The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities.
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine.
Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine.
Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.
If that’s the case, I’d like to hear from Matt about this. I’ve known him for years, and I don’t think he is unaware of conflicts like these. In fact I’ve seen him be deeply thoughtful about complex problems in the past. He’s not perfect (who is?), but he really does try.
Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.
> Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
there is a level of actions that are so bad that intent doesnt actually matter anymore. i would say matt has crossed that line here.
ThePrimeagen just did an interview with him, the video is also available on youtube now too.
Not the best interview IMO since prime didn't have much time to prepare questions / topics, and so he is very much "firing from the hip" but you'll get to hear matt go into detail about this topic.
You could also draw parallels from Drupal's death spiral that kicked off when (at the behest of corporate clients) Aquia decided to pivot to "large core" architecture and tossed the bulk of the community overboard in the process.
> The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities.
> Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?
And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?
Were it to go to trial, legal discovery would be fun. How many internal conversations were had about, “Those jerks at WPEngine are eating our lunch”. Rather than, “I am truly concerned about how the trademark is being confused by this one specific successful company. Whatever can we do?”
Civil discovery isn’t a public process. The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public, and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public,
Not directly, but they can enter it as evidence into the lawsuit, in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it. Absolutely parties try to get embarrassing information exposed to the media in this way. They only can do that if it is plausibly relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit-but internal conversations in which executives are attacking the company suing them very likely are.
> in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it.
Motions to seal evidence are routinely granted by courts in civil matters. Parties can try to get embarrassing information entered into the public record, but they have to convince a judge, and that’s often an uphill battle. Courts don’t like to be used as a tool for private parties to air the others’ dirty laundry.
I was more thinking that this would be government intervention regarding the non-profit status. Discovery would still be secret, but probably a smoking gun there that the organization is not independent of the commercial entity.
As far as I am aware, the WP.org”s (or is it the foundation?) actions are distasteful, but they are allowed to ban whomever they like.
> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public
Well certainly.
> and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
In this case that kind of sensitive information absolutely wouldn't be able to be redacted (successfully) because those conversations would be entirely germane.
WP Engine could file a complaint with the IRS about tax exempt status abuse. But that would be a heck of an escalation, and even more damaging to the WordPress ecosystem than Matt’s ridiculous actions so far.
But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.
There is a standard, numbered IRS form for this exact purpose. Having once drafted a copy once, they do indeed require you to submit some kind of narrative and supporting documentation that there is some kind of impropriety in relation to their particular tax exempt status.
It’s not clear to me that WordPress.org has done that. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask WP Engine to pay WordPress.org some kind of fair compensation for the infrastructure demands they induce.
Sure, if they put the same requirements to pay on everyone. But specifically targeting one major competitor to the for profit company that is controlled by the same person who controls the nonprofit?
That gets into a pretty.sticky situation real quick.
I agree. And whether or not Automattic gets the money or WordPress.org does matter, but so does the way any such transaction is structured.
If Automattic is an infrastructure vendor (in a technical sense at least) to WordPress.org, it’s still reasonable that Automattic doesn’t want to just give its competitors free infrastructure.
I own a hosting business that’s heavily built upon WordPress and even I — at a scale immensely smaller than WP Engine - CDN some of my critical plugins and themes myself. (For a lot of reasons.)
WP Engine is absolutely massive. The load they put on systems that they consume from isn’t trivial. Asking for remuneration from a competitor that is using your services, according to their means, isn’t anticompetitive.
If a8c wants WPE to mirror the plugin and theme repos, they maybe should have asked for that. MM led out of the gate with his now-well-worn "existential threat" rhetoric and actually managed to escalate it from there. As one reddit commentator put it, "you catch more flies with honey than with lighter fluid".
The WP ecosystem needs mirrors anyway, but at this point I think it needs outright alternate repos, not under control of a8c in any way. This could be an attractive proposition to plugin/theme devs, because in this case, MM has been poisoning his own well for some time now (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511). What are the odds that MM will accept a patch to WP core that allows alternate plugin/theme stores?
At the rate things are going though, a hard fork of the GPL'd core is looking more attractive every day. It just needs a catchy name. ClassicPress is already out there, but ... meh. How about FreePress?
To me, I think it's more that it shows they're one entity and then it is a massive issue about the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years. But, I guess we'll see because WP Engine is going to come out swinging on this. They have to.
There is also the fact that WP Engine sponsored a WordPress Foundation event and then was kicked out of it because of this dispute. The WordPress foundation accepted 75k knowing what WP Engine was doing and then didn't honour the deal.
