28 ms·

Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

574 points by dangrossman 2y ago

AlexDragusin 2y ago
Ah Quinn Emanuel on the job - yeah, the defendants are cooked, one way or another!
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  When you hire them, QE is very good at making the opposing party spend almost as much as you do!
chuckadams 2y ago
COMPLAINT FOR: (1) Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations; (2) Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations; (3) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.; (4) Attempted Extortion; (5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code§ 17200, et seq.; (6) Promissory Estoppel; (7) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement; (8) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution; (9) Libel; (10) Trade Libel; and (11) Slander. Spicy.
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- DannyBee 2y ago
  Of these, the ones that are interesting are basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10. The CFAA claim here is actually basically an extortion claim (plus other throwaway general claims) framed in CFAA terms. See 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(7) This is actually somewhat uncommon to see :) However, it seems likely to be dismissed (without prejudice) or need to be amended since it looks like it doesn't plead the claim properly. "(g)Any person who suffers damage ... may maintain a civil action ... A civil action for a violation of this section may be brought only if the conduct involves 1 of the factors set forth in subclauses (I), (II), (III), (IV), or (V) of subsection (c)(4)(A)(i). They do not actually explicitly allege one of these factors is present, and it reads like it is a necessary element to maintain a civil action claim. Now, mind you, the factors are present (It's stuff like 'you have to cause at least 5k in damage), but the response is going to state they've failed to plead a claim by not explicitly meeting all the necessary elements.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    Well, there’s also specifically the element of exceeding authorization that doesn’t even seem plausible on its face. The real meat of the federal complaint is the request for a declaratory judgment.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      Yeah but at least they bother to plead the exceeding authorization portion. I actually think they want more than just the trademark issue resolved. I agree it is sort of the minimum they want resolved (but i flag it as non-interesting because i don't think they will have a lot of trouble winning unless there is something amazing in the response) But i think they bothered to include the CFAA claim and unfair competition claim because losing access to those services worried them (and because the unfair competition claim enables them to air a whole bunch of evidence of conflicts/etc in front of a jury when it would otherwise be irrelevant)
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    A speculation I've heard is that the CFAA is meant to try to get some preliminary injunctive relief.
    - DannyBee 2y ago
      Yeah, but they won't because they haven't fully pleaded the claim :)
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talldayo 2y ago
It's hard to even imagine what a best-case scenario looks like for Matt at this point. Putting aside the matter of righteousness, his business is pretty much chalked for professional applications at this point. B2B partnerships are done - anyone with lawyers on-staff are going to get shoulder-tapped and asked to find another hosting solution. Smaller customers have all the more reason to bleed out to competitors, and the plugin/theme ecosystem is going to see the writing on the wall better than anyone else. Qui bono? Who is Matt "protecting" from harm, really? I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here. On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would be a shockingly wasteful decision.
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- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  If it's any three things, it's about money, money, and money. Zooming out a bit, Automattic acquired Tumblr and like all those before it seems to be choking on it. Competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow and Shopify are all nipping at WordPress' marketshare. I don't know what WordPress.com's stats look like, but blogging is out of sytle. New cool kids want the new black. That is to be social media influencers. Along the same lines, the WordPress Community is "aging out". Events online or off there's too little "youth" engaged and excited about the product. In shoet, the pie isn't what it once was. Matt looked around the room, saw deep pockets (i.e., WP Engine) and made a go for it. That was a poor decision. Seeing himself as a cult leader who would get unwavering support from his cult (aka The WordPress Community) was another mistake. People are fatigued and enough them have stopped drinking his Kool Aid. There are pockets of support but certainly not what it used to be. Many WP people are anxious to move on from the Mattopoly.
  - pier25 2y ago
    > blogging is out of sytle OTOH maybe the majority of WP users are not blogging. It's anecdotal but I know about a dozen WP users first-hand (and maintain a couple of those installations) and none of them use it for blogging. It's mostly for marketing websites and shops with WooCommerce.
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sys13 2y ago
What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce enthusiasm for the OSS project.
- caust1c 2y ago
  Wait that's not making it better? /s Seriously though, it's a freaking legacy. Sad to see it go this way.
- jameslk 2y ago
  I’m an arm length removed from all this drama having not used Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I’d use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that happens between corporations all the time My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
  - threeseed 2y ago
    > irrelevant to my concerns This is very relevant to anyone that cares about open source. Companies being able to host any OSS without the threat of a trademark dispute is vital to the software industry.
    - jameslk 2y ago
      Kind of a similar situation as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_trademark_dispute?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema... This didn’t kill Mozilla in the end or really affect the OSS community for Firefox or Debian
      - ensignavenger 2y ago
        Mozilla didn't cut Debian users off from the plugin ecosystem or any other Mozilla services.
greyface- 2y ago
Full PACER/RECAP docket, for those interested in following future filings: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v-automattic-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v...
shabgzer 2y ago
"What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands." Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is gold. What a time to be alive.
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- draw_down 2y ago
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- int_19h 2y ago
  It gets better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726796
PedroBatista 2y ago
These 2 belong in a Judge Judy episode.
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olliej 2y ago
Um this seems pretty horrendous (from a moral PoV, no idea about legal), at the time Mullenweg apparently said > Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress > Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related > open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, > its name, is now fully independent from any company." But then the complaint says: > What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were > publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private > company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred > irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants > had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands." Again, no idea about the legality of saying you've done one thing in public, but functionally ensuring that the actual result is the opposite, but morally that's pretty gross.
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- Maxious 2y ago
  Source for the Mullenweg statement https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  Also, I saw on X earlier today, someone posted that the agreement WP Engine was being asked to agree to included verbiage that WPE would not be allowed to fork WordPress. Is not forkability one of the keys to OSS? Shady.
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- DannyBee 2y ago
  It supports their various unfair competition/etc claims, but mostly seems written for the IRS/press/etc.
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threeseed 2y ago
> Mullenweg failed to disclose this exclusive licensing arrangement between his nonprofit (the WordPress Foundation) and his for-profit (Automattic) in the WordPress Foundation’s tax filings with the California government, claiming that there were no “contracts ... between [WordPress Foundation] and any officer, director or trustee ... or with an entity in which any such officer, director or trustee had any financial interest”. That can't be good for him.
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- o11c 2y ago
  It certainly sounds so, but I went looking for the source and I'm not sure what to look for besides the allegation itself. In particular, I did not find a date for that particular claim. There are also several holes in adjacent statements - for example, ignoring the fact that the Foundation was "paid" in the form of being given the trademark in the first place. And the fact that trademarks can change value over time.
  - 3np 2y ago
    Without knowing how it works in California, it might be that filings are available to the public if you go digging for it but not necessarily online.
- photomatt 2y ago
  That's not true, will address in court. They made up a lot of things in this.
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  - rideontime 2y ago
    Is there any practical difference between transferring ownership of the trademark to Automattic vs. granting them an exclusive license that they're able to sublicense?
DataDive 2y ago
That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg found out. Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.
- csa 2y ago
  > Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers. I think both sides more or less see this as a case of standing up against a bully — they may lose out in the short run (in terms of money), but they think that they will discourage future bullying by fighting back. I’m not sure if either side is right, but that’s why they both drew a line in the sand, imho.
