Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO, Seems Bound and Determined to Wreck WordPress | Hacker News Reader

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO, Seems Bound and Determined to Wreck WordPress

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113 pointsCrankyBear57 comments

If you’ve followed closely, this article is a retread of the last four months.

Also will someone please fork WordPress.

Reminds me of this: https://medium.com/node-js-javascript/growing-up-27d6cc8b7c5...

There's ClassicPress. But a better alternative than sticking with WP is https://textpattern.com/ (which has better and more stable codebase that is as old as WordPress).

TextPattern needs more attention and love in general! (Although to be fair, it also needs to be developed a wee bit faster.)

I’ve been a PHP dev for a long time and never seen Text Pattern. Thanks for sharing!

I'm just catching up.. can someone please explain why this part is unreasonable?

- WordPress code is open-source.

- WP Engine is entitled to use the source code.

I don't see how that entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free?

If you were WP Engine, wouldn't you want to have your own copy that you control anyway? Am I missing something?

Because that's how open source works. If you don't want for profit companies using code for free, then offer it under a license that states that.

Parent is asking about infra not copyright.

This is interesting in terms of Github. They could pull the same thing and say only the porceline git client and MS approved clients can pull. After all it is their servers. The open source licenses are orthogonal to this and are between authors and users.

Github isn't leveraging a (theoretically) separate 501(c)(3) non-profit to attack a specific competitor.

Open source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose?

Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.

Using WordPress.org services isn't some rogue hotlink, it's hardcoded into the WordPress source code. And Matt explicitly refuses to add a config option to switch servers[1] - you have to manually patch WP to do so.

Legally, he may be in the right (I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend like I can accurately predict the outcome of the ongoing lawsuit), but morally I think I can reasonably say that Matt is pretty squarely in the wrong when he's trying to abuse WP.org services to blackmail WP Engine out of 8% of their revenue.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885

It’s unreasonable because the real reason was WordPress.com looking to kneecap a competitor.

Doubly so when they tried stealing the plugin.

Curious what you'd make of these holdings, I'm not up on all the nonsense that's happened:

- It was reasonable, in that it is fair and sensible, in that it was not trying to attain an unjust advantage. It might not be generous. But that's life in the big leagues.

- Going about it boorishly (ex. the login checkbox), then reacting poorly in an attempt to own the haters, definitely crossed a line (I'm sure stealing their plugin did as well, assuming they overrode someone else's code with their own in people's installs)

How was it not attaining an unjust advantage when WP.org banned WPEngine?

Nothing entitles a for-profit entity such as WP Engine, to use the non-profit wordpress.org theme/plugin repository resources and infrastructure for free

A court order currently entitles them to exactly that.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/10/court-orders-mullenweg-and...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25451524-wp-engine-v...

"the Court finds that WPEngine is likely to succeed on the merits of its intentional interference with contractual relations claim"

"Within 72 hours, Defendants are ORDERED to... restore WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org as it existed as ofSeptember 20, 2024"

It seems you can't use your theoretically independent non-profit to extort your for-profit arm's competitor.

I wanna be really ultra-clear here, because I might say this and be perceived as defending wordpress or thinking it's a good thing: this is bad!!!

I, unfortunately for myself, have some legal background and that's a...choppy...reading of it.

Let me explain:

The court found WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim that WordPress.org/Automattic/Mullenweg intentionally interfered with WPEngine's existing customer contracts through specific harmful actions taken after September 20, 2024, including:

- Suddenly blocking access that had been freely available.

- Taking over and modifying the ACF plugin without authorization.

- Forcing WPEngine's customers to declare they weren't affiliated with WPEngine.

- Making it difficult for WPEngine to service its existing customers.

- Actively trying to get WPEngine's customers to break their contracts.

The court viewed these as potentially illegal interference tactics, especially since they appeared to be retaliatory after WPEngine refused to pay the demanded 8% revenue share.

However, this is different from a finding about WordPress.org's general right to implement a fair charging system in the future. The issue isn't that WordPress.org wanted to charge money - it's that they allegedly used improper interference tactics to try to force payment and harm WPEngine's business relationships.

Noting again for the record, I deplore the behavior here. However, you are allowed to charge people: just not start doing only with one singular entity, as a gish gallop of nonsense that affects the one singular entity's customers.

(the shortest smoking gun on this is footnote 11, but it might be too legal-ese to parse the plain meaning, which is "hey this makes sense if you're complaining about a one-off surprise of fucking with only your customers, but I can't justify it in the long term, and you know that, you're not trying to either")

Footnote 11: "In its briefs, WPEngine refers to its “interference claims” but only addresses the elements of theclaim for intentional interference with contractual relations. See Mot. at 26-28. For this reason,the Court does not separately analyze whether WPEngine is likely to succeed on its claim forintentional interference with prospective economic relations.")

> However, this is different from a finding about WordPress.org's general right to implement a fair charging system in the future.

Sure. I didn't say that. My claim is entirely accurate - WPEngine is currently entitled to free access, under a court order.

Wait, you put me through all that so you could do "I wasn't replying on the substance, I said currently!"

Okay lol

The WordPress community of developers/contributors has been under the impression that the dot org site was under the control of the nonprofit WP foundation. However Matt recently declared that dot org has been his personal website this whole time, and that entitles him to solely decide when someone else can no longer use it. However documents of the founding seem to indicate that dot org is indeed under the foundation: https://x.com/sneakytits85/status/1881119968215142462?s=46

In the abstract, yeah, that'd probably be fine. Maybe not 100% legally -- the injunction that WP Engine got seems to imply that blocking one specific competitor from using the infrastructure might not be cool -- but if it was a restriction that was in place from the beginning, it'd probably have been acceptable.