This is also the most shocking thing to me, that Matt seems to be very blasé about using Automattic and the foundation more or less interchangeably and in a very public way to further his goals. So other than the tax writeoffs what was the point of creating the foundation? Where is this guy's legal counsel? Surely they have to be screaming their heads off right now because from the outside every indication now is that the Foundation is really just an extension of Automattic that exists to dodge taxes and whether it is claiming its nonprofit status legally is now becoming a question mark. This is so far for Matt to have fallen and taken WordPress with him
They're represented by Perkins Coie. Who, even as someone from the EU who doesn't do any legal stuff, I have heard of and know are very good. I think they'll be kind of loving this mess. Because even though this is a mess, they're going to get paid to deal with the mess.
If the non-profit is doing something for the benefit of the for-profit it’s the reverse of a donation - unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company.
> unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Essentially laundering money through the 501c3 to try and negate taxes. In this case actual money never changed hands, but what is the financial value of cutting off your competitor from the theme/plugin repo?...
this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately.
even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.
the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
It also explicitly says you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that. I thought it might be common, but the other big providers do not use WordPress in their product names.
Probably (the trademark equivalent of) fair use, because WordPress is what they are selling. If I have a basket of windows disks to sell, I can write Microsoft Windows on my price list because the thing I'm selling is called that.
This analogy came up recently when discussing Elasticsearch. It's flawed.
Free and open source software does not, and has never, required giving up trademark rights. I think the GPLv3 is even explicit about this.
In the Windows case it's fair use of the trademark because you're reselling something you previously bought. That's not applicable here.
WordPress is open source software, but a hosting service has a variety of characteristics unrelated to the nominal software. Besides, WP Engine are disabling key features of the product: of course that's misleading.
Come now, this seems to be a huge abuse of "trademark" of a term. Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move. I'm gonna start adding it to my list... OpenAI, Mozilla Foundation, Wordpress.
Edit. Side note:
I looked up the Linux trademark usage guidelines. Looks like half the internet is infringing on this one too if you squint. So maybe this all boils down to a case of "Don't be a jerk" that some entities adhere to when it comes to protecting their trademark, whilst others like Automattic use it to bully competitors.
Or it's WP Engine being a jerk, and this is just a way to put some pressure on them.
Look at it this way - WordPress is the #1 platform for websites. It is a free, Open-source, and huge asset to the community. Are you going to shit on the guys who made it and gave it away because you have some sympathy for some overpriced, hosting company?
If the Wordpress team disappeared, it would be a tragedy. If WP Engine disappeared it would be nothing.
> Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move.
I get the "ick" factor here, but there doesn't really seem to be a better alternative. If "OpenSourceWare" isn't trademarked by non-profit "OpenSourceSoft", the options are either a) no trademark, and it's a free-for-all where the biggest marketing budget and SEO teams get the biggest return on mindshare and search results or b) Oracle gets the trademark and nobody else is allowed to use it.
The page you linked applies to trademarks owned by the Linux Foundation. The Linux trademark is actually owned by Linus Torvalds, not by the Linux Foundation; and different rules apply to it, as your link notes.
>For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy.
if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service.
and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
Up until this dispute the WordPress trademark policy contained this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Now it's been updated to say this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
It's pretty clear that WP Engine has been in compliance with the old trademark policy and that the new one is acknowledging that they don't have legal standing to demand anything about the WP abbreviation (not least because they waited so long to complain about the usage) so they're instead inserting a petulant and childish slight.
microsoft doesn’t have a trademark on “ms” either. like i said, if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
this is going to be just as flimsy of a defense as “mikerowesoft”
> if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
Of course not. They will (if it goes that far) point out that their use of WP is explicitly in line with the trademark holder's public guidance on that exact point.
You can't tell everybody that it's fine to use wording like that and then sue them when they do it.
There's also "estoppel by laches", which boils down to "you waited too long". Guarantee that's going to be part of WPE's defense too. Then there's the fact that a8c actually invested in WPE while this supposed infringement was taking place.
Trademarks are largely (but not exclusively) about preventing consumer confusion. I can offer a course called "Learn how to use Excel like a pro" and not get sued by MS, as long as I'm not making it seem like I'm Microsoft.
Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.
I've been thinking about this all week since this WP stuff kicked off. You know what's funny, as far as I know I was the first senior person to have a conversation with Ubuntu about that from the DO side, and as far as I recall it (granted it was a long time ago) it was basically them: "Uhm, you can't do that"- me: "maybe, not sure, but probably better to be friends tho yah?" them: "yah" me: "k" - dunno how it is today, but at least till I left, that was how it remained, always earned a shit load of respect in my book, not sure how it'd have gone for us if they decided to really get nasty, but either way, super grateful they didn't, good job Ubuntu people!!!!
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.
In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".
Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.
They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.
I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).
>>>we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. Try using “wp” instead, or another variation...
Don't condone confusing ip policy if you don't want to end up with confusing product names, especially in a resurgence of 'the domain name is the product' of unlimited tlds.