  - dmix 2y ago
    Ignoring the executive drama (on both sides) it is in bad taste to build WPEngine off an Open Source project and barely contribute back to it. It's probably a case where their version is so heavily customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals. But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well. Relationships are important in business.
    - initplus 2y ago
      Harder to justify contributing back when the open source project is so tightly coupled to your biggest for profit competitor.
    - busterarm 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - onli 2y ago
        HN isn't one person. There was always a lot of criticism of those closed source licenses. See for example the thread when Redis fell, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
The alleged extortion of the WP Engine CEO seems absolutely inexcusable regardless of what you think of the trademark dispute. Impossible to imagine a valid justification for telling someone you'll tattle to their investors and the press if they don't accept a job offer.
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  It's absolutely unhinged. I really wonder how much legal support Matt had during all of this.
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dangrossman 2y ago
There's a "no forking" clause in the term sheet Automattic sent to WP Engine: https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet-wp-engine-inc.-automattic-trademark-license_09.19.2024-1.pdf https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet... IANAL, but the WordPress license (GPLv2) says that if you attempt to sublicense the software or otherwise distribute it under different terms, you forfeit your own license to it: "4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." WordPress is itself a fork, with no copyright assignments, so Matt has no ability to change the license. Given this, is it legal for WordPress.com to continue using and distributing the WordPress software as we speak?
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  This is an excellent question! From my armchair, it would appear a valid reading, but IANAL and all.
- photomatt 2y ago
  This was a separate agreement from their GPL license, which of course allows them to fork. Sorry it's not clear from the term sheet, but this was about them forking our Stripe extension to replace the attribution from us to them for WooCommerce sites hosted on WP Engine. Stripe is also looking into this, as it's spammy.
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  - DannyBee 2y ago
    I think you missed the point. They (i know it's you but easier to not personalize it here) do not own all the rights to the software themselves. For the parts they do not own, they have no rights other than what they got through GPLv2. Those rights are conditioned upon them not trying to sublicense/etc the software in a way that conflicts with GPLv2. Which this term sheet purports to do.
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photomatt 2y ago
Howdy, Matthew Charles Mullenweg from the lawsuit here. One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic. That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her team there in the meetings I posted here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/ https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/ They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.
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- wging 2y ago
  That's not what page 35 says at all. Check out page 36: > 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined. (edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct to read page 35 as saying that)
  - photomatt 2y ago
    She was interviewing November 2023 to January 2024. She declined the WordPress.org role on January 26, 2024. I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share.
    - Mystery-Machine 2y ago
      Why you don't share it? You said there's much more emails and messages, but you never shared any. Why not?
      - photomatt 2y ago
mikeyinternews 2y ago
I hope Matt can supply his legal team with conversations that would somehow justify his behaviour. From my (incomplete) reading of the complaint, he (Matt) does indeed look very "petulant". It's almost like he's intentionally self-destructing, which is why I hope for his sake that he has more tangible evidence to share, especially after reading section 201.
- photomatt 2y ago
  Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad, while not addressing the core issue of their trademark violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about their bad behavior.
  - rolandog 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Dude, your "trademark violations" claim is going to get absolutely destroyed in court. I obviously don't have all the details, but I would expect that if you did have more evidence against WPEngine, given how much you're posting in online forums I would expect you would have put forth something that helps your case, and I sure haven't seen it. How can you counter: 1. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks. 2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first. 3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way. I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.
chx 2y ago
Is it just me who took a double take at the very first name? WPE called the heavy cavalry -- Rachel Kassabian from Quinn Emanuel? oh boy. Remember Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc which found thumbnail versions of copyrighted images for search engine purposes is fair use? That was originally against Google and she was Google's lead counsel.
- nikcub 2y ago
  I noticed her name in the original C&D, too (amateur tech legal nerd). For those curious: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/kassabian-rachel-herrick/ https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/kassabian-rachel-herr... She's done a lot of notable copyright work for Google, Yandex, Vimeo, Cloudflare and (ironically) Tumblr - amongst others.
- jasondigitized 2y ago
  The CEO is WPEngine is a highly respected business woman. She has friends in high places. Extorting her was not smart.
spellsaidwrong 2y ago
I have never seen a more reckless case of CEO behaviour in a long time. I have no idea how the discussions with streamers and now Hacker News, is going to fare for Mullenweg, but I don't think it's good.
- enjikaka 2y ago
  He did let WP fuck it up with React too. Writing WP themes lets you experience the worst templating solution ever, especially post that. Crazy dude that one.
- bigiain 2y ago
  [flagged]
- brokenodo 2y ago
  It would be unsurprising if someone who named a company after themselves turned out to be a narcissist who couldn’t help themselves. https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/ https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    I don’t know about that, it’s normal to name a business after the founder. For example JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Disney, Boeing, Wells Fargo. The reference is also quite oblique.
    - pwillia7 2y ago
      King Gilette
      - adolph 2y ago
        Amazing: Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist.[16] He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894)[17] which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette
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tky 2y ago
Now begins the portion of the proceedings where lots of dirty laundry gets aired, discovery feels like a visit to the proctologist, and absolutely nothing good comes of it for either side but for the attorneys. Makes Matt look like just another guy with money throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get what he demanded. Sad because many thought highly of him before he went off the reservation.
shabgzer 2y ago
The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint, the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track, but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  > The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it. The CEO of Cloudflare already offered to host it for free: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
  - Arcuru 2y ago
    Sure now that it's in the news and can give them good PR, but a week ago they weren't the ones paying for it.
    - FireBeyond 2y ago
      You can buy a lot of web hosting for $400M. And with everything here, it also seems like quite a deliberate and calculated move to make sure he personally maintains ownership of WP.org (or else why was it not transferred to the Foundation (also him) when all the trademark stuff was being done?)
  - mthoms 2y ago
    Don't celebrate yet. It looks more like he's just trying to help Matt out rather than support the community - https://imgur.com/a/6isRMCv https://imgur.com/a/6isRMCv Fun fact: WPEngine is a Cloudflare customer. Automattic is not.
- justin66 2y ago
  "Generously," perhaps, but "selflessly" is a poor way to characterize any of his behavior.
felizuno 2y ago
After some seriously bad experiences with them I hope WPEngine loses their shirt. WRT their headless tooling the advertising versus the reality is insane. They held one of our clients hostage asking for $10k/month, we left for Kinsta for low hundreds per month and have had nothing but performance improvements and great support. I frankly don't like WordPress at all and don't really care about this lawsuit, but was burned so bad by WPEngine I can't help but stop by and say bad things about them.
- Aloha 2y ago
  I moved to WPEngine from a self hosted job, money well spent. I've never had a lick of trouble, and even though I'm pretty proficient at hosting LAMP apps, it's much less effort than self-hosting.
  - felizuno 2y ago
    If you ported an already working app then you missed out on the unmitigated disaster of Atlas Content Modeler, which was advertised as production ready but slowly became abandonware without them ever really acknowledging it. I hope you never need to consume your content via GraphQL, because they absolutely can't handle it at reasonable traffic loads.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    Same. Work hosts a bunch of client sites on WPEngine. We only ever had one problematic client who uploaded a heap of high bandwidth video and blew out their disk and bandwidth allocations by over 10x - WPEngine didn't cut them off, and worked with us/them to move their large media assets off the WP install (for reasons, the client went with AWS S3/CloudFront). We know WPE aren't the cheapest way to host WP, but if a client argues about the difference between a $5/month GoDaddy hosting plan and the $20/month starter plan on WPE - that's a pretty good indicator that they're not a right fit client for us. We have a few smaller agencies we'll hand them over to who are a better fit for them.
