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By philsquared_ 2024-09-2617:3916 reply The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities.
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.
By tomphoolery 2024-09-2620:353 reply > The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.
If that’s the case, I’d like to hear from Matt about this. I’ve known him for years, and I don’t think he is unaware of conflicts like these. In fact I’ve seen him be deeply thoughtful about complex problems in the past. He’s not perfect (who is?), but he really does try.
Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.
Am I off?
By swyx 2024-09-277:48 > Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
there is a level of actions that are so bad that intent doesnt actually matter anymore. i would say matt has crossed that line here.
ThePrimeagen just did an interview with him, the video is also available on youtube now too.
Not the best interview IMO since prime didn't have much time to prepare questions / topics, and so he is very much "firing from the hip" but you'll get to hear matt go into detail about this topic.
By raymond_goo 2024-09-2715:17 video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
By d0mine 2024-09-2912:57 His interview with Theo https://youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU
Compare and contrast with the OpenAI old board vs sama drama the other day. And the end result of non-profit being steered by the for-profit entity.
By forgetfreeman 2024-09-277:05 You could also draw parallels from Drupal's death spiral that kicked off when (at the behest of corporate clients) Aquia decided to pivot to "large core" architecture and tossed the bulk of the community overboard in the process.
By petre 2024-09-2712:38 > they hide behind when people get their sites exploited
It's all in the GPL under "no warranty" and the license is attached to the WP source.
> The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. > Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?
And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2024-09-2621:162 reply Were it to go to trial, legal discovery would be fun. How many internal conversations were had about, “Those jerks at WPEngine are eating our lunch”. Rather than, “I am truly concerned about how the trademark is being confused by this one specific successful company. Whatever can we do?”
Civil discovery isn’t a public process. The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public, and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public,
Not directly, but they can enter it as evidence into the lawsuit, in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it. Absolutely parties try to get embarrassing information exposed to the media in this way. They only can do that if it is plausibly relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit-but internal conversations in which executives are attacking the company suing them very likely are.
By otterley 2024-09-275:37 > in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it.
Motions to seal evidence are routinely granted by courts in civil matters. Parties can try to get embarrassing information entered into the public record, but they have to convince a judge, and that’s often an uphill battle. Courts don’t like to be used as a tool for private parties to air the others’ dirty laundry.
By FireBeyond 2024-09-2622:14 > The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public
Well certainly.
> and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
In this case that kind of sensitive information absolutely wouldn't be able to be redacted (successfully) because those conversations would be entirely germane.
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2024-09-2622:09 I was more thinking that this would be government intervention regarding the non-profit status. Discovery would still be secret, but probably a smoking gun there that the organization is not independent of the commercial entity.
As far as I am aware, the WP.org”s (or is it the foundation?) actions are distasteful, but they are allowed to ban whomever they like.
By ttul 2024-09-2621:45 I kind of want discovery to happen in this situation.
By snowwrestler 2024-09-2621:351 reply WP Engine could file a complaint with the IRS about tax exempt status abuse. But that would be a heck of an escalation, and even more damaging to the WordPress ecosystem than Matt’s ridiculous actions so far.
But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.
By TheNewsIsHere 2024-09-2623:263 reply There is a standard, numbered IRS form for this exact purpose. Having once drafted a copy once, they do indeed require you to submit some kind of narrative and supporting documentation that there is some kind of impropriety in relation to their particular tax exempt status.
It’s not clear to me that WordPress.org has done that. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask WP Engine to pay WordPress.org some kind of fair compensation for the infrastructure demands they induce.
By ensignavenger 2024-09-271:211 reply Sure, if they put the same requirements to pay on everyone. But specifically targeting one major competitor to the for profit company that is controlled by the same person who controls the nonprofit?
That gets into a pretty.sticky situation real quick.
By RandomThoughts3 2024-09-276:572 reply Does it?
The fundamental question is: is the non profit going outside the boundary of its status?
