6 ms·

My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

87 points by madmanweb 2y ago

egeozcan 2y ago
> ...how it (the Wordpress community) has been made to depend on Matt’s leadership at Automattic’s infrastructure. And how that is a very bad thing. > This post is best read while listening to Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine. (There’s a jazzy cover if you are so inclined.) Well, I hope nobody needs to listen to "(This is what you asked for,) Heavy Is the Crown" when listening to the future developments :) I'm not on team WP Engine or Matt, and I have no personal stake in this (I don't use WordPress). But at this point, I’m concerned that things are going to crash and burn, impacting the average blogger who just wants to publish content - far more than they’d ever expect. I dislike Medium even more than I dislike the WordPress ecosystem.
- brtkdotse 2y ago
  Is WordPress even used for blogging anymore? In my view it’s more akin to Emacs or Jira - a platform to build whatever you want that out of the box just happens to be configured as a blog/text editor/bug tracker. I’d say this is the golden moment for Ghost to shine.
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    I would love to see ghost rise higher in all of this, but my experience is that it’s very, very hard to sell most clients on it. They have all heard from someone that Wordpress does everything, it’s the standard, it’ll give them more options down the line, etc. Ghost is more than enough quite often, but I wonder if a few more key features could convince a large amount of people to convert. Their editor is great, but making it more extendable would be a huge deal. I’ve dug into it several times now, but I don’t see a clear path to a maintainable plugin API for the editor that would allow you to add more cards at will by just throwing them into a directory for example. It’s possible, but how would you version plugins? Would the editor need to be decoupled from ghost well enough that you can install the version that supports your plugins best? How do you handle broken plugin content? What if someone stops maintaining a plugin; do all the users of it eternally stay on the last version of the editor that supports it? If that problem was solved I think a lot more people might come over to ghost as things like recipe cards, ad server integrations, form builders, and other popular tools made it into the editor. Yet, would that actually make ghost better? I think there’s a version of this that would be objectively better, but you’d have to be careful not to allow for all kinds of potential breakage and friction. Right now everything is fully integrated so there are no regressions caused by upgrades. It would be a shame to lose that. I wish I had more time to work on this. It’s a really fun, properly challenging problem.
  - aldavigdis 2y ago
    I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.) In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it. WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.
- georgehotelling 2y ago
  The thing about listening to a song as you read the post is a jab at Mullenweg's "This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed." on https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/
thimabi 2y ago
This whole affair has been a disaster for everyone involved. Just a ton of dirty laundry being aired in public… Time is ripe for a new publishing ecosystem — more secure, with less cruft, and preferably better governance. But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on.
- sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
  > But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on. Right. But this is because of a very simple, undeniable fact that is unpopular around these here parts: There is nothing close to as good as WordPress at everything WordPress can be made to do. No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. There are no real PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to install, configure or use. There are no CMSes that can get close to being as good for a bespoke mix of small ecommerce, member systems, digital downloads sales, form handling etc. Hosted or not hosted. Say what you like about the block editor (personally I think it is an impressive but ultimately ten-year-plus project). But TinyMCE and shortcodes has proved painfully non-robust and there is no other block editor on an open source CMS that gets close to being open-ended enough for an extensible CMS. Gutenberg has some strengths over hosted solutions like e.g. the Squarespace editor. There is no open-source CMS that rolls out security patches automatically the way Wordpress does, or can do so at the scale WordPress does. HN people may dislike this, but it has not been out-competed because it is actually basically competent and extensible, and has no real jack-of-all-trades competitors at all. There's nothing with this level of contribution, extensibility, attention to detail, longevity or backwards compatibility. Personally I think WP Engine needed a bit of a straightener; there are things they should not have done and there are things they could do. But this was not the way to go about it. The damage Matt is doing, in particular with the "Secure Custom Fields" gaslighting bullshit is among the most depressing examples of willingly setting one's own hair on fire that I've ever seen. (Edited for clarity, but sorry everyone, I'm waiting for a new coffee grinder to be delivered this morning)
  - pell 2y ago
    >No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use. There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and themes, the webhosters which optimize for WordPress, the developers and companies which are dedicated to developing for, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites.
ndheebebe 2y ago