hashim-warren 2y ago
The complaint says Matt has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing. Is this a legal maneuver by Rachel Kassabian to have Matt lose the WordPress trademark? If so, that's deeply sad.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Why is it sad? If he is self-dealing between wordpress.org and Automattic, that's a big no-no. It sure looks from his comments here like he sees the two as one entity. Also, the man outright said "use 'WP' since we think 'WP' is generic" and then cried "brand confusion" years later. If you want to avoid brand confusion, maybe don't tell people they can use your trademark?
- psyopsy 2y ago
  Why sad? If he defrauded the government, he’s got bigger problems than losing a trademark.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Matt doesn’t own the trademark, the Wordpress Foundation does. Losing a lawsuit to WP Engine would not change that.
  - anon7000 2y ago
    I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, partly because they owned the trademark before the WP foundation was created.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  You make it sound like it's a black eye against Kassabian. In fact, many people believe that absolutely, if he has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing his way into a $400M net worth, then absolutely he deserves to lose the license to that trademark.
tock 2y ago
Who pay's for this legally? Automattic or Matt personally?
- dmix 2y ago
  Lists defendants as: > AUTOMATTIC INC., a Delaware corporation; and MATTHEW CHARLES MULLENWEG, an individual Considering he controls Automattic as chairman and probably most voting rights he could probably make that choice himself. Besides maybe some legal filings he has to do personally paperwork-wise, maybe with his own lawyer. It's up to you how much effort you spend defending yourself. As long as the board/investors aren't too bothered by it.
isiahl 2y ago
For the record, since I’m seeing it a lot in this thread: Green names = new account
- wokedang 2y ago
  [flagged]
- happyxpenguin 2y ago
  Oh this is good info to know! I never had a desire to create an HN account but i've been using it more frequently since this whole thing started and finally made an account.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Lol I used to think it was mods
  - voyagerfan5761 2y ago
    For this, I blame Reddit. Yes, I thought the same when I was new.
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dopamean 2y ago
I cant imagine why in a million years Heather would consider leaving WPE to work for Automattic. It makes literally no sense.
- nailer 2y ago
  Likewise. Leadership role at successful business versus less important role at less successful business.
- shrubble 2y ago
  I readily admit that I have no knowledge about WPE’s internal affairs and I have no animus against them. That said a company above a certain size can have multiple issues that could cause a person to consider leaving; such as internal politicking, the private equity firm making management decisions that are distasteful, or even just a loss of the company’s original tight-knit community of employees turning into “another corporate entity”.
tock 2y ago
It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825
- safety1st 2y ago
  Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.
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  - stephenr 2y ago
    > WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good technical and architectural direction until this person was appointed, which is honestly just laughable. In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes are not just made, but embraced and defended. Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it our way is better". For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a statement for multiple executions the way native prepared statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has had built-in support for prepared statements (including parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
    - chippiewill 2y ago
kubectl_h 2y ago
> One such company that relied on Defendants’ promises was WPE, founded in 2010. WPE is a true champion of WordPress, devoting its entire business to WordPress over other similar open source platforms. In reliance on Defendants’ many promises, WPE invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community—only to see the petulant whims of Mullenweg inflict harm to its business and the community that has embraced it. Is lawsuit language usually so... dramatic? The tone of this document is weird...
- lolinder 2y ago
  Complaints usually are, yes. I'm not a lawyer, but each one I've read has been a bit over the top and it feels like they're written as much for public consumption as they are for the judge. Maybe it's with the jury in mind?
  - kubectl_h 2y ago
    Interesting. This might be the first one I've ever read. Makes sense though and that was the vibe I got from sections: that this is more like an opening statement in ways.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    The jury doesn't usually read the complaint. However, a lot of the words you see as dramatic have specific legal meanings. In this case "relied on promises" is in the language of the tort he is suing over. I don't think the "true champion" sentence has a specific meaning, but it is definitely written to imply that WPE enhanced the value of the WordPress brand.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      What about "petulant whims"? I don't think it's just legal language—I've read plenty of court opinions too, some dramatic, some not. Complaints seem particular prone to the dramatic.
      - 2y ago
nightowl_games 2y ago
The Stripe attribution stuff that WPEngine is accused of sounds potentially illegal. I don't think Automattic's trademark claims are fundamentally going to hold up. From the complaint: "WPE’s nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source software platform and plugin used for its clients’ websites are fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines and the practices of nearly all businesses in this space." I dont know what the settled trademark law is, but this seems like common sense to me. Everyone says 'WordPress' to refer to the software platform. Just seems like extortion, plain and simple. I get Matt's upset that WPEngine is making all this money, but that's par for the course when you release something open source. You simply need a better product if you want to beat WPEngine in the marketplace.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
  They forked an open source plugin and changed the affiliate code in it along with their other changes. How could that be illegal?
  - nightowl_games 2y ago
    Sounds like something that WooCommerce should have in their license or something. idk sounds like a pitfall to me. Why would anyone pay WooCommerce anything then? Just fork it and change the attribution code.
    - fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
      They can’t. All Wordpress plugins are required to be GPL, like Wordpress itself, and like the software Wordpress itself was forked from. The viral license they agreed to is working as intended. I don’t know what people are actually paying for.
shabgzer 2y ago
I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a separate issue.
- curiousgal 2y ago
  Yeah well in the real world circumstances are what matters. Something that may be benign is no longer so following his sad attempt at extorting them.
- eXpl0it3r 2y ago
  Not a lawyer, it likely becomes an issue, because a) by Matt's own words wordpress.org is operated and maintained by Automattic employees and thus b) the blocking essentially leads to competitive disadvantage and a general conflict of interest. But maybe there's also some law that can be leverage, that you can't just block one company, especially if it's some common good or so.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  In the real world, if you tell people X and insist that X is true, X becomes something of a binding promise on you. In this case X is "you can use the letters WP to imply WordPress in your branding." There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I assume WP.org can ban whomever they like. Now, if they did it because WP.com asked them to, the non profit status becomes a question. Furthermore, WP hardcodes the URL for the resource, meaning you cannot self host the plugins even if you wanted.
syradar 2y ago
I have not used WP in a while but will recommend clients to not use WP Engine. The more I read about them the more they sound like grifters.
dramm 2y ago
Given Mullenweg's behavior I wish WP Engines and their very capable litigation attorneys nothing but the best of luck, which I doubt very much they will need. Jeez, how to torch a brand's reputation.
crop_rotation 2y ago
HN has reached a point where if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you will be treated worse than if you were simply doing bad stuff by default. WPEngine is not some mom and pop shop. The courts will decide whether WPEngine or Automattic is in the wrong here. But Automattic's contribution to Wordpress and the ecosystem simply dwarf WPEngine. Now for their crime of being champions of Open Source they will be judged in the eyes of HN. This is like HN praising MSFT for all small things and bashing Google for doing strictly less evil stuff than whatever Microsoft does (Bing in China censored vs dragonfly, windows full of ads, Edge with tons of shady features, Azure with the worst security).
- usernamed7 2y ago
  > if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you didn't read the filing and it shows
- throw16180339 2y ago
  I'm judging Matt because he cut off 1.5 million users from security updates. That's reason enough to consider him a bad actor.
legitster 2y ago
I've been a long Wordpress user and proponent for a long time. Until a week ago I had never heard the name Mullenweg. Regardless of who's in the right or wrong here (I have my opinions), my perception of Wordpress flipped a switch overnight. It went from this quiet, reliable, refreshingly boring open source platform to yet another cult of personality tech fiefdom.
- fastball 2y ago
  Seems a bit self-contradicting. If it actually was a cult of personality tech fiefdom, and you are a long-time Wordpress user, presumably you would've heard of Mullenweg before this? The fact that you hadn't indicates that it's not.
- trog 2y ago
  I'm in basically the same boat, but aside from a bit of eye rolling I think I've convinced myself I can just ignore this and safely continue to download wordpress.org/latest.zip when I need it and hack it into whatever shape is convenient - which is what I've always liked doing with it anyway.
