When this story first emerged, I was somewhat sympathetic to Matt/Automattic. But geeze, he is just looking worse and worse. Between this tantrum and threatening a former employee over a very innocuous statement [1], his credibility is pretty low in my opinion.
To be fair, this was actually a common thing for blogging software companies at the time! Six Apart (makers of Movable Type) was named after the six-day age gap between the company's founders. And Tumblr Inc was originally Davidville Inc, David Karp's consulting company.
Kellie's article is a well-written and reasonable response to mean-spirited bullying. It makes me wonder why a lot of people think it's good to have Silicon Valley companies run by trolls. Is that really the way to build successful businesses?
> "Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case."
I don't think I have ever before seen, in an official public statement, a "The lawyer we just hired always beats the lawyer they just hired!" boast, and it seems ridiculous - it's almost even hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer rather than that their case should win on merit.
Selecting a lawyer with a proven record, and expressing confidence in them are not "hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer". They're smart strategies, whether you decide to take the case to court, or seek a settlement (on either side).
I agree that it is of course smart to choose a lawyer you think can win, it's the public statement about the lawyer's track record that seems crazy to me, not the hiring decision.
Expressing confidence publicly just seems like a ‘stronger’ way of expressing it (as compared to doing so privately). Perhaps Automattic is trying to get WP Engine stakeholders to press for a settlement?
It makes no difference in their battle against WP Engine, who would very quickly discover which lawyers they're going up against with or without this blog post.
That line in the blog post is aimed at public perception, not WP Engine's perception, and from a PR point of view there's not really any benefit to it only downside - I guess their thinking is that some members of public might think "the winning lawyer wouldn't join the losing team so Automattic must be in the right here", but it actually makes them look like their legal defence is weak enough that they need to resort to trying to win through legal skills rather than business facts.
When I call it "crazy" I'm talking from the point of view of someone who has drafted a couple of announcements quite similar to this one, and many others that weren't related to defending legal cases but were still walking tricking lines in PR/comms, and I just can't imagine a line like that being suggested by anyone I've worked with and can't imagine letting it slip into a release I was involved in.
A sentiment that a lawyer is so good they will overcome this challenge rather than conveying that the lawyer will prove the questions of law and fact resolve it in their favor... it just... well... seems like the kind of shit that's for a TV show where it's not about contesting facts and law.
Yeah, ofc, the lawyer skill gradient exists and causes slam-dunk cases to be decided in the "wrong" [0] direction. It's just odd to say you will win because the lawyer is that good, makes it sound like you might be wrong but are going to win simply because you have better council.
[0] There's gotta be a fancy latin-sounding lawyer word for this, right?
No one is going to “win.” They’re going to settle. The quality of your lawyer will absolutely, positively influence your pleasure in the settlement. There are facts and law bad enough to overwhelm any lawyer, but usually there’s garbage on either side of the case and each lawyer will be able to use his or her skill to handle the garbage.
> There's gotta be a fancy latin-sounding lawyer word for this, right?
The audience for this statement is WP Engine's significant customers. WordPress is in a position to do much more damage to WP Engine in the near term, which will reflect poorly on the IT manager for selecting them as a vendor. WordPress is not so subtly encouraging those customers to reconsider their decision and migrate off WP Engine.
If WP Engine decides to fork, it devalues the "just like WordPress but better" value proposition and increases operating expenses as they can no longer inherit improvements from WordPress. A fork may mean they don't hit the growth targets they promised Silver Lake. Selecting this attorney is putting down a marker that WordPress wants a verdict, not a settlement.
The other wild card potentially more damaging to WP Engine and Silver Lake is the discovery process inherent in any lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think most commenters are correctly decoding the relative bargaining power of the two sides.
There’s no world where forcing significant customers off WP Engine works out well for Automattic.
Those customers are not going to migrate their sites to the company that just gave them an operational and security headache (Automattic).
And most big customers do not give a shit about Wordpress per se. They just use it because it’s a free and convenient accelerant for the sites they want to build. If it starts becoming a hassle they will just move to a different CMS. There are plenty of options.
"In an email, Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement who drafted the original Open Source Definition, told The Register, "Let's be clear about WP Engine: It's built on WordPress. There would be no business without WordPress. And it's a large business with big revenue, operated as if it's funded by private equity."
"Private equity always demands big returns, regardless of the harm they do to the business. One of my customers has been completely destroyed by them – they are still operating but on such thin resources that they can't dedicate the time of one engineer to work with me on an open source compliance review, even if I do it for free.
"So, WP Engine is in that situation, and has to increase returns to the investors. What do they do? Cut any voluntary expense, which includes returning any value to the creators of WordPress. I'm told that WordPress asked for eight percent of revenue, which sounds fair to me considering that it's the basis of WP Engine's business.