> Also that WP Engine was not actually providing WordPress because they were limiting a single resource-heavy feature. As if WordPress.com hasn’t been going even further in providing a limited WordPress experience since the beginning. I was thinking the same thing! > This means that many of the people who work for Automattic are technically external contractors despite acting on behalf of the company, holding business cards with the company logo or conducting WordCamp talks on behalf of the company. (Which rendered legal action about what I endured as good as impossible, as I did not have any rights as an actual employee and my contract was with Automattic in California, under US law.) Many countries use duck tests for employment both for taxation and employment law. Does it quack like employment? Are you given instructions? Are you forbidden from subcontracting? Is there a fixed hourly rate? Are you required to work set hours? Etc. And possibly human rights based law would pierce both anyway. For example you can be discriminated against as a customer in a shop and sue.
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  Author here. The US/CA statues of limitations are also extremely short compared to what I am used to, so I was too late for to perform any legal action over this stateside after I recovered somewhat from all of this. (There may be a way to go against the EU subsidiaries, but I'm not doing it alone.) (Anyway. Matt. If you're reading this, then I've seen you've been very generous with your checkbook for the past couple of weeks. I am open to burying the axe to a certain extent but that would require paying for estimated unpaid overtime and on-call hours, providing proper compensation for keeping me for almost a year on a trialmattician contract and destroying my mental and financial well-being among other things. You know how to find me. If not, I'll see you in Brussels.)
  - ndheebebe 2y ago
    Sorry to hear that (about the mental and financial health). Hope it gets better. Appreciate the reply! I also commented more for the general readership of HN. Rights are kept by exercising them. You rarely want to go to court (maybe 0.001 times per lifetime) but just indicating you know your rights goes a long way. Read your country's laws - there are probably friendly descriptions online. Ideally work somewhere where this is not needed though. For example if the company is hostile to basic things like if you country has sick leave and you take it and it is an issue then I would say move on quickly. Unless you are happy. Maybe they are paying a lot or you are a founder, that would be different. So know your rights. Understand a contract is subject to wider laws and some conditions may be severed and unenforcable. Really. If I had to choose learn Rust or learn some law. Learn some law. IANAL, but a citizen, which is the point!
MobileVet 2y ago
> What not everyone knows is that those sites are mirrored over to the WordPress.com infrastructure, including WooCommerce customer data and purchase histories — and that infrastructure is as far as I understand the GDPR — not compatible with European privacy regulations Yikes. Not surprising in this age of data hoovering, but definitely sketchy and likely illegal in the EU. I guess it follows the other point about Automattic ignoring laws outside of the US
- soco 2y ago
  I might be wrong but the impression is that every US company tries the same, with different rates of success, And I don't only mean SaaS companies, or even IT. And I also don't mean unknowingly, but actively trying to impose their usual ways.
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  I still find it confusing that you can both claim to be GDPR compliant and also that only US law apply to your operations. Automattic was also claiming compliance via the EU-US Privacy Shield which had already been made invalid by the European Court of Justice for a while.
LordAtlas 2y ago
Judging from this post, it seems there are lots of regulatory holes in the way Automattic operates in the EU. Mullenweg needs to be careful that the eye of the EU doesn't turn its gaze towards him and his company, or he could be in some trouble. But I can't say I'm surprised by his belief that he only answers to US laws and jurisdiction.
- auggierose 2y ago
  > that the eye of the EU doesn't turn its gaze towards him EU = Sauron ?
  - abirch 2y ago
    They built the one ring to rule them all.
    - auggierose 2y ago
      Actually, I am building that one, so probably the EU isn't Sauron after all.
- nikdoof 2y ago
  The mention of the self-employed employees could be interesting to HRMC in the UK, if they are skirting around IR35 it could end up with them being handed a large tax bill. Also their UK branch is called "MINISTRY OF AUTOMATTIC"... really.
  - aldavigdis 2y ago
    Yeah. The Irish one is called Aut O'Mattic from the top of my head. Very Professional.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  I would argue that his recent behaviour warrants Automattic (and WordPress, as its dependence) being classed as a Designated Gatekeeper by the EU Commission under the Digital Markets Act.
bullenweg 2y ago
> WordPress and Automattic as Subject to EU Legislation I'm loath to defend Mullenweg but WordPress.com is not 43% of the internet. WordPress (the software) is used by 43% of websites, WordPress.com is used by a few million, making it smaller than Wix, Squarespace and even other WordPress hosts like WPEngine.com. Automattic has no relationship with a meaningful amount of end-user data.
- closewith 2y ago
  The argument seems to be about specific services like Jetpack, which is not limited to Wordpress.com. I also don't think it's clear that the legal boundaries between the various entities (the person, Automattic, Wordpress Foundation, Wordpress.org, Wordpress.com, etc) would hold, particularly in the EU and particularly where the beneficial owners are identical or have large overlap.
- ndheebebe 2y ago
  How does Jetpack play into that? Wordpress.anything in general must be a data juristional nightmare. Every plugin has access to UGC and could be sending bits of that anywhere.
  - bullenweg 2y ago