I’m not fully convinced that’s the case even in the context of the for profit disagreements with its competitor.
By TheNewsIsHere 2024-09-2712:54 I agree. And whether or not Automattic gets the money or WordPress.org does matter, but so does the way any such transaction is structured.
If Automattic is an infrastructure vendor (in a technical sense at least) to WordPress.org, it’s still reasonable that Automattic doesn’t want to just give its competitors free infrastructure.
I own a hosting business that’s heavily built upon WordPress and even I — at a scale immensely smaller than WP Engine - CDN some of my critical plugins and themes myself. (For a lot of reasons.)
WP Engine is absolutely massive. The load they put on systems that they consume from isn’t trivial. Asking for remuneration from a competitor that is using your services, according to their means, isn’t anticompetitive.
By ensignavenger 2024-09-2723:31 I'm not fully convinced either, but it certainly raises eyebrows, and might attract an investigation to gather more facts.
By mthoms 2024-09-270:53 That's just it. WPEngine are not being asked to pay WordPress.org. They are being asked to pay Automattic.
Why is this standard being applied to only one user, and a competitor at that?
By damagednoob 2024-09-2710:021 reply Should Automattic be compelled to subsidise their competitors?
By chuckadams 2024-09-2713:39 If a8c wants WPE to mirror the plugin and theme repos, they maybe should have asked for that. MM led out of the gate with his now-well-worn "existential threat" rhetoric and actually managed to escalate it from there. As one reddit commentator put it, "you catch more flies with honey than with lighter fluid".
The WP ecosystem needs mirrors anyway, but at this point I think it needs outright alternate repos, not under control of a8c in any way. This could be an attractive proposition to plugin/theme devs, because in this case, MM has been poisoning his own well for some time now (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511). What are the odds that MM will accept a patch to WP core that allows alternate plugin/theme stores?
At the rate things are going though, a hard fork of the GPL'd core is looking more attractive every day. It just needs a catchy name. ClassicPress is already out there, but ... meh. How about FreePress?
> The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
I honestly wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries. From what I can tell, it's essentially the non-profit acting on commands from the for-profit.
Basically the equivalent in my mind to a "in-kind donation".
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2621:462 reply To me, I think it's more that it shows they're one entity and then it is a massive issue about the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years. But, I guess we'll see because WP Engine is going to come out swinging on this. They have to.
There is also the fact that WP Engine sponsored a WordPress Foundation event and then was kicked out of it because of this dispute. The WordPress foundation accepted 75k knowing what WP Engine was doing and then didn't honour the deal.
This is also the most shocking thing to me, that Matt seems to be very blasé about using Automattic and the foundation more or less interchangeably and in a very public way to further his goals. So other than the tax writeoffs what was the point of creating the foundation? Where is this guy's legal counsel? Surely they have to be screaming their heads off right now because from the outside every indication now is that the Foundation is really just an extension of Automattic that exists to dodge taxes and whether it is claiming its nonprofit status legally is now becoming a question mark. This is so far for Matt to have fallen and taken WordPress with him
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2710:57 > Where is this guy's legal counsel?
They're represented by Perkins Coie. Who, even as someone from the EU who doesn't do any legal stuff, I have heard of and know are very good. I think they'll be kind of loving this mess. Because even though this is a mess, they're going to get paid to deal with the mess.
> the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years
How? There's exactly zero dollars of donations from Automattic in the Wordpress Foundation financials. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
(It would be quite defensible for Automattic to claim they're donating many millions in-kind every year, but they don't seem to be doing it.)
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2713:471 reply They'll be writing off all those contributions 4000 hours is a lot of hours.
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2721:021 reply It’s a guess since they’re keep track of hours of contributions. Development services are services under that irs doc, afaik.
It doesn't matter that Automattic keeps track. For the contribution to be fiscally relevant, the Foundation needs to keep track and release receips (and presumably report the totals somewhere).
By that_guy_iain 2024-10-0817:30 And the foundation would keep track of it by Automattic saying this is how much work we did...
