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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> The lawsuit describes Automattic and Mullenweg’s conduct as an abuse of the open-source internet architecture, alleging that “a single individual (Matt Mullenweg) exercises apparent singular control over what they claim to be more than 40% of all websites in the world through his personal website (WordPress.org).” It calls this level of control “an appalling deception” that is “contrary to every conceivable public policy.”

That seems like a specious argument to me. There's no deception involved as far as I can tell, and I can't see how public policy has anything to do with this. It sucks for many reasons that Wordpress powers so much of the web, but it's pretty rich for someone whose business is built on Wordpress to claim its success is an existential threat. I will not comment on what I think about a cybersecurity business that is built on a Wordpress site, as it's simply not relevant.

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> There's no deception involved as far as I can tell

Whether it is germane to the case or not, there was plenty of deception:

When the rights were transferred to the WPF, Matt didn't disclose that the Foundation was essentially just him, and the two other nominal members were effectively absent.

When the rights were transferred, and a big deal was made of this, "It now belongs to the WPF, which ensures that no commercial entity or interest can affect what should be a community project", there was no mention of how, on that same day the WPF silently granted a "irrevocable, non-expiring, exclusive universal commercial licence" to Automattic.

Matt repeatedly would refer to wp.org as a community resource and not his, until push came to shove, and "no, actually, it's exclusively mine and has nothing to do with Automattic or the WPF".

And several other examples. Apropos of anything else, there has been deception.

Matt didn't attest under oath that he was transferring the rights to an arms-length organization; others might have assumed that, but I'm not sure why they would. Isn't the WPF-Automattic relationship more or less the norm with companies that have 'open-source business models'?

>Isn't the WPF-Automattic relationship more or less the norm with companies that have 'open-source business models'?

No, it's not, and I think that's the crux of most of the controversy. One quick comparison would be Drupal: https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

I suggested that the WPF-Automattic relationship was “the norm”, and you countered with a post where Drupal describes itself as “unique and groundbreaking within the Open Source community”. While Drupal might be better (or worse), this post doesn’t disagree with my message.

It is not the norm. Open source projects sponsored by a commercial organization tied to that project might be nominally controlled by a foundation, but that foundation isn’t effectively controlled by a single person in their private capacity, who has secretly granted the commercial entity an exclusive, irrevocable commercial license.

I don’t know if there is past precedent, but it’s certainly not the norm.

What would be more normal is a company more or less owning the open source software and simply licensing it under a permissive license and then having a closed source or open core fork. An example there would be any number of Red Hat projects.

It actually does, but in a bit non-obvious way if you have been tricked by Matt's/Automattic's wording.

The very core of free software (as in beer, not the fsf definition) is, well, dramatic reduction of cost for customers. Opening the source for modification is merely in expectation that some of the customers would contribute something back. The relationship is highly asymmetrical. Therefore, Takers in Drupal lingo are inherent, consequential part of the deal.

Drupal's system just goes one step above in recognizing those who contribute back in a mostly good faith, unbiased effort.

The typical business models behind FOSS are professional services (support and training) and commercial extensions (open-core model). In the latter model (or both), the governing body makes the majority of contributions and consequentially (key word) steers the project. For example chromium is the way it is not because Google said it should be that way, but rather they put the effort to implement their wishes.

Some FOSS-on-the-surface projects reject contributions that do not align with their commercial vision and even go as far as to chase legal action against forks. Both examples have been discussed in this very forum quite thoroughly.

This brings us to the problem with wordpress, wordpress foundation and Matt/Automattic. The governing foundation is generally established so that the major Makers and Takers (remember, entities can exist in Maker-Taker duality) do not go into open warfare and in turn sabotage the whole FOSS project. Wordpress itself is a FOSS project, directly enabling both Automattic and WPE. WPE is a clear Taker here, no objections to this judgement. However, Foundation is for all intents and purposes Matt/Automattic. When Matt and WPE did go into open warfare, this lack of separation between commercial and charitable operations meant that Matt abused his powers over WPF, weaponized it and used it against WPE in Automattic's fight against WPE.

This is where WPF-Automattic relationship is totally out of the norm in open-source/open-core business models.

That quote is referring to the credit system, not the relationship between Acquia and the Drupal Association.

> but I'm not sure why they would

Because that's the expectation that was set by Mullenwegs words and actions. Who ever said you need to be under oath for deception to take place?

Apparently libel laws aren't a thing because you're not under oath now or something along those lines.

Per my comment on another message, it seems like Matt was telling the truth, but not the whole truth, which is probably more than he was legally required to do.

At times, it can be. But the transfer of rights to the WFP was made as being about the community, and not allowing any commercial organization to have rights to that app ecosystem.

That press release was made the very same day as the WFP then silently granting back exclusive rights to Automattic.

The WFP has never, until this court case, acknowledged that any org has such commercial rights, let alone "irrevocable, exclusive and universal" rights. For the best part of a decade.

Matt may not have been under oath but the announcement on behalf of WPF was entirely factually inaccurate, because a commercial organization absolutely did and would have those rights over "WordPress". And he can't even claim ignorance, because he was the one granting those rights, that same day.

It seems like Matt was telling the truth, but not the whole truth, which is probably more than he was legally required to do.

Deception doesn’t require a misrepresentation is made under oath. Especially when dealing in the world of business or nonprofits.

Now if someone made the claim that he perjured himself that would be different.

> There's no deception involved as far as I can tell

155 pages of deception here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/51-2.pdf Page 32 "Defendants Conceal the Truth Regarding the WordPress Directory" and page 73 "Wrongfully Expropriate WPE’s Most Popular Plugin" are particularly related. (The part where Matt decides to take over WP Engine's popular plugin and rename it, taking all their customers and reviews is particularly egregious)

Deception with respect to him having full control of Wordpress, which is what the quote was about.

I'm not an expert or part of the community and haven't been following too closely.

But I vaguely remember there was a story where he said he transferred control of some aspect of WP to a non-profit organization not controlled by him, with a press release and everything, but then later that day control was transferred back to him without telling anyone.

In any case, I believe it's pretty clear that most people who rely on WordPress had no idea that it is almost singularly controlled by him. Whether this was done via deception or not is indeed a good question.

When you file a lawsuit you initially make every argument you might possibly want to use in your initial filing, knowing some of them will be whittled down. Pretty much every lawsuit ever includes some claims that are a bit of a stretch, because the lawyers need to CYA. If you fail to make the argument you may be precluded from introducing it later, so it's just safer to include it now.

I think it's more about running up the legal bill of the defendant. It costs virtually nothing to include a spurious claim in a complaint (it can literally be a sentence or two). The defense has the burden of getting the weak claim dismissed with pages and pages of arguments (because they don't want any chance of it slipping through).

The bar for a "shotgun" complaint is way too high in the legal system.

I sort of suspect it's also a case of bluffing. You can't know for sure which aspect of a complaint is the one that makes the defendants soil themselves, and you might trigger a settlement or make them behave strangely in ways that give you clues about where exactly it is they're ticklish.

I've been told before that some people will settle a case to avoid setting a legal precedent, which might trigger giant class action suits.

I love how the top comment on every single HN post is some contrarian "nuh uh!" take from someone who is lightyears away from being an expert in that thing.

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