WPEngine, Inc. vs. Automattic– Order on Motion for Preliminary Injunction
courtlistener.com
courtlistener.com
@photomatt literally screwed himself over by talking about his actions here, when everyone was screaming at him to shut the fuck up. Will he start listening now?
In short, what this injunction does is a) remove the checkbox, b) return ACF to WPEngine, c) restore access to website, d) no bond required.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821336#41821399 ("Secure Custom Fields by WordPress.org (wordpress.org)")
"You should stop doing dumb/illegal stuff, it might impact you" is very different advice than "You should stop talking about the dumb/illegal stuff you do, they may stop you".
Mullenweg posted a whiny tweet about it: https://x.com/photomatt/status/1867759730992586756
I think this is an area that Drupal gets right, and Dries wrote an interesting post about it in October:
Automattic for the People
1) This is a preliminary injunction, not a decision. An injunction which resets a situation to the former status quo pending a decision isn't all that unusual.
2) I don't think the issue here is so much a "warranty" as much as that Automattic (et al) set out to discriminate against WPEngine to obtain a business advantage. If Automattic wanted to shut down the WordPress plugin repository entirely, they'd be within their rights to do so. (It'd be business suicide, of course - but the point is that they could.)
If Matt hadn't tried to extort WP Engine he would have been perfectly within his right to say "large hosts have to pay to use the WordPress plugin directory". The injunction is purely about one specific company who was allegedly harmed by Automattic.
It’d make sense for a true non-profit to ask all hosting companies and other high volume users to help fund it, but if it’s not a fully-owned subsidiary of Automattic that’d be everyone, not just when he needs leverage against one company.
This injunction is against WPcom (a for profit entity) and not WPorg. Matt conducted tortious interference. This sets zero precedent on OSS maintainers.
Not really. The court order is to restore things to the status quo of 3 months ago, to require that Matt undo all of the things he specifically had to single out to do to fuck over WPEngine. If Matt hadn't specifically singled out WPEngine, and instead decided to stop providing the website to everybody, there wouldn't have been much of a case anyone could bring.
> However, I say that with not fully understanding the seperation of actions between Automattic the company and Matt in his own personal capacity.
As I understand it, everything Wordpress is Matt in three trenchcoats. Certainly, that's how he's pushing it in his defense filings in this lawsuit.
Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation are both Matt's to use as he sees fit. There isn't a meaningful distinction between him and his organizations.
The more relevant outcome of WPEngine getting the injuction is in Section F (p40), which includes removing that WordPress login checkbox.
Matt is pretty clearly a terrible client from a client control perspective. He's simply not good at doing anything but exactly what he wants to do.
As I have said elsewhere, he is now in this situation solely due to his own actions, having gained almost nothing and lost a lot. He'll lose more if this goes to trial.
The lawyer thing was hilarious. Someone actually claiming to be his lawyer was on the HN threads and anytime he was asked a question the response was a version of "Oh, I hadn't heard about this. I can't answer that."
I've heard about corporations being persons too but a person claiming to be a corporation is a new one. Has that regal "L'État, c'est moi" ring to it.
What he says is that, because wordpress[dot]org is his personal site, telling him what to do with it would violate his First Amendment rights.
Well, a judge did indeed rule on the injuction.
He just retweeted this tweet about the case: https://x.com/brian_essig/status/1866640985842692452
> This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What’s next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?
Even though you don't have a contract, you make a promise (Matt: wp.org is free forever to anyone), someone (WP Engine) relies on that promise to their detriment, and the plaintiff's reliance on that promise was reasonable. Discussion of promissory estoppel at 44:17 (over the next 3 minutes or so) in [1].
And note that singling out WP Engine for very explicitly a payment is part of the rationale.
Shortly after Mike also discusses the same point made by /u/DannyBee [2], ie that the attorneys seem to be considering this case not in the context of the wordpress business, in which Matt being allowed to say you all have access to the code / updates / plugins at my whim is not great for wordpress the company outside of this narrow cirumstance.
[1] A discussion by attorney Mike Dunford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdwiZEhRS3o
Like, come up with some new material.
Please don't, just let them.
Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
I think Matt needs to be replaced, and while the “what” may be arguable, he loses hard on the “how”.
And maybe give the wp.org domain ownership to the Foundation, making WP a bit more reliable and resilient to one's actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Also worth reading the poster's follow-up years later and the ensuing discussion. Graeme's observation about the significance of the comment is super important:
That comment has gotten a bum rap over the years. The commenter was trying to be helpful with Dropbox's YC application (that's what "app" meant on HN in 2007). Back then, file synchronization was widely thought to be a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. I've been trying for years to get people to understand this (starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275, then https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), even though I know you can't argue with the internet.
