It gets so much worse. Today, my sales guy was trying to register for WordCamp, a conference that we have been attending for years as an essential place to meet customers. And then he encountered the registration form for a WordPress.org login, which neatly specifies that you affirm you have no “affiliation with WP Engine, whether financial or otherwise.” [1]
Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my team can register for a WordPress.org account.
I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear business justification (aside from limiting competition).
Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years.
> Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website
Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore? Just because I bought something from Amazon doesn't mean I'm now affiliated with Amazon. "Affiliation" (usually) means something like a formal association, partnership, or close connection, not that you're just a customer.
Besides that, dump Wordpress regardless, clearly they've lost focus from the actual users and Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for.
The language is intentionally vague, and leaves the determination on the person who has to check the box.
I have a competing product and shouldn't get too far in the weeds on what I truly think here, but the predominant feeling across people that have to interact with this is that it's done on purpose.
It's not so much that people don't understand what the word "affiliation" means, it's that you'd have to be completely certain that a lawyer, hired from what is clearly a litigious org, would have the same understanding.
This isn't a legal document from the federal government. There's no perjury risk. Just click the box and get what you need. What, is Matt paying for deep background checks on everyone that does check that box? It's one of the most ridiculous checkboxes on the interwebs
You’re thinking about this from the perspective of good faith. I think the people who are worried are looking at it from the perspective of no longer being comfortable saying something is too absurd to happen.
For example, say your company ends up on Matt’s legal radar and he trawls the logs looking for accesses from your IPs and says you violated CFAA – even if you’re totally comfortable that you’d prevail in court, that could be an expensive process and discovery might turn up things you’d prefer not to be public. In situations like that it’s easier simply not to risk dealing with him since people who are focused on vengeance will often waste resources on pointless activity just to prove a point.
maybe it's just me that always has that "under penalty of perjury" sarcastically running in my inner voice whenever I see these types of ridiculous EULA type of things.
Somebody should really force the issue to "have standing" to fight the ridiculousness. I'm shocked WP Engine hasn't already
Companies are absolutely allowed to arbitrarily ban certain people or groups of people from using their services, and if you sign a contract attesting to you being allowed to use the service, you can absolutely be found guilty and/or liable of breach of contract.
Some courts have interpreted the definition of "unauthorized access" in the CFAA pretty broadly. That checkbox about WP Engine is arguably an "access control mechanism" since you can't access the site without checking it. Maybe it's a stretch but it's not that much of a stretch.
IANAL either but I was under the impression that changed with the Van Buren v United States Supreme Court case [1]. If you register and accept a EULA, it’s no longer “unauthorized” access, regardless of whether you exceed EULA limits, as long as you’re using the authorized interface (as opposed to trying to get access to the servers via SSH or some other side channel). It’s not the criminal courts’ job to enforce access limits.
IANAL, not from the US either. But if you register, you are signing a legally-binding licence agreement. Doesn't lying or giving false information nullify this contract?
For example, if you register on wordpress.org while claiming you have no affiliation with WPE, but you did have any sort of affiliation, they could consider the contract null/void, and claim the access was unauthorised because the contract wasn't valid.
The contract can be null and void but if you can still login, it’s not unauthorized access. The burden is on the company to pursue breach of contract. That’s my reading of the decision but again, IANAL.
It is not illegal to beach a contract. You can be held liable for damages but there is no criminal penalty and some judges think beaching contracts can be good (so called efficient breach)
I saw this exchange too and was shocked - it is Matt who has chosen to add this checkbox and chose the wording of the question - if he cannot explain who should or should not check it, or what he means by his own words, how can anyone?
His responses to perfectly sensible questions about this ridiculous box has been awful.
Agreed, and I think this isn't really about whether he personally knows legal jargon, but about whether he had a clear idea WTF he wanted before making brash demands and threats.
(Or, much less charitably, the intentional use of vague language in bad faith.)