If the non-profit is doing something for the benefit of the for-profit it’s the reverse of a donation - unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company.
> unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Essentially laundering money through the 501c3 to try and negate taxes. In this case actual money never changed hands, but what is the financial value of cutting off your competitor from the theme/plugin repo?...
Not an insignificant amount.
By kgwgk 2024-09-2715:30 Ah, I misunderstood your "wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries" as "it seems it doesn't" rather than "it seems it does". I completely agree.
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2621:451 reply > The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
I think the fact those boundaries have been crossed will be a massive legal issue for WordPress.org and Automattic since they'll have problems proving they're two separate entities and they will have been using that as a charity as a tax write-off. What is the penalty for tax evasion where you create a fake charity to write tax off of? It's prison, right?
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2024-09-2623:34 Not that I think it would happen, but that would some outcome. Attempting to squeeze a competitor only to land in jail for tax fraud.
By AlienRobot 2024-09-2621:333 reply Have you read this? https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.
By munbun 2024-09-272:27 That’s really not a fair statement from him given:
1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.
2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.
3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.
By that_guy_iain 2024-09-2621:50 The quote says WP Engine is contributing. WP Engine also gave WP.org 75k in sponsorship money, I would say that's a contribution. It's also important to know that after WP.org took that 75k sponsorship money, they kicked them out of the event they sponsored.
I suspect that his figure on the number of hours is somewhat cooked up and biased. Did he cite a reliable and reasonable source of data that we can all consult to check the veracity of this claim?
By ValentineC 2024-09-2622:36 The numbers are on WordPress.org's Five for the Future website:
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/automattic/
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/
this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately.
even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.
the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
By WillPostForFood 2024-09-2621:575 reply It also explicitly says you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that. I thought it might be common, but the other big providers do not use WordPress in their product names.
Essential Wordpress
Core Wordpress
Enterprise Wordpress
By brianfryer 2024-09-271:122 reply > you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that
WP Engine is explicitly not doing that.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GYPsyoSbwAACO7X?format=jpg&name=...
By WillPostForFood 2024-09-275:11 If you are selling "Core Wordpress" WP Engine is explicitly naming a product using "Wordpress". If it was "Core WP" that would be fine.
By lupoair 2024-10-0414:12 They just changed the naming after this dispute started.
And yet, here is Godaddy doing the same thing:
https://www.godaddy.com/en-ph/hosting/wordpress-hosting
Or a recent hosting provider I interacted with in a 3rd world country:
https://client.absolutehosting.co.za/store/wordpress-hosting
Come now, this seems to be a huge abuse of "trademark" of a term. Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move. I'm gonna start adding it to my list... OpenAI, Mozilla Foundation, Wordpress.
Edit. Side note:
I looked up the Linux trademark usage guidelines. Looks like half the internet is infringing on this one too if you squint. So maybe this all boils down to a case of "Don't be a jerk" that some entities adhere to when it comes to protecting their trademark, whilst others like Automattic use it to bully competitors.
By WillPostForFood 2024-09-275:19 Or it's WP Engine being a jerk, and this is just a way to put some pressure on them.
Look at it this way - WordPress is the #1 platform for websites. It is a free, Open-source, and huge asset to the community. Are you going to shit on the guys who made it and gave it away because you have some sympathy for some overpriced, hosting company?
If the Wordpress team disappeared, it would be a tragedy. If WP Engine disappeared it would be nothing.
By Marsymars 2024-09-274:44 > Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move.
I get the "ick" factor here, but there doesn't really seem to be a better alternative. If "OpenSourceWare" isn't trademarked by non-profit "OpenSourceSoft", the options are either a) no trademark, and it's a free-for-all where the biggest marketing budget and SEO teams get the biggest return on mindshare and search results or b) Oracle gets the trademark and nobody else is allowed to use it.