- MaxMatti 2y ago
  Above a certain size all communities sooner or later turn into cults, most of the time around one or a few persons. The ones that you don't perceive as such you just haven't looked into close enough. I wish it were different but so far I have yet to find a community that doesn't fit that description. Not just open source, not just software, any community.
  - grvdrm 2y ago
    Next up: Substack?
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      Rhetoric question: how many Substackers use Notion to organize their writings?
- 2y ago
tock 2y ago
Also Matt, care to address this: https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-ceo-of-wordpress-com-cries-foul-and-threatens-me-with-legal-action-f116ac57d862 https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c... I'm speechless.
- curiousgal 2y ago
  Why would you be speechless? This is 100% on brand based on what I've been reading (ironically most of it written by him).
silverliver 2y ago
[flagged]
dgellow 2y ago
Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn’t follow what happened. The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me who know nothing about the case
- chillfox 2y ago
  1. Rich dude wants other rich corp to give him money. 2. Rich corp says no. 3. Rich dude has public meltdown. 4. Rich corp sues rich dude.
- robjwells 2y ago
  Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on WordPress as a whole. WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging comments. In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP Engine customers from the theme and plugin repositories hosted at WordPress.org — which until recently people had believed to be under the control of the WordPress Foundation, but is actually under the personal control of Mullenweg. Now this lawsuit has been filed. Edit: Characters for the unaware: Matt Mullenweg: The "top" person in WordPress in its various forms, including the non-profit WordPress Foundation, and the for-profit company Automattic (whichs runs the for-profit WordPress.com host, among other things). WP Engine: A separate for-profit WordPress host.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    Thanks!
- jeanlucas 2y ago
  Long post, writing this for myself as well: The players - WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011; - WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010 with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director; - Automattic is a private company that owns and runs WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles Mullenweg; - WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that makes money by hosting WordPress since 2010; - WP Engine and Wordpress.com are direct competitors; - WordCamp is a conference run by volunteers that happens regularly, this year it happened between 17-24 of September -- What happened, afaik: - Sept 23: Matt calls WP Engine "the cancer of WordPress" on his blog [1][2][3] and says that it profits from the open source without contributing enough - Sept 24: WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic to “retract false, harmful, and disparaging statements”, after Matt Mullenweg called it a “cancer” [4] - Sept 25: Automattic sends a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, alleging unauthorized use of the WordPress trademark [5] and I quote "If you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine." - Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking plugin updates from WP Engine - Same day: Matt on his personal blog says Automattic has "been attempting to make a licensing deal" with WP Engine "for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along" [7] and doubles down that this is about WP Engine's disrespecting WordPress trademarks - Oct 1st: Automattic made public [8][9] a seven-year agreement proposed to WP Engine in exchange for 8% of their revenue, the document has the sign date of Sept 20 (during WordCamp?) that could be paid in royalties and/or employees to contribute to WordPress.org; the document also states no forking of WordPress allowed - Oct 2nd (you are here): WP Engine sues Automattic AND Matt, Matt is here on this thread generating more evidence against himself in the comments [10]; the document has tweets, conversations, everything... And if it goes to a public trial more dirt will come up for sure; -- Extra facts (not necessarily related) - Automattic has invested on WP Engine in 2011 [11] - Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019 for 3MM USD [12], and in Aug this year announced it was moving it to WordPress [13] - Drupal creator gives some insight on this feud and how Drupal deals with that [14] [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-engine-a-cancer-to-wordpress-and-urges-community-to-switch-providers/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 [5] https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-engine/ https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-... [6] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ [7] https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/ [8] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet-wp-engine-inc.-automattic-trademark-license_09.19.2024-1.pdf https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet... [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656 [11] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-series-a-financing/ https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-series-a-... [12] Auttomatic + Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tum... [13] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blogs-wordpress-automattic https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blog... [14] https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem
zackerist 2y ago
This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome, whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it. It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few extra dollars. He knew going in that this would cost him a lot. He'll spend a ton on lawyers and courts, but he'll do it for reasons that some people cannot comprehend. I would fight to the death if someone threatened my child. Some may not even agree with on that.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
  He’s neglecting his child to have a fight with his neighbour.
  - Loudergood 2y ago
    Not just neglecting the child, but using it as a weapon.
Havoc 2y ago
There is no way this ends well for Matt. Not with that giant paper trail about going nuclear and leveraging audience.
password4321 2y ago
Did not see a link yet to the previous brief discussion about an interview 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 On With Theo / T3.gg
stevenhubertron 2y ago
What I find crazy is we the people are taking sides and investing emotion into two corporations, neither of which have the best interests of their customers at heart. At the end of the day the only winner is who makes more money from this, we as users will continue to lose no matter the outcome. We have all become corporatists.
srmarm 2y ago
This whole situation is a negative sum game, everyone is going to come out worse off - Matt/WP/WP Engine, the project and all the end users. It's such a shame. If there's a solid legal argument from either side, let dispassionate legal teams deal with it in a dignified manner. As someone who defaults to wordpress as the bedrock of new projects, this instability is a massive turn off.
- paxys 2y ago
  Not everyone. The lawyers on both sides are going to get rich.
MangoCoffee 2y ago
it's sad to see people taking sides in this thread. Ultimately, this issue boils down to two corporations fighting over money
trickyager 2y ago
This lawsuit seems to be the prophesized exploding car covered in hammers [1]. The astounding part to me is that it's Matt's behavior itself that's making the car explode multiple times, sending hammers flying everywhere. [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-users-making-memes-about-cars-and-hammers-tumblr-ceo-photomatts-so-called-meltdown-and-controversy-explained https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-us...
vitalychernobyl 2y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
alberth 2y ago
Can someone ELI5 this whole topic? Is the crux of the issue that WPE website use to say things like: "Start creating on WordPress today" or "Power your creativity on the #1 platform for WordPress" Which might have implied that WPE was official Wordpress? https://web.archive.org/web/20220105010059/https://wpengine.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220105010059/https://wpengine.... --- In comparison to other companies like Pressable that simply use marketing copy like: "WordPress Hosting that Means Business" https://pressable.com https://pressable.com Though this is also confusing, because Automattic acquired majority equity stake in Pressable. So Pressable is Automattic. https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/ https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/ --- There's so much happening with this story that I feel like I don't understand what the root issue is.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  It's about disabling revisions. Or private equity. Or not contributing back to core. Or trademarks. Or freeloading on w.org infrastructure. Or hacking Stripe plugins. Or whatever else might stick to the wall in this 18-hour period... Start with this: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/ Then read the complaint: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... (also the post's link). It's highly readable, not dense legalese at all.
- legitster 2y ago
  The ELI5 of why this is so complicated is what everyone thought was "Wordpress" was actually a cluster of shady self-serving business dealings by Matt Mullenweg. The Wordpress Foundation does not actually own the name "Wordpress". The name is essentially owned by Matt Mullenweg and he licenses it out to the Foundation and other organizations which he approves of. Matt Mullenweg was personally displeased with certain aspects of WPEngine's business, asked for money from them, and then cut off all of WPEngine's customers from accessing shared Wordpress resources. And the justification he is using was WP Engine's infringement of the copyright.
  - 2y ago
mikemitchelldev 2y ago
100% in support of photomatt on this. Matt, many of your critics are speaking loudly but everyone still loves you for what you've given to the open source community. Hopefully the differences will be resolved.
presspot 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation Just saying
mrlatinos 2y ago
Matt Mullenweg is a hypocritical troll who hides his greed behind a false defense of open source.