The comment only became infamous years later [1, 2], after Dropbox was clearly a success—so this is a case of hindsight. If people would only read all three comments, instead of stopping at the first, they'd see that the exchange was pleasant and successful [3]. But a meme is more fun. It didn't exist, so it had to be invented! [4]
Compare that with the other infamous-HN-comment-from-2007, "did you win the Putnam" [5], which got pilloried in real time. No hindsight fallacy there!
If the hivemind had empathy (which alas it does not), people would stop to consider how they'd feel about getting publicly mocked over decades for something they posted with good intentions at age 22 [6]. Alas, this is how the internet works—not much we can do about it. It's amazing, though, what a good sport BrandonM has been about it all this time. That part of the story is actually real, so we should celebrate that too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138488 (August 2013, i.e. 6 years later) seems to be the earliest reference on HN itself.
[2] April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 (Oct 2013)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272 from Drew, and then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9479
[4] https://www.whitman.edu/VSA/trois.imposteurs.html
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079, but don't miss the witty and graceful concession (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35350)
I don’t think the point is that the people saying it at the time were stupid, it’s just interesting that people can come to completely wrong conclusions which seem reasonable at the time.
There was a time on HN where it actually made sense to bat a YC application back and forth, and to talk about what might make a more or less compelling one. It's long gone, and the people dunking on this comment have completely lost touch with what the original community was. I'm not saying that community was better (it was much more insular), but it was certainly more collegial.
† In fact, I think we now know it was literally correct, and YC had the same qualms, accepting Drew Houston just to get access to him and apparently hoping he'd find something better to work on.
As you can see by the success of Dropbox, point 1 wasn’t a real issue. That’s also the funniest point, because „why would anyone pay for XYZ, as a software engineer I can just do A, B, C, and D myself“ is such a common counterpoint which completely neglects that most customers aren’t going to do ABCD themselves because they don’t want to deal with it and don’t have the know how.
And point 3 probably can also be classified as wrong, at least Dropbox seems to make some amount of money.
Because to me it seems like he’s criticizing the product itself, not just the presentation.
A real shame to see such a great legacy flushed for zero ROI.
It's probably more likely he just went nuts, but it's fun as a head canon.
Blackrock does not at all operate the same as a private equity and it's a huge pet peeve of mine when people lump them in together. Usually they are confusing Blackrock with Blackstone.
All Blackrock does is manage wealth and investments on behalf of individual clients. One of the ways they do this is by sticking private assets into funds for their clients. It's more akin to Vanguard than anything to do with private equity. There's no reason to believe BlackRock would be breathing down their necks when all they do is broker the funds on behalf of their clients.
Automattic DOES have private equity backers though like Tiger Global, Insight, ICONIQ, and more.
Blackrock absolutely has private equity operations which they do not hide even a little bit
> Private equity is a core pillar of BlackRock’s alternatives platform. BlackRock’s Private Equity teams manage USD$41.9 billion in capital commitments across direct, primary, secondary and co-investments.
https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/strategies/alte...
They also do more traditional asset management, but saying they “do not operate at all the same as a private equity” is like saying that Jack In The Box “does not operate at all like a taco place” despite the fact that you can buy a taco at every one of their locations.
I get your point, but again, they are doing this on behalf of clients. And 49b is less than a percent of their holdings. So I would still think of them as a brokerage.
This would be like calling Uber a restaurant company just because they launched UberEats.
they are doing this on behalf of clients
an apt comparison.
Some people dislike how ubereats operate.
The dislike of private equity is not unfounded, but also the problems don't actually stem from private equity at all, but from bad/misaligned incentives. People tend to want to assume that private equity buying a business will retain the same incentive as the original owners - but the reason why PE would buy a business is _because_ the original owners weren't being perfectly efficient (aka, stingy).
This has nothing to do with private equity per se, and has everything to do with capitalism at it's core.
He stood to gain from this little knife twist, we all may still lose. Who knows what misconceptions were born/the downstream effects. WPEngine was never under any obligation to Matt himself/Automattic/WordPress/the Foundation [whatever distinction - if any - that may offer!]... outside of the license.
I don't believe it's a question of distance overboard, it started there! To quote Kendrick: "colonizer"
Despite not needing the money, Matt seemed to be very upset that WPEngine was making money.