By eurleif 2024-09-275:27 The page you linked applies to trademarks owned by the Linux Foundation. The Linux trademark is actually owned by Linus Torvalds, not by the Linux Foundation; and different rules apply to it, as your link notes.
>For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy.
Which links to this page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark
By AlchemistCamp 2024-09-2710:10 Wow, you're right. That page is a undeniably an infringement.
Probably (the trademark equivalent of) fair use, because WordPress is what they are selling. If I have a basket of windows disks to sell, I can write Microsoft Windows on my price list because the thing I'm selling is called that.
This analogy came up recently when discussing Elasticsearch. It's flawed.
Free and open source software does not, and has never, required giving up trademark rights. I think the GPLv3 is even explicit about this.
In the Windows case it's fair use of the trademark because you're reselling something you previously bought. That's not applicable here.
WordPress is open source software, but a hosting service has a variety of characteristics unrelated to the nominal software. Besides, WP Engine are disabling key features of the product: of course that's misleading.
By immibis 2024-09-2717:07 The hosting company sells WordPress hosting services. The rest of the arguments are nonsense, such as the one about revisions being disabled.
By ensignavenger 2024-09-271:322 reply Looks like those are just headings, not product names.
By pests 2024-09-275:21 Wut? In what are are those not product names? Any reasonable person would assume so.
By incredimike 2024-09-2817:22 Looks like product names to me. It’s certainly confusing at least, which is an issue either way.
if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service.
and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
By lolinder 2024-09-2621:02 Up until this dispute the WordPress trademark policy contained this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Now it's been updated to say this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
It's pretty clear that WP Engine has been in compliance with the old trademark policy and that the new one is acknowledging that they don't have legal standing to demand anything about the WP abbreviation (not least because they waited so long to complain about the usage) so they're instead inserting a petulant and childish slight.
http://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpressf...
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks
Straight from the Wordpress trademark page that was just recently changed to talk shit about a competitor:
microsoft doesn’t have a trademark on “ms” either. like i said, if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
this is going to be just as flimsy of a defense as “mikerowesoft”
By kadoban 2024-09-271:45 > if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
Of course not. They will (if it goes that far) point out that their use of WP is explicitly in line with the trademark holder's public guidance on that exact point.
You can't tell everybody that it's fine to use wording like that and then sue them when they do it.
yeah but Wordpress.org explicitly said "using WP is okay". if they turn around and say "no it's not" that's promissory estoppel
By chuckadams 2024-09-2714:00 There's also "estoppel by laches", which boils down to "you waited too long". Guarantee that's going to be part of WPE's defense too. Then there's the fact that a8c actually invested in WPE while this supposed infringement was taking place.
I am already running out of popcorn.
Trademarks are largely (but not exclusively) about preventing consumer confusion. I can offer a course called "Learn how to use Excel like a pro" and not get sued by MS, as long as I'm not making it seem like I'm Microsoft.
Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.
By neom 2024-09-273:59 I've been thinking about this all week since this WP stuff kicked off. You know what's funny, as far as I know I was the first senior person to have a conversation with Ubuntu about that from the DO side, and as far as I recall it (granted it was a long time ago) it was basically them: "Uhm, you can't do that"- me: "maybe, not sure, but probably better to be friends tho yah?" them: "yah" me: "k" - dunno how it is today, but at least till I left, that was how it remained, always earned a shit load of respect in my book, not sure how it'd have gone for us if they decided to really get nasty, but either way, super grateful they didn't, good job Ubuntu people!!!!
Earlier this month, WordPress explicitly said that their trademark didn't cover "WP"
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.
In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".
Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.
They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.
I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).
The whole standard for trademark law is whether it causes confusion in commerce.
Sounds like they might have a not-great ip lawyer.
Your don't have to claim WP to claim it's being marketed as an abbreviation for your trademark, within your market.
I'm not saying it's a winning argument, but better than whatever the legal framing/ posturing of 'WP isn't our TM' is. Bad PR, if not bad legal take.
