photomatt

Yes.

The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-license. The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood.

I'm very comfortable with the truth of everything being public, it's on our side. The legal case will drag out for years.

Why doesn't she share messages that prove she declined a WordPress.com job in 2022? You're holding me to a different standard. I'm here, I'm talking to journalists. They're not.

Automattic employs ~100 people that work full-time on WordPress.org. I can appoint them into positions on WordPress.org, if I think that's appropriate.

Just wait!

She was interviewing November 2023 to January 2024. She declined the WordPress.org role on January 26, 2024. I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share.

Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. Co2 where I'm at is 572.

I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day. I have not threatened to take down WordPress.org. WPE's preservation requests do complicate things, legally, though, for the Slack and forums that W.org offers.

Both Cloudflare and Fastly have reached out offering CDN services to W.org, which we're considering. Cloudflare also serves a lot of WP Engine. We do like controlling our infrastructure, though, for a variety of reasons, and have run it without problems or downtime for 21 years. Currently the only outside vendor we use is Slack/Salesforce, which donates free Slack Pro accounts for 49k users. (I think that would cost ~5M/yr.) We also use some Github, which is free for open source.

Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/

WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.

If you watch this stream with Theo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU

He polls his audience and 54% of the thousand people watching thought WP Engine was an official thing, based on visiting their website that day. They have since updated their website a lot, including rewriting customer testimonial quotes without permission:

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1841644271939604628

Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad, while not addressing the core issue of their trademark violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about their bad behavior.

The agreement wasn't about their license to the code, it was about their license to the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. They could agree to not do things allowed under the GPL, like replacing our Stripe attribution, it's their right to. Or not.

What would you like me to answer? I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. I've only been releasing things I've said or sent.

Howdy, Matthew Charles Mullenweg from the lawsuit here.

One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic. That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her team there in the meetings I posted here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/

They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.

That's not true, will address in court. They made up a lot of things in this.

Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with everything I have.

This was a separate agreement from their GPL license, which of course allows them to fork. Sorry it's not clear from the term sheet, but this was about them forking our Stripe extension to replace the attribution from us to them for WooCommerce sites hosted on WP Engine. Stripe is also looking into this, as it's spammy.

The problem isn't their use of WP, it's their use of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.

Today, I offered them a reprieve: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-reprieve/

Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers.

I'm high on life.

No, I will continue to serve in all of those roles.

It's hard, I agree. You'll need to be a good engineer to set it up and host it. But it's very doable. I guess we'll see how good their engineers are.

I do read! And I hope you consider WordPress for something in the future and don't let a PE firm's bad behavior forcing us into a public fight cloud your user experience.

Happy to answer any questions HN folks have about this. Love y'all. :)

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Multiple roles | $110-$210k+ and great benefits

We're looking for engineers to help us build, grow, and maintain products used by over a billion people each month across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper & Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts, and many more.

If you love the open web, open source, radical problem ownership, and simple over pure solutions, Automattic is probably the place for you.

We're working on some big initiatives, like running Tumblr on WordPress: https://automattic.com/2024/08/27/shipping-tumblr-and-wordpr....

Systems Engineer

  * removes friction between developers and shipping software
  * owns availability, performance, and security
  * shares code, experience, and knowledge both internally and externally
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/srsyshn

Product-minded Generalist

  * endlessly curious about how things work – infrastructure, language and libraries, product, and business
  * solves problems across any level of the stack, in any codebase
  * comfortable with using mostly PHP and JavaScript, no need to have serious experience with them
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/enghn

…or find something else on https://join.a8c.com/allhn

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Multiple roles | $110-$210k+ and great benefits

We're looking for engineers to help us build, grow, and maintain products used by over a billion people each month across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper & Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts, and many more.

If you love the open web, open source, radical problem ownership, and simple over pure solutions, Automattic is probably the place for you.

We have a distributed, remote, async work environment - and we've had it since we started.

Product-minded Generalist

  * endlessly curious about how things work – infrastructure, language and libraries, product, and business
  * solves problems across any level of the stack, in any codebase
  * comfortable with using mostly PHP and JavaScript, no need to have serious experience with them
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/enghn

Systems Engineer

  * removes friction between developers and shipping software
  * owns availability, performance, and security
  * shares code, experience, and knowledge both internally and externally
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/srsyshn

…or find something else on https://join.a8c.com/allhn

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Multiple roles | $110-$210k+ and great benefits

We're looking for engineers to help us build, grow, and maintain products used by over a billion people each month across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper & Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts, and many more.

If you love the open web, open source, radical problem ownership, and simple over pure solutions, Automattic is probably the place for you.

Did you know that every five years, every Automattician deserves a sabbatical – 3 paid months off! Even I, as a CEO, took mine this year: https://ma.tt/2024/05/sabbatical-wrap/

Product-minded Generalist

  * endlessly curious about how things work – infrastructure, language and libraries, product, and business
  * solves problems across any level of the stack, in any codebase
  * comfortable with using mostly PHP and JavaScript, no need to have serious experience with them
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/enghn

Systems Engineer

  * removes friction between developers and shipping software
  * owns availability, performance, and security
  * shares code, experience, and knowledge both internally and externally
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/syshn

…or find something else on https://join.a8c.com/allhn

Automattic | Remote | Full-time | Multiple roles | $110-$210k+ and great benefits

We're looking for engineers to help us build, grow, and maintain products used by over a billion people each month across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, Jetpack, Tumblr, Beeper & Texts.com, Day One, Pocket Casts, and many more.

If you love the open web, open source, radical problem ownership, and simple over pure solutions, Automattic is probably the place for you.

Product-minded Generalist

  * endlessly curious about how things work – infrastructure, language and libraries, product, and business
  * solves problems across any level of the stack, in any codebase
  * comfortable with using mostly PHP and JavaScript, no need to have serious experience with them
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/enghn

Systems Engineer

  * removes friction between developers and shipping software
  * owns availability, performance, and security
  * shares code, experience, and knowledge both internally and externally
  * apply at https://join.a8c.com/syshn

Staff+ Data Scientist

  * HN exclusive – not announced publicly anywhere else (except here last time)!
  * partners with business and product teams to help them make better decisions or attribute impact of product changes
  * drives foundational data science projects across the organization
  * has experience in a similar role in an organization at a similar scale
  * reach out to ines@ for more info

…or find something else on https://join.a8c.com/allhn

It's funny because a lot of our growth has come from being one of the early CMSes to be completely W3C / XHTML compliant out of the box, security improvements including our update system give us auto-update numbers better than Android (but not as good as Chrome or iOS), and client-side performance and SEO performance are a huge reason why people choose WP! Some things are in the eye of the beholder.

That's a good list, there's cool stuff coming with many of those! SQLite support will be official if it's not already thanks to the Playground work.

https://wordpress.org/playground/