"But because it's an open source project, WordPress can ask but can't demand that money, so they have to turn to hostile enforcement of their trademark and denying access to their updates."
The lawyer they've hired is a very serious guy who is concerned about his long term reputation. It's unlikely he would hostage his fortune to someone who was a "pissed off-preteen." Reasonable people may differ but I don't believe you have correctly assessed the players and the sum of forces at work in this situation.
I have sites on WPE and I've worked for a major WP plugin developer. I've been in and out of the community since 2010. I know the players pretty well.
Matt has sabotaged any chance of a good result for him and Automattic no matter how good this lawyer is. And even if he wins in court he's already lost in the court of public opinion. Its over.
We have been using and building WordPress sites since 2006. I have no experience with WP Engine but I bear them no ill will. I think the "court of public opinion" is very difficult to assess and dominant players can take a very very long time to die.
Matt may need to step down if your assessment is correct but that's distinct from what happens to Word Press as a platform.
My sense is that the Word Press negotiating position is stronger and WP Engine will either have to fork or make a much larger contribution. But I may be wrong. If that does not happen then I believe that the private equity players will do a lot more damage to open source communities because a "harvesting paradigm" will continue.
The legal victory is almost moot, even if Automattic is found to have acted in their rights. How does any Wordpress developer know they are not going to be next? Or all of the third party plugin providers? Or theme makers? All of them heavily use Wordpress branding in their services, few contribute to the open source.
The precedent being set here is wild, and every Wordpress organization becoming a Mullenweg personal mouthpiece account defending him personally is just so, so, bad.
This is one of the the most needless self-destructive acts I have ever seen in the world of business.
> How does any Wordpress developer know they are not going to be next? Or all of the third party plugin providers? Or theme makers? All of them heavily use Wordpress branding in their services, few contribute to the open source.
This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?
I am not sure which way this will go, but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago. I am not sure whether it was trademark infringement, but they did seem to be leaning heavily on the trademarked term. I compared WPE's website to Dreamhost's (as I am familiar with the latter as a provider of hosting for WordPress-based websites), and the latter used the term far more sparingly.
I’m not a lawyer, but why would they remove uses of WordPress from their website right before suing Automattic if their position is that they weren’t violating the trademark?
Fair enough - I can see there are limits but the material in Automattic’s lawsuit didn’t seem that problematic. Not sure how the law can distinguish between ok and too much use of ‘WordPress’.
If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today.
Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engine was very clear about being a third party provider for hosting WordPress blogs. They weren't claiming to be the original WordPress, or the original WordPress hosting provider, or anything similar.
Based on Matt's voluminous posts yesterday, the concept of the law isn't really relevant to how he run's WordPress.org or Autommatic.
He admitted to violating labor laws and non-profit tax laws, and perpetuated several ongoing torts. He had a very productive day; it explains why he had to hire one of the most sadistic corporate lawyers in America.
> As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
Not just a retroactive agreement, a retroactive rewriting of trademark usage. Up until a few days into this dispute, the appropriate text on WordPress's site explicitly permitted people to use "WP" as they saw fit (as much as they can, as I don't believe they have a trademark on WP, just WordPress). Matt hastily edited things to imply WPEngine was in violation.
>As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine
I'm only slightly following the dispute between Automattic and WPEngine but it might have more to do with WPEngine rewriting the payment identifier on Automattic's open source Woo Commerce ecommerce plugin.
WPEngine's payment identifier rewrite results in WPEngine getting a cut of ecommerce payments processed through their hosted sites and not Automattic.
I don't know the details though and probably didn't even explain it right. Matt talked about it recently in a Youtube interview.
WP Engine should consider challenging the Wordpress Foundation's 501(c)(3) status by filing a complaint with the IRS. IANAL but I have run nonprofits, and they must be very careful about how it interacts with a for profit entity, especially when they share staff.
You "realized"? He built WordPress from the first day. That's why he runs both its non-profit and Automattic, which is named after him.
It sounds like you haven't been aware at all about WordPress and suddenly looked up some numbers and imposed traditional company expectations on an open source project with a commercial arm.
Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us. Mr. Katyal stated, “I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.”
Our focus is and has always been protecting the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
> Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
My perception: the personal grievance comes through loud and clear. Hopefully cases are decided more on their merits and less on the identities of the attorneys prosecuting them.
Regardless of which side you're on, so far the one thing that seems clear here is that the lawyers are going to be the real winners here.
When that is happening between two companies I generally don't care about it that much, but I hope open source doesn't turn out to be collateral damage here.
Exactly my thinking as well. All this bickering managed to do is convince me to setup my blog on Ghost instead of anything WP-related.
Both parties seemingly suck, and I wish them both the worst. In the meantime, this is a great excuse to promote WP-alternatives and improve upon them just in case this whole thing goes completely pear-shaped.
