11 ms·

Mullenweg threatens corporate takeover of WP Engine

101 points by rob 2y ago

markx2 2y ago
It never was about trademarks ....
- eli 2y ago
  I mean, yeah, he's been pretty clear that about that and the trademark complaint was awfully light on evidence of actual trademark issues. He doesn't like their business model, doesn't think they contribute enough upstream, etc. But that's just not something you get to control when you license your software as GPLv2. Some people are gonna use it in ways you don't like. He should have just done an marketing campaign about why you should host with Wordpress.com instead of WP Engine. Instead he's torched an insane amount of goodwill for seemingly no return.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    WordPress.com isn't a good comparison to WP Engine. For starters, you can't install plugins, because you're renting out a single site on a multisite network and any custom plugin code would trivially violate the paper-thin isolation between tenants. WP Engine provides separately containerized servers and databases so you can do whatever. It's like the difference between getting an account on a Mastodon instance versus a specialized Mastodon instance hoster.
    - desas 2y ago
      WordPress.com allows plugins on the business and e-commerce plans. Sites with plugins are hosted in isolated environments. This has been the case for years and years.
    - kemayo 2y ago
      It's an okay comparison really, so long as you compare the right bits. WordPress.com has cheaper and lower-feature plans than WP Engine's lowest one ($20/month), but once you hit that same price tier ("Business" @ $25/month) you can install plugins. WP Engine is a pure commercial WordPress hosting service, while WordPress.com also has a personal blogging service stapled on.
wmf 2y ago
Don Mullenweg is going to make them an offer they can't refuse.
bawolff 2y ago
> Mullenweg told The Repository, “When you’re right, you can talk. When you’re wrong, [the lawyers] tell you to shut up. My lawyers are fine, they’re like, ‘go for it!’” Lol. That sounds like something no lawyer has ever said.
- atonse 2y ago
  Lawyers don’t advise you on what is right or what is wrong. That’s what priests do. Lawyers advise you on what is legal and what isn’t, and what opens you up to liability. He seems quite confused.
- pier25 2y ago
  Sounds like he's a bit delusional
  - karmajunkie 2y ago
    yeah, one has to wonder if he and elon musk are shopping at the same dealer...
dopamean 2y ago
He's going to need at least a couple billion dollars. I cant imagine Silver Lake would accept any Automattic stock in the deal. It'd have to be all cash.
- itsdrewmiller 2y ago
  I think he’s threatening to sue or extort them for 51% of the company, or something like that? If I were him I would spend less time talking to his terrible lawyer and more time talking to a mental health professional.
rideontime 2y ago
> WP Engine removed the news widget from its users’ dashboards on September 24, reportedly breaking thousands of sites in the process Is the "breaking thousands of sites" claim supported by any actual evidence, or is this just something Matt said?
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  There's been no dispute around if WP Engine removed the news widget or not from their managed installs. Matt claims that removing that widget fundamentally breaks Wordpress and thus broke all of WP Engine's sites.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Wait, wait - you mean when he wrote > the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20241001091653/https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241001091653/https://wordpress... ) he just meant that they disabled the news widget? I assumed that tweet I couldn't see replies to was a thread about them accidentally breaking customer's external-facing sites by mistake when they took out the news widget, not that he's defining "removed this widget" as "breaking customer sites".
    - duskwuff 2y ago
      I suppose that, if you define "any feature that ships with WordPress" (as opposed to a plugin) as a "WordPress core feature", then yes, disabling the WordPress news feed in wp-admin is technically "disabling a WordPress core feature". On the other hand, oh, come on!
    - unsnap_biceps 2y ago
      Yes, that's exactly it. They only removed the widget. Nothing broke other than people wouldn't see Matt's posts forced into their dashboard.
floating-io 2y ago