Except Wordpress even explicitly suggests using wp in the domain: https://wordpress.org/about/domains/
>>>we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. Try using “wp” instead, or another variation...
Yea- same point though. Bad IP advice / strategy.
Don't condone confusing ip policy if you don't want to end up with confusing product names, especially in a resurgence of 'the domain name is the product' of unlimited tlds.
By patmcc 2024-09-2621:57 Definitely bad IP advice, but I think it helps WP Engine to be able to say "look even all the various 'official' Wordpress sites said our name was fine for years".
Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
They will try to move towards enterprise infrastructure with v7 but will probably fail as their (third party) devs are not that good.
I’ve actually seen a lot of PHP code for Wordpress, wrote some, and the only way to get it right today is to make use of a GPT, cause their (WP’s) internals are so many and so weird and inconsistent sometimes.
> Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
I wonder are you very young? People were saying this a decade, even 15 years, ago
By collinmanderson 2024-09-2712:19 I can confirm WordPress felt like it was fundamentally flawed in 2009, yet it amazingly continues to grow in market share.
I think they’ve succeeded by staying stable with minimal large changes for 20 years and maintaining strong backward compatibility. Meanwhile the rest of the web chases the latest technology cycles, where everything needs to be redone every 5 years because there’s a new way to do things.
The developers who make WordPress understand and are pretty empathetic to their audience / user base, and don’t expect them to put in much work to install and maintain their website.
Other technologies seem to almost intentionally create backwards compatibilities in order to set user expectations that, yes you need to put in work to continue use our framework.
By larodi 2024-09-281:22 Not much younger anymore but still following Wordpress. This time the difference is GPT which writes and modifies html static site as if it was WP render.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine
I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.
Wpengine doesn’t contribute to the core as much as they promised, and prohibits their employees to do so.
WPEngine has no obligation to contribute anything.
This is not how open source has or is supposed to work.
By chiefalchemist 2024-09-273:451 reply Exactly.
Conclusion: This isn't about OSS, it's about money (and power).
Shamelessly, MM has dug himself a hole. If X is any indication, going forward there are few in the community who will trust him. A leader who isn't trusted is no leaser at all. Evidently he realizes this and is stuck doubling down on stupid. Rinse and repeat.
If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
By rafark 2024-09-2818:57 >If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
I feel like this is a half empty half full kind of situation. Some people might think like you but others might view it as probably the most memorable keynote in Wordpress history (because if all the drama).
By austhrow743 2024-09-270:33 If they had an informal development in exchange for server access type relationship then that would qualify as some sort of obligation.
Doesn't really have anything to do with open source though. Haven't seen anything about matt/wordpress.org/Automattic trying to prevent them from using open source code.
By InsomniacL 2024-09-2710:03 > I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.
Automattic sent the cease and desist to WP Engine.
By mthoms 2024-09-271:15 Incorrect. Dot org is not involved. https://x.com/wpengine/status/1839246341660119287
By davidandgoliath 2024-09-278:49 Gets even more wild when you consider Automattic invested in WP Engine's Series A in 2011, despite all this insidious trademark abuse commencing in 2010.
No chance this is personal.
Isn't that the same what MS does with VS Code?
Open Source so that VS Codium exists but Codium can't access MS's extension store.
By ensignavenger 2024-09-271:261 reply VS Code is a product of Microsoft Corp, not a nonorofit foundation. Wordpress.org is a nonprofit foundation, and as a nonprofit, there are rules they have to follow that for profit organizations don't have to.
Sure, but one of those rules is not "you must allow other entities to use your resources for free".
By ensignavenger 2024-09-274:25 Sure, but see this comment I made in another thread- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665361
By PeterZaitsev 2024-09-270:451 reply If MS Does it, does it make it right ?
By nailer 2024-09-271:16 Nobody is asserting this.
Does Automattic follow wordpress.org's copyright rules? If not then I see the hypocrisy. If so then I don't.
Also it seems wordpress.org kept their resources open to WPEngine until WPEngine sued wordpress.org[1] (not wordpress.com according to the blog post).