Like many here I suspect I care less about who wins the litigation than about the third parties - businesses, individuals and at least one major charity - who will have been affected by Matt’s and Automattic’s actions.
Where is the blog post about the affect this has had on them?
This feels like a classic "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". It appears the more Matt talks, the more he tarnishes the reputation Wordpress has.
Nobody seems to have noticed that Matt Mullenweg stopped responding to everyone everywhere (including HN) after they hired the external law firm. They likely told him to shut up.
I get it that there are probably a lot of people here to depend on Wordpress for their work or personal blog or whatever but ... do we really need daily updates and discussion on this spat between two companies?
I've probably answered my own question already because evidently a lot of people here find this kind of schoolyard scrap intriguing ... I just wonder ... why. I guess the answer is to just upvote everything else on the front page.
From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers.
That's why they forced the new boondoggle editing UI that everyone hates. For the good of the customers.
That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Matt also seems very proud of his new, shady lawyer, who failed to disclose that he had cases before the Supreme Court when he endorsed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for open spots. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have since reciprocated by ruling for this guy's clients every time, in several cases with decisions that confounded even conservative legal experts. So, it would seem Matt found a dirty lawyer to represent his dirty case. (EDIT: Katyal is the lawyer who suggested corporations should be immune from anti-trafficking laws because it would be bad for business and got his endorsee pals to bless corporate wage theft. He's the kind of lawyer companies turn to when they want to get away with something truly evil.)
We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality
Based on Matt's gross misrepresentations of reality on yesterday's thread, the only party to this case making gross mischaracterizations of reality is Matt.
If WordPress were truly an independent, community-led organization like Matt claims, he would have been forced out by now for the harm he's inflicted upon it.
> That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Thats actually true. Backward compatibility was and still is the #1 thing in WP, and its why it won over the web: No small business or individual customer cares about 'better code' in the backend if those 'improvements' break their websites. This was what a lot of wordpress competitors did in the past and they suffered for it.
No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers. Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved until Matt decides to make the breaking change that forcibly breaks hundreds of plugins, etc., random bugs that nobody understands, poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness that makes even Java look like a speedster.
Backwards compatibility is just the excuse Matt has been using from the beginning to justify how abysmally bad the code is.
> No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers
Never ever seen one single non-technical website owner or user complain about 'spaghetti code'. As for 'code quality affecting other things', that's our (programmers') exaggeration:
> Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved
NASA, White House, CNN, Reuters, Techcrunch and a thousand other gigantic organizations use Wordpress and they arent getting hacked.
Neither any of the small to medium businesses that use wp for their own websites, marketing sites or ecommerce sites - as long as they keep their site and plugins updated.
> poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness
I dont know where you are pulling that out from. Default wp can do 1.5 seconds load time from start to finish and get 99, 100, 99 scores in google page speed. Even with a good theme, its still as fast.
> Backwards compatibility is just the excuse
Its not the excuse. Its the #1 concern of small and medium businesses and individuals, and whenever it was violated WP or any plugin, droves of them left the WP ecosystem or stopped using such plugins.
Really, what we concern ourselves as programmers and what the overwhelming majority of users on the internet concern themselves with, have a huge chasm in between them.
In what world was anyone in the Senate unaware that Neal Katyal, the _former acting U.S. Solicitor General_, was suing the Trump administration over its travel ban on behalf of _the entire state of Hawaii_?
Furthermore, while I just don’t care about this WordPress case and I hate Gorsuch with the fires of a thousand burning suns, but I cannot stand people arguing in bad faith, no less than *The Washington Post* let the whole world know before Katyal introduced Gorsuch that this was the case. [0]
> Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers.
On the very same day Matt released a press release patting himself on the back for doing so, and how deeply devoted to the community he was. Indeed the press release specifically talked about how this ensured WordPress would never be unduly influenced by for-profit companies!
As far as I can figure, from watching Matt's recent interviews and my own conjecture...
Matt's seen his open source creation go, over the course of 20 years, from a hobbyist product to now one with a multitude of companies creating billions of revenue from it.
But as it's grown certain companies are now huge and flush with VC cash. Which does change the equation. In the early days it might be reasonable to turn a blind eye to trademark infringement when it helps all boats rise, but now things are very imbalanced.
IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress.
But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way.
If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been.
As Wordpress itself is open-source Matt doesn't have any levers except the name Wordpress. As anybody in open-source should know - the code might well be open for forking but the name is very protected. Just because the trademark hasn't been entirely well enforced doesn't mean the protection is lost - the right always belongs to the trademark holder to use and enforce how they please as unilaterally as they wish. Trademarks can lose their protection if they start referring to generics but that's not the case here. Wordpress doesn't mean generic CMS - it's always referring to a Wordpress source code hosted by various companies.