574 points by dangrossman 2y ago

AlexDragusin 2y ago

Ah Quinn Emanuel on the job - yeah, the defendants are cooked, one way or another!

pclmulqdq 2y ago
When you hire them, QE is very good at making the opposing party spend almost as much as you do!

chuckadams 2y ago

COMPLAINT FOR: (1) Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations; (2) Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Relations; (3) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 et seq.; (4) Attempted Extortion; (5) Unfair Competition, Cal. Bus. Prof. Code§ 17200, et seq.; (6) Promissory Estoppel; (7) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement; (8) Declaratory Judgment of Non-Dilution; (9) Libel; (10) Trade Libel; and (11) Slander. Spicy.

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DannyBee 2y ago
Of these, the ones that are interesting are basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10. The CFAA claim here is actually basically an extortion claim (plus other throwaway general claims) framed in CFAA terms. See 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(7) This is actually somewhat uncommon to see :) However, it seems likely to be dismissed (without prejudice) or need to be amended since it looks like it doesn't plead the claim properly. "(g)Any person who suffers damage ... may maintain a civil action ... A civil action for a violation of this section may be brought only if the conduct involves 1 of the factors set forth in subclauses (I), (II), (III), (IV), or (V) of subsection (c)(4)(A)(i). They do not actually explicitly allege one of these factors is present, and it reads like it is a necessary element to maintain a civil action claim. Now, mind you, the factors are present (It's stuff like 'you have to cause at least 5k in damage), but the response is going to state they've failed to plead a claim by not explicitly meeting all the necessary elements.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  Well, there’s also specifically the element of exceeding authorization that doesn’t even seem plausible on its face. The real meat of the federal complaint is the request for a declaratory judgment.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    Yeah but at least they bother to plead the exceeding authorization portion. I actually think they want more than just the trademark issue resolved. I agree it is sort of the minimum they want resolved (but i flag it as non-interesting because i don't think they will have a lot of trouble winning unless there is something amazing in the response) But i think they bothered to include the CFAA claim and unfair competition claim because losing access to those services worried them (and because the unfair competition claim enables them to air a whole bunch of evidence of conflicts/etc in front of a jury when it would otherwise be irrelevant)
- jcranmer 2y ago
  A speculation I've heard is that the CFAA is meant to try to get some preliminary injunctive relief.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    Yeah, but they won't because they haven't fully pleaded the claim :)

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talldayo 2y ago

It's hard to even imagine what a best-case scenario looks like for Matt at this point. Putting aside the matter of righteousness, his business is pretty much chalked for professional applications at this point. B2B partnerships are done - anyone with lawyers on-staff are going to get shoulder-tapped and asked to find another hosting solution. Smaller customers have all the more reason to bleed out to competitors, and the plugin/theme ecosystem is going to see the writing on the wall better than anyone else. Qui bono? Who is Matt "protecting" from harm, really? I just don't understand in any sense what the end goal was here. On the one hand, I feel like I must not understand because I lack an emotional connection to the project. In the other hand, I feel like a stoic approach is the only one that makes sense. It's a baffling tempest-in-a-teapot that must have extra details I don't understand. If all this occurred with no hidden motives, it would be a shockingly wasteful decision.

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chiefalchemist 2y ago
If it's any three things, it's about money, money, and money. Zooming out a bit, Automattic acquired Tumblr and like all those before it seems to be choking on it. Competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WebFlow and Shopify are all nipping at WordPress' marketshare. I don't know what WordPress.com's stats look like, but blogging is out of sytle. New cool kids want the new black. That is to be social media influencers. Along the same lines, the WordPress Community is "aging out". Events online or off there's too little "youth" engaged and excited about the product. In shoet, the pie isn't what it once was. Matt looked around the room, saw deep pockets (i.e., WP Engine) and made a go for it. That was a poor decision. Seeing himself as a cult leader who would get unwavering support from his cult (aka The WordPress Community) was another mistake. People are fatigued and enough them have stopped drinking his Kool Aid. There are pockets of support but certainly not what it used to be. Many WP people are anxious to move on from the Mattopoly.
- pier25 2y ago
  > blogging is out of sytle OTOH maybe the majority of WP users are not blogging. It's anecdotal but I know about a dozen WP users first-hand (and maintain a couple of those installations) and none of them use it for blogging. It's mostly for marketing websites and shops with WooCommerce.

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sys13 2y ago

What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce enthusiasm for the OSS project.

caust1c 2y ago
Wait that's not making it better? /s Seriously though, it's a freaking legacy. Sad to see it go this way.
jameslk 2y ago
I’m an arm length removed from all this drama having not used Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I’d use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that happens between corporations all the time My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
- threeseed 2y ago
  > irrelevant to my concerns This is very relevant to anyone that cares about open source. Companies being able to host any OSS without the threat of a trademark dispute is vital to the software industry.
  - jameslk 2y ago
    Kind of a similar situation as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_trademark_dispute?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema... This didn’t kill Mozilla in the end or really affect the OSS community for Firefox or Debian
    - ensignavenger 2y ago
      Mozilla didn't cut Debian users off from the plugin ecosystem or any other Mozilla services.

greyface- 2y ago

Full PACER/RECAP docket, for those interested in following future filings: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v-automattic-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/wpengine-inc-v...

shabgzer 2y ago

"What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands." Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is gold. What a time to be alive.

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draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
int_19h 2y ago
It gets better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726796

PedroBatista 2y ago

These 2 belong in a Judge Judy episode.

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olliej 2y ago

Um this seems pretty horrendous (from a moral PoV, no idea about legal), at the time Mullenweg apparently said > Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress > Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related > open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, > its name, is now fully independent from any company." But then the complaint says: > What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were > publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private > company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred > irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants > had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands." Again, no idea about the legality of saying you've done one thing in public, but functionally ensuring that the actual result is the opposite, but morally that's pretty gross.

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Maxious 2y ago
Source for the Mullenweg statement https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark https://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark
chiefalchemist 2y ago
Also, I saw on X earlier today, someone posted that the agreement WP Engine was being asked to agree to included verbiage that WPE would not be allowed to fork WordPress. Is not forkability one of the keys to OSS? Shady.
- deleted 2y ago
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DannyBee 2y ago
It supports their various unfair competition/etc claims, but mostly seems written for the IRS/press/etc.

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threeseed 2y ago

> Mullenweg failed to disclose this exclusive licensing arrangement between his nonprofit (the WordPress Foundation) and his for-profit (Automattic) in the WordPress Foundation’s tax filings with the California government, claiming that there were no “contracts ... between [WordPress Foundation] and any officer, director or trustee ... or with an entity in which any such officer, director or trustee had any financial interest”. That can't be good for him.

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o11c 2y ago
It certainly sounds so, but I went looking for the source and I'm not sure what to look for besides the allegation itself. In particular, I did not find a date for that particular claim. There are also several holes in adjacent statements - for example, ignoring the fact that the Foundation was "paid" in the form of being given the trademark in the first place. And the fact that trademarks can change value over time.
- 3np 2y ago
  Without knowing how it works in California, it might be that filings are available to the public if you go digging for it but not necessarily online.
photomatt 2y ago
That's not true, will address in court. They made up a lot of things in this.
- deleted 2y ago
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- rideontime 2y ago
  Is there any practical difference between transferring ownership of the trademark to Automattic vs. granting them an exclusive license that they're able to sublicense?

DataDive 2y ago

That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg found out. Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.

csa 2y ago
> Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers. I think both sides more or less see this as a case of standing up against a bully — they may lose out in the short run (in terms of money), but they think that they will discourage future bullying by fighting back. I’m not sure if either side is right, but that’s why they both drew a line in the sand, imho.
- dmix 2y ago
  Ignoring the executive drama (on both sides) it is in bad taste to build WPEngine off an Open Source project and barely contribute back to it. It's probably a case where their version is so heavily customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals. But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well. Relationships are important in business.
  - initplus 2y ago
    Harder to justify contributing back when the open source project is so tightly coupled to your biggest for profit competitor.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - onli 2y ago
      HN isn't one person. There was always a lot of criticism of those closed source licenses. See for example the thread when Redis fell, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

The alleged extortion of the WP Engine CEO seems absolutely inexcusable regardless of what you think of the trademark dispute. Impossible to imagine a valid justification for telling someone you'll tattle to their investors and the press if they don't accept a job offer.

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
It's absolutely unhinged. I really wonder how much legal support Matt had during all of this.
- deleted 2y ago
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dangrossman 2y ago

There's a "no forking" clause in the term sheet Automattic sent to WP Engine: https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet-wp-engine-inc.-automattic-trademark-license_09.19.2024-1.pdf https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet... IANAL, but the WordPress license (GPLv2) says that if you attempt to sublicense the software or otherwise distribute it under different terms, you forfeit your own license to it: "4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." WordPress is itself a fork, with no copyright assignments, so Matt has no ability to change the license. Given this, is it legal for WordPress.com to continue using and distributing the WordPress software as we speak?