So if wordpress.org is getting sued, why would they keep their resources open to the litigant?
By lolinder 2024-09-2622:44 Part of what's so weird about the communication from Matt here is that WordPress.org is not getting sued by anyone—indeed, as far as I can tell WP Engine isn't suing anyone.
All that happened is that WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic. WordPress.org misrepresenting the situation is not a good look.
The dispute (on the surface) is about trademark not copyright and Automattic has an exclusive license to the trademark.
By gscott 2024-09-276:51 I went to WP Engines website and on it they say "Host your WordPress site with the WordPress experts".
It feels confusing to me. The word "the" makes me explicitly think this is Wordpress themselves. They are "the" experts. WP Engine makes it pretty clear they are Wordpress. It is front and center. It has a different meaning than "Host your WordPress site with WordPress experts".
By troyvit 2024-09-2622:09 Arg, thanks for clarifying that. I misused that term.
By mthoms 2024-09-271:13 No-one is being sued (yet) and wordpress.org was not targeted in any way. Matt is being dishonest by repeating this lie anywhere and everywhere. Including on the very page you linked.
WPEngine sent a cease and desist letter addressed to, and targetting only, Matt Mullenweg and his for profit company Automattic. WPEngine are explicitly not targeting wordpress.org in the letter. You can read it here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Side note: wp.org is indeed mentioned a couple times in the letter but only when referencing Matt's blog post on the site, the trademark rules, and some technical information around the revisions feature. The "demands" part of the letter address Matt and Automattic exclusively.
Matt knows that an attack on dot org would rally everyone to his side, which is why he is repeating this lie over and over. He is trying to use the community as shield.
This is also (IMHO) why he shut off access to dot org. He wants WPEngine to be seen taking some sort of action against the community.
Matt is constantly shifting between "Matt from Automattic" and "Matt from the WP Foundation" wherever it suits him. It's sickening. He needs to be removed from the foundation immediately.
By DannyBee 2024-09-2621:13 100% - i raised exactly this issue in the legal claim concerns.
This is a remarkably bad plan from a legal perspective.
By norswap 2024-09-289:28 True, but in this case we can simply judge based on the actions taken.
The claims (trademark violation, no contributing anything back) seem pretty sensible and borne out in practice.
WordPress is an open source project stewarded by a foundation that set rules for its use. If you don't follow them there are consequences. As simple as that, really.
These rules (paying a license or contributing back) seem sensible too.
Normalizing people leeching off the work of other doesn't seem like a good approach.
Some people might disagree with the philosophy — perfectly fine! They can write their own blog engine and release it in a permissive open-source license and make copyrights freely available to anyone. This is a blog engine, not exactly antitrust material.
By lnxg33k1 2024-09-275:55 It's not really crossing the boundaries, in this kind of situations I don't know if people is misunderstanding genuinely or they do the interests of corporations because they have interests in WPEngine. WordPress.org is not going against all competitors of WordPress.com, is going against a competitor that has high load towards free resources of WordPress.org, having many customers, but not contributing anything towards those free resources. And WordPress.org has banned that leecher from keep stressing their systems for free with no contributions. When Matt said to go to pick another WordPress hosting instead of WPEngine, WordPress.com wasn't mentioned either.
By fluidcruft 2024-09-271:491 reply Wouldn't that risk be mitigated if WPEngine were more engaged with supporting development?
By fluidcruft 2024-09-272:06 Because they would be represented in the org. If you choose to stay on the sidelines, should you be surprised to find out your not important to the action?
By throwaway984393 2024-09-275:10 [dead]
Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
By marcus_holmes 2024-09-272:401 reply Agree. The fundamental differences between Free Software and Open Source but Commercial Software were always tricky.
The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".
I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.
I think there’s a place for “we did 99% of the work here, but we want you to be able to tweak things if you need, read the code, and compile it for new systems without us in the loop.”
In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.
That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.