I wonder what would happen if WP Engine suddenly decided "Hey, we're going to rename the business, stop using the trademarks, fork WordPress, and start a new thing with our existing customers." Would it take off? Would it tank? I believe WordPress is GPL, so I don't see why they couldn't (as long as they could legally fork or counter things like WooCommerce, that is). It's a bit different from the situation with OpenTofu and similar since WP Engine would only need to keep their existing, highly invested customers to get a good start. The rest is a matter of marketing. T'will be interesting to see how this ends. (Note: I'm not saying that there is or is not merit to Mullenweg's or WP Engine's position. I haven't studied the situation enough to have an informed opinion there.)
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  Honestly, I'd be all for a fork. Wordpress is dying a slow death. The only way forward I see is to break with the history that's holding it back and make radical changes to its architecture. Matt will never do that. Perhaps WP Engine can.
  - ValentineC 2y ago
    ClassicPress already exists, for those who strongly disagree with the Gutenberg block editor: https://www.classicpress.net https://www.classicpress.net
  - dmurko 2y ago
    It's strange death when the WP market share is at over 40% of all websites [1] and still growing (though slowly). Lots of people might not like it, but saying it's dying is more of a wish than a fact. [1] https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/ https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  WP Engine could legally do this, but if they had the development resources to do so, Matt Mullenweg probably wouldn't be doing legally questionable and morally reprehensible things to try and coerce WP Engine into funding WordPress itself. Maintaining a fork of WordPress with its own independent development priorities would involve a lot of work. What WP Engine will most likely do is run their own plugin repository mirror, strip off whatever trademarks they don't feel legally empowered in using, and move on. WordPress cannot legally exclude WP Engine from using WordPress code.
miiiiiike 2y ago
Searched the USPTO trademark site, no trademark for "WP" registered by the WordPress Foundation. WP is GPLv2. Is WP Engine distributing their modifications without releasing their changes? No trademark issue, license seems fine. From what I can tell this is nothing.
- luckylion 2y ago
  The Trademark is for WordPress, not WP. The name "WP Engine" isn't the alleged problem, it's their usage in their hosting packages like "WordPress Core".
  - atonse 2y ago
    Ok so if they changed their plans to "Core" and said "Includes vanilla WordPress" is Ma.tt going to have an issue with it? This really doesn't seem to be much about Trademarks, but more like what every other open source project complains about, that someone ELSE made a ton of money from the open source project, not them (even though that someone else is following the original license). Couldn't they have just changed the license to WP? It wouldn't have affected most customers.
    - luckylion 2y ago
      I don't know what he would or would not have an issue with, I'm just saying what his claim is. Personally, I don't care either way, I don't like either party. Automattic isn't a good steward of WP and has a lot of conflict of interest that they don't want to acknowledge and WP decisions are "what benefits wp.com" first. WP Engine is an aggressive sales company that also has hosting attached. They're extremely overpriced, the GoDaddy of WP Hosting. Whenever I hear somebody uses them it's a strong indicator that they're making enough money but have no technical knowledge on the team.
      - riffic 2y ago
        are we now conflating Automattic with the WordPress Foundation?
hshshshsvsv 2y ago
This is what happens when you raise billions in VC money.
ArchOversight 2y ago
I have used WordPress in the past for various projects, and have upgraded it for customers far more than I would like to recount, but all of this is making me not want to use WordPress for anything moving forward. This does not feel like a stable foundation/platform to build a future on.
- monetus 2y ago
  These were my thoughts exactly, regardless of the outcome. If I had something deployed and could move it, I would be migrating off of WordPress right now.
- kemayo 2y ago
  I have some domains with wordpress.com as their registrar (they had a good deal when Google Domains was getting sold off), and I'm definitely side-eyeing that relationship now...
- notimetorelax 2y ago
  I’m currently building a site on Wordpress and beginning. Wonder of if I should be using it. Are there good alternatives that allow page editing and have good ecosystem?
humblepi 2y ago
It's like if someone rewrote Eⅼоn Мuѕk in PHP.
wenbin 2y ago
If I understand correctly, Automattic and WP Engine generate approximately the same revenue? The creator of WordPress would undoubtedly be extremely disappointed… they should have achieved much greater success.
tptacek 2y ago