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
This is an excellent question! From my armchair, it would appear a valid reading, but IANAL and all.
photomatt 2y ago
This was a separate agreement from their GPL license, which of course allows them to fork. Sorry it's not clear from the term sheet, but this was about them forking our Stripe extension to replace the attribution from us to them for WooCommerce sites hosted on WP Engine. Stripe is also looking into this, as it's spammy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- DannyBee 2y ago
  I think you missed the point. They (i know it's you but easier to not personalize it here) do not own all the rights to the software themselves. For the parts they do not own, they have no rights other than what they got through GPLv2. Those rights are conditioned upon them not trying to sublicense/etc the software in a way that conflicts with GPLv2. Which this term sheet purports to do.

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photomatt 2y ago

Howdy, Matthew Charles Mullenweg from the lawsuit here. One thing I'm surprised they disclosed is on page 35 that Heather Brunner at WP Engine was interviewing for a job at Automattic. That's why we were spending so much time together 1:1 without her team there in the meetings I posted here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/ https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/ They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.

deleted 2y ago
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wging 2y ago
That's not what page 35 says at all. Check out page 36: > 92. Mullenweg’s premise was false, as WPE’s CEO had never interviewed with or negotiated a job offer with Automattic. To the contrary, back in 2022 Automattic had asked if she would be interested in running wordpress.com, but she politely declined. (edit: I have no idea who is right, but it's just not correct to read page 35 as saying that)
- photomatt 2y ago
  She was interviewing November 2023 to January 2024. She declined the WordPress.org role on January 26, 2024. I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share.
  - Mystery-Machine 2y ago
    Why you don't share it? You said there's much more emails and messages, but you never shared any. Why not?
    - photomatt 2y ago

mikeyinternews 2y ago

I hope Matt can supply his legal team with conversations that would somehow justify his behaviour. From my (incomplete) reading of the complaint, he (Matt) does indeed look very "petulant". It's almost like he's intentionally self-destructing, which is why I hope for his sake that he has more tangible evidence to share, especially after reading section 201.

photomatt 2y ago
Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad, while not addressing the core issue of their trademark violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about their bad behavior.
- rolandog 2y ago
  [flagged]
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Dude, your "trademark violations" claim is going to get absolutely destroyed in court. I obviously don't have all the details, but I would expect that if you did have more evidence against WPEngine, given how much you're posting in online forums I would expect you would have put forth something that helps your case, and I sure haven't seen it. How can you counter: 1. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks. 2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first. 3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way. I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.

chx 2y ago

Is it just me who took a double take at the very first name? WPE called the heavy cavalry -- Rachel Kassabian from Quinn Emanuel? oh boy. Remember Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc which found thumbnail versions of copyrighted images for search engine purposes is fair use? That was originally against Google and she was Google's lead counsel.

nikcub 2y ago
I noticed her name in the original C&D, too (amateur tech legal nerd). For those curious: https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/kassabian-rachel-herrick/ https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/kassabian-rachel-herr... She's done a lot of notable copyright work for Google, Yandex, Vimeo, Cloudflare and (ironically) Tumblr - amongst others.
jasondigitized 2y ago
The CEO is WPEngine is a highly respected business woman. She has friends in high places. Extorting her was not smart.

spellsaidwrong 2y ago

I have never seen a more reckless case of CEO behaviour in a long time. I have no idea how the discussions with streamers and now Hacker News, is going to fare for Mullenweg, but I don't think it's good.

enjikaka 2y ago
He did let WP fuck it up with React too. Writing WP themes lets you experience the worst templating solution ever, especially post that. Crazy dude that one.
bigiain 2y ago
[flagged]
brokenodo 2y ago
It would be unsurprising if someone who named a company after themselves turned out to be a narcissist who couldn’t help themselves. https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/ https://ma.tt/2003/04/hit-diggity/
- zarzavat 2y ago
  I don’t know about that, it’s normal to name a business after the founder. For example JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Disney, Boeing, Wells Fargo. The reference is also quite oblique.
  - pwillia7 2y ago
    King Gilette
    - adolph 2y ago
      Amazing: Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist.[16] He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894)[17] which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_C._Gillette

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tky 2y ago

Now begins the portion of the proceedings where lots of dirty laundry gets aired, discovery feels like a visit to the proctologist, and absolutely nothing good comes of it for either side but for the attorneys. Makes Matt look like just another guy with money throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get what he demanded. Sad because many thought highly of him before he went off the reservation.

shabgzer 2y ago

The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint, the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track, but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.

JimDabell 2y ago
> The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it. The CEO of Cloudflare already offered to host it for free: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663 https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663
- Arcuru 2y ago
  Sure now that it's in the news and can give them good PR, but a week ago they weren't the ones paying for it.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    You can buy a lot of web hosting for $400M. And with everything here, it also seems like quite a deliberate and calculated move to make sure he personally maintains ownership of WP.org (or else why was it not transferred to the Foundation (also him) when all the trademark stuff was being done?)
- mthoms 2y ago
  Don't celebrate yet. It looks more like he's just trying to help Matt out rather than support the community - https://imgur.com/a/6isRMCv https://imgur.com/a/6isRMCv Fun fact: WPEngine is a Cloudflare customer. Automattic is not.
justin66 2y ago
"Generously," perhaps, but "selflessly" is a poor way to characterize any of his behavior.

felizuno 2y ago

After some seriously bad experiences with them I hope WPEngine loses their shirt. WRT their headless tooling the advertising versus the reality is insane. They held one of our clients hostage asking for $10k/month, we left for Kinsta for low hundreds per month and have had nothing but performance improvements and great support. I frankly don't like WordPress at all and don't really care about this lawsuit, but was burned so bad by WPEngine I can't help but stop by and say bad things about them.

Aloha 2y ago
I moved to WPEngine from a self hosted job, money well spent. I've never had a lick of trouble, and even though I'm pretty proficient at hosting LAMP apps, it's much less effort than self-hosting.
- felizuno 2y ago
  If you ported an already working app then you missed out on the unmitigated disaster of Atlas Content Modeler, which was advertised as production ready but slowly became abandonware without them ever really acknowledging it. I hope you never need to consume your content via GraphQL, because they absolutely can't handle it at reasonable traffic loads.
- bigiain 2y ago
  Same. Work hosts a bunch of client sites on WPEngine. We only ever had one problematic client who uploaded a heap of high bandwidth video and blew out their disk and bandwidth allocations by over 10x - WPEngine didn't cut them off, and worked with us/them to move their large media assets off the WP install (for reasons, the client went with AWS S3/CloudFront). We know WPE aren't the cheapest way to host WP, but if a client argues about the difference between a $5/month GoDaddy hosting plan and the $20/month starter plan on WPE - that's a pretty good indicator that they're not a right fit client for us. We have a few smaller agencies we'll hand them over to who are a better fit for them.

hashim-warren 2y ago

The complaint says Matt has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing. Is this a legal maneuver by Rachel Kassabian to have Matt lose the WordPress trademark? If so, that's deeply sad.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
Why is it sad? If he is self-dealing between wordpress.org and Automattic, that's a big no-no. It sure looks from his comments here like he sees the two as one entity. Also, the man outright said "use 'WP' since we think 'WP' is generic" and then cried "brand confusion" years later. If you want to avoid brand confusion, maybe don't tell people they can use your trademark?
psyopsy 2y ago
Why sad? If he defrauded the government, he’s got bigger problems than losing a trademark.
snowwrestler 2y ago
Matt doesn’t own the trademark, the Wordpress Foundation does. Losing a lawsuit to WP Engine would not change that.
- anon7000 2y ago
  I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, partly because they owned the trademark before the WP foundation was created.
FireBeyond 2y ago
You make it sound like it's a black eye against Kassabian. In fact, many people believe that absolutely, if he has been lying to the IRS and self-dealing his way into a $400M net worth, then absolutely he deserves to lose the license to that trademark.