Matt's clearly acting emotionally and not terribly logically - that's clear for everyone to see. But I do think its with the long term intention of making a more sustainable community.
Ultimately WPEngine can just rename their company and the only lever Matt has over them goes away.
Or they can embrace the name and pay a fair licensing cost - a rate significantly lower than if they were licensing some other commercial CRM software.
> IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress. But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way. If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been.
WP Engine also acquired, and continues to maintain, projects like Advanced Custom Fields [1] and Local [2].
Local used to have pro features, which became free for everyone after the acquisition [3].
Where is it documented Automattic (or Mr Mullenweg) owns any of WP Engine?
(ETA: Not saying it's impossible he or they have an interest -- I've just never seen this suggested. WP Engine is in many ways a competitor to wordpress.com, so it would be unusual, I think. And he/they have long not been a fan of WP Engine.)
2018 would tie in with about when I first got the impression he was not a fan of WP Engine. I'm sure there was fuss once before (about them not being on the "recommended hosting" page?)
Medium term WordPress itself and the participants in its ecosystem are going to be the losers here.
As a normal WordPress user who is a current client of Automattic AND WP Engine (for different sites), I’m simply far less likely to use WordPress at all for anything new. Why would I at this point? Why would anyone?
Eh, my day-to-day lawyer and the firm I'd hire if a big company sued me and my company are different. If I were in Matt's position I'd have probably taken everything to a single firm that could handle all conceivable work, but it's not uncommon to do otherwise.
The first lawyer he refers to may be actually Automattic corporate counsel, too, and you'd definitely want an outside firm on this suit.
Though any lawyer should have told him to shut up.
> Though any lawyer should have told him to shut up.
Yeah, it's not exactly a contentious legal opinion, "Don't go on a massive, selective, foot-in-mouth comment spree that just raises more questions and problems than it answers on social media after being served with a suit."
> Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us. Mr. Katyal stated, “I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.”
> Our focus is and has always been protecting >the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
>For the longest time he didn't admit he had a child, or support her. He had to be legally forced to start paying child support even after he became wealthy.
I never really understood why he did that?! I suppose it was personal vendetta against his gf at the time.
When this story first emerged, I was somewhat sympathetic to Matt/Automattic. But geeze, he is just looking worse and worse. Between this tantrum and threatening a former employee over a very innocuous statement [1], his credibility is pretty low in my opinion.
[1] https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c...
In that thread, Matt instantly jumping to a "you are against me/you must be the enemy" is suuuuch a red flag that he has Main Character Syndrome.
I think naming his company AutoMATTic really says it all.
To be fair, this was actually a common thing for blogging software companies at the time! Six Apart (makers of Movable Type) was named after the six-day age gap between the company's founders. And Tumblr Inc was originally Davidville Inc, David Karp's consulting company.
Now that's a bit of trivia I did not know.
Kellie's article is a well-written and reasonable response to mean-spirited bullying. It makes me wonder why a lot of people think it's good to have Silicon Valley companies run by trolls. Is that really the way to build successful businesses?
Edit: added missing word "companies"
Far out, this whole thing is links to links to links, is there somewhere I can read a summary of this whole stupid drama?
Someone shared this LWN article somewhere among all the discussions, and it seems neutral enough:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/
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> "Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case."
I don't think I have ever before seen, in an official public statement, a "The lawyer we just hired always beats the lawyer they just hired!" boast, and it seems ridiculous - it's almost even hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer rather than that their case should win on merit.
Selecting a lawyer with a proven record, and expressing confidence in them are not "hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer". They're smart strategies, whether you decide to take the case to court, or seek a settlement (on either side).
I agree that it is of course smart to choose a lawyer you think can win, it's the public statement about the lawyer's track record that seems crazy to me, not the hiring decision.
Expressing confidence publicly just seems like a ‘stronger’ way of expressing it (as compared to doing so privately). Perhaps Automattic is trying to get WP Engine stakeholders to press for a settlement?
What about this “seems crazy”?
It makes no difference in their battle against WP Engine, who would very quickly discover which lawyers they're going up against with or without this blog post.
That line in the blog post is aimed at public perception, not WP Engine's perception, and from a PR point of view there's not really any benefit to it only downside - I guess their thinking is that some members of public might think "the winning lawyer wouldn't join the losing team so Automattic must be in the right here", but it actually makes them look like their legal defence is weak enough that they need to resort to trying to win through legal skills rather than business facts.
When I call it "crazy" I'm talking from the point of view of someone who has drafted a couple of announcements quite similar to this one, and many others that weren't related to defending legal cases but were still walking tricking lines in PR/comms, and I just can't imagine a line like that being suggested by anyone I've worked with and can't imagine letting it slip into a release I was involved in.