This is a pretty one-sided summary of the situation and, despite citing the Theo Browne interview, leaves out from it that WPE and WordPress and Automattic have apparently been in protracted negotiations about this for over a year. Users are understandably shocked by this outcome, but it seems implausible to claim that WPE was. I think it's also useful to note that Mullenweg wasn't demanding 8% of WPE's revenue, but rather an allocation of WPE revenue to WordPress ecosystem development (by staff members on WPE's own team), with the revenue to Automattic (or whoever, I forget) as an in-kind payment option.† That is a much more reasonable-sounding ask than simply forking over cash to Mullenweg's own business. I'm not following this closely enough to vouch for the way Mullenweg is handling any of this (though: at this point I assume/hope he has counsel reviewing what he's saying!) but it would be weird to me at this point to see WPE cast as the "good guys" here. This seems like another one of those "it's just a bunch of guys" scenarios. † This is according to Mullenweg, of course, but he had Theo Browne reading emails to WPE off his laptop during the interview to back the claim up.
- aimazon 2y ago
  "Negotiation" invokes visions of term sheets and boardrooms but what Matt actually meant by "negotiation" (as revealed in the interview) was emails in which he expressed displeasure at the lack of contribution from WP Engine, and only in the days before WordCamp did any sort of terms arrive at the table (the 8% demand). Matt has acknowledged he escalated things in the space of days, not years. The emails read out are birthday party invites, not term sheets. I agree that WP Engine cannot be characterised as "good guys" given it's a bottom-line driven machine that will chew up and spit out all in its path, and Matt has earned credibility through decades of community-minded WordPress stewardship, but let's not pretend this is some business deal that went sour, it's Matt using every inch of leverage he has to cause WP Engine pain because of his moral objections to the private-equity machine taking money away from his community-minded company. Obviously WP Engine were never going to pay Automattic tens of millions of dollars per year, Matt knows that, we know that, it's a side show. He was just saying things to ruin their day. Just like the millions of dollars per year in costs incurred running WordPress.org that Matt has wheeled out to justify causing WP Engine pain by cutting them off from plugin updates (Cloudflare have offered to host WordPress.org for free; Matt has not accepted the offer).
corobo 2y ago
I wish he'd just do whatever he's going to do already. Dudes just coming off as having a bit of a manic one at this point. Two things that are true: - Big businesses built off the back of an open source software should absolutely chuck a bit back to said software - Matt is messing with peoples' bread and butter to win his little slap fight which is a complete dickhead move.
- jeltz 2y ago
  And they do chuck a bit back. Matt just thinks it is not enough.
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
> “I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to do this,” he said. “I was taken advantage of for so many years" Mullenweg has a current net worth of approximately $400 million (source https://andsimple.co/cases/matt-mullenweg-net-worth/ https://andsimple.co/cases/matt-mullenweg-net-worth/)
djbusby 2y ago
Am I stupid or could WPE "simply" had a clone/copy/mirror of the necessary WP.org things? eg: how Linode has for Debian mirrors?
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  Even better: just proxy the requests up to WP.org through GCP/AWS.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tky 2y ago
> When asked what his legal counsel has advised regarding his speaking out publicly, Mullenweg told The Repository, “When you’re right, you can talk. When you’re wrong, [the lawyers] tell you to shut up. My lawyers are fine, they’re like, ‘go for it!’” Every time he posts or speaks, he does more damage to his reputation and that of WordPress. His lawyers have probably told him to shut up, but he seems like he’d make a miserable know-it-all client.
iambateman 2y ago
The saddest aspect of this situation is that I believe Mullenweg truly wants more people to participate in and benefit from open source software. But by dragging thousands of developers into a pissing match and unilaterally breaking the update process for 1.5M sites without warning, he’s making the case that WordPress is unstable. Leadership matters. I hope WordPress gets the chance to find new leaders before it dies a slow death. The web needs WordPress to be great and right now it isn’t.
butz 2y ago
Eleventy v3.0.0 was just released, time to migrate your website, improve performance and make it easier to upgrade. And the best part: no plugin vulnerabilities.