tock 2y ago

Who pay's for this legally? Automattic or Matt personally?

dmix 2y ago
Lists defendants as: > AUTOMATTIC INC., a Delaware corporation; and MATTHEW CHARLES MULLENWEG, an individual Considering he controls Automattic as chairman and probably most voting rights he could probably make that choice himself. Besides maybe some legal filings he has to do personally paperwork-wise, maybe with his own lawyer. It's up to you how much effort you spend defending yourself. As long as the board/investors aren't too bothered by it.

isiahl 2y ago

For the record, since I’m seeing it a lot in this thread: Green names = new account

wokedang 2y ago
[flagged]
happyxpenguin 2y ago
Oh this is good info to know! I never had a desire to create an HN account but i've been using it more frequently since this whole thing started and finally made an account.
TZubiri 2y ago
Lol I used to think it was mods
- voyagerfan5761 2y ago
  For this, I blame Reddit. Yes, I thought the same when I was new.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

dopamean 2y ago

I cant imagine why in a million years Heather would consider leaving WPE to work for Automattic. It makes literally no sense.

nailer 2y ago
Likewise. Leadership role at successful business versus less important role at less successful business.
shrubble 2y ago
I readily admit that I have no knowledge about WPE’s internal affairs and I have no animus against them. That said a company above a certain size can have multiple issues that could cause a person to consider leaving; such as internal politicking, the private equity firm making management decisions that are distasteful, or even just a loss of the company’s original tight-knit community of employees turning into “another corporate entity”.

tock 2y ago

It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825

safety1st 2y ago
Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- stephenr 2y ago
  > WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good technical and architectural direction until this person was appointed, which is honestly just laughable. In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes are not just made, but embraced and defended. Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it our way is better". For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a statement for multiple executions the way native prepared statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has had built-in support for prepared statements (including parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
  - chippiewill 2y ago

kubectl_h 2y ago

> One such company that relied on Defendants’ promises was WPE, founded in 2010. WPE is a true champion of WordPress, devoting its entire business to WordPress over other similar open source platforms. In reliance on Defendants’ many promises, WPE invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community—only to see the petulant whims of Mullenweg inflict harm to its business and the community that has embraced it. Is lawsuit language usually so... dramatic? The tone of this document is weird...

lolinder 2y ago
Complaints usually are, yes. I'm not a lawyer, but each one I've read has been a bit over the top and it feels like they're written as much for public consumption as they are for the judge. Maybe it's with the jury in mind?
- kubectl_h 2y ago
  Interesting. This might be the first one I've ever read. Makes sense though and that was the vibe I got from sections: that this is more like an opening statement in ways.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The jury doesn't usually read the complaint. However, a lot of the words you see as dramatic have specific legal meanings. In this case "relied on promises" is in the language of the tort he is suing over. I don't think the "true champion" sentence has a specific meaning, but it is definitely written to imply that WPE enhanced the value of the WordPress brand.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    What about "petulant whims"? I don't think it's just legal language—I've read plenty of court opinions too, some dramatic, some not. Complaints seem particular prone to the dramatic.
    - 2y ago

nightowl_games 2y ago

The Stripe attribution stuff that WPEngine is accused of sounds potentially illegal. I don't think Automattic's trademark claims are fundamentally going to hold up. From the complaint: "WPE’s nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source software platform and plugin used for its clients’ websites are fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines and the practices of nearly all businesses in this space." I dont know what the settled trademark law is, but this seems like common sense to me. Everyone says 'WordPress' to refer to the software platform. Just seems like extortion, plain and simple. I get Matt's upset that WPEngine is making all this money, but that's par for the course when you release something open source. You simply need a better product if you want to beat WPEngine in the marketplace.

fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
They forked an open source plugin and changed the affiliate code in it along with their other changes. How could that be illegal?
- nightowl_games 2y ago
  Sounds like something that WooCommerce should have in their license or something. idk sounds like a pitfall to me. Why would anyone pay WooCommerce anything then? Just fork it and change the attribution code.
  - fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
    They can’t. All Wordpress plugins are required to be GPL, like Wordpress itself, and like the software Wordpress itself was forked from. The viral license they agreed to is working as intended. I don’t know what people are actually paying for.

shabgzer 2y ago

I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a separate issue.

curiousgal 2y ago
Yeah well in the real world circumstances are what matters. Something that may be benign is no longer so following his sad attempt at extorting them.
eXpl0it3r 2y ago
Not a lawyer, it likely becomes an issue, because a) by Matt's own words wordpress.org is operated and maintained by Automattic employees and thus b) the blocking essentially leads to competitive disadvantage and a general conflict of interest. But maybe there's also some law that can be leverage, that you can't just block one company, especially if it's some common good or so.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
In the real world, if you tell people X and insist that X is true, X becomes something of a binding promise on you. In this case X is "you can use the letters WP to imply WordPress in your branding." There are several torts around this sort of thing, like promissory estoppel.
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Not a lawyer, but I assume WP.org can ban whomever they like. Now, if they did it because WP.com asked them to, the non profit status becomes a question. Furthermore, WP hardcodes the URL for the resource, meaning you cannot self host the plugins even if you wanted.

syradar 2y ago

I have not used WP in a while but will recommend clients to not use WP Engine. The more I read about them the more they sound like grifters.

dramm 2y ago

Given Mullenweg's behavior I wish WP Engines and their very capable litigation attorneys nothing but the best of luck, which I doubt very much they will need. Jeez, how to torch a brand's reputation.

crop_rotation 2y ago

HN has reached a point where if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you will be treated worse than if you were simply doing bad stuff by default. WPEngine is not some mom and pop shop. The courts will decide whether WPEngine or Automattic is in the wrong here. But Automattic's contribution to Wordpress and the ecosystem simply dwarf WPEngine. Now for their crime of being champions of Open Source they will be judged in the eyes of HN. This is like HN praising MSFT for all small things and bashing Google for doing strictly less evil stuff than whatever Microsoft does (Bing in China censored vs dragonfly, windows full of ads, Edge with tons of shady features, Azure with the worst security).

usernamed7 2y ago
> if you do good deeds, you better be flawless or else you didn't read the filing and it shows
throw16180339 2y ago
I'm judging Matt because he cut off 1.5 million users from security updates. That's reason enough to consider him a bad actor.

legitster 2y ago

I've been a long Wordpress user and proponent for a long time. Until a week ago I had never heard the name Mullenweg. Regardless of who's in the right or wrong here (I have my opinions), my perception of Wordpress flipped a switch overnight. It went from this quiet, reliable, refreshingly boring open source platform to yet another cult of personality tech fiefdom.

fastball 2y ago
Seems a bit self-contradicting. If it actually was a cult of personality tech fiefdom, and you are a long-time Wordpress user, presumably you would've heard of Mullenweg before this? The fact that you hadn't indicates that it's not.
trog 2y ago
I'm in basically the same boat, but aside from a bit of eye rolling I think I've convinced myself I can just ignore this and safely continue to download wordpress.org/latest.zip when I need it and hack it into whatever shape is convenient - which is what I've always liked doing with it anyway.
MaxMatti 2y ago
Above a certain size all communities sooner or later turn into cults, most of the time around one or a few persons. The ones that you don't perceive as such you just haven't looked into close enough. I wish it were different but so far I have yet to find a community that doesn't fit that description. Not just open source, not just software, any community.
- grvdrm 2y ago
  Next up: Substack?
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Rhetoric question: how many Substackers use Notion to organize their writings?
2y ago

tock 2y ago

Also Matt, care to address this: https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-ceo-of-wordpress-com-cries-foul-and-threatens-me-with-legal-action-f116ac57d862 https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c... I'm speechless.

curiousgal 2y ago
Why would you be speechless? This is 100% on brand based on what I've been reading (ironically most of it written by him).