A sentiment that a lawyer is so good they will overcome this challenge rather than conveying that the lawyer will prove the questions of law and fact resolve it in their favor... it just... well... seems like the kind of shit that's for a TV show where it's not about contesting facts and law.
Lawyering is not just about knowing the law and proving facts, for an example of this, I recommend the book about Theranos: “Bad Blood”.
Yeah, ofc, the lawyer skill gradient exists and causes slam-dunk cases to be decided in the "wrong" [0] direction. It's just odd to say you will win because the lawyer is that good, makes it sound like you might be wrong but are going to win simply because you have better council.
[0] There's gotta be a fancy latin-sounding lawyer word for this, right?
No one is going to “win.” They’re going to settle. The quality of your lawyer will absolutely, positively influence your pleasure in the settlement. There are facts and law bad enough to overwhelm any lawyer, but usually there’s garbage on either side of the case and each lawyer will be able to use his or her skill to handle the garbage.
> There's gotta be a fancy latin-sounding lawyer word for this, right?
“America”
The audience for this statement is WP Engine's significant customers. WordPress is in a position to do much more damage to WP Engine in the near term, which will reflect poorly on the IT manager for selecting them as a vendor. WordPress is not so subtly encouraging those customers to reconsider their decision and migrate off WP Engine.
If WP Engine decides to fork, it devalues the "just like WordPress but better" value proposition and increases operating expenses as they can no longer inherit improvements from WordPress. A fork may mean they don't hit the growth targets they promised Silver Lake. Selecting this attorney is putting down a marker that WordPress wants a verdict, not a settlement.
The other wild card potentially more damaging to WP Engine and Silver Lake is the discovery process inherent in any lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think most commenters are correctly decoding the relative bargaining power of the two sides.
There’s no world where forcing significant customers off WP Engine works out well for Automattic.
Those customers are not going to migrate their sites to the company that just gave them an operational and security headache (Automattic).
And most big customers do not give a shit about Wordpress per se. They just use it because it’s a free and convenient accelerant for the sites they want to build. If it starts becoming a hassle they will just move to a different CMS. There are plenty of options.
If 5-10% leave and WP Engine decides it's better to pay a royalty rather than fork that probably works out well enough. For context see https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/02/automattic_wp_engine_...
"In an email, Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement who drafted the original Open Source Definition, told The Register, "Let's be clear about WP Engine: It's built on WordPress. There would be no business without WordPress. And it's a large business with big revenue, operated as if it's funded by private equity."
"Private equity always demands big returns, regardless of the harm they do to the business. One of my customers has been completely destroyed by them – they are still operating but on such thin resources that they can't dedicate the time of one engineer to work with me on an open source compliance review, even if I do it for free.
"So, WP Engine is in that situation, and has to increase returns to the investors. What do they do? Cut any voluntary expense, which includes returning any value to the creators of WordPress. I'm told that WordPress asked for eight percent of revenue, which sounds fair to me considering that it's the basis of WP Engine's business.
"But because it's an open source project, WordPress can ask but can't demand that money, so they have to turn to hostile enforcement of their trademark and denying access to their updates."
Or... hear me out... Matt has the legal acumen of a pissed-off pre-teen and he thought this was clever.
Occam's Razor and all that.
The lawyer they've hired is a very serious guy who is concerned about his long term reputation. It's unlikely he would hostage his fortune to someone who was a "pissed off-preteen." Reasonable people may differ but I don't believe you have correctly assessed the players and the sum of forces at work in this situation.
I have sites on WPE and I've worked for a major WP plugin developer. I've been in and out of the community since 2010. I know the players pretty well.
Matt has sabotaged any chance of a good result for him and Automattic no matter how good this lawyer is. And even if he wins in court he's already lost in the court of public opinion. Its over.
We have been using and building WordPress sites since 2006. I have no experience with WP Engine but I bear them no ill will. I think the "court of public opinion" is very difficult to assess and dominant players can take a very very long time to die.
Matt may need to step down if your assessment is correct but that's distinct from what happens to Word Press as a platform.
My sense is that the Word Press negotiating position is stronger and WP Engine will either have to fork or make a much larger contribution. But I may be wrong. If that does not happen then I believe that the private equity players will do a lot more damage to open source communities because a "harvesting paradigm" will continue.
> Neal has taken on sloppy Quinn Emanuel many times, many many times, and each case he has won BIGLY. WP ENGINE IS THE ENEMENY OF THE PEOPLE!
I mean Quinn Emanuel is sloppy
https://venturebeat.com/business/apple-nokia-win-2m-after-sa...
