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.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
So what you're saying is that Matt is a tyrant because he isn't as an effective communicator as DHH is? That's quite an unusual take on tyranny.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
There is no objective measure of what makes a tyrant. If one comes across as a tyrant, they are a tyrant!
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
What personal attacks are you referring to? There are no personal attacks found anywhere in this thread, nor would there be any logical reason to bring emotions into it at all.
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
The whole point of this thread is that you're defending what you perceived to be a personal attack against Matt (calling him a tyrant) and the other poster was trying to explain that it was not, in fact, a personal attack.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
It looks to me like passive aggressive lynch mobbing. Putting the issues aside, you seem to be doing a good job not letting the comments that charge you with medical and psychological issues get to you.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
I don't care about wordpress or this situation. I may be, just maybe, being too generous. Somehow people feel it's proper to question someone's sanity, provide armchair legal advice, and even suggest carbon monoxide intake is involved. Maybe people should be a little self aware of their critiques of others. Maybe.
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/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
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.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
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.
Man... You are still talking on the internet publicly, obviously without any lawyer checking out what you say before you post comments. You will inevitably end up posting a lot of things that can make you look bad or sink the case for your side. Just stop talking about this anywhere online and offline. Let the lawyers talk.
As someone who had to handle four websites that suddenly stopped getting Wordpress security updates and updates for plugins because of how you handled this I don’t very much care to hear about “their” bad behavior.
You have no checks and balances so we paid the price. I hope people stop using Wordpress in droves. I hope you have to worry about your business the same way you suddenly made people have to worry about theirs.
> How is it even legal for wordpress.org (a public nonprofit) to take these actions on behalf of a for profit?
There are three (or more) entities using the WordPress name now and confusing the heck out of a bunch of commenters, all of them controlled by Matt:
- The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the owner of the WordPress trademark.
- WordPress.com/Automattic is the company suing and being sued, and the exclusive commercial licensee of the trademark. They also pay people to work on the Foundation, and on WordPress.org.
- WordPress.org is a website personally run by Matt [1], through another company he owns called Mobius Ltd.
I'm sorry, _their_ smear campaign? That's rich, considering you've been the one on the "scorched earth nuclear" crusade to get rid of a "cancer" from the WP community.
They didn't have to cherry-pick anything to make you look bad. You did that by yourself. While also making a criminal case for extortion.
And regarding their trademark violation: WP Engine was founded in 2010. You've been OK with the trademark violation for 14 years, and suddenly decided to take legal action just now? C'mon. The optics of this don't put you in a good light no matter how you spin it.
Dude, your "trademark violations" claim is going to get absolutely destroyed in court. I obviously don't have all the details, but I would expect that if you did have more evidence against WPEngine, given how much you're posting in online forums I would expect you would have put forth something that helps your case, and I sure haven't seen it. How can you counter:
1. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks.
2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first.
3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way.
I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.
You are giving them more options and a bigger legal attack surface by writing online. If it turns out not to be a smear campaign and a court decides that, that alone is an attack surface for you getting surely convicted of slander.
The legal game is a different one. Get a lawyer and don't write online. Otherwise you will learn to lose everything you've built in your life over some stupid comments online.
Again, get a lawyer. Now. Stop writing. Now. Everything you will write or say will be used against you in the court of law.
There is a damn good reason this is mandatory for every cop to tell you if they arrest you.
You are mounting up the evidence for them. For free. They ragebaited and played you like a fool. Don't be that guy. Play the smart move.
It seems less like they're cherry-picking and more like you've attached one of those giant tree-shaker machines to your cherry tree and all they are doing is just standing underneath it catching everything.
Do you think your ego may have gotten in the way of doing what was best for your business and users here? How was harming so many sites and the WP name justifiable here?
You've been doing that to yourself, since you brought up the FBI in response to "a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." months ago
Of course -- and he should keep his temper tantrums to his poor behavior on that platform (like he's done in the past), because it's obvious he can't handle being grown up and handling Wordpress.
So they're "cherry picking" things that you said which make you look bad, which are true and accurate - and that's a "smear campaign".
While you are telling lies about trademark violations and extorting money specifically from WPEngine and have publicly admitted you're not doing that to anyone else that provides Wordpress hosting? And you've used terms like "war" and "nuclear option" when threatening the lies you subsequently told?
And somehow you still think _you're_ the good guy here?
:boggle:
Just resign. Make the WordPress Foundation into everything you've pretended it is over the years, including rightful and permanent owner of the trademarks and .org domain, and complete seperate from you personally and Automattic and it's related businesses. _Maybe_ that'll save WordPress. Maybe...
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.
"May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email."
Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May. The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to them months ago.
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.
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:
If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.
The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here for your own good) is context that makes those texts not look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
No one here is disputing that you might have been in the right until September. It's your actions in September that you need to account for.
That's a weird analogy. It'd be more like your natural gas provider trying to negotiate a deal and then when you don't reach an agreement they turn off the valve to your house.
I'm not talking about him cutting them off from WordPress.org (that's problematic for other reasons), I'm talking about the repeated texts and phone calls threatening to launch a smear campaign against them if they don't sign a deal. That is what looks like extortion.
>” If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.”
This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.
> I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk: "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
> I've got quotes from current and former employees, some may even stand up and speak as well.
There's the gasoline and matches. And then, while he's on stage:
> I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WordPress very easily
In isolation this sounds very much like "nice community goodwill you have there... would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." In the context of the other texts and phone calls WPE cites it sounds more like an explicit threat with no subtly.
Since when did relaying employee experience constitute an existential threat to a businesses ability to operate? This forum is littered with people who engage in "threats" as a mode of business every single day.
Seriously, read the complaint before commenting. What the parent says isn't "a reductive read", it's literally what WP Engine is alleging (with extensive documentation) and Matt is pointedly not denying.
Read the complaint before commenting any further, please.
Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be defended against all not just one. Do you really believe they are the only ones? Are you going to go after everyone next?
Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to use the trademark approach, I think your actions are going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have in time.
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.
> Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years
In reverse order:
1. Why on earth are other hosts obligated to contribute to Automattic, their competitor, just because Automattic also contributes to the open source project?
2. You have, on multiple recent occasions, spelt out unequivocally that WordPress.org is YOU, and not the Foundation. Again, why on earth are WordPress hosts obligated to contribute to you?
A couple posts up is claiming Mullenweg's singling out WP Engine, and here you're claiming he runs a protection racket against anyone who wants to make money running WordPress sites. Which is it?
This argument is pretty tedious. If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more chickens.
But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark, offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't give back to the community, and that's bad. I can understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I really don't understand why people are so against him here.
I mean, a protection racket tends to start that way. Give someone prominent a thumping with relative impunity, use the threat of that to get everyone else to comply
Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
I'm not 100% in the tank for Mullenweg, there's some inconsistencies I find troubling. But WordPress is an incredible, open project. Mullenweg's built an admirable community and business. There are so, so many WordPress hosting sites, and they're doing great. Mullenweg has outlined his issues w/ WP Engine (they turn off history). Does anyone honestly think a private equity firm would do better than he has? Does anyone in all these WordPress threads truly believe a good outcome here is PE firms can do as they like, giving back relatively very little to the community and slowly diluting the trademark? Who thinks this is sustainable? Who in his position would let this happen?
> Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.
All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--either directly or through insinuation like you're doing here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?
The obvious unanswered question is “why just WP Engine?” Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and service providers would be wise to at least be anxious about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.
I don't understand why this matters. You were asking for a reason, that's the reason. You can call it a "thin excuse", but Mullenweg's been upfront about his position.
> Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross revenue.
The 8% comes from the trademark licensing agreement [0]. They also offer to put them in the Five for the Future program if they do the contribution (they can also spend that 8% on people working on WordPress, which again enriches Mullenweg not at all, or some combo). This sounds pretty clearly like it's addressing the "you contribute very little back to the community" criticism Mullenweg has.
There's even more evidence in the "Forking" section, where they're basically like, "quit switching the attribution codes on our stuff".
Again, it sounds like WP Engine was being pretty uncool, and Mullenweg's trying to get them to be cooler.
You continue to suggest I’ve insinuated he is extorting others and I have done no such thing. Please stop that. A protection racket does not need a quorum of victims to be distasteful or illegal.
It does need to be a protection racket though. Mullenweg didn't walk up to WP Engine and say, "sure would be a shame if you somehow lost access to the plugins repo, if you pay me some $$$ I'll make sure that doesn't happen." He wrote a public blog post about how they turn off features he considers essential to WordPress. I'm not him, but it seems like if they just flipped that feature on (which would enrich him not at all) he'd be cool.
You've admitted a number of times in this thread that you consider the nonprofit organization to be just an extension of the for profit company. There are serious consequences for that for the organizations and you personally.
I was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the chat replay before deciding whether the results of any poll taken during that stream are credible.
I have to wonder how many people that voted even know what WordPress is or even use it. It’s easy to click a button on the screen to vote one way or another during a stream while being completely uninformed.
Sure it’s in use by a large portion of websites (43% I think I saw last) but that doesn’t mean that 43% of people know what WordPress is.
That stream wasn’t on a WordPress-centric channel.
>>>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.
You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8% being typical? For what kind of franchise?
If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert", do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
A new car dealership pays 3-8% back to their parent company plus a 1-2%
marketing fee, upto 500,000 as an initial fee. They get logo rights and inventory.
If this wasn't open source they could ask for those fees but they decided to give away their software with an open license. Without that license they would have never grown into what they became. But Matt sees another company doing well and he gets jealous and demands a piece of their success and goes postal when he doesn't get his way.
I think he needs to step away from wordpress.org because the conflict of interest is too great.
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.
Hi Matt, great that you're participating here and I'm broadly supportive regarding your concerns with the trademark and WP Engine's conduct.
However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
To be entirely blunt it's all damage control for us at this point when your name comes up, and it's because of that one singular mistake, if this was just WPE and Automattic duking it out in court no one would really care, but now the reliability of the WPOrg infrastructure is being questioned by a big chunk of the people who depend on WordPress and they will probably be inclined to walk away from your infrastructure and deeper into the arms of someone like WPEngine when they get the chance.
If you care about the broad perception of your efforts and your business practices I think you need to address this. Again I see that there are plenty of reasons to take issue with WPE's conduct but this singular decision you made has people calling for you to step aside and let someone else run WordPress. It's not going to go away on its own.
> make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning
AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers and do not depend on Canonical to run their business. WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
> WPEngine is a hosted service and could make very simple changes to download updates from their own servers.
This all kicked off when he publicly accused WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress for disabling revisions:
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.
Making WordPress contact something other than api.wordpress.org requires altering the codebase. Making this configurable is something he has explicitly rejected:
> Why would I build that? The built-in source works great, for tens of millions of servers.
- If WP Engine alters WordPress, even just to alter its configuration, they are “butchering” it.
- If WP Engine doesn’t alter WordPress and leaves it pointing at api.wordpress.org, they are unfairly using community resources.
– Huge numbers of people using api.wordpress.org is actually “great” and scales to tens of millions of servers.
As far as I can see, he doesn’t have a consistent position. He’s just grabbing hold of the nearest accusation that he thinks will harm WP Engine in the heat of the moment, regardless of what he has previously claimed or who else it hurts.
> Disabling revisions is a configuration change. This is the simplest possible change you could make, and it’s unacceptable in his eyes.
Actually this is wrong. Yes the constant WP_POST_REVISIONS exists. But WP Engine has disabled this constant. They do in fact "butcher" WordPress in the sense that they remove a feature, you can't turn it back on by yourself, and you need to talk to their support to get a limited version of it re-enabled by them.
Add to that, revisions are a big deal for a certain type of customer. Say, an enterprise scale publisher for example who has built an extensive publishing workflow around WP. (Hacker News consistently underestimates how massive some WordPress installs are; the scale of the world's biggest publishers, many of whom rely on WordPress, blows your nice little startup out of the water.)
So I am aware of a case or two where this actually became a negotiating point in an enterprise contract. The customer was entirely unaware that revisions were just a free thing built into WP, and it influenced the resulting contract and cost. Dirty dirty on WPE's side, really.
BTW this is documented at https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/ and you can see on that page that they limit their environment in many other ways. In the abstract this may not be a huge problem, hosts have costs and security and various limitations to think about. In my personal experience there are limitations which are not listed on that page and those are more frustrating.
The revision system is terrible though. Even we limit it for our clients. It doubles or triples the amount of queries your site and admin needs to run. Have some multi language plugin on top and your site will be eating memory and cpu. If WordPress would have made an actual usuable revision system, this wouldnt have been an issue at all
I think this is where Matt's perspective actually makes sense: "So, you guys built a $400M/yr business on our open source project, and when you had problems with the revision system, instead of contributing improvements, you just turned it off (and maybe converted it into an enterprise upsell some people are paying extra for!)?"
Intel, Google, even Microsoft etc. develop improvements to Linux knowing full well that their competitors will also get access to those improvements. For sure it's disappointing that WP Engine contributes almost no time to Core.
To recap, every post is stored in the wp_posts table and revisions have a post_type of 'revision' and a post_status 'inherit' (attachments also inherit). There's no gradual improvement you can do to this. More, their codex does not discourage accessing the database directly at all rather points out there's a class to make it easy https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description so moving revisions to a separate table will break every plugin which wants to access revisions and uses the wpdb class to do so which is just not acceptable: "WordPress strives to never break backward compatibility. It’s one of our most important philosophies, and makes updates much easier on users and developers alike".
We can have debates about whether this philosophy is the right one or not but there's no point. It's what it is and it makes fixing things like this simply not possible.
WordPress is infamous for its terrible codebase. Everything is jammed into a single wp_posts table including revisions. The frontend code is just as bad. I'm sure they blame the need for backwards compatibility. The entire thing should be retired.
The entire thing makes money and serves the purposes of people using it even for free.
It's a well-engineered product whether you want to accept it or not. Unlike more than half of the tech world that's unprofitable and is just a fart in the wind of tech memory.
No, it's not well-engineered (speaking with over 25 years as a professional software engineer), at least the portions of the code I have looked at. Things I vaguely remember (it's been ten years since I looked at it) are lack of data normalization (and not in a performance optimizing way), template includes that depend directly on order of inclusion and variables in other templates, very little code isolation, and PHP.
WP is a well-delivered product that works well for its user base in most situations. Plenty of code is well-marketed, profitable, and fulfills users' needs, but not well-engineered.
By the way, I know the PHP gripe is contentious, but it's not the reason why I think WP is badly engineered, it's just the reason it was easier to engineer it badly.
If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won’t work. (Docs don’t say what “won’t work” means; returns null, throws exception?) Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.
If allow_url_fopen is disabled in php.ini, this still won’t work. (How? No idea.)
Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed.
But it will be printed if scream.enabled is set in php.ini.
Or if scream.enabled is set manually with ini_set.