It's mostly that WordPress maintained that infrastructure for a very long time without having any sort of restrictions on who could use it -- whether you're a self-hosted WordPress site, or you're using some sort of managed hosting (like WP Engine or WordPress.com). Plus it's literally hardcoded into WordPress to use it; you can't change that without maintaining your own patched version. So everyone involved in the WordPress community viewed it as a general public good for all users of WordPress... and it suddenly getting weaponized didn't play well. For one thing, it put up a lot of people who were just users of WordPress as collateral damage.

(And the cost of the infrastructure doesn't seem to have been one of Matt's complaints, in general. If it was, and he'd been up-front about that, I suspect reactions might have been different.)

Because the Wordpress organization is a nonprofit, the organizations assets can't be used to the exclusive benefit of a for profit- Automatic. And therein lies the issue- Mullenweg attempted to weaponize the nonprofits assets against WP Engine in favor of his own for profit. Whether or not those actions were legal is being decided in court, but it doesn't look good for Mullenweg. And it certainly wasn't in the best interests of the wider Wordpress ecosystem, which is what Wordpress.org the nonprofit was setup to serve.

Wreck wordpress? doesn't seem like it -- seems like a classic "somebody pseudo forked my open-source-ish product / project and they became too popular".. so I'm going to try to prevent fragmentation / somebody else "making money off of all my hard work" kind of thing.

The takeover and renaming of a third party extension and subsequent updates which released previously paid features was a huge shock.

Add on top of that Matt claimed that WordPress.org is his personal website, so neither it nor the official plug-in repository are under the control of the foundation (unless he's walked back that claim since I last paid attention).

There's still going to be plenty of users, but a lot of trust has been lost, and a lot of users are now looking for alternatives.

Yes, and they way they are going about it is wrecking wordpress

is there an opportunity to make a vendor neutral Wordpress here?

Just can't call it Wordpress. So Locutionprinter or something.

VerbalCompressor?

EDIT to add:

SentencePublisher

TokenStream

IdeaRadio

Well I didn't just register that domain, but sure..

Termjuicer

WP is a fork of b2/cafelog. So b3/bistrolist?

(There’s also b2evolution.)

...and someone bought it!

When you’re as rich as he is what difference does it make?

His sense of self importance and relevance seems to be especially crucial to him. He is losing both.

I'm trying to figure out what's the most loving thing to do for a person in his situation.

If you’re a relative or friend, take them aside and have a frank conversation. If not, nothing you can do!

And accept that there’s a good chance this will accomplish nothing but getting you on their naysayers list.

People can continue behavior where all they really need to do is stop actively harming themselves for no gain at all for years. It’s bizarre to watch from the outside. In the best cases they haven’t roped anyone else into their delusion-bubble.

I think it's to try to help them by offering compassion, understanding, and trying to create harmony.

Try to look at it from an outside perspective instead of through the lens of our own preconception. Humans are subject to making terrible mistakes and lapses of judgment. Sometimes things spiral out of control. We all have our demons, so to speak.

It's very easy to judge a tech multimillionaire bro and saying he should know better, he deserves this, etc. And I mean easy as in cheap. It's the prevailing view and it feels "fair" to a lot of people who didn't get so lucky or so far ahead in life, so they don't feel the need to be sympathetic. But it adds no value to the situation, so it's a pretty useless take. And it's not like the world has a limited supply of sympathy, so it's OK to offer it even in these situations.

At this point I think the guy just needs help.

I've done my best not to pathologize him here, but...

Suggest therapy.

Sometimes, rock bottom is the only way to stop

+1, unfortunately counter-intuitive. A bit of a song comes to mind:

"A junkie won't bounce until he hits the ground" - Say Hey There, Atmosphere

My family and I all tried to help a sibling for something like 20 years. Nothing stuck [from us], they had to choose it. The ground helped. Trying to minimize harm just created more :/

Functionally infinite money seems to just not be enough in life for a lot of people. I honestly think if they weren't powerful it would be considered a serious mental illness.

Couldn’t have said it any better, thank you.

Funny thing is his net worth is almost entirely tied in Automattic, and he is doing his very best to crater the company's value.

Ego doesn't go away just because you made a bunch of money.

If anything, experience suggests it's the opposite.

There's usually a crowd of hangers-on who are feeding the ego and enjoying the perks.

They need someone to whisper in their ear "remember you are mortal" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

I've heard speculation that he as VCs driving him to make money and this is causing all the crazy behaviour.

That could also lead someone to blow the hatch.

It’s amazing nobody has sat him down and told him to stop throwing temper tantrums yet.

He gave severance packages to that cohort.

That exact thing happened here, several times.

It's really sad seeing this whole saga play out.

Who flagged this? Matt?

> How would you react if someone demanded you pay them 8% of your annual revenue? Yeah. Like that.

If I built my product on the labour of that "someone", I would pay it. Seems these days, doing what's honourable is not that simple.

You are making it sound like it was a single person who could not pay their bills.

It was not. That's a $7.5 billon company threatening $1 billion company over totally frivolous reasons.

> If I built my product on the labour of that "someone", I would pay it.

Automattic is not contributing 8% of their revenue to PHP. (Nor MySQL, Apache, or all the other bits of free labor they're similarly built off.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com