That analogy is backwards: You'd be the one asking your employer to clarify the terms they chose and wrote themselves which they are trying to press upon you.
It's totally reasonable to ask the party introducing "shall not associate with" into a contract exactly WTF "associating" is supposed to cover.
> You'd be the one asking your employer to clarify the terms they chose and wrote themselves which they are trying to press upon you
I’ve made edits to employment agreements. It would be totally inappropriate for the other side to demand legal advice from me. It would be polite for me to clarify. But I’m under no obligation to.
It sounds like there's some confusion here between "hard legal obligation to give non-binding external advice" versus "moral and practical obligation to fix the binding wording if they are actually interested in mutual agreement and understanding."
I suspect most people asking Mr. Mullenweg "what do you mean by X" are doing so with a subtext or next-step of "now go fix the text to correctly capture what you really meant."
I’m reading “he shouldn't get to ask” [1] as distinct from he shouldn’t ask in a hard legal sense.
> with a subtext or next-step of "now go fix the text to correctly capture what you really meant"
That’s unreasonable. An e-mailed clarification is a reasonable ask. (Adding a clarification is nice. But not a reasonable expectation. Especially from a proven nutjob.)
If you add vague additions in you ammendments and then refuse to clarify when asked about your intentions, potential employers might just decide it's not worth the risk. Same here.
If they can't explain the basic intent of the agreement in the first place, I'd be awfully hesitant to sign.
Matt was just asked if the spirit of the checkbox was to keep out customers and wouldn't answer. That's not really the same as asking him for legal advice.
Right. And these words can have bizarre meaning in legal terms. For instance, in Illinois law the word "shall" does not mean something is mandatory. Most of the time it should be read as simply "may".
> Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore?
I have neither a WordPress.com account (I mean, that I know of, anyway) nor an affiliation with WP Engine. However, can we back up for a minute? If a website is asking me to make an assertion that may have legal consequences, it should absolutely be spelling out the intention and meaning of the language it uses. If you ask me what "affiliation" means, I'll give you my best answer as to what I understand it means. If you ask me to sign a document that says I do or do not have affiliation with some entity, I will tell you to clarify what an affiliation is and refuse to sign without it.
"Not necessarily" can apply to almost any use of language, but I feel like this kind of thing can commonly be interpreted as non-affiliated. In an analogous case, if you work for an organization that performs public elections, at least in my country, you can't be affiliated with a party, but your personal business (voting for them) isn't included. Being publicly connected with or being compensated by another entity would seem to me to present an arguable affiliation
> Being publicly connected with or being compensated by another entity would seem to me to present an arguable affiliation
It looks like it's a legitimate legal issue [1][2].
TL; DR It may make sense to explicitly clarify when you're using the term 'affiliate' as it is defined in 17 CFR § 230.601 / Rule 144 [3] versus "affiliate, including but not limited to []," or whatever.
If you buy something from Amazon you've made a one-time exchange.
If you use WP Engine, you have an ongoing agreement with them to provide and support a service on which your business depends. A reasonable and literate person could construe that to be an affiliation.
The language is, as described, intentionally vague and people with varying degrees of “affiliation” have been hit by the consequences.
Matt also refuses to provide any elaboration on intent and instead says “you should talk to a lawyer”.
This has the chilling effect he is looking for. No-one is “talking to a lawyer” to create or use a Wordpress.org account. Anyone who has sniffed the same air as WPE knows the intent.
Isn't that what lawyers end up doing, arguing which definition of the word applies? And since (as far as I can surmise) elonmusk.php hasn't clarified what that word means in his checkbox, won't it be safer to be cautious?
The problem is that Matt/WordPress is not using the standard definition of affiliation. On social media, Matt suggested that being a customer or service provider to WP Engine was an "affiliation" for purposes of that checkbox.
Boilerplate is good but definitions are best, even with boilerplate words that have boilerplate definitions. Incorporating those definitions into the document at the time of execution benefits all parties. Again: minimize ambiguity, anticipate what will make dispute resolution easier.