But not if the right error_reporting level isn’t set.
If it is printed, exactly where it goes depends on display_errors, again in php.ini. Or ini_set.
I can’t tell how this innocuous function call will behave without consulting compile-time flags, server-wide configuration, and configuration done in my program. And this is all built in behavior.
I would argue that Wordpress is a great example of how something doesn't need to be "well-engineered" (when it comes to abstractions, maintainability, etc) to be widely useful for many.
Although I think the exception there is security (and yes I know many will say clean and well engineered code is secure code). Security has to be solid or it will impact too many people negatively.
For years, wordpress stored user session data in 'wp_options'. Moderately trafficked sites needed to come up with regular purging hacks to 'clean' their wp_options table. Why? Session data is not an 'option', it's... session data. Make a database table called 'wp_sessions'. Transient 'cached' data also... in 'wp_options'. This was not an example of 'good engineering'.
This is just one of many examples of suboptimal tech decisions. Some have been mitigated, updated or otherwise 'fixed' over the years, so they may not be relevant any longer. It's a very popular and widely used platform despite some poor development and engineering choices, and perhaps even in some cases because of these poor choices, but that doesn't make them good engineering.
The idea that no one is allowed to criticize anything unless they can and have done better is one of the most perniciously stupid ideas out there that just won't go away.
If the parent poster is secretly Linus Torvalds, do you walk away in shame because he HAS done a project with better engineering? Or are the criticisms, perhaps, objectively valid or invalid, and worth engaging with regardless of the merits of the person making the criticisms?
Well when their whole argument boils down to "php sucks" and they back up their claims with a document that was invalid 12 years ago when it was written, they better have something to back up these criticism.
Perhaps you should engage with the claims rather than the person. As someone who doesn't frequently use PHP, the criticisms in the linked post from 2012 seem valid if the facts presented are true -- there's some pretty weird, and in a few cases, downright dangerous behavior presented there.
What is invalid, specifically, about that blog post?
WPEngine has tons of developers working on the WordPress ecosystem. This contribution argument doesn't work with me. They're contributing plenty of hours into WordPress plugins that their competition also can use.
That's the amount of hours they contribute to the "Five for the Future" program which specifically refers to work on a subset of the WordPress project managed by Automattic. For example, WPEngine own and develop Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin used by hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites. The work they do on that isn't covered in the 40 hours. Likewise, WPEngine run the DE{CODE} conference but that isn't included in the 40 hours either.
Are you able to name of the publishers that you say run massive WP installs?
I do know they exist of course, Sony being one.
I’m coding up a little something that I feel is more modern and superior compared to WP, and I’d like to learn what their business requirements and use cases are that keep them on WP.
I don't want to discourage you...but there's so many WP alternatives out there that are supported by bigger companies, have a big ecosystem around them with agencies and developers for many years. Why would massive WP installs switch to "a little something"?
I just see the opportunity to provide developers and users a better experience using modern tooling, and feels open and simple enough for anyone to download and use without worrying about security vulnerabilities.
Something that feels powerful and safe; like WP of 10 to 15 years ago.
Digital First Media/MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper publishers in the US, runs its 100+ local newspaper (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, etc.) websites on WordPress.
I’m not really focusing on WP Engine’s service here. I’m pointing out that the constraints Mullenweg has voiced appear to be self-contradictory and unsatisfiable by any WordPress host.
It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient.
Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time.
Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)
I'm sorry but WP-ENGINE lost my vote when they started quoting evangelizing and ambassadorship events as "contributions". Everyone knows that's a 50/50 self-marketing and brand outreach. I don't understand why people are taking WP ENGINE's side, in the past 5 years, the evils and exploits of VC investments have been widely documented. This is a clear and present danger/example of what is wrong with VC in America. Look at VC in other parts of the world, they are heavily regulated for this particular reason. This industry has taken the premise of the movie "pretty woman" and escalated to new hights of corporate GREED.
Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about. Had they known they 100% would have ensured that customers didn't lose service. Matt chose to surprise them.
It's a very nuanced thing. The world could be very different today. There would have been very little pushback against Matt's crusade if he'd just thought about making sure service to users was uninterrupted.
Instead he dragged 1.5 million sites into the middle of this in a way that made him look like the bad guy.
I hope that WordPress will continue to be open and Matt will continue to lead it, but he just cost himself a lot mindshare. That's why I asked him to explain why he made the choice he did.
Hopefully he has a PR person who is advising him on how to handle this situation. Were it me, I would say something like: "My passion for keeping WordPress open source got the better of me and I made a hasty decision which caused problems for end users. I've learned from this and it's not a mistake I will ever repeat. Going forward if there are changes to how we administer WPorg's services we will discuss them with the community and announce them well in advance because we want them to be rock solid and reliable for all of the millions of websites which depend on them."
This type of statement would go over well with a lot of people including the big enterprise customers who are depending on WP, who Matt really wants and who are constantly being courted by WP's competitors. In followup messaging you can reiterate all the strengths of open source e.g. how it reduces vendor lock-in.
But what do I know, I've only sold a couple million dollars worth of WP contracts, meanwhile Matt is worth 400 of those big M's. :)
Even without dragging the wordpress.org infrastructure into the mess, MM's blackmail campaign wouldn't have played well with the community. But it would have blown over as just more #wpdrama, whereas this ... I think we're likely to see the WordPress trademark invalidated. Even if it isn't, this case winning means every last WP host can just line up and cite it, making the trademark as good as generic anyway.
> Sure, but to do that they'd need to know they are about to be cut off, something which they were given zero warning about
According to Automattic they had been in discussions for 20 months. Your anger should be with WPEngine for taking your money while knowing full well their service depended on servers ran by a company they were on (best case) shaky terms with.
Up until about 8 months ago, Bluehost (another big paid hoster of WordPress sites) ran its own plugin mirror with no issues: https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror
Matt's behavior is inexcusable and shows that WordPress needs a complete restructuring without him. Too many sites rely on WordPress to endanger them because of one man's temper tantrum. I don't understand how you can defend this reckless behavior by him. Who cares what WPE could have should have done. He needs to step down immediately.
"WPEngine should have foreseen something that has never happened in the 20 years of the software's history".
I mean yeah, companies should have contingency plans for things that are extraordinarily rare but let's be reasonable about it. No one, including you, saw this coming.
I challenge you to find a single blog post, tweet or HN/Reddit comment that suggests Matt could one day shut off wp.org access to a single company running 1.5 million sites without any notice to that company, or the community members who will be affected. It's unconscionable. Or at least it was.
Newfold Digital, which owns Bluehost, is the only entity with a commercial trademark sub-license agreement from Automattic per the recently updated WordPress Foundation Trademark Policy:
It's not about what WP Engine could have done, but how Matt acted. If he wanted WPE to use their own Plugin repository, he could have told them so and given them a date. But cutting off access to updates without warning to all these sites is inexcusable. Matt chose the "nuclear option" without realizing that the fallout would also hit WordPress and himself. In addition to hundreds of thousands of websites that had nothing to do with his gripes.
In a social media post on the platform X, he boasted that as a result of his actions, WPE is now a “distressed asset,” worth just a “fraction” of what it was before, because “[c]ustomers are leaving in droves” – calling into question whether Defendants’ motivations extend beyond mere interference and extortion, and are in fact a thinly disguised attempt to artificially drive down WPE’s valuation in hopes of acquiring it on the cheap
Its not unlikely that the gameplan all along was slander and disrupt them so much that the company would become worthless, then acquire it. He was trying to blackmail/extort WPE's CEO into coming to work for him, after all! (text message screenshots are in the lawsuit too)
Because Canonical makes it easy to clone their entire repositories and host your own mirrors. You can change your ubuntu mirrors changing the configuration files themselves (or via graphical programs on desktop systems), unlike in WordPress where you'd need to "butcher it" (Matt's words, regarding disabling revisions by WPE) modifying the source code to point to another server.
> AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers
I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well.
A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day.
Being able to pull it locally saves all that.
Also, it is faster and does provide some security.
> They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
That depends on how you look at it.
If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be
a big problem for both DO and AWS.
They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros.
But from the very beginning, Canonical/Ubuntu chose to make mirroring the repo easy, and encouraged the usual network of public mirrors to participate, much as Debian and other distros had done for years. (It wouldn't be unfair to say that Canonical/Ubuntu had to meet the expectation those distributions had set.)
That is something the WordPress community (albeit centralised in the WordPress.org decision makers) could have been doing for decades.
A million people trusted WPE’s resources. WPE, in turn, relied on someone else’s. The real issue here is that WPE completely overlooked the fact that they haven’t done the work to maintain the availability of their apps. It’s like buying a fridge, stocking it with $200 worth of food, and forgetting to plug it in.
With the wrinkle that your landlord enthusiastically invited you to move in, and never made you sign a contract, but after your dog shed all over the place he started making ominous noises about how you'd better sign one equal to eight percent of your gross revenue, and every conversation with him is now very strained
The GPL, and WordPress's trademark policy, which up to a week ago stated " The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit."
On the other hand, the use of WordPress servers is in no way covered by the GPL. WP Engine can pay for their own servers the same way Bluehost used to.
wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. The actual non-profit [1] had expenses of $41k in 2022, which wouldn't come anywhere near paying for wordpress.org infrastructure and personnel. I guess Wordpress is going the RHEL route. You can clone it, but can't use their trademarks or infrastructure.
Automattic's associate legal counsel begs to differ [1]:
> Let’s apply this to the WordPress trademarks (also called simply “marks”). The WordPress Foundation owns the right to use the WordPress marks for non-commercial purposes. It can also sublicense out this right for particular events (e.g., WordCamps) and to people supporting the WordPress project and community. The Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that facilitates access to WordPress-related software.
They tried to set it up that way and were denied. Apparently the flip side of that is they no longer feel constrained to not "Us[e] the resources of the non-profit you control to kneecap a competitor to the for-profit you control."
So like I said, at this point it's no different than RHEL's very stringent trademark protections, and restrictions on using their update servers (cdn.redhat.com) if you're not paying them. The only difference here is that if WP Engine was itself a non-profit, Matt wouldn't be going after them. RHEL is not as generous.
Apparently these are the new rules. If you're a for-profit entity advertising "Wordpress Hosting" instead of "Hosting with Wordpress installed" and want access to the infrastructure of wordpress.org (which costs millions of dollars a year) you now have to pay, either in cash or equivalent contributions.
Personally that seems fair. It should have come with a minimum 90 day public notice period, and the stuff about being a cancer etc. is pretty crazy. Changing marketing language and setting up your own plugin mirror like Bluehost did (https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror) is not the end of the world.
This is 100% correct as a position of principle, but it's not a foregone conclusion that WPE was able to take the necessary steps here.
To be very specific about at least one of the issues:
* The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
* If WPE forks WordPress to fix that, and continues to say they host WordPress, IANAL but they probably have a trademark violation problem on their hands.
There are certainly workarounds which exist, but it's hard for us to conclude casually on Hacker News whether they can be deployed at WP Engine scale and in compliance with whatever agreements WP Engine is bound to.
So yeah you're right about what the right thing to do is. But frequently reality is not that simple. They needed time and maybe even assistance from wporg (in helping them to be free of wporg. errrr)
> * The URLs pointing to the WP plugin directory on wordpress.org are hardcoded into WordPress
But they can be changed via filters. I do that all the time to manage when certain request are being made (and making sure it's in a cron job and not a user-request).
WP Engine does run their own plugin in the instances they host, though I assume it's not obligatory. Still, every site I ever had to look at that was on WPE had it installed and enabled.
WP does come with its own CA certs, but that file could be appended (or replaced, again via filter) as well. Since they're comfortable changing things like the revision settings, I doubt this would be something they wouldn't do.
I'm not saying Matt is reasonable, but "it's not an easy thing to do" isn't true.
It's academic now, the mirroring has been a done deal since Oct 1. WPE operates their own mirror and API server now. Matt of course did not help at all in this effort.
>However I do not understand why you chose to make 1.5 million enemies in the WordPress community in one weekend by shutting down their ability to update plugins with zero warning and consequently reducing the security of their websites.
yup. I'm about to make a new site and I dont care about the platform, I just want to write. but I'm not gonna use wordpress ever again now, probably. Matt seems friendly but this is evil CEO garbage
Well said, I hope that there will be forum to discuss the ethos of these actions and see if there isn’t a better way to go about this, and how we can strengthen the community of open source.
An interesting article was written by Dries (Drupal Founder) and others.
Uhh. I am. I've launched probably 30 websites using WP over the last 10 years, a couple for household name brands. WordPress stopped being "cool" awhile ago (because "PHP sucks" and the like), I've defended my usage of it in plenty of past comments, despite it being long past "cool". The way MM talks about enforcing the trademark, the licensing distinction (i.e. the commercial use of "WordPress" to Automattic only) -- am I allowed to call myself a "WordPress" developer and charge people money for it anymore? Or do I have to worry about a trademark troll?
I'll admit that I'd already been looking for a modern alternative. I'm a web developer, I almost exclusively write in TypeScript, something running on Node just makes more sense for me. I recently built a project on PayloadCMS and NextJS -- Payload has since integrated directly into Next's server and has a really nice "website" template to get started. I'll be using that from now on.
Up can run WordPress just fine headless.
Not my own cup of coffee but it works
I think the data schema in Wordpress is decent.
With the addition of Pods it has become a lot
more flexible.
(There were other solutions that mostly cost $$)
Most of my issues with WP has to do with the front end.
To me, the military language used in a few of their execs messages was telling.... I have seen that more than once in anti competition lawsuits and Heather has as well
Hi Matt - long time WordPress user here, and I've been hosting and running a WordPress multisite for over 15 years now. In fact, I met you at a WordCamp here in NZ 15 or 16 years ago. Anyway, this whole episode has been the final nail in the coffin for me, and I no longer want to have anything to do with WordPress.
I've long thought that the relationship between Automattic/WordPress.com and WordPress.org was not good for the community, and your behaviour here has put that beyond doubt.
I honestly don't know what's going through your head, but you need to try to wind back the clock a couple of weeks and put things right. You continue to lie and manipulate words (even in this thread!) to make it sound like you are in the right, but it's not working. You need to stop.
I left WordPress ~8 years ago for a similar reason.
I watched Matt destroy friends' WordPress businesses by saying they violated the WP ethos while he and Automattic did the same thing in their businesses.
I've seen them break legal agreements with theme creators and refuse to pay them despite contracts. They also use legal threats against small creators to force them to accept an agreement that pays far less.
I would never do business with Matt or Automattic. They have behaved unethically in my experience.
Matt has too much power and uses it to do whatever he wants. He should never have been allowed to be involved in WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
> He should never have been allowed to be involved in WordPress.org once he was working at Automattic.
