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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

No reason given?

Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!

I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.

There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.

He got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.

He tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"

Does Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?

Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.

I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.

Does WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?

They do not. It's GPL

Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.

It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.

> Only to the extent the company pledged to do so.

Is this not the standard expectation? Does one typically add a gratuity when contributing to OSS?

> It did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.

So they kept the promise?

I don't know about standard behaviour, some people consider behaviour normal that I consider slimy.

I heard at the time that a WP Engine employee had told someone that his/her pledged "full time assignment" had shrunk to a small number of hours per week after a while. That's hearsay, I heard it from someone who doesn't work at either of the two companies and it must be third-hand. But if that were the case, and if the pledge didn't say how long the full-time assignment would be kept up, some people would say that the promise was kept. Those people probably also would say that you shouldn't trust a handshake agreement, and please have a lawyer check the written agreement, and if you run an open source project, copy the policies Oracle has for JDK.

What I say is that there's a conflict waiting to happen, if one of the parties expects the pledge to be kept up for a significant period of time and the other expects to tiptoe away shortly later.

Open to correction here, but I understand it to be like this: the kernel of the contention is about the use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, not the software itself. Essentially, WP Engine is a commercial entity profiting from the use of the trademark. Regardless of how it has been handled, it does not seem to be a frivolous claim.

They were using the trademark on the website to describe WordPress the software project under nomitative fair use in the same way many, many hosting providers have been doing for decades. He openly admitted in online comments to trying (and failing) to extort their CEO in private to give Automattic huge payments, and if they declined that he'd destroy their valuation by cutting off their access and buy them for pennies on the dollar. Among other threats leading up to the lawsuit, which taken together made it look like a blatantly selective punitive measure for cynical reasons.

It doesn't help that the word "Wordpress" is used for all sorts of different, but overlapping things: wordpress.com for his private WordPress commercial host competing with WPEngine, wordpress.org for the WordPress Foundation he also controls, WordPress describing the open source GPL licensed project.

Google makes things much simpler to avoid misusing their trademarks by splitting Chrome for their commercial product and Chromium for the open source project.

And the part that is being litigated is whether that is, in fact, fair use, correct?

I like the comparison to Chrome and Chromium. I don't know the timeline of the whole wordpress IP. At this most it has arguably undergone genericization. That's why I think it's complicated enough that there is merit to arguments on either side.

That's a small part of what's being litigated. The rest of what's being litigated is unfair trade practices, monopolization, promissory estoppel, defamation, and computer fraud/abuse. (Seriously, there are 18 causes of action in the Third Amended Complaint, which is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... . There are also counterclaims, which are here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43... )

> nomitative fair use

No, WP Engine has been highlighting WordPress and using the word in a way that it did make a lot of non-technical people believe that WP Engine was 'WordPress'. In that, Mullenweg has a point.

WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.

Didn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine? I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.

He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.

That's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.

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