Source: have worked through a lot of contracts, license agreements, labor agreements, and disputes over the same.
What if I being a customer "help" this company translating a part of the software? I am more than a customer then? should or shouldn't suggest features? how charm may I interact with support so I can still be a customer and not something more? Can I wear T-shirts of this company?
The fact he is using Wordpress.org would seem to be a clear violation of its 501(c)(3) IRS status. If someone has not filed a complaint by now with the IRS perhaps they should. The C3 must be very careful in sharing staff with the for profit entity, and it must be very careful in how they interact.
Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried, but the IRS turned them down. It's Matt's personal toy (staffed by people from Automattic), as far as anyone knows.
> Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried, but the IRS turned them down.
My interpretation of their story [1] is that holding the WordPress trademark wasn't enough for 501(c)(3) status, so they had to do something educational like promoting free software.
They transferred the trademark once they received 501(c)(3) status, and could have transferred the operation of dot org too if they wanted.
I believe the consensus among the moderate community is that Matt continues to hold onto dot org for "control", just like how the Foundation's board mostly comprises Matt's friends, and never had actual external community involvement.
I am not sure what you are saying. The assignment of the WordPress trademark to the Foundation was on the same day it was licensed back to Automattic and Matt for WordPress (commercial usage) and wordpress.org
Matt tried to put Wordpress.org as a 501(c)(3) but they ran into problems, e.g. it was a lead gen for paid plug-ins that Automattic owned. So Matt has used his and Automattic resources for wordpress.org for a long time. You can read more about this in the WPEngine suit (page 12). [1]
Let's put the trademark transfer and subsequent relicensing part aside, because I think we agree on that.
> Matt tried to put Wordpress.org as a 501(c)(3) but they ran into problems, e.g. it was a lead gen for paid plug-ins that Automattic owned. So Matt has used his and Automattic resources for wordpress.org for a long time. You can read more about this in the WPEngine suit (page 12).
Where in the lawsuit does it mention that "they ran into problems" transferring operation of dot org to the 501(c)(3)? All I see on page 12 is:
> Until recently, Defendants had given the WordPress community the impression that wordpress.org—the repository for the WordPress software and plugins—was owned and controlled by the WordPress Foundation.
Edit: I found it from a link in a different comment:
There is some more discussion here. [1]
I have no reason to doubt him...wordpress.org does support significant commercial activity, and even if it did go through, would likely require much more conflict/recusal issues. Not surprising he decided to pay taxes on an entity that probably runs at a loss anyway!
Which is another signal that Matt isn’t serious about the Wordpress Foundation. The correct move would have been to form a for profit subsidiary owned by the foundation to run Wordpress.org since it’s an unrelated business activity.
It’s a well trodden path used by tons of nonprofits like the Smithsonian, Mozilla, OpenAI, etc. when they need to operate something that the IRS won’t grant tax exemption.
> The correct move would have been to form a for profit subsidiary owned by the foundation to run Wordpress.org since it’s an unrelated business activity.
They formed WordPress Community Services PBC, which now runs the "official community" WordCamps, so sponsors didn't have to restrict their messaging:
Are you saying their governance is worse than Wordpress.org amid this giant fiasco?
Mozilla Corporation is the one receiving the hundreds of millions of dollars from Google that funds almost all the the development of the Firefox browser. Without it, Mozilla would be a tiny fraction of what it is now and FF would be dead in the water.
This is entirely orthogonal from the community. It's an IRS requirement.
> Mozilla Corporation is the one receiving the hundreds of millions of dollars from Google that funds almost all the the development of the Firefox browser. Without it, Mozilla would be a tiny fraction of what it is now
How do you know? I mean sure if the Mozilla Foundatio wouldn't have bothered with any alternative fundraising opportunities, but that's not exactly a realistic alternative realtity, is it?
> and FF would be dead in the water.