101 points by rob 2y ago

markx2 2y ago

It never was about trademarks ....

eli 2y ago
I mean, yeah, he's been pretty clear that about that and the trademark complaint was awfully light on evidence of actual trademark issues. He doesn't like their business model, doesn't think they contribute enough upstream, etc. But that's just not something you get to control when you license your software as GPLv2. Some people are gonna use it in ways you don't like. He should have just done an marketing campaign about why you should host with Wordpress.com instead of WP Engine. Instead he's torched an insane amount of goodwill for seemingly no return.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  WordPress.com isn't a good comparison to WP Engine. For starters, you can't install plugins, because you're renting out a single site on a multisite network and any custom plugin code would trivially violate the paper-thin isolation between tenants. WP Engine provides separately containerized servers and databases so you can do whatever. It's like the difference between getting an account on a Mastodon instance versus a specialized Mastodon instance hoster.
  - desas 2y ago
    WordPress.com allows plugins on the business and e-commerce plans. Sites with plugins are hosted in isolated environments. This has been the case for years and years.
  - kemayo 2y ago
    It's an okay comparison really, so long as you compare the right bits. WordPress.com has cheaper and lower-feature plans than WP Engine's lowest one ($20/month), but once you hit that same price tier ("Business" @ $25/month) you can install plugins. WP Engine is a pure commercial WordPress hosting service, while WordPress.com also has a personal blogging service stapled on.

wmf 2y ago

Don Mullenweg is going to make them an offer they can't refuse.

bawolff 2y ago

> Mullenweg told The Repository, “When you’re right, you can talk. When you’re wrong, [the lawyers] tell you to shut up. My lawyers are fine, they’re like, ‘go for it!’” Lol. That sounds like something no lawyer has ever said.

atonse 2y ago
Lawyers don’t advise you on what is right or what is wrong. That’s what priests do. Lawyers advise you on what is legal and what isn’t, and what opens you up to liability. He seems quite confused.
pier25 2y ago
Sounds like he's a bit delusional
- karmajunkie 2y ago
  yeah, one has to wonder if he and elon musk are shopping at the same dealer...

dopamean 2y ago

He's going to need at least a couple billion dollars. I cant imagine Silver Lake would accept any Automattic stock in the deal. It'd have to be all cash.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago
I think he’s threatening to sue or extort them for 51% of the company, or something like that? If I were him I would spend less time talking to his terrible lawyer and more time talking to a mental health professional.

rideontime 2y ago

> WP Engine removed the news widget from its users’ dashboards on September 24, reportedly breaking thousands of sites in the process Is the "breaking thousands of sites" claim supported by any actual evidence, or is this just something Matt said?

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
There's been no dispute around if WP Engine removed the news widget or not from their managed installs. Matt claims that removing that widget fundamentally breaks Wordpress and thus broke all of WP Engine's sites.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Wait, wait - you mean when he wrote > the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20241001091653/https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241001091653/https://wordpress... ) he just meant that they disabled the news widget? I assumed that tweet I couldn't see replies to was a thread about them accidentally breaking customer's external-facing sites by mistake when they took out the news widget, not that he's defining "removed this widget" as "breaking customer sites".
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    I suppose that, if you define "any feature that ships with WordPress" (as opposed to a plugin) as a "WordPress core feature", then yes, disabling the WordPress news feed in wp-admin is technically "disabling a WordPress core feature". On the other hand, oh, come on!
  - unsnap_biceps 2y ago
    Yes, that's exactly it. They only removed the widget. Nothing broke other than people wouldn't see Matt's posts forced into their dashboard.

floating-io 2y ago

I wonder what would happen if WP Engine suddenly decided "Hey, we're going to rename the business, stop using the trademarks, fork WordPress, and start a new thing with our existing customers." Would it take off? Would it tank? I believe WordPress is GPL, so I don't see why they couldn't (as long as they could legally fork or counter things like WooCommerce, that is). It's a bit different from the situation with OpenTofu and similar since WP Engine would only need to keep their existing, highly invested customers to get a good start. The rest is a matter of marketing. T'will be interesting to see how this ends. (Note: I'm not saying that there is or is not merit to Mullenweg's or WP Engine's position. I haven't studied the situation enough to have an informed opinion there.)