To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.
By lolinder 2024-09-290:04 > In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work.
There is space for that, but it's not open source or free software, and the project should use a license that reflects that.
From the article:
> WordPress’s GPL code
Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?
It's a question of philosophy, not license. The whole "release code under GPL but get angry when other people besides you start making more money than you do from it" thing is strikingly different from the attitude in the GPL FAQ:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...
The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.
By redwall_hp 2024-09-272:48 It's also worth noting that WordPress is a descendent of the B2/cafelog blogging software. Automattic, themselves, are the other people making money off of someone else's project...and now they're mad that other other people are doing the same.
The issue at hand seems to be WP Engine using Automattic-sponsored infrastructure for their own for-profit services, not modifications to free software.
That's the place that Matt decided to hit them, but that's not where the complaint lies. The complaint as laid out in the blog posts [0][1] is nearly identical to the complaints that Elastic had against AWS: trademark use causing confusion and drawing customers away from the "official" offerings.
Beyond that, Matt absolutely has beef with modifications that WP Engine has made to the free software, going so far as to say that these modifications mean that what they're offering is "not WordPress". Never mind that WordPress.com is likewise a bastardized modification—that's okay because it's "us" doing the modifying!
> This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
This kind of attitude is incompatible with the premise of Free Software, which places a strong emphasis on encouraging reuse and modification to suit user needs.
By gtirloni 2024-09-279:44 I haven't been following the drama since the beginning so thanks for the perspective. Totally agree this isn't good.
What people say is one thing but one should draw conclusions instead from what they do. Too often the GPL is used to enforce a two-tier system in which everyone is free but some are more free than others. The original creators of a work retain proprietary and commercial relicensing rights while everyone else gets serfdom.
By CaptArmchair 2024-09-276:18 That's not because of the GPL. The GPL has little to do with barring access to a platform on which code is published. Arguably, if a copy existed elsewhere, say GitHub, then WPEngine is free to use that code according to the GPL.
In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.
In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).
The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.
By lolinder 2024-09-271:52 Agreed. And the communications I'm seeing out of WordPress.org around this very much suggest that WordPress is firmly in that category.
You're trying to come up with distinctions between Open Source and Free Software where there are practically none, except for the politics of Free Software, which is inconsequential BS.
I guess what I'm saying is that the politics (I phrased it as ethics, but I think we're talking about the same thing) are far more consequential than people give them credit for, and isolating the mechanics from the ethical framework is why Open Source is losing coherency as a movement—it's a religion with no doctrine, and in the absence of a strong inward-facing ethic it doesn't have enough staying power to hold out in the face of monetary incentives.
By bad_user 2024-09-275:09 The whole point of Open Source was for it to not be a religion.
If anything, it is the indoctrination in Free Software that led many young people to believe that proprietary software is immoral. Coupled with zero-interest rates, this led to companies founded without sustainable business models. The companies making it work are usually doing so by selling products and services where the OSS parts are complementary and not the main product being sold, and it's a good thing they do.
I'd say that the doctrine part doesn't help at all.
By iambateman 2024-09-270:461 reply This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
By Maxious 2024-09-276:50 A couple of hours ago Matt dropped into a twitch stream and offered up an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"
> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
I think being banned for a post like this is fair enough:
> [I hope] that the CEO dies a forever painful death involving a car […]
By itsFolf 2024-09-278:45 Can't disagree, but the huge mistake started at “We generally do not comment on individual cases, but". A CEO recklessly copy pasting information from his platform's internal moderation portal into a public forum should really put into question their ability to stay level headed while running the business and the effectiveness of their company's policies and security practices. I genuinely cannot think of any other case this mind boggling.
By rendaw 2024-09-2712:13 > dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
Full quote. This is ridiculous, and to me looks more than a little tongue in cheek.
Hoping for people's death isn't good, but this isn't a threat. It's an expression of frustration, and people think these things, and sometimes say them out loud. And there's a huge power imbalance here.
