photomatt

Thank you!

I wrote a blog post about this: https://ma.tt/2025/09/externalities/

My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.

The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.

Happy to answer any questions from HN folks, to the extent I can. I love this community and have been here since 2007.

Howdy!

This could set a very dangerous precedent if it goes through.

It started because WP Engine was abusing the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks in a way that was confusing to customers around the world.

That's a very shallow assessment of Automattic's business, which has over half a billion in revenue and much of it not from WordPress. You also assume that investor pressure could drive company decisions, which is ridiculous given I vote 84% of the stock. Automattic has infinite runway, we're not a startup stumbling from funding round to funding round.

I don't think anything about our update could cause the issues he describes and we've had no other reports, this is the only claim on the internet, and doesn't include enough technical details to tell if it's an actual bug or not.

If it's a bug, our bad and we'll fix ASAP. If it's a bug, it's a very rare one. There have been 225k downloads of the SCF plugin in the past 24 hours, implying a lot of updates. I would estimate at least 60% of the sites with auto-upgrade on and using .org for updates have done so already. https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/advance...

That said, I'm happy to pay system2 whatever he thinks his time was "spent" on a Sunday is worth. Just let me know an amount and where to send. You can contact me here: https://ma.tt/contact/ .

I will happily promote and link to any forks from WordPress.org. I've linked to two already, let me know if I need to promote more.

Have you read the GPL?

Nothing has broken. Perhaps WP Engine should have consider that before suing us.

We have taken on stewardship of this code going forward, and will dedicate engineers to it. Probably more than Silver Lake does.

It actually is an excellent website, and the repo is here: https://github.com/bullenweg/bullenweg.github.io

This release fixes a separate security vulnerability from the original update.

Sorry for that error, the post has been updated now.

All the information in the links you shared is totally wrong. Our lawyers have never said that WordPress.org is a non-profit or owned by the Foundation. It's owned and run by me personally, and I have a trademark license from the WordPress Foundation to use the WordPress name and brand on the site.

Totally different. The Foundation has no employees, only volunteers and three board members. (I'm one of them.)

The scope will be significantly broader as Mary brings a lot of talents to the ecosystem.

I'm very excited to have Mary on board. :)

I expect a lot of top technical talent at WP Engine that's aligned with Open Source is thinking the same thing.

Thank you for the feedback. I'll try to do better.

It's early afternoon for me, I'm in South Africa right now. https://x.com/photomatt/status/1842048123541061859

Please don't make assumptions on time zones, it's rude.

Also, I am very much listening to the advice from my friends and lawyers, and even some random internet strangers. Happy to change my mind if presented with new information.

This was more generous than both the Basecamp and Coinbase buyout offers, I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant. I can be a little ASD so sometimes my written communication doesn't come through the best.

It was posted on September 30 ~10pm UTC, so people had about 4 days to decide.

Our current average salary is 149k USD, median is 134k USD.

I love a good pun. :)

We have a special stock program called A12, and one cool feature of it is that you can still sell stock after you've left, with windows every six months. (You can only buy if you're currently employed, and it's downside protected, so you effectively have a 1x liquidation preference just like sophisticated investors.

As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years, in a variety of arrangements. None have abused the WordPress and WooCommerce trademark as much as WP Engine has, hence our C&D against them.