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
Honestly, I'd be all for a fork. Wordpress is dying a slow death. The only way forward I see is to break with the history that's holding it back and make radical changes to its architecture. Matt will never do that. Perhaps WP Engine can.
- ValentineC 2y ago
  ClassicPress already exists, for those who strongly disagree with the Gutenberg block editor: https://www.classicpress.net https://www.classicpress.net
- dmurko 2y ago
  It's strange death when the WP market share is at over 40% of all websites [1] and still growing (though slowly). Lots of people might not like it, but saying it's dying is more of a wish than a fact. [1] https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/ https://kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/
kmeisthax 2y ago
WP Engine could legally do this, but if they had the development resources to do so, Matt Mullenweg probably wouldn't be doing legally questionable and morally reprehensible things to try and coerce WP Engine into funding WordPress itself. Maintaining a fork of WordPress with its own independent development priorities would involve a lot of work. What WP Engine will most likely do is run their own plugin repository mirror, strip off whatever trademarks they don't feel legally empowered in using, and move on. WordPress cannot legally exclude WP Engine from using WordPress code.

miiiiiike 2y ago

Searched the USPTO trademark site, no trademark for "WP" registered by the WordPress Foundation. WP is GPLv2. Is WP Engine distributing their modifications without releasing their changes? No trademark issue, license seems fine. From what I can tell this is nothing.

luckylion 2y ago
The Trademark is for WordPress, not WP. The name "WP Engine" isn't the alleged problem, it's their usage in their hosting packages like "WordPress Core".
- atonse 2y ago
  Ok so if they changed their plans to "Core" and said "Includes vanilla WordPress" is Ma.tt going to have an issue with it? This really doesn't seem to be much about Trademarks, but more like what every other open source project complains about, that someone ELSE made a ton of money from the open source project, not them (even though that someone else is following the original license). Couldn't they have just changed the license to WP? It wouldn't have affected most customers.
  - luckylion 2y ago
    I don't know what he would or would not have an issue with, I'm just saying what his claim is. Personally, I don't care either way, I don't like either party. Automattic isn't a good steward of WP and has a lot of conflict of interest that they don't want to acknowledge and WP decisions are "what benefits wp.com" first. WP Engine is an aggressive sales company that also has hosting attached. They're extremely overpriced, the GoDaddy of WP Hosting. Whenever I hear somebody uses them it's a strong indicator that they're making enough money but have no technical knowledge on the team.
    - riffic 2y ago
      are we now conflating Automattic with the WordPress Foundation?

hshshshsvsv 2y ago

This is what happens when you raise billions in VC money.

ArchOversight 2y ago

I have used WordPress in the past for various projects, and have upgraded it for customers far more than I would like to recount, but all of this is making me not want to use WordPress for anything moving forward. This does not feel like a stable foundation/platform to build a future on.

monetus 2y ago
These were my thoughts exactly, regardless of the outcome. If I had something deployed and could move it, I would be migrating off of WordPress right now.
kemayo 2y ago
I have some domains with wordpress.com as their registrar (they had a good deal when Google Domains was getting sold off), and I'm definitely side-eyeing that relationship now...
notimetorelax 2y ago
I’m currently building a site on Wordpress and beginning. Wonder of if I should be using it. Are there good alternatives that allow page editing and have good ecosystem?

humblepi 2y ago

It's like if someone rewrote Eⅼоn Мuѕk in PHP.

wenbin 2y ago

If I understand correctly, Automattic and WP Engine generate approximately the same revenue? The creator of WordPress would undoubtedly be extremely disappointed… they should have achieved much greater success.