I'm not sure that last part makes sense. For starters, there's a chronological issue -- Matt co-created the open source WordPress project in mid 2003, founded Automattic in mid 2005, and founded the WordPress Foundation in 2010. But even setting that aside, who exactly would/should have prevented him from serving in roles in multiple organizations that he himself founded, and why?
If he's abusing the non-profit foundation in some blatantly for-profit way, then yes that would clearly be problematic -- but it doesn't seem clear-cut whether that has happened. The foundation owns the trademark, and the owner of a trademark must defend it in order to keep it. And as for the wordpress.org infrastructure, that appears to be totally separate from the foundation.
Alternatively, if the foundation had never been formed at all, would that have been a better outcome? I'm skeptical, since in the post-ZIRP world many VC-funded "single vendor open source" infrastructure software companies (whose projects lack separate non-profit foundations) are having their own relicensing dramas, and issues with insufficient contributions from large cloud vendors. This seems to be an industry-wide problem right now.
It was a conflict of interest when his policies at Automattic were in direct conflict with his role in the Org. The reality was he used them both to achieve his aims and as a dictator. The Org should have been run by the community for the good of WordPress, not the good of Matt or Automattic.
I suppose I'm just unconvinced about the severity of the "conflict of interest" claims, which have been said by quite a few people in these threads (I don't mean to single you out in any way!) but without concrete, unambiguous examples rising to the level of clear wrongdoing or malicious intent.
I know you gave some examples alleging bad behavior up-thread, but in those cases it isn't clear that the specific core problem related to a conflict of interest with Matt having dual roles at Automattic and the Foundation.
Or for instance, regarding "the good of WordPress": my impression is that Matt's various organizations are by far the largest contributors to WP core development, so it's hard to argue an overall trend of not acting in the best interest of WordPress. Stated another way, if Automattic were to go out of business, WordPress development would be significantly impacted. I think this means "the good of WordPress" and "the good of Automattic" are synergistic and intertwined.
At the end of the day, developing and maintaining a major open source project is very expensive. Someone needs to pay for it, and when a majority of that cost is paid by a single entity, that entity will naturally have disproportionate control. If major ecosystem members aren't contributing their share (as is alleged in WPE's case), I don't see how an entirely community-driven approach would be successful.
To be clear though, with respect to WP's situation, I don't have a dog in this fight and am neither condoning nor condemning the behavior of the parties involved.
It's obvious what you intend to accomplish, but here is what you've actually accomplished:
Before this week I knew what wordpress was (of course), did not know either names WP Engine nor Matt Mullenweg, and had never happened to build a site with wordpress.
Now I know your name and will never build a site with wordpress.
You can choose to make that about me instead of recognizing any responsibility for that outcome, but it's never the less a fact. Do with this simple data what you will, but data it is.
Another comment by someone else in one of the severel conversations on this went something like:
"I don't know either of these companies and so far WP Engine hasn't said anything yet. So far I have only heard Wordpress's side of the story, and that has made me assume that Wordpress are the side in the wrong."
Every once in a while there's someone who's smarter than everyone else and keeps talking. SBF from FTX famously was giving interviews to whoever would listen.
> The atypical chattiness for a criminal defendant is likely causing Bankman-Fried's attorneys to scratch their heads, or worse. Prosecutors can use any statements, tweets or other communications against him at his trial, which is scheduled for October.
> Prosecutors love when defendants shoot their mouths off," said Daniel R. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor who is now a white-collar criminal defense attorney. If Bankman-Fried's public comments before trial can be proven false during the trial, it may undermine his credibility with a jury, he said.
I have seen a couple founders post to HN like this during legal action. Its embarrassing, even if I enjoy reading the content.
Of course its possible that these posts are happening through consultation with a lawyer/PR or something but often it feels like someone using their “inside” voice in the outside, and reads like unforced errors.
A. Legally, it cannot possibly help you (whatever happened, happened). However, it can hurt you (inconsistent statements, etc). This is particularly true in colloquial environments like HN.
B. While it may be useful reputation/press wise, because anything you do wil be evidence, you should be having someone else do that.
C. If you are part of a publicly traded company, you can run into SEC violations quickly from what you say, how you say it, and where you say it. Even moreso if you are CEO/an officer/etc
I could go on forever here - for example, you can also run yourself into trouble quickly if the people you are talking to are people you know may be witnesses in the case, etc.
There is a near infinite number of reasons lawyers tell people to STFU when you get sued.
Of course, if your company/you as CEO get sued, it can obviously be incredibly frustrating and difficult to sit there and watch a one-sided story take hold - not the least of reasons because people often take complaints as evidence rather than assertions, and the response rarely gets as much press, etc.
I think the closest lots of HNers come is when they love their company and see a legal complaint pop up on HN that they felt is just insane but can't say anything about it. It's like that, but like 100x worse :P.
But saying nothing is the most useful thing you can do - get away from it. Take a walk, meditate, whatever.
Get the people who are experts in handling it involved (lawyers, comms folks, whatever), and let them do their job.
I'm going to do him the favor of not responding to anything else he writes in this thread for his own good.
The best case scenario here is that Rachel (or one of her associates more likely) takes every single sentence Matt has written here, or anywhere else, tonight, and cross-checks it against every other sentence or fact he's claimed before. Or that his company has claimed. or the foundation has claimed. or ....
Then at the deposition, they will then ask a lot of hard, uncomfortable questions about every single inconsistency, no matter how little. Because that is what they spend many hours preparing to do.
Does similar apply to some of the Automattic employees who have been talking everywhere?
Is there a point where it could switch from "a bunch of people running their mouths" to "a coordinated harassment campaign against WP Engine and its customers"?
Most lawyers in cases like this are not assholes (surprisingly), so they generally won't spend time/energy deposing people who can't produce useful evidence, even if they could.
As a result, you would generally stick to people who have relevant evidence, are capable of legally binding the company (often director or above) or speaking for it (various others), etc.
But - if you need to prove a coordinated campaign, and can't get evidence of it otherwise (emails, chats, etc), sometimes you just got to depose a lot of people.
Usually the path of least resistance is taken, however, and electronic evidence is often sufficient enough these days to not end up having to depose lots of employees.
Judges (magistrate and otherwise) also are pretty careful in ensuring you aren't being malicious (IE just trying to harass employees)
Lawyering is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Lots of companies fall into the trap of letting lawyers make business decisions instead of being advisors of legal risk/etc to the business.
Done properly, they are advisors 99% of the time.
Which means, to answer your question, there are plentyof situations where the outcome of the lawsuit is not as valuable to the business as the narrative/etc.
For example, there are people/companies whose brand is their most valuable asset. "family friendly" celebrities are a common example, i think.
For them, the narrative and control of it may be way more important than winning or losing.
Now, i would still say - even in that case, the person going off and talking in public without someone helping them know what to say (not necessarily a lawyer) is still often a really bad idea. They are often too close to it, etc, to really be objective about what will make the most sense, even if the goal is "control the narrative" rather than 'win the lawsuit" or whatever.
But in those cases, working with a crisis manager or whatever, if the most important thing is the perception, have at it.
At the same time, people involved tend to be in a bit of a bubble. It often feels more critical, urgent, and well known than it really often is.
So for example, here, i'm sure to lots of employees/Matt it feels like a thing everyone is talking about. But in reality, uh, its not. It isn't carried by any major news site, and even among the general open source or developer community, i would bet 99% of people have no idea about any of this.
Even within their customer base i would imagine it still isn't widespread knowledge (though it likely will be over say the next week).
So in a case like this, you have time to catch your breath, engage your best people, and think about your response.