FF is dead in the water. It's market share is small enough that devs don't care about it anymore and it doesn't really provide any real advantages to users unless you really care about telemetry data going to Mozilla instead of Google. Mozilla has don't pretty much all it can to kill any kind of differentiation while refusing to innovate at all.
The Foundation gives its subsidiary money, just like any other parent company can.
Whether or not Wordpress.org makes money is irrelevant to its for/non profit status. It’s a legal technicality due to IRS tax exemption rules for unrelated business activities. They have to put those operations into a separate subsidiary, even if it never makes any profit.
If the nonprofit can’t afford to run Wordpress.org then the whole nonprofit was a farce anyway.
Unfortunately, anecdotally, there's a lot of group thinking in WordPress. It's one of the reasons "The WordPress way" is able to run counter to industry best practices. Most people don't know any better, and the handful who do don't speak up. It's a textbook case of toxic kindness.
Given the collective actions / behaviors / culture, I've been saying this for close to 10 years:
The other day I was thinking how communities around a programming language or software framework sometimes become toxic subcultures, where its members dogfood the product too much to the point where they can't think outside the box. I guess corporations take advantage of this mechanism of brainwash feedback loop to foster loyal employees who believe in the mission, who can speak the lingo and think in the given conceptual framework, no matter how arbitrary or wrong.
It also leads to "big fish in a small pond" syndrome, where people in the inner circle start to think highly of themselves, to look down on the "newbies" and users. They value thier expertise in this niche without realizing its relative poverty and low quality in the larger context. It's a mix of arrogance and ignorance that insulates their ego.
I hope the collective disillusionment that WordPress is going through will be healthy for ecosystem in the long run. Let a hundred forks and alternatives bloom!
The part which did it in for me was learning that Matt personally owns Wordpress.org. It's not the Foundation. It's not Automattic. It's Matt, personally.
> I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act
Send a copy to your state AG [1]. Copy your governor’s office [2] and state representatives if you have the time.
Does merely hosting a website on WP Engine constitute an affiliation? I wouldn’t consider myself affiliated with Apple, Microsoft, or Volkswagen, just because I use their products and services.
The author (and myself, coincidentally) used to work at WP Engine. I still have friends there, I could still describe their infrastructure if I had to. How am I not to interpret myself as "affiliated?"
That’s not what affiliation means. This checkbox is similar to T&C that “prevent” competitors from signing up. It’s more about having grounds to bring up WPEngine’s behavior in court if they check the box. It’s understandable you did not realize this, though, and perhaps that chilling effect was intended.
"is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today."
Insert Twitter, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, etc... at the beginning of that quote. The people who own the social networks rarely give a shit about the users once they hit critical mass. And the owners will eventually burn it down or enshitify it beyond recognition.
You believe that. I believe that. I'm sure my lawyer believes that. I'm sure Matt's does, too. I'd prefer not to have to convince a judge or jury to see it our way. If I were in the author's shoes, I don't know if I'd expose my company to that much of a legal risk with someone who's been acting "interestingly" recently.
I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why someone might not want to split legal hairs with their leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win such an argument in court.
I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law.
(I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at press conferences they called.)
>I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law.
Sounds exactly like one of the candidates running for POTUS!
All I know about the recent Matt and WordPress kerfuffle is what I've read here on HN. Based solely on what I've seen of his own comments here on these stories, I think you're right. What I meant in that sentence was "Matt's lawyers do, too", even if Matt might not think so.
One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about. He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe this bullshit."
By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for billable hours I completely believe it."
The red flag I keep an eye out for is redemptive rejection: treating rejection of one's arguments, whether by a person or the evidence, as evidence for it.
Most commonly this comes in the form of false victimhood, e.g. look at how hard they are trying to shut me down. Other times it manifests like this. The problem is it's a logical attractor; whatever belief it first attaches to, it monotonically increases faith in.
Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my team can register for a WordPress.org account.
I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear business justification (aside from limiting competition).
Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-...