Lol
[dead]
The legal victory is almost moot, even if Automattic is found to have acted in their rights. How does any Wordpress developer know they are not going to be next? Or all of the third party plugin providers? Or theme makers? All of them heavily use Wordpress branding in their services, few contribute to the open source.
The precedent being set here is wild, and every Wordpress organization becoming a Mullenweg personal mouthpiece account defending him personally is just so, so, bad.
This is one of the the most needless self-destructive acts I have ever seen in the world of business.
Not "business" I guess, but Andrew Lee and the whole freenode saga has has got to come close
> How does any Wordpress developer know they are not going to be next? Or all of the third party plugin providers? Or theme makers? All of them heavily use Wordpress branding in their services, few contribute to the open source.
Easy, just don't be too successful.
This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?
I am not sure which way this will go, but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago. I am not sure whether it was trademark infringement, but they did seem to be leaning heavily on the trademarked term. I compared WPE's website to Dreamhost's (as I am familiar with the latter as a provider of hosting for WordPress-based websites), and the latter used the term far more sparingly.
I’m not a lawyer, but why would they remove uses of WordPress from their website right before suing Automattic if their position is that they weren’t violating the trademark?
That’s easy - limiting potential liability if they lose. It’s not an admission of guilt though.
Fair enough - I can see there are limits but the material in Automattic’s lawsuit didn’t seem that problematic. Not sure how the law can distinguish between ok and too much use of ‘WordPress’.
This is exactly what trademark law is set up to do: https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark-infringement
It would give a lot of power to trademark policies.
Mozilla has one of the stricter trademark policies but it's for a good reason and the community mostly trusts them. WordPress not so much.
If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today.
Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engine was very clear about being a third party provider for hosting WordPress blogs. They weren't claiming to be the original WordPress, or the original WordPress hosting provider, or anything similar.
In that case I have no idea why Automattic would attempt to try to get WPE to license the trademark.
Based on Matt's voluminous posts yesterday, the concept of the law isn't really relevant to how he run's WordPress.org or Autommatic.
He admitted to violating labor laws and non-profit tax laws, and perpetuated several ongoing torts. He had a very productive day; it explains why he had to hire one of the most sadistic corporate lawyers in America.
Perhaps if they were called WPHosting, but WPEngine sounds very like core wordpress.
I have no opinion on this one way or the other, but when I saw WPEngine, I thought it was core wordpress.
> As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
Not just a retroactive agreement, a retroactive rewriting of trademark usage. Up until a few days into this dispute, the appropriate text on WordPress's site explicitly permitted people to use "WP" as they saw fit (as much as they can, as I don't believe they have a trademark on WP, just WordPress). Matt hastily edited things to imply WPEngine was in violation.
>As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine
I'm only slightly following the dispute between Automattic and WPEngine but it might have more to do with WPEngine rewriting the payment identifier on Automattic's open source Woo Commerce ecommerce plugin.
WPEngine's payment identifier rewrite results in WPEngine getting a cut of ecommerce payments processed through their hosted sites and not Automattic.
I don't know the details though and probably didn't even explain it right. Matt talked about it recently in a Youtube interview.
If you read through the lawsuit, that's not even the case.
I understand what's in the lawsuit, I am just speculating on what might have been the last straw that led to the lawsuit.
WP Engine should consider challenging the Wordpress Foundation's 501(c)(3) status by filing a complaint with the IRS. IANAL but I have run nonprofits, and they must be very careful about how it interacts with a for profit entity, especially when they share staff.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/How%20to%20Lose%20Your%20Ta...
> "WP Engine can hardly say the same"
So much of Automattic's corpospeak drips with spite. Makes me understand why other companies are so "bland" — to protect themselves
> From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
Does he actually believe this? WP Engine makes some very popular and well-liked products.
That's because it's not corpospeak, it's Mattospeak.
Automattic apparently has 1800 employees (LOL). Surprised they don't have a board, HR, comms, and other teams?
Also I realized "Matt" is front and center in Automattic so that says a lot
I just twigged the name is AutoMATTic
You "realized"? He built WordPress from the first day. That's why he runs both its non-profit and Automattic, which is named after him.
It sounds like you haven't been aware at all about WordPress and suddenly looked up some numbers and imposed traditional company expectations on an open source project with a commercial arm.
> He built WordPress from the first day.
WordPress is a fork of b2/cafelog [1], and arguably wouldn't be where it is today without the initial open source community behind it.
[1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
# A Statement from Automattic
Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us. Mr. Katyal stated, “I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.”
Our focus is and has always been protecting the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
In case anyone was wondering I also reserve all of my rights related to this and all other matters.
You forgot this bit, or perhaps it was edited in:
> Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
My perception: the personal grievance comes through loud and clear. Hopefully cases are decided more on their merits and less on the identities of the attorneys prosecuting them.
