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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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