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Comment by joshbetz | Hacker News Reader

> This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/license.t...

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Warranty disclaimers may (or may not, depending on the law of the effected jurisdiction) limit liability for claims on an implied warranty theory, but they certainly don't apply to tortious interference or unfair competition claims.

I’m not saying the claims here are valid, but the warranty disclaimers don't seem at all relevant to the bases of liability asserted.

thank you, now I'm learning the things I wanted to learn when I made my comment

I haven’t bothered to look at the actual filing, but none of the causes of action mentioned in the article were about warranty, merchantability, or fitness for purpose.

yeah, this part is where I am confused - the dispute itself is about bad business to business behavior, but the class status of this lawsuit drills down to harm caused to end users. I'm trying to figure out what expectations end users are entitled to since it's obviously not the case that WP users can hold Automattic directly liable when they are hacked.

I _think_ the argument is that WPE gave them the (at the time reasonable) expectation that risk mitigation was handled by them, and Automattic made that expectation impossible to meet retroactively hence tortious interference, but is there language that passes the liability up the chain from the end users? To me it seems like WPE has a case but the end users as a class might face headwinds.

And for everybody angrily downvoting me I agree with you that Matt is an asshole but that doesn't mean I don't want to understand the nuance of a class claim in a case like this.

IANAL. The chain of argument is roughly: WP was transferred to WPorg -> WPorg promised open access to WP ecosystem (including plugins) -> Matt/Automattic retained effective control over WPorg -> Matt/Automattic abused their control over WPorg to sabotage WPE's ability to provide contractual services -> WPE's customers suffered.

EDIT: I think the part causing most confusion is relying on customer's expectation that they are NOT using WPE's product, but rather using WP plus WPE's services. I.e. If X contractor installs a thing to your house/car/whatever and then manufacturer of that thing then uses it to sabotage your business, you get a claim against manufacturer, not you against contractor.

But in this case the manufacturer does not offer any warranty at all to anybody.

This is not about any warranties at all. The warranty and liability disclaimer applies strictly to those parts and is used to establish

This suit is about unfair business practices: tort and ratchet. The suit raises a claim that Matt publicly boasted of harming WPE through his actions, which should establish intent. The core claim is that Matt/Automattic/WPF acting as a unit intentionally abused their collective power and relationship with WPE to cause harm on WPE and their customers, demanded payment to stop causing harm and on top of that attempted to pull said customers away to their for-profit alternatives.

Before you go and claim "but there are no warranties and SLAs on plugin repository", a supporting claim in the suit is that WPF plugin repository is hard-coded into WP software, therefore part of the overall service (volunteer effort maintaining the WP package) and selectively targeting users of WPF repository constitutes unfair business practice.

A distant analogy could be a tourist spot scam where nefarious party sees a family, offers their child a candy and then harasses parents to pay up. Or similarly with flowers for couples.

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