Regardless of which side you're on, so far the one thing that seems clear here is that the lawyers are going to be the real winners here.
When that is happening between two companies I generally don't care about it that much, but I hope open source doesn't turn out to be collateral damage here.
Exactly my thinking as well. All this bickering managed to do is convince me to setup my blog on Ghost instead of anything WP-related.
Both parties seemingly suck, and I wish them both the worst. In the meantime, this is a great excuse to promote WP-alternatives and improve upon them just in case this whole thing goes completely pear-shaped.
> Both parties seemingly suck
What exactly sucks about WPEngine, specifically?
Like many here I suspect I care less about who wins the litigation than about the third parties - businesses, individuals and at least one major charity - who will have been affected by Matt’s and Automattic’s actions.
Where is the blog post about the affect this has had on them?
Hopefully his first advice was to tell Matt to cease the hotheaded tweets, livestream interviews, and hn comments.
This feels like a classic "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". It appears the more Matt talks, the more he tarnishes the reputation Wordpress has.
Nobody seems to have noticed that Matt Mullenweg stopped responding to everyone everywhere (including HN) after they hired the external law firm. They likely told him to shut up.
I get it that there are probably a lot of people here to depend on Wordpress for their work or personal blog or whatever but ... do we really need daily updates and discussion on this spat between two companies?
I've probably answered my own question already because evidently a lot of people here find this kind of schoolyard scrap intriguing ... I just wonder ... why. I guess the answer is to just upvote everything else on the front page.
They already took it down?
From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers.
That's why they forced the new boondoggle editing UI that everyone hates. For the good of the customers.
That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Matt also seems very proud of his new, shady lawyer, who failed to disclose that he had cases before the Supreme Court when he endorsed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for open spots. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have since reciprocated by ruling for this guy's clients every time, in several cases with decisions that confounded even conservative legal experts. So, it would seem Matt found a dirty lawyer to represent his dirty case. (EDIT: Katyal is the lawyer who suggested corporations should be immune from anti-trafficking laws because it would be bad for business and got his endorsee pals to bless corporate wage theft. He's the kind of lawyer companies turn to when they want to get away with something truly evil.)
We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality
Based on Matt's gross misrepresentations of reality on yesterday's thread, the only party to this case making gross mischaracterizations of reality is Matt.
If WordPress were truly an independent, community-led organization like Matt claims, he would have been forced out by now for the harm he's inflicted upon it.
> That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Thats actually true. Backward compatibility was and still is the #1 thing in WP, and its why it won over the web: No small business or individual customer cares about 'better code' in the backend if those 'improvements' break their websites. This was what a lot of wordpress competitors did in the past and they suffered for it.
No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers. Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved until Matt decides to make the breaking change that forcibly breaks hundreds of plugins, etc., random bugs that nobody understands, poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness that makes even Java look like a speedster.
Backwards compatibility is just the excuse Matt has been using from the beginning to justify how abysmally bad the code is.
> No, the spaghetti code has always been bad for customers
Never ever seen one single non-technical website owner or user complain about 'spaghetti code'. As for 'code quality affecting other things', that's our (programmers') exaggeration:
> Security exploits, hacked-together functionality that can't be improved
NASA, White House, CNN, Reuters, Techcrunch and a thousand other gigantic organizations use Wordpress and they arent getting hacked.
Neither any of the small to medium businesses that use wp for their own websites, marketing sites or ecommerce sites - as long as they keep their site and plugins updated.
> poor performance requiring expensive and extensive modifications to achieve basic levels of responsiveness
I dont know where you are pulling that out from. Default wp can do 1.5 seconds load time from start to finish and get 99, 100, 99 scores in google page speed. Even with a good theme, its still as fast.
> Backwards compatibility is just the excuse
Its not the excuse. Its the #1 concern of small and medium businesses and individuals, and whenever it was violated WP or any plugin, droves of them left the WP ecosystem or stopped using such plugins.
Really, what we concern ourselves as programmers and what the overwhelming majority of users on the internet concern themselves with, have a huge chasm in between them.
“failed to disclose?”
In what world was anyone in the Senate unaware that Neal Katyal, the _former acting U.S. Solicitor General_, was suing the Trump administration over its travel ban on behalf of _the entire state of Hawaii_?
Furthermore, while I just don’t care about this WordPress case and I hate Gorsuch with the fires of a thousand burning suns, but I cannot stand people arguing in bad faith, no less than *The Washington Post* let the whole world know before Katyal introduced Gorsuch that this was the case. [0]
[0] https://wapo.st/3XZhy2u
> Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers.
On the very same day Matt released a press release patting himself on the back for doing so, and how deeply devoted to the community he was. Indeed the press release specifically talked about how this ensured WordPress would never be unduly influenced by for-profit companies!