silverliver 2y ago

[flagged]

dgellow 2y ago

Is there an ELI5 of the situation? I didn’t follow what happened. The court document has details but is the PoV of one of the parties, that makes it an unreliable summary for people like me who know nothing about the case

chillfox 2y ago
1. Rich dude wants other rich corp to give him money. 2. Rich corp says no. 3. Rich dude has public meltdown. 4. Rich corp sues rich dude.
robjwells 2y ago
Mullenweg has for a little while claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the open-source WordPress project, that its branding causes confusion among users, and that it ships an inferior product that reflects badly on WordPress as a whole. WP Engine disputes this and sent Mullenweg & Automattic a cease-and-desist letter, intending to stop the disparaging comments. In reponse, Mullenweg cut off WP Engine customers from the theme and plugin repositories hosted at WordPress.org — which until recently people had believed to be under the control of the WordPress Foundation, but is actually under the personal control of Mullenweg. Now this lawsuit has been filed. Edit: Characters for the unaware: Matt Mullenweg: The "top" person in WordPress in its various forms, including the non-profit WordPress Foundation, and the for-profit company Automattic (whichs runs the for-profit WordPress.com host, among other things). WP Engine: A separate for-profit WordPress host.
- dgellow 2y ago
  Thanks!
jeanlucas 2y ago
Long post, writing this for myself as well: The players - WordPress is open source, under GPLv2; a least since 2011; - WordPress is managed by the WordPress Foundation since 2010 with Matthew Charles Mullenweg as director; - Automattic is a private company that owns and runs WordPress.com, whose CEO and founder is Matthew Charles Mullenweg; - WP Engine is a separated company that uses Wordpress that makes money by hosting WordPress since 2010; - WP Engine and Wordpress.com are direct competitors; - WordCamp is a conference run by volunteers that happens regularly, this year it happened between 17-24 of September -- What happened, afaik: - Sept 23: Matt calls WP Engine "the cancer of WordPress" on his blog [1][2][3] and says that it profits from the open source without contributing enough - Sept 24: WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic to “retract false, harmful, and disparaging statements”, after Matt Mullenweg called it a “cancer” [4] - Sept 25: Automattic sends a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, alleging unauthorized use of the WordPress trademark [5] and I quote "If you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine." - Sept 26: WP Engine is banned from Wordpress.org [6] breaking plugin updates from WP Engine - Same day: Matt on his personal blog says Automattic has "been attempting to make a licensing deal" with WP Engine "for a very long time, and all they have done is string us along" [7] and doubles down that this is about WP Engine's disrespecting WordPress trademarks - Oct 1st: Automattic made public [8][9] a seven-year agreement proposed to WP Engine in exchange for 8% of their revenue, the document has the sign date of Sept 20 (during WordCamp?) that could be paid in royalties and/or employees to contribute to WordPress.org; the document also states no forking of WordPress allowed - Oct 2nd (you are here): WP Engine sues Automattic AND Matt, Matt is here on this thread generating more evidence against himself in the comments [10]; the document has tweets, conversations, everything... And if it goes to a public trial more dirt will come up for sure; -- Extra facts (not necessarily related) - Automattic has invested on WP Engine in 2011 [11] - Automattic acquired Tumblr in 2019 for 3MM USD [12], and in Aug this year announced it was moving it to WordPress [13] - Drupal creator gives some insight on this feud and how Drupal deals with that [14] [1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-engine-a-cancer-to-wordpress-and-urges-community-to-switch-providers/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41619587 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 [5] https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-engine/ https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-... [6] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/ [7] https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/ [8] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet-wp-engine-inc.-automattic-trademark-license_09.19.2024-1.pdf https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet... [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718485 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726656 [11] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-series-a-financing/ https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-closes-1-2m-in-series-a-... [12] Auttomatic + Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/186964618222/automattic-tum... [13] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blogs-wordpress-automattic https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blog... [14] https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

zackerist 2y ago

This is a strong blow to WordPress, but we'll survive. When corporate interests go after the inventors, whatever the outcome, whoever wins, we'll all be left with a scar at the end. Matt has the longest-term vision among all the parties involved. WordPress is his brainchild and his life's duty to defend it. It's oblivious to think that this guy went after WPE for a few extra dollars. He knew going in that this would cost him a lot. He'll spend a ton on lawyers and courts, but he'll do it for reasons that some people cannot comprehend. I would fight to the death if someone threatened my child. Some may not even agree with on that.

fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago
He’s neglecting his child to have a fight with his neighbour.
- Loudergood 2y ago
  Not just neglecting the child, but using it as a weapon.

Havoc 2y ago

There is no way this ends well for Matt. Not with that giant paper trail about going nuclear and leveraging audience.

password4321 2y ago

Did not see a link yet to the previous brief discussion about an interview 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690667 On With Theo / T3.gg

stevenhubertron 2y ago

What I find crazy is we the people are taking sides and investing emotion into two corporations, neither of which have the best interests of their customers at heart. At the end of the day the only winner is who makes more money from this, we as users will continue to lose no matter the outcome. We have all become corporatists.

srmarm 2y ago

This whole situation is a negative sum game, everyone is going to come out worse off - Matt/WP/WP Engine, the project and all the end users. It's such a shame. If there's a solid legal argument from either side, let dispassionate legal teams deal with it in a dignified manner. As someone who defaults to wordpress as the bedrock of new projects, this instability is a massive turn off.

paxys 2y ago
Not everyone. The lawyers on both sides are going to get rich.

MangoCoffee 2y ago

it's sad to see people taking sides in this thread. Ultimately, this issue boils down to two corporations fighting over money

trickyager 2y ago

This lawsuit seems to be the prophesized exploding car covered in hammers [1]. The astounding part to me is that it's Matt's behavior itself that's making the car explode multiple times, sending hammers flying everywhere. [1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-users-making-memes-about-cars-and-hammers-tumblr-ceo-photomatts-so-called-meltdown-and-controversy-explained https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/why-are-tumblr-us...

vitalychernobyl 2y ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

alberth 2y ago

Can someone ELI5 this whole topic? Is the crux of the issue that WPE website use to say things like: "Start creating on WordPress today" or "Power your creativity on the #1 platform for WordPress" Which might have implied that WPE was official Wordpress? https://web.archive.org/web/20220105010059/https://wpengine.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220105010059/https://wpengine.... --- In comparison to other companies like Pressable that simply use marketing copy like: "WordPress Hosting that Means Business" https://pressable.com https://pressable.com Though this is also confusing, because Automattic acquired majority equity stake in Pressable. So Pressable is Automattic. https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/ https://poststatus.com/automattic-pressable/ --- There's so much happening with this story that I feel like I don't understand what the root issue is.

chuckadams 2y ago
It's about disabling revisions. Or private equity. Or not contributing back to core. Or trademarks. Or freeloading on w.org infrastructure. Or hacking Stripe plugins. Or whatever else might stick to the wall in this 18-hour period... Start with this: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991906/d7340f3b866d855b/ Then read the complaint: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... (also the post's link). It's highly readable, not dense legalese at all.
legitster 2y ago
The ELI5 of why this is so complicated is what everyone thought was "Wordpress" was actually a cluster of shady self-serving business dealings by Matt Mullenweg. The Wordpress Foundation does not actually own the name "Wordpress". The name is essentially owned by Matt Mullenweg and he licenses it out to the Foundation and other organizations which he approves of. Matt Mullenweg was personally displeased with certain aspects of WPEngine's business, asked for money from them, and then cut off all of WPEngine's customers from accessing shared Wordpress resources. And the justification he is using was WP Engine's infringement of the copyright.
- 2y ago

mikemitchelldev 2y ago

100% in support of photomatt on this. Matt, many of your critics are speaking loudly but everyone still loves you for what you've given to the open source community. Hopefully the differences will be resolved.

presspot 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation Just saying

mrlatinos 2y ago

Matt Mullenweg is a hypocritical troll who hides his greed behind a false defense of open source.