Which you should take.
That isn't always the case mind you (it's like any incident response). But i think it's the case here.
Right, this all feels like (and I'm not trying to be rude with this, I'm speaking from experience) a mental break. Or he's got some sort of vendetta that he feels burning everything down is worth it over.
Some of his comments from the other day on reddit have already been used in this very lawsuit, you'd think he would know to shut the hell up at this point if it's #2.
I don't even know if it's a vendetta about WP specifically or just the result of his general disposition. About a year ago he had an embarrassing public meltdown after some random Tumblr users talked shit about him because they didn't like his moderation policies. Banning people, then publicly shaming them, then replying to their posts on other social media sites...
There’s a whole-ass archetype among founder-owners of successful companies who stick with them long-term, that looks like this. It’s not all of them, by any means, but it’s definitely one sort. In ordinary circumstances it manifests as a preference for maintaining control over making moves that might, by some measures, be better (improving business success, or limiting liability, say) and a string of quiet and maybe fishy-seeming but not exactly red-flag dust-ups; when a big enough obstacle (especially to that whole “control” thing) shows up and throwing their weight around can’t make it go away, though, things can get real dicey.
My take is this is 100% someone sticking to a naive worldview because they are smart and logical (and I don't doubt that they are). But the world doesn't work like that. And as much as I hate to admit it, these WPE people are playing the game and just baiting and provoking a response from him. They're like schoolyard bullies that poke and wave hands inches from your face, then cry foul to principal Government when you rightfully retaliate. As much as a smart and "fair" person would think this is a reasonable and logical response, the principal does not think so. They will look at the rules, say "a ha, you broke rule 3(a) and hit someone", and then send you to detention. No amount of if, buts, and logical "reasons" will matter at that point.
honestly, just read this and his initial post about the whole issue (content is "sacred" or whatever) and it's clear he's semi-deluded himself into thinking he has massive support and/or more important in the grand scheme of things than he actually is. burned so many bridges and still won't concede anything.
That's not what page 35 says at all. Check out page 36:
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or
negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she
would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
(edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct to read page 35 as saying that)
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.
> As the audience, with no horse in this race, I’m glad he keeps talking.
You really shouldn't, IMO.
For one thing, what parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy. I get that that's fun from the sidelines, but I certainly don't think we should encourage employers to violate other people's privacy.
For another, we have a court system with lots of rules around it for a reason. These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here. He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying here and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it. He could be bringing up totally irrelevant facts while not talking about the actual important things, with his counterparty correctly not talking about it, but leaving the impression that there is nothing there. Etc.
> parent poster is saying is that he might be violating someone's privacy
As you say it is terrible, and they should not have done that. Irrespective of the legal outcome it taints them in my eye forever. That being said that particular horse has left the barn already. It is not like us third parties gigling from the sidelines will affect it.
> These threads help people form opinions, but the truth is that none of the protections in place in a courtroom apply here.
Yeah sure. People on the internet can lie. It is not like we believe everything which comes out of the mouth of any party ever. That is not a reason for me wishing them to shut up.
It would be in their best interest to stop talking. But it is not our job as third parties to enforce that or even encourage it. We are not his legal representation, nor we are his fairy godmother.
> He, or his opposite party, could literally be lying about everything they're saying…
Yes.
> … and there's no way for us to know or evaluate it.
That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely evaluate them. We don’t have as strong tools as people in a court case do. For example we can’t subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a court case. They have to be always engaged.
And it is important to remember that the likely outcome of any such evaluation is that “there is not enough info for me to know for certain”. That is not some weird edge case of critical thinking, but the default state of things.
> That is not true. We can hear them out and then apply our logic, look at the things presented and can absolutely evaluate them. We don’t have as strong tools as people in a court case do. For example we can’t subpoena them, nor can we demand discovery. But that is how 99.9% of our interactions are. It is not like we only have to engage our critical faculties when it is about a court case. They have to be always engaged.
You're right, I spoke more strongly than warranted. I was getting at this distinction - in a court case, there are real tools, both legal and investigative, that let you determine truth to a much higher degree than in random internet (or real life) conversations.
What I highly dislike is that the person who is acting responsibly legally, and who is probably acting more responsibly by trusting the court system to determine what should happen, is always the party that doesn't engage in this kind of talk. The side acting irresponsibly is trying to change public perception by sidestepping the actual legal mechanisms here, and we shouldn't usually let them.
(I'm speaking generally, in this case I feel less strongly because a lot of this is public knowledge.)
> The side acting irresponsibly is trying to change public perception by sidestepping the actual legal mechanisms here, and we shouldn't usually let them.
It is a double edged sword though. Sometimes people talk and they are convincing and the independently verifiable facts support what they say. Sometimes they make themselves look like a fool.
Just because one side talks doesn’t mean they win. Just here the side which runs their mouth is comming through (to me, in my perception) at best unprofessional, if not perhaps even a tad bit vindictive and unhinged. Not a good look, even if they are right and legally win at the end.
He has no self control. His interview on The Primeagen was especially telling. It’s deeply personal for him. His interactions with the WPEngine staff are all spoken about like casual personal relationships. Nothing was handled professionally. No matter who’s right, or to what extent, he’s publicly digging himself a hole.
I mean not only he hopped on a live stream to babble before going to court, he bragged about it and said the WP Engine people are afraid to do the same. This is school yard level big brain moves.
> I dropped on the livestream for ThePrimeagen earlier today after a colleague pinged me that he was talking about the Silver Lake / WP Engine situation.
> Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?
> For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave
an interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the
interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer.
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.
The question you need to ask yourself is whether you _should_ talk to journalists during a legal matter, instead of trying to fight the court of public opinion.
hmm.. no, I don't think it is all on your side, sad to say. I was with you until I read this message you sent to Heather Brunner:
>> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres:
* Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict.
* Your interviewing with Automattic over the past year.
* I will possibly tell the press all of the above.
That's just so obviously threatening and uncalled for. Even if Brunner were considering jumping ship, you shouldn't threaten someone into accepting an offer.
Now, you don't know me from Adam, but I want you to strongly, strongly consider that this thing that you've been afraid of happening, has actually already happened. And that is, that you have become Evil Matt -- with the little horns on your head and everything. And to get back to being Good Matt, you're going to have to let some things go.
"No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it." -- Charles Schulz
What I think you don't realize is, the minor discrepancies in statements of facts are inconsequential in the court of opinon. Even if (which TBH don't find implausible at all) everything you said and posted is true and I agree in principle, that doesn't resolve the issues around CoI and they way you have been communicating over the last couple of weeks, including the WPConf bombshell and the abrupt discontinuation of service. The fallout of the drama and the way you have been playing your hand vastly overshadow whatever your motivations for "going
nuclear" was.
I don't believe you will gain anyone's sympathy by resolving a misunderstanding about who-said-what-when in some inconsequential matter somehow apparently also part of this drama. Some if it seems like pure distraction that I don't see why anyone outside of the individuals involved should have ever heard about in the first place.
I second the sentiment that you don't appear healthy and could suggest maybe let someone else take a seat in one of the (3? 4?) chairs for a change? At least from the outside, you still seem free to choose your focus yourself. Maybe that window will be closing...
Literally everybody is telling you to STFU. The problem as I see it, is that you might feel incredibly confident in your case, but you are so close to things that you have convinced yourself of your own righteousness.
That’s not necessarily reality, and you are not as righteous as you believe. Even if you are - your words could be misconstrued.