WPEngine (and a horde of Emanuel Urquhart lawyers led by Rachel Kassabian) are taking him to the cleaners. This won't be pretty. A preliminary injunction is not easy to get, it's really likely WPEngine will win at least something.
He spent years squashing anyone who complained about Gutenberg, and then he calls WPEngine a cancer and accuses them of offering an inferior version. All to find out that he's not even familiar!
Ouch. The court is basically saying that they need to implement the preliminary injunction for the wider public good. Rather puts the lie to several assertions by Mullenweg.
In fact, it's not at all looking good for Mullenweg or Automattic.
Considering the only changes [1] [2] have been to add more sites to the list I guess there's going to be a second hearing to enforce the injunction.
[1]: https://github.com/wordpressenginetracker/wordpressenginetra...
[2]: https://github.com/wordpressenginetracker/wordpressenginetra...
So they can add sites to the tracker GH right up to the 71 hour, then remove it and still be in compliance with the order.
edit: as the WPEngine checkbox has been removed from https://login.wordpress.org/ since the order, I don't see why they won't also follow the order regrading the site tracker.
> ...
> slack.wordpress.org); and
That is going to be a very awkward slack channel.
The injunction covers almost everything relevant - returning ACF, taking down the website tracker, removing the checkbox, etc. Basically return everything as it was before Matt became a supervillain the day of Wordcamp.
That's remarkably bad for Automattic - tortuious interference is often a throwaway claim.
The judge here clearly does not think much of Automattic's positions.
I wonder if Neal found the merit yet[1].
I'm not saying I have faith in the system, exactly, especially when it tends to only do this at the behest of other very wealthy people demanding it, but it is nice to see.
Matt Mullenweg, if you're reading this (and we know you read HN), feel free to not listen to your attorneys and continue to attack random individuals and companies randomly because you decide you don't like them, or whatever. It will surely end well for you and definitely not with more massive own goals like this one. (And if you are Matt Mullenweg's attorney, and reading this because he decided to follow my bad advice instead of your good advice, well, I'm happy to take a steak dinner in appreciation of the massive bill you'll soon be sending him.)
That jives with Matt's claims that his lawyers were on board with all of his nonsense (and now, probably legally incriminating!) posts. But it could also have just been someone LARPing.
- Elon Musk put it in writing that he was going to buy Twitter with no due diligence. Contracts are nine tenths of the law; no court in the world is going to get you out of one because the biggest value the court system has to the wealthy is contract enforcement.
- Alex Jones never actually argued the merits of the defamation case against him. He didn't even show up to court. Judges have wide latitude to rule against people who don't show up to defend their cases, because otherwise nobody would be dumb enough to actually defend themself in a (neutral) court of law.
- One of the few things US law can actually still protect you against is all the classic failure modes of banks and investments, both because the wealthy demand protection for their wealth and because the less-wealthy have been fleeced by investment fraud for so long that the list of memestock victims includes Issac Newton. SBF did the one kind of financial crime that the system actually cares about[0].
Today's system is corrupt on the margins: it needs to at least provide the appearance of impartiality, because the wealthy still rely on it being an impartial arbitrator of competing interests. In 1500s England, wealthy people didn't get divorces, they got annulments, where they paid a priest to go squint at Bible verses and find something to explain why the marriage was spiritually invalid. The wealthy person gets to sidestep the rules, but only if someone can find their desired loophole. Sometimes, they can't.
And then sometimes a Henry VIII comes along, tries to have it both ways, gets told no, says "fuck that, I'm the church now", and completely replaces the partially corrupt system with a completely corrupt one. Matt Mullenweg seems to be playing at the same bit, doing ideological purges of Automattic and such; but he doesn't own the WordPress community, and he doesn't own the law.
Enjoy it while it lasts, because it might not survive convicted felon / ex-President / President-Elect Donald Trump, depending on how many of Big Tech's Henry VIIIths come running to Trump for protection from countries that actually enforce their antitrust laws.
[0] This also goes for Martin Shkreli; whose first criminal charge was for running a Ponzi scheme, not for jacking up the cost of generic drugs to exploit FDA regulations on sole-supplier drugs.
Yes he did, under oath, and he didn't do so well - he was caught lying about evidence during his testimony, and famously admitted that he knew that the shooting wasn't staged.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/03/alex-jones-trial-def...
There WAS a trial, but it was not about guilt or innocence, it was about “how much” cause he already lost due to him not showing up
Why does Matt legally have to provide services to people he doesn't want to, even if he's morally wrong or generally being an asshole?