Definitely bad IP advice, but I think it helps WP Engine to be able to say "look even all the various 'official' Wordpress sites said our name was fine for years".
Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
They will try to move towards enterprise infrastructure with v7 but will probably fail as their (third party) devs are not that good.
I’ve actually seen a lot of PHP code for Wordpress, wrote some, and the only way to get it right today is to make use of a GPT, cause their (WP’s) internals are so many and so weird and inconsistent sometimes.
> Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
I wonder are you very young? People were saying this a decade, even 15 years, ago
I can confirm WordPress felt like it was fundamentally flawed in 2009, yet it amazingly continues to grow in market share.
I think they’ve succeeded by staying stable with minimal large changes for 20 years and maintaining strong backward compatibility. Meanwhile the rest of the web chases the latest technology cycles, where everything needs to be redone every 5 years because there’s a new way to do things.
The developers who make WordPress understand and are pretty empathetic to their audience / user base, and don’t expect them to put in much work to install and maintain their website.
Other technologies seem to almost intentionally create backwards compatibilities in order to set user expectations that, yes you need to put in work to continue use our framework.
Not much younger anymore but still following Wordpress. This time the difference is GPT which writes and modifies html static site as if it was WP render.
If they had an informal development in exchange for server access type relationship then that would qualify as some sort of obligation.
Doesn't really have anything to do with open source though. Haven't seen anything about matt/wordpress.org/Automattic trying to prevent them from using open source code.
Conclusion: This isn't about OSS, it's about money (and power).
Shamelessly, MM has dug himself a hole. If X is any indication, going forward there are few in the community who will trust him. A leader who isn't trusted is no leaser at all. Evidently he realizes this and is stuck doubling down on stupid. Rinse and repeat.
If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
>If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
I feel like this is a half empty half full kind of situation. Some people might think like you but others might view it as probably the most memorable keynote in Wordpress history (because if all the drama).
True, but in this case we can simply judge based on the actions taken.
The claims (trademark violation, no contributing anything back) seem pretty sensible and borne out in practice.
WordPress is an open source project stewarded by a foundation that set rules for its use. If you don't follow them there are consequences. As simple as that, really.
These rules (paying a license or contributing back) seem sensible too.
Normalizing people leeching off the work of other doesn't seem like a good approach.
Some people might disagree with the philosophy — perfectly fine! They can write their own blog engine and release it in a permissive open-source license and make copyrights freely available to anyone. This is a blog engine, not exactly antitrust material.
Gets even more wild when you consider Automattic invested in WP Engine's Series A in 2011, despite all this insidious trademark abuse commencing in 2010.
VS Code is a product of Microsoft Corp, not a nonorofit foundation. Wordpress.org is a nonprofit foundation, and as a nonprofit, there are rules they have to follow that for profit organizations don't have to.
Part of what's so weird about the communication from Matt here is that WordPress.org is not getting sued by anyone—indeed, as far as I can tell WP Engine isn't suing anyone.
All that happened is that WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic. WordPress.org misrepresenting the situation is not a good look.
I went to WP Engines website and on it they say "Host your WordPress site with the WordPress experts".
It feels confusing to me. The word "the" makes me explicitly think this is Wordpress themselves. They are "the" experts. WP Engine makes it pretty clear they are Wordpress. It is front and center. It has a different meaning than "Host your WordPress site with WordPress experts".
No-one is being sued (yet) and wordpress.org was not targeted in any way. Matt is being dishonest by repeating this lie anywhere and everywhere. Including on the very page you linked.
WPEngine sent a cease and desist letter addressed to, and targetting only, Matt Mullenweg and his for profit company Automattic. WPEngine are explicitly not targeting wordpress.org in the letter. You can read it here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Side note: wp.org is indeed mentioned a couple times in the letter but only when referencing Matt's blog post on the site, the trademark rules, and some technical information around the revisions feature. The "demands" part of the letter address Matt and Automattic exclusively.
Matt knows that an attack on dot org would rally everyone to his side, which is why he is repeating this lie over and over. He is trying to use the community as shield.
This is also (IMHO) why he shut off access to dot org. He wants WPEngine to be seen taking some sort of action against the community.
Matt is constantly shifting between "Matt from Automattic" and "Matt from the WP Foundation" wherever it suits him. It's sickening. He needs to be removed from the foundation immediately.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
I think the fact those boundaries have been crossed will be a massive legal issue for WordPress.org and Automattic since they'll have problems proving they're two separate entities and they will have been using that as a charity as a tax write-off. What is the penalty for tax evasion where you create a fake charity to write tax off of? It's prison, right?
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.
That’s really not a fair statement from him given:
1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.
2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.
3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.