I cannot understand why your legal team is not advising you to stop making public comments. Or perhaps they are, and you aren’t listening to them? Either way, you are being incredibly foolish.
Have you ever been party to or close to an important legal proceeding?
Anything said and documented prior to the hearing will be combed through. Even tiny inconsistencies will be cherry picked and entered as evidence to raise doubt of the claims made.
I'm all for the sentiment behind a CEO addressing ongoing lawsuits candidly, but in reality its just a bad idea. Statements made without being fully vetted by council, with the context of all other statements already made, will inevitably have issues that could throw a wrench in the case.
Have you spoken to a lawyer, Matt? That’s a terrible course of action. It’s like talking to the police. You never do so, no matter how innocent you are.
You're taking this very personally and in the public domain even though it will hurt your company.
Maybe there gets a point you become so wealthy, that ego is all that matters. But you're supposedly a smart guy who cares about his products, community and company, why not take the practical and economically safe route of duking it out in court?
At least on this site, you may be “here” but you’re not responding meaningfully to most of the questions/comments posed to you. This seems more like a weird approach to PR than any kind of attempt to clarify or justify your position.
"she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic"
But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as you've revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few weeks. I don't follow, how can Heather apply for a job with Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you personally own?
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.
> 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.
So are you now using company resources for personal projects (as they point out, you constantly have claimed that the .org domain is your personal domain) as well as for non profit org projects?
Doesn't exactly sound... beneficial to investors interests.
Why did you tell the community: "the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company"? That's objectively untrue. Period.
That was 14 years ago Matt. You mislead the community for 14 years.
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 understand the workings of the trademark. The question I asked of you (that you avoided) is why did you claim that the trademark was "fully independent from any company" and that Automattic had "give[n] up control". [0]
That's demonstrably untrue. The assignment on file with the USPTO is clear:
>WordPress Foundation, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, ... hereby grants to Automattic Inc., an exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks identified in Exhibit A attached hereto...
I’m curious: what else is there to a trademark? Nominal ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they’ve granted “irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic” (as claimed in this lawsuit), what else is there? Maybe there is something, I’m no lawyer or particularly deeply familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like, for all practical purposes, ownership belonging to the Foundation is a furphy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy>.
> The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org.
The Foundation? You mean, you, a retired, inactive coder (as far as I could tell, or near enough) and oh yeah, one of those "freeloading leeches", as you described Private Equity... a Managing Partner, in fact?
Weird that you never mentioned that this license was granted on the same day it was transferred.
I love how he explains that “consideration” was conjured from thin air.
I own a car. I want to drive my own car on weekdays. To accomplish this, I give my car to Jimmy, and he promises to let me use it on weekdays?
Using the same analogy as in that post, apparently this is a valid contract with “consideration” because I gave Jimmy my car and, “in return,” he gave me my car back Monday–Friday.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine that it is illegal to donate a noncommercial license to a nonprofit organization, without contracts and considerations coming into play. But if I’m wrong, and “consideration” is a required element of a transaction like this, I don’t think this wash-sale version of it would pass muster anyway.
I also do not get it, I don't know why consideration is even relevant for a donation.
I assume someone wanted to restructure things so that a fully owned trademark was owned by a non-profit instead, with them retaining commercial rights.
Why would either side want to minimize the donation size? It reduces taxes for the commercial company and the non-profit doesn't care about income tax.
I don't know if the site is accurate but it's odd to bring up considerations for sure. I don't see anything immoral or unethical about want to restructure so that a non-profit handles the non-profit stuff.
There are so many legal entities here that appear completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation, Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.
the statements about the non-profit situation seem especially bad. He'll obviously have his own side of the story, but I'm guessing they didn't misread the tax filings.
Matt, with the greatest of respect - shut up, and get off the internet until this is over. You just keep digging the hole and making things worse for yourself.
In this instance, you are not the smartest guy in the room, and anything you say is just going to make the outcome of this whole saga that much more painful.
If I were in your position I'd be very carefully trying to figure out what the next step is, especially given whats going to come out about the Wordpress foundation's commercial licensing agreement with Automattic. That alone should be an exctremely worrying position for you personally, assuming your legal team have pointed out the issues on an international scale that you're about to be hit with.
Your response to this complaint is going to look very interesting.
Also, a note for the audience: Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour. WPEngine apparently has deep pockets.
Not only that but the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian. As I noted elsewhere in the thread, she was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.
At first the idea that a $1000/hr associate planted a typo or two intentionally made me laugh but the more I think about it the more I think that's exactly what someone playing 4D chess with a lawsuit like this might do.
I doubt it. I've been involved with a similarly priced law firm once for an investment in a company I had a small stake in. They misspelled the names of multiple people, fixed it in the next draft version after it was pointed out to them, and then had it pop back up in some of the names a few versions later.
I know more than I'd like to about this topic; I spent most of a decade supporting legal document management systems.
Large law firms use document management systems[0] to store their documents. It's a really primitive VCS that integrates with Microsoft Office. The user who checks out a document usually has exclusive access to it until it's checked back in. Other people can check out a copy of the same document, but it won't usually contain any changes the other person made. There's additional work required and many users don't know how to do this. It's common for changes to be lost or a partner to have the help desk unlock documents. I'm guessing that's what happened in this case.
Yeah it's probably more likely they just need to bill 80 hours a week or whatever amount not to get fired and were going too fast to notice the error :)
As I write many more things collaborating with people who do not speak English as a first language, it is more obvious than ever that grammar and spelling errors have absolutely no correlation with the quality of the argument when it comes to professional communication.
At some level sure, but if a lawyer is typing a 30 page document in a few hours, they might have someone proofread it once but I guarantee you the thought that went into writing it was far more serious than the thought that went into proofreading it.
Do you put the typo next to the thing you want to hide to distract the opposition or do you put the typo miles away to draw their attention to something irrelevant?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but it made me burst out loud and it's probably the funniest thing I've read all week.
Red herrings? People actually believe lawyers set up a 9D chess game in court and move pieces by making typos to distract from facts ?
Lawyers are humans too. I know a bunch of oldies who still don't use a spell checker or anything. They just eyeball it or have associates do it. If you make typos, you fix them on subsequent revisions. If not, too bad.
Typos don't really matter in legal complaints, except for looking unprofessional. It would be a waste if my $1000/hour lawyer spent their time proofreading, honestly. The typos also guarantee that I'm getting a real, logical human writing my complaint rather than someone faking it with ChatGPT.
Typos in long-lived documents like contracts, patents, etc. matter quite a bit, by contrast. See eg the second amendment, where billions of dollars have been spent over a few commas.
This is actually one of my favorite uses for contemporary AI technology. It very much can (and does) catch this type of spelling error. Google Docs does this for me quite often. It's not always right -- but it often prompts me to review exactly this type of situation. It's pretty amazing, really.
I'm always amazed at how many typos make it into legal docs that should be picked up by automatic spell checks. It seems to be a normal and accepted practice for legal types - interesting to see that's the case in the US as well as here in the UK.
Hi Matt. I wanted to ask, do you think that the actions you've taken will improve the WordPress community in the long term? What do you think are the likely outcomes for WordPress users and contributors, regardless of how this conflict ends?
I was curious about your defense of Matt's behavior in this thread but your empathy makes sense given that you work on a similar project that you describe as:
> A static site that is 100% free and open-source, competing with several businesses operating scammy subscription models.
Is this a competitor to Wordpress? Can you elaborate more about how the competition in this space uses scammy subscription models? It might help to illustrate the issues in the industry for outsiders like me.