    Jetpack the plugin does not send end-user data home, only Jetpack the paid service does that, the customer base of Jetpack is small. If a plugin's theoretical access to user data is enough to cause GDPR responsibilities for the developer that would have broad ramifications across the world of open-source, as code written by some developer in their free time is being used by every company.
    - ahumanoverhere 2y ago
      This is factually incorrect. Jetpack, even the free version, sends all sorts of data over to Automattic. Automattic has access to the details of any site running Jetpack. This may have changed with the shift to modularized separate plugins but prior to 2022, there was a ton of data being sent to Automattic.
Havoc 2y ago
> Matt seems to treat what happens on WordPress.org to be within his personal domain, while those who contribute generally assume that their contributions are within the WordPress Foundation’s scope That seems to be the crux of the issue. At least with respect to the now what question. Thinking more and more this is going to require a substantial rethink of the entire thing well beyond a fork. Especially if Matt sticks to his guns
- Raed667 2y ago
  We thought there were 2 entities: WordPress.com & WordPress.org , but turns out those 2 are basically the same, but there is still a 3rd one WordPress Foundation (that is not WordPress.org apparently)
  - aldavigdis 2y ago
    Then there's Audrey Capital LLC, WordPress Community Services (which is a B corp owned by the foundation), an array of Automattic subsidiaries around the world.
briandear 2y ago
Can someone explain the whole drama of all of this? I have heard of “Wordpress” and I have heard of “WP Engine” and I have heard that .com and .org are apparently not the same thing. But other than that this feels like walking into someone else’s family argument halfway through it. I don’t know what “side” to be on, nor what those “sides” even are.
- prettyStandard 2y ago
  Basically WPEngine vs AutoMATTic (emphasis mine) WPEngine is private equity(I personally like their founder, find his talks) Matt seems to be a founder gone crazy(I don't know much about him) .com and .org are both controlled by Matt. .com is Matts business side .org is Matts non-profit side WPEngine is another company All of this seems to be very unfortunate. Even if Matt has valid claims, he seems to have shot himself in the foot, and lost community support.
  - aldavigdis 2y ago
    His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount. I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.
- Karellen 2y ago
  A really good primer on the whole background is LWN's recent "The WordPress mess" https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/ https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/ They have a follow-up "WordPress retaliation impacts community". It's currently subscribers-only for another week, but they do allow subscribers to generate free links provided subscribers don't abuse that - which I don't think this should count as? https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/993895/8482b183b2dcb418/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/993895/8482b183b2dcb418/
- csomar 2y ago
belorn 2y ago
> I can’t see how Matt’s recent ideas on the rights to use the WordPress logo, the name or the wordmark requiring companies that he doesn’t like to pay up are in compliance with the GPL license. Trademarks and logos are not attached to the software license. The Linux kernel has a trademark page (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark) which is separated from the gplv2 license. Python has their own trademark page (https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) which is separated from the bsd-like python license that the python software use. Take any major free software project and they will likely have a trademark legal page detailing what is or isn't allowed, which will be separated from the software license. Neither the free software foundation nor Open Source Initiative provide trademark under same terms as the software license. FSF specifically has the following statement: "While our software is available under a free and open source software license, the copyright license does not include an implied right or license to use our trademark" (https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/ModelTrademarkGuidelinesv1.0.pdf https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/ModelTrademarkGu...) OSI also has a guide for their trademarks (https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines), which limits how people and company uses wordmarks and icons. OSI says in their introduction: "In fact, the law obligates trademark owners to police their marks and prevent the use of confusingly similar names by third parties" Last, there are historical examples where non-profits that produce free software, that being Mozilla, was in a trademark conflict with Debian, a project based on free software. The Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute resulted in Firefox, licensed under gpl, being renamed Iceweasel with a new icon that replaced the original icon that is owned by Mozilla. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_trademark_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema...) That 10 years dispute ended in 2016.
- g-b-r 2y ago
  I wouldn't take Mozilla's handling of trademarks as an example to follow. They were the first to be so drastic in the open source world, and they were and probably still are despised for that
  - belorn 2y ago
aeuropean12 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this insightful post. I have used WP for more than a decade and must say these are very serious points, especially considering EU legislation and the questionable behavior by Mr. Mullenweg. This will be interesting reading to EU legislators and lawyers working in the IP and privacy space.
xwowsersx 2y ago
I'm attempting to move my blog from WordPress to Ghost. There's a WP plugin for exporting to Ghost. The zip format wouldn't work, only the json one did, but now I'm missing images :( Anyone have experience exporting from WP and importing to Ghost?

87 points by madmanweb 2y ago

> ...how it (the Wordpress community) has been made to depend on Matt’s leadership at Automattic’s infrastructure. And how that is a very bad thing. > This post is best read while listening to Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine. (There’s a jazzy cover if you are so inclined.) Well, I hope nobody needs to listen to "(This is what you asked for,) Heavy Is the Crown" when listening to the future developments :) I'm not on team WP Engine or Matt, and I have no personal stake in this (I don't use WordPress). But at this point, I’m concerned that things are going to crash and burn, impacting the average blogger who just wants to publish content - far more than they’d ever expect. I dislike Medium even more than I dislike the WordPress ecosystem.

brtkdotse 2y ago
Is WordPress even used for blogging anymore? In my view it’s more akin to Emacs or Jira - a platform to build whatever you want that out of the box just happens to be configured as a blog/text editor/bug tracker. I’d say this is the golden moment for Ghost to shine.
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  I would love to see ghost rise higher in all of this, but my experience is that it’s very, very hard to sell most clients on it. They have all heard from someone that Wordpress does everything, it’s the standard, it’ll give them more options down the line, etc. Ghost is more than enough quite often, but I wonder if a few more key features could convince a large amount of people to convert. Their editor is great, but making it more extendable would be a huge deal. I’ve dug into it several times now, but I don’t see a clear path to a maintainable plugin API for the editor that would allow you to add more cards at will by just throwing them into a directory for example. It’s possible, but how would you version plugins? Would the editor need to be decoupled from ghost well enough that you can install the version that supports your plugins best? How do you handle broken plugin content? What if someone stops maintaining a plugin; do all the users of it eternally stay on the last version of the editor that supports it? If that problem was solved I think a lot more people might come over to ghost as things like recipe cards, ad server integrations, form builders, and other popular tools made it into the editor. Yet, would that actually make ghost better? I think there’s a version of this that would be objectively better, but you’d have to be careful not to allow for all kinds of potential breakage and friction. Right now everything is fully integrated so there are no regressions caused by upgrades. It would be a shame to lose that. I wish I had more time to work on this. It’s a really fun, properly challenging problem.
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.) In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it. WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.
georgehotelling 2y ago
The thing about listening to a song as you read the post is a jab at Mullenweg's "This post should be read while listening to Wish by Joshua Redman. The writing is synchronized to the music reading speed." on https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/ https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/

thimabi 2y ago

This whole affair has been a disaster for everyone involved. Just a ton of dirty laundry being aired in public… Time is ripe for a new publishing ecosystem — more secure, with less cruft, and preferably better governance. But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on.

sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
> But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on. Right. But this is because of a very simple, undeniable fact that is unpopular around these here parts: There is nothing close to as good as WordPress at everything WordPress can be made to do. No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. There are no real PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to install, configure or use. There are no CMSes that can get close to being as good for a bespoke mix of small ecommerce, member systems, digital downloads sales, form handling etc. Hosted or not hosted. Say what you like about the block editor (personally I think it is an impressive but ultimately ten-year-plus project). But TinyMCE and shortcodes has proved painfully non-robust and there is no other block editor on an open source CMS that gets close to being open-ended enough for an extensible CMS. Gutenberg has some strengths over hosted solutions like e.g. the Squarespace editor. There is no open-source CMS that rolls out security patches automatically the way Wordpress does, or can do so at the scale WordPress does. HN people may dislike this, but it has not been out-competed because it is actually basically competent and extensible, and has no real jack-of-all-trades competitors at all. There's nothing with this level of contribution, extensibility, attention to detail, longevity or backwards compatibility. Personally I think WP Engine needed a bit of a straightener; there are things they should not have done and there are things they could do. But this was not the way to go about it. The damage Matt is doing, in particular with the "Secure Custom Fields" gaslighting bullshit is among the most depressing examples of willingly setting one's own hair on fire that I've ever seen. (Edited for clarity, but sorry everyone, I'm waiting for a new coffee grinder to be delivered this morning)
- pell 2y ago
  >No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use. There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and themes, the webhosters which optimize for WordPress, the developers and companies which are dedicated to developing for, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites.

ndheebebe 2y ago

> Also that WP Engine was not actually providing WordPress because they were limiting a single resource-heavy feature. As if WordPress.com hasn’t been going even further in providing a limited WordPress experience since the beginning. I was thinking the same thing! > This means that many of the people who work for Automattic are technically external contractors despite acting on behalf of the company, holding business cards with the company logo or conducting WordCamp talks on behalf of the company. (Which rendered legal action about what I endured as good as impossible, as I did not have any rights as an actual employee and my contract was with Automattic in California, under US law.) Many countries use duck tests for employment both for taxation and employment law. Does it quack like employment? Are you given instructions? Are you forbidden from subcontracting? Is there a fixed hourly rate? Are you required to work set hours? Etc. And possibly human rights based law would pierce both anyway. For example you can be discriminated against as a customer in a shop and sue.

aldavigdis 2y ago
Author here. The US/CA statues of limitations are also extremely short compared to what I am used to, so I was too late for to perform any legal action over this stateside after I recovered somewhat from all of this. (There may be a way to go against the EU subsidiaries, but I'm not doing it alone.) (Anyway. Matt. If you're reading this, then I've seen you've been very generous with your checkbook for the past couple of weeks. I am open to burying the axe to a certain extent but that would require paying for estimated unpaid overtime and on-call hours, providing proper compensation for keeping me for almost a year on a trialmattician contract and destroying my mental and financial well-being among other things. You know how to find me. If not, I'll see you in Brussels.)
- ndheebebe 2y ago
  Sorry to hear that (about the mental and financial health). Hope it gets better. Appreciate the reply! I also commented more for the general readership of HN. Rights are kept by exercising them. You rarely want to go to court (maybe 0.001 times per lifetime) but just indicating you know your rights goes a long way. Read your country's laws - there are probably friendly descriptions online. Ideally work somewhere where this is not needed though. For example if the company is hostile to basic things like if you country has sick leave and you take it and it is an issue then I would say move on quickly. Unless you are happy. Maybe they are paying a lot or you are a founder, that would be different. So know your rights. Understand a contract is subject to wider laws and some conditions may be severed and unenforcable. Really. If I had to choose learn Rust or learn some law. Learn some law. IANAL, but a citizen, which is the point!

MobileVet 2y ago

> What not everyone knows is that those sites are mirrored over to the WordPress.com infrastructure, including WooCommerce customer data and purchase histories — and that infrastructure is as far as I understand the GDPR — not compatible with European privacy regulations Yikes. Not surprising in this age of data hoovering, but definitely sketchy and likely illegal in the EU. I guess it follows the other point about Automattic ignoring laws outside of the US

soco 2y ago
I might be wrong but the impression is that every US company tries the same, with different rates of success, And I don't only mean SaaS companies, or even IT. And I also don't mean unknowingly, but actively trying to impose their usual ways.
aldavigdis 2y ago
I still find it confusing that you can both claim to be GDPR compliant and also that only US law apply to your operations. Automattic was also claiming compliance via the EU-US Privacy Shield which had already been made invalid by the European Court of Justice for a while.

LordAtlas 2y ago

Judging from this post, it seems there are lots of regulatory holes in the way Automattic operates in the EU. Mullenweg needs to be careful that the eye of the EU doesn't turn its gaze towards him and his company, or he could be in some trouble. But I can't say I'm surprised by his belief that he only answers to US laws and jurisdiction.

auggierose 2y ago
> that the eye of the EU doesn't turn its gaze towards him EU = Sauron ?
- abirch 2y ago
  They built the one ring to rule them all.
  - auggierose 2y ago
    Actually, I am building that one, so probably the EU isn't Sauron after all.
nikdoof 2y ago
The mention of the self-employed employees could be interesting to HRMC in the UK, if they are skirting around IR35 it could end up with them being handed a large tax bill. Also their UK branch is called "MINISTRY OF AUTOMATTIC"... really.
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  Yeah. The Irish one is called Aut O'Mattic from the top of my head. Very Professional.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
aldavigdis 2y ago
I would argue that his recent behaviour warrants Automattic (and WordPress, as its dependence) being classed as a Designated Gatekeeper by the EU Commission under the Digital Markets Act.

bullenweg 2y ago

> WordPress and Automattic as Subject to EU Legislation I'm loath to defend Mullenweg but WordPress.com is not 43% of the internet. WordPress (the software) is used by 43% of websites, WordPress.com is used by a few million, making it smaller than Wix, Squarespace and even other WordPress hosts like WPEngine.com. Automattic has no relationship with a meaningful amount of end-user data.

closewith 2y ago
The argument seems to be about specific services like Jetpack, which is not limited to Wordpress.com. I also don't think it's clear that the legal boundaries between the various entities (the person, Automattic, Wordpress Foundation, Wordpress.org, Wordpress.com, etc) would hold, particularly in the EU and particularly where the beneficial owners are identical or have large overlap.
ndheebebe 2y ago
How does Jetpack play into that? Wordpress.anything in general must be a data juristional nightmare. Every plugin has access to UGC and could be sending bits of that anywhere.
- bullenweg 2y ago
  Jetpack the plugin does not send end-user data home, only Jetpack the paid service does that, the customer base of Jetpack is small. If a plugin's theoretical access to user data is enough to cause GDPR responsibilities for the developer that would have broad ramifications across the world of open-source, as code written by some developer in their free time is being used by every company.
  - ahumanoverhere 2y ago
    This is factually incorrect. Jetpack, even the free version, sends all sorts of data over to Automattic. Automattic has access to the details of any site running Jetpack. This may have changed with the shift to modularized separate plugins but prior to 2022, there was a ton of data being sent to Automattic.