To my non-lawyer and only-watching-from-the-sidelines self, the ACF situation seems more clearly actionable, but the other things are very interesting.
Matt may even be morally correct in some ways, but that doesn’t give him the right to use his position as Wordpress leader to damage the business of someone who competes with Automattic.
Could matt/automattic/wordpress.org/wordpress.com (they all act as the same entity: matt) have withdrawn services in a way that didn't tortiously interfere with a business contract? Of course. But he didn't, because tortiously interfering with WPEngine's customer contracts was his primary goal. His complaints about cost were secondary at best, and seem to have been entirely a pretext.
To add more perspective: withdrawing services from everybody usually requires one to simply stop working and/or paying bills. To withdraw services from WPEngine, matt had to consciously expend time/effort/money, just to interfere with WPEngine's customer contracts. Doing nothing would have been less work and cost matt less.
1) the fact that subbing in his fork of their plugin killed already purchased "pro" user features without warning was an illegitimate attack on the "pro" customers themselves (who probably have a case against him personally),
2) the pretense that he was doing it for "security reasons" because there was an exploit (every single part of everything about wordpress has an exploit in a random month) shows that he thought he was doing something unjustifiable; he should have been clear and open about why he was forking, and not do anything that broke people's installs, and
3) the behind-the-scenes harassment was just over the top. He should have just made his demand, and when they turned it down, sent a follow up explaining how he was going to cut off access so they could coordinate doing it cleanly. Instead he was intentionally optimizing for chaos and saying this in private communications over and over again.
He could have done almost all of the same things, and just refused to update "pro" users to the fork and instead refer them to WPEngine's alternative setup. Instead he ranted and raved ominously behind the scenes, trying to make it as clear as possible that this was extortion when in essence it wasn't. It was all of the fake snarkiness in public and in private, attempts to poach employees, threats to destroy the company, and insinuations of security problems that made it extortion.
WPE is going to win this because Mullenweg seemingly has no ability to emotionally self-regulate. Real teenage swatter vibes. And I think he was in the right, and I think that without all of the crap, they'd probably have backed down and started contributing.
They'll probably end up getting a remedy where he has to help them set up and maintain their alternative plugin directory, he might have to pay them damages, and he might even end up having to allow everyone use of the mark freely. Then what does he have? He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Even though wordpress.org is built/maintained by volunteers such as WPEngine who were all told it's a "community asset", "nobody owns it but wordpress", "it's maintained by the foundation".
Volunteers who now find out from court documents that wordpress.org is the personal website of Matt who can do whatever he wants with it?
Volunteers who are now banned from the thing they helped build for simply voicing disagreement with actions which are accepted by most as extreme/unwarranted?
Even volunteers who work on WordPress (not w.org), who built in to the Core reliance on w.org infrastructure after being lied to that it's owned by the Foundation.
I think in this specific case, they have absolutely no right and the injunction supports that.
Not to mention the threats posted online to other plugin developers, "we can and will find an exploit in your plugin and do exactly the same to you if we want" indicated it had very little to do with security. I'm sure he had Automattic employees pulled onto finding even the most trivial of exploits just to be able to do this.
> they'd probably have backed down and started contributing
WPE contributes probably in the seven digit a year range to WP. The very conference that Matt went "nuclear" at was sponsored by WPE to the tune of $75K (and for insult on injury, they were denied the ability to attend, and I believe all references to them were removed, but the money was kept).
(It's thinkable to ask for money from entities accessing the plugin registry, making it a paid api. But not a fee from a company just for using a Foss software. The license doesn't allow that.)
This was the only sensible and just outcome.
The "Secure Custom Fields" thing is one of the most egregious things to happen in open source for at least a decade. Just crazy.
Hopefully Matt understands he has become self-limiting and steps back from some of his positions/takes off one of his too many hats.
Just because they have a huge number of OSS projects. Most of it is open source, even things that really don’t see 3rd party contributions (like https://github.com/Automattic/vip-go-mu-plugins, https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso, https://github.com/Automattic/redvelvet-lib, https://github.com/Automattic/newspack-plugin, https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-ios)
Automattic has other issues (leadership, especially!!) but software development happens largely in the open. Just look at the GH issues and PRs in the WP-calypso and Gutenberg repositories, and you’ll see even a lot of technical discussion and planning happening completely public. You can even chime in if you want :)
Automattic has lots of issues. But they simply have much more open software development practices than nearly any other tech company (most of which are completely private and closed source). I just don’t think this is the core problem.
And then the day he gets out he'll continue the feud.