tptacek 2y ago

This is a pretty one-sided summary of the situation and, despite citing the Theo Browne interview, leaves out from it that WPE and WordPress and Automattic have apparently been in protracted negotiations about this for over a year. Users are understandably shocked by this outcome, but it seems implausible to claim that WPE was. I think it's also useful to note that Mullenweg wasn't demanding 8% of WPE's revenue, but rather an allocation of WPE revenue to WordPress ecosystem development (by staff members on WPE's own team), with the revenue to Automattic (or whoever, I forget) as an in-kind payment option.† That is a much more reasonable-sounding ask than simply forking over cash to Mullenweg's own business. I'm not following this closely enough to vouch for the way Mullenweg is handling any of this (though: at this point I assume/hope he has counsel reviewing what he's saying!) but it would be weird to me at this point to see WPE cast as the "good guys" here. This seems like another one of those "it's just a bunch of guys" scenarios. † This is according to Mullenweg, of course, but he had Theo Browne reading emails to WPE off his laptop during the interview to back the claim up.

aimazon 2y ago
"Negotiation" invokes visions of term sheets and boardrooms but what Matt actually meant by "negotiation" (as revealed in the interview) was emails in which he expressed displeasure at the lack of contribution from WP Engine, and only in the days before WordCamp did any sort of terms arrive at the table (the 8% demand). Matt has acknowledged he escalated things in the space of days, not years. The emails read out are birthday party invites, not term sheets. I agree that WP Engine cannot be characterised as "good guys" given it's a bottom-line driven machine that will chew up and spit out all in its path, and Matt has earned credibility through decades of community-minded WordPress stewardship, but let's not pretend this is some business deal that went sour, it's Matt using every inch of leverage he has to cause WP Engine pain because of his moral objections to the private-equity machine taking money away from his community-minded company. Obviously WP Engine were never going to pay Automattic tens of millions of dollars per year, Matt knows that, we know that, it's a side show. He was just saying things to ruin their day. Just like the millions of dollars per year in costs incurred running WordPress.org that Matt has wheeled out to justify causing WP Engine pain by cutting them off from plugin updates (Cloudflare have offered to host WordPress.org for free; Matt has not accepted the offer).

corobo 2y ago

I wish he'd just do whatever he's going to do already. Dudes just coming off as having a bit of a manic one at this point. Two things that are true: - Big businesses built off the back of an open source software should absolutely chuck a bit back to said software - Matt is messing with peoples' bread and butter to win his little slap fight which is a complete dickhead move.

jeltz 2y ago
And they do chuck a bit back. Matt just thinks it is not enough.

kylehotchkiss 2y ago

> “I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to do this,” he said. “I was taken advantage of for so many years" Mullenweg has a current net worth of approximately $400 million (source https://andsimple.co/cases/matt-mullenweg-net-worth/ https://andsimple.co/cases/matt-mullenweg-net-worth/)

djbusby 2y ago

Am I stupid or could WPE "simply" had a clone/copy/mirror of the necessary WP.org things? eg: how Linode has for Debian mirrors?

kylehotchkiss 2y ago
Even better: just proxy the requests up to WP.org through GCP/AWS.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tky 2y ago

> When asked what his legal counsel has advised regarding his speaking out publicly, Mullenweg told The Repository, “When you’re right, you can talk. When you’re wrong, [the lawyers] tell you to shut up. My lawyers are fine, they’re like, ‘go for it!’” Every time he posts or speaks, he does more damage to his reputation and that of WordPress. His lawyers have probably told him to shut up, but he seems like he’d make a miserable know-it-all client.

iambateman 2y ago

The saddest aspect of this situation is that I believe Mullenweg truly wants more people to participate in and benefit from open source software. But by dragging thousands of developers into a pissing match and unilaterally breaking the update process for 1.5M sites without warning, he’s making the case that WordPress is unstable. Leadership matters. I hope WordPress gets the chance to find new leaders before it dies a slow death. The web needs WordPress to be great and right now it isn’t.

butz 2y ago

Eleventy v3.0.0 was just released, time to migrate your website, improve performance and make it easier to upgrade. And the best part: no plugin vulnerabilities.