The various articles back then also omitted that the trademark licence is perpetual and irrevocable.
After ClassicPress fork here comes: DramaPress
Dramattic
lol more like CheckMattePress!
The popcorn value on this saga is awesome!
As far as I can figure, from watching Matt's recent interviews and my own conjecture...
Matt's seen his open source creation go, over the course of 20 years, from a hobbyist product to now one with a multitude of companies creating billions of revenue from it.
But as it's grown certain companies are now huge and flush with VC cash. Which does change the equation. In the early days it might be reasonable to turn a blind eye to trademark infringement when it helps all boats rise, but now things are very imbalanced.
IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress. But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way. If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been.
As Wordpress itself is open-source Matt doesn't have any levers except the name Wordpress. As anybody in open-source should know - the code might well be open for forking but the name is very protected. Just because the trademark hasn't been entirely well enforced doesn't mean the protection is lost - the right always belongs to the trademark holder to use and enforce how they please as unilaterally as they wish. Trademarks can lose their protection if they start referring to generics but that's not the case here. Wordpress doesn't mean generic CMS - it's always referring to a Wordpress source code hosted by various companies.
Matt's clearly acting emotionally and not terribly logically - that's clear for everyone to see. But I do think its with the long term intention of making a more sustainable community.
Ultimately WPEngine can just rename their company and the only lever Matt has over them goes away.
Or they can embrace the name and pay a fair licensing cost - a rate significantly lower than if they were licensing some other commercial CRM software.
> IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress. But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way. If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been.
WP Engine also acquired, and continues to maintain, projects like Advanced Custom Fields [1] and Local [2].
Local used to have pro features, which became free for everyone after the acquisition [3].
[1] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/reflecting-on-two-...
[2] https://wpengine.com/blog/better-together-wp-engine-and-flyw...
[3] https://localwp.com/pro-for-everyone/
What percentage of WPEngine does Automattic own? Why do not they donate to Wordpress Foundation out of that?
Where is it documented Automattic (or Mr Mullenweg) owns any of WP Engine?
(ETA: Not saying it's impossible he or they have an interest -- I've just never seen this suggested. WP Engine is in many ways a competitor to wordpress.com, so it would be unusual, I think. And he/they have long not been a fan of WP Engine.)
Automattic invested in WP Engine ~13 years ago. I don't know if they still own the shares though.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/15/silverton-automattic-put-1...
Automattic made an investment in WP Engine in 2011:
https://wptavern.com/automattic-makes-second-investment-wpen...
Automattic were an early investor in WPEngine, but they exited the investment around 2018.
Thanks.
2018 would tie in with about when I first got the impression he was not a fan of WP Engine. I'm sure there was fuss once before (about them not being on the "recommended hosting" page?)
That's when they were bought by private equity. So there was a big fuss about that.
Medium term WordPress itself and the participants in its ecosystem are going to be the losers here.
As a normal WordPress user who is a current client of Automattic AND WP Engine (for different sites), I’m simply far less likely to use WordPress at all for anything new. Why would I at this point? Why would anyone?
Yesterday: "My lawyer says I can say what I want."
Today: "We have hired a lawyer."
Neal Katyal though. Someone you hire if you expect to go the distance.
Eh, my day-to-day lawyer and the firm I'd hire if a big company sued me and my company are different. If I were in Matt's position I'd have probably taken everything to a single firm that could handle all conceivable work, but it's not uncommon to do otherwise.
The first lawyer he refers to may be actually Automattic corporate counsel, too, and you'd definitely want an outside firm on this suit.
Though any lawyer should have told him to shut up.
> Though any lawyer should have told him to shut up.
Yeah, it's not exactly a contentious legal opinion, "Don't go on a massive, selective, foot-in-mouth comment spree that just raises more questions and problems than it answers on social media after being served with a suit."
I’m always impressed at how many lawyers apparently exist in the comments of HN posts /s
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works for me...
> Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us. Mr. Katyal stated, “I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.”
> Our focus is and has always been protecting >the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
They changed the URL and didn’t immediately set up a alias, so people were hitting an error page for a bit.
I guess whatever mediocre blogging software they’re using didn’t handle it automatically, or maybe they just don’t know how to use it.
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Steve Jobs was famously mean, and had a 'flexible' relationship with the truth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5l3hys/commen...
But he was also famously reasonable at times when most people would have been just mean. [0] He had a complex and conflicting personality.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
Definitely! And I’m typing in an iPhone right now! But he wasn’t a great example of “co-opetition”.
>For the longest time he didn't admit he had a child, or support her. He had to be legally forced to start paying child support even after he became wealthy.
I never really understood why he did that?! I suppose it was personal vendetta against his gf at the time.
Yeah, Jobs probably went "only I get to be rude... and to my employees, too"