Off topic, but I'm a bit of an amateur musician myself. I try to check out other musicians that I encounter, but I wasn't able to find anything about you or your music online. Do you have a bandcamp or something similar? The contrabass trombone is a really interesting instrument.
It is eternally surprising to me how much "hosted X" businesses can make. There are a lot of non-technical people ready to overspend by 10x just to have someone else be "responsible" for downtime.
I do this all day long to avoid being the person in the hot seat when something breaks… when it’s someone else’s money, and when the org’s dysfunctional or political enough for there to be a “hot seat” (nearly all large and medium orgs, at least half of small orgs).
It’s kinda comical because it’s absolutely a principal-agent problem disguised as being in the best interest of the company. 10x costs and in practice worse uptime & performance for internal-political insurance and on-call avoidance for me personally, sold with a list of benefits that the company either doesn’t need, or that only look like benefits due to very-partial accounting, or that have such lengthy footnoted caveats that no, they probably won’t be a benefit in-fact.
DHH was talking about this in his recent rails world keynote. Hosting companies are getting huge margins because developers are afraid of using a computer.
Matt, thanks for engaging here and for all you’ve done with WordPress. My college internship was working on “Standard Theme” in 2009. We haven’t met but I’m Stephen.
I don’t expect you to take questions from an internet stranger, but since you asked…
What rules does Automattic enforce for all companies who operate businesses built on WordPress? In other words…when does a business owe 8%? There are thousands of businesses wondering if they’re next on the list.
Matt. You are rich. What is behind your motivations here? You seem to be very candid and passionate about this but I must be missing something. Why spend your time doing this? What’s your end goal?
Matt, you have been criticised here for speaking openly but it is quite refreshing to hear you be so candid and not hide behind PR consultants issuing generic press releases.
Hi Matt! I appreciate the transparency. Reading about this has been interesting to say the least.
I am curious about your desired outcome. If you win, WP Engine pays 8% going forward? If you lose, will it be business as usual? Fewer open source offerings?
Obviously this could take years to resolve, but developers do have very real concerns over what the landscape may look like in a few years.
Since you're trying to get WP Engine to pay for "WordPress" trademark, by contributing back to open-source, because you feel they should, since it made them rich, I was wondering how many open-source projects did Automattic contribute to financially? Aside from WordPress, I'm sure you stand on the shoulders of giants such as Linux, nginx, MySQL, JavaScript libraries (or maybe you should call it ECMAScript, because you're not paying any trademark fees), etc.?
Comical that contributing to the most used CMS on the planet isn't sufficient. They must contribute financially to all open source otherwise they don't have a claim against WPE
This boils down to something quite simple. WPEngine wants money. Matt wants money too. It’s zero sum.
Matt, free advice. If you really think your commercial product is better (maybe it retains more post history or whatever the case), spend more time selling it.
Hey Matt. This has no relevance to anything but is a fun story I wanted to share. 15-20 years ago I discovered a "UX bug" on default Wordpress installs, which was that all you needed to impersonate someone in a Wordpress comment section was know their email address. I used your guessable email address while writing a comment on the official Wordpress.org blog and it pulled your gravatar etc. Sorry. I was a child at the time. lol
[Edit 2: could you kindly take some time to explains where you disagree as you downvote this so I can learn? Reading documents like this for the first time pointing out where things don't make sense to me.]
> 89. Defendants’ extortion campaign included levying personal attacks against the CEO of WPE for not capitulating to his demands. For instance, on September 26, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview on the X platform during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
[Edit: Ignore this paragraph, see JimDabell and lolinder comments below] I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening, ChatGPT also doesn't seem to think so based on its transcript. During the interview Matt did ask at one point if Theo would talk to Lee and Heather on stream, it was about giving everyone a fair chance to tell the story and I doubt that anyone can characterise it as extortional in nature.
Even it was Matt who gave the number away during stream (if it was cut out of the YouTube version) or off stream, it's a huge stretch to claim that as "personal attacks" as part of an "extortion campaign"...
> 90. Defendants’ attacks against WPE’s CEO have also continued in private. First, on September 28, 2024, Mullenweg attempted to poach her to come and work for Automattic, and falsely suggested that WPE’s investor was making her do something she did not want to do.
They screen capped just Matt's message without any context about what was said prior to that message? By September 28, 2024 they have already met many times in-person, too. I think it's just insane for Matt to send a text like but that just seems very out of context in isolation. If absolutely nothing compelled Matt to send that message then I guess it's possible that he's either extremely naive or he is a psychopath.
> 91. After WPE’s CEO did not immediately respond, Mullenweg threatened her the following day. Specifically, on September 29, 2024 Mullenweg gave her until midnight that day to “accept” his job “offer” with Automattic. If she did not accede to his demand, Mullenweg threatened to tell the press, and WPE’s investor, that she had interviewed with Automattic:
> 93. WPE’s CEO did not respond to Mullenweg’s September 29 threat
91 has very interesting wording: "After WPE's CEO did not *immediately* respond". In contrast to 93, they also don't claim that Heather didn't respond to the messages on September 28.
The screenshot of Matt's message on September 29 begins with this:
> Heather, after our extensive discussions about you joining Automattic, the offer you negotiated with me is still on the table.
So... there was definitely a conversation between the screenshots on September 28 and September 29 that lead Matt to think that they presumably didn't include?
> 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined.
92 feels like an assertion that's deliberately placed between 90, 91 and 93 to potentially make their claim seem more valid? I suppose "had never interviewed" depends what kind of evidence Matt can produce at this point if he's not lying; if it's all in-person and there are no records at all, which he pointed out in the interview with Theo, then it's unfortunate.
The "[had never] negotiated" part doesn't make sense at all if something was indeed discussed between September 28 and September 29.
> If you decline, on Monday morning, I tell Greg Mondres:
> - Lee's refusal to negotiate terms to resolve our conflict
> - your interviewing with Automattic over the past year
> - I will possibly tell the press all of the above
I feel like the minority on HN that wants to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. Even so, that's a sure-fire way to get someone who may have been listening to you to turn on you.
If you're not going to call your lawyers, at least call Theo since he offered.
> > during which he gave the CEO’s personal cell phone number to the interviewer and encouraged him to contact her. She was in fact contacted by the interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUJgahHjAKU
> I watched the whole interview they linked to and don't recall that happening
He admits it here:
> Afterward, I also privately shared with him the cell phone for Heather Brunner, the WP Engine CEO, so she can hop on or debate these points. As far as I’ve heard she hasn’t responded. Why is WP Engine scared of talking to journalists live?
I agree that after or during isn't a meaningful distinction. I honestly don't understand how anyone characterise that as "personal attack" and link it to "extortion".
This is referencing a different livestream than the one with Theo, they refer to that one separately as a livestream on YouTube. It's confusing because of where the footnote is placed, but if you trace the 46 back up to the top you'll see it refers to a different quote:
> On September 28, 2024, Mullenweg gave an interview to the author of the “This
might be the end of WordPress” video blog. Among other statements, Mullenweg acknowledged
his retaliatory and vindictive intentions, saying: “They could make this all go away by doing a
license. Interesting question is whether, now … you know, maybe more than 8% is what we would
agree to now.”46
The X interview is a different one. Matt's been busy.
While others are stating that you should not, the court of public opinion delivers results (including to Wordpress) a lot faster than the formal court system. So get ahead.
In general it’s better better the hear authentic voices than none or lawyered-up PR consultants, and this site has hammered companies that do so in the past.
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