engine?” Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and service providers would be wise to at least be anxious about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.

He wrote a whole blog post about it: they disable history.

So can WordPress Core. It's an explicit option:

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"?

> So can WordPress Core. It's an explicit option:

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 continue to suggest I’ve insinuated he is extorting others and I have done no such thing. Please stop that. A protection racket does not need a quorum of victims to be distasteful or illegal.

It does need to be a protection racket though. Mullenweg didn't walk up to WP Engine and say, "sure would be a shame if you somehow lost access to the plugins repo, if you pay me some $$$ I'll make sure that doesn't happen." He wrote a public blog post about how they turn off features he considers essential to WordPress. I'm not him, but it seems like if they just flipped that feature on (which would enrich him not at all) he'd be cool.

Seriously, you need to stop talking.

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.

The source for that figure is literally "random person on twitter".

I'm not even joking. Matt reposted it earlier today.

https://x.com/sandro_groganz/status/1841437394236489874

I was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the chat replay before deciding whether the results of any poll taken during that stream are credible.

I have to wonder how many people that voted even know what WordPress is or even use it. It’s easy to click a button on the screen to vote one way or another during a stream while being completely uninformed.

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.

>>>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.

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?

A new car dealership pays 3-8% back to their parent company plus a 1-2% marketing fee, upto 500,000 as an initial fee. They get logo rights and inventory.

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.

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