I suspect that his figure on the number of hours is somewhat cooked up and biased. Did he cite a reliable and reasonable source of data that we can all consult to check the veracity of this claim?
The quote says WP Engine is contributing. WP Engine also gave WP.org 75k in sponsorship money, I would say that's a contribution. It's also important to know that after WP.org took that 75k sponsorship money, they kicked them out of the event they sponsored.
Because they would be represented in the org. If you choose to stay on the sidelines, should you be surprised to find out your not important to the action?
It's not really crossing the boundaries, in this kind of situations I don't know if people is misunderstanding genuinely or they do the interests of corporations because they have interests in WPEngine. WordPress.org is not going against all competitors of WordPress.com, is going against a competitor that has high load towards free resources of WordPress.org, having many customers, but not contributing anything towards those free resources. And WordPress.org has banned that leecher from keep stressing their systems for free with no contributions. When Matt said to go to pick another WordPress hosting instead of WPEngine, WordPress.com wasn't mentioned either.
This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"
> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I
don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
Can't disagree, but the huge mistake started at “We generally do not comment on individual cases, but". A CEO recklessly copy pasting information from his platform's internal moderation portal into a public forum should really put into question their ability to stay level headed while running the business and the effectiveness of their company's policies and security practices. I genuinely cannot think of any other case this mind boggling.
> dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
Full quote. This is ridiculous, and to me looks more than a little tongue in cheek.
Hoping for people's death isn't good, but this isn't a threat. It's an expression of frustration, and people think these things, and sometimes say them out loud. And there's a huge power imbalance here.
Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
Agree. The fundamental differences between Free Software and Open Source but Commercial Software were always tricky.
The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".
I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.
I think there’s a place for “we did 99% of the work here, but we want you to be able to tweak things if you need, read the code, and compile it for new systems without us in the loop.”
In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.
That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.
To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.
It's a question of philosophy, not license. The whole "release code under GPL but get angry when other people besides you start making more money than you do from it" thing is strikingly different from the attitude in the GPL FAQ:
The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.
It's also worth noting that WordPress is a descendent of the B2/cafelog blogging software. Automattic, themselves, are the other people making money off of someone else's project...and now they're mad that other other people are doing the same.
The issue at hand seems to be WP Engine using Automattic-sponsored infrastructure for their own for-profit services, not modifications to free software.
That's the place that Matt decided to hit them, but that's not where the complaint lies. The complaint as laid out in the blog posts [0][1] is nearly identical to the complaints that Elastic had against AWS: trademark use causing confusion and drawing customers away from the "official" offerings.
Beyond that, Matt absolutely has beef with modifications that WP Engine has made to the free software, going so far as to say that these modifications mean that what they're offering is "not WordPress". Never mind that WordPress.com is likewise a bastardized modification—that's okay because it's "us" doing the modifying!
> This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
This kind of attitude is incompatible with the premise of Free Software, which places a strong emphasis on encouraging reuse and modification to suit user needs.
What people say is one thing but one should draw conclusions instead from what they do. Too often the GPL is used to enforce a two-tier system in which everyone is free but some are more free than others. The original creators of a work retain proprietary and commercial relicensing rights while everyone else gets serfdom.
That's not because of the GPL. The GPL has little to do with barring access to a platform on which code is published. Arguably, if a copy existed elsewhere, say GitHub, then WPEngine is free to use that code according to the GPL.
In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.
In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).
The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.
You're trying to come up with distinctions between Open Source and Free Software where there are practically none, except for the politics of Free Software, which is inconsequential BS.
I guess what I'm saying is that the politics (I phrased it as ethics, but I think we're talking about the same thing) are far more consequential than people give them credit for, and isolating the mechanics from the ethical framework is why Open Source is losing coherency as a movement—it's a religion with no doctrine, and in the absence of a strong inward-facing ethic it doesn't have enough staying power to hold out in the face of monetary incentives.
The whole point of Open Source was for it to not be a religion.
If anything, it is the indoctrination in Free Software that led many young people to believe that proprietary software is immoral. Coupled with zero-interest rates, this led to companies founded without sustainable business models. The companies making it work are usually doing so by selling products and services where the OSS parts are complementary and not the main product being sold, and it's a good thing they do.
I'd say that the doctrine part doesn't help at all.
1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities.
All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days.
In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself.
But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately.
He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction.
To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.
My guess is, that he knows, that his trademark claims will likely not hold up in court and he'd need to spend some money to get to court in the first place.
As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way.
Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted.
I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation.
Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.
In the end, he really took the "scorched earth nuclear approach". Small problem: the land become inhabitable and nobody wants to touch this radioactive dump.
My thoughts are to the devs with clients on these platforms; they are going to take the heat for all the problems in place of the real disrupter.
I'm one of those devs who