Havoc 2y ago

> Matt seems to treat what happens on WordPress.org to be within his personal domain, while those who contribute generally assume that their contributions are within the WordPress Foundation’s scope That seems to be the crux of the issue. At least with respect to the now what question. Thinking more and more this is going to require a substantial rethink of the entire thing well beyond a fork. Especially if Matt sticks to his guns

Raed667 2y ago
We thought there were 2 entities: WordPress.com & WordPress.org , but turns out those 2 are basically the same, but there is still a 3rd one WordPress Foundation (that is not WordPress.org apparently)
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  Then there's Audrey Capital LLC, WordPress Community Services (which is a B corp owned by the foundation), an array of Automattic subsidiaries around the world.

briandear 2y ago

Can someone explain the whole drama of all of this? I have heard of “Wordpress” and I have heard of “WP Engine” and I have heard that .com and .org are apparently not the same thing. But other than that this feels like walking into someone else’s family argument halfway through it. I don’t know what “side” to be on, nor what those “sides” even are.

prettyStandard 2y ago
Basically WPEngine vs AutoMATTic (emphasis mine) WPEngine is private equity(I personally like their founder, find his talks) Matt seems to be a founder gone crazy(I don't know much about him) .com and .org are both controlled by Matt. .com is Matts business side .org is Matts non-profit side WPEngine is another company All of this seems to be very unfortunate. Even if Matt has valid claims, he seems to have shot himself in the foot, and lost community support.
- aldavigdis 2y ago
  His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount. I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.
Karellen 2y ago
A really good primer on the whole background is LWN's recent "The WordPress mess" https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/ https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/ They have a follow-up "WordPress retaliation impacts community". It's currently subscribers-only for another week, but they do allow subscribers to generate free links provided subscribers don't abuse that - which I don't think this should count as? https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/993895/8482b183b2dcb418/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/993895/8482b183b2dcb418/
csomar 2y ago

belorn 2y ago

> I can’t see how Matt’s recent ideas on the rights to use the WordPress logo, the name or the wordmark requiring companies that he doesn’t like to pay up are in compliance with the GPL license. Trademarks and logos are not attached to the software license. The Linux kernel has a trademark page (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark) which is separated from the gplv2 license. Python has their own trademark page (https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) which is separated from the bsd-like python license that the python software use. Take any major free software project and they will likely have a trademark legal page detailing what is or isn't allowed, which will be separated from the software license. Neither the free software foundation nor Open Source Initiative provide trademark under same terms as the software license. FSF specifically has the following statement: "While our software is available under a free and open source software license, the copyright license does not include an implied right or license to use our trademark" (https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/ModelTrademarkGuidelinesv1.0.pdf https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/ModelTrademarkGu...) OSI also has a guide for their trademarks (https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines), which limits how people and company uses wordmarks and icons. OSI says in their introduction: "In fact, the law obligates trademark owners to police their marks and prevent the use of confusingly similar names by third parties" Last, there are historical examples where non-profits that produce free software, that being Mozilla, was in a trademark conflict with Debian, a project based on free software. The Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute resulted in Firefox, licensed under gpl, being renamed Iceweasel with a new icon that replaced the original icon that is owned by Mozilla. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_trademark_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema...) That 10 years dispute ended in 2016.

g-b-r 2y ago
I wouldn't take Mozilla's handling of trademarks as an example to follow. They were the first to be so drastic in the open source world, and they were and probably still are despised for that
- belorn 2y ago

aeuropean12 2y ago

Thank you for sharing this insightful post. I have used WP for more than a decade and must say these are very serious points, especially considering EU legislation and the questionable behavior by Mr. Mullenweg. This will be interesting reading to EU legislators and lawyers working in the IP and privacy space.

xwowsersx 2y ago

I'm attempting to move my blog from WordPress to Ghost. There's a WP plugin for exporting to Ghost. The zip format wouldn't work, only the json one did, but now I'm missing images :( Anyone have experience exporting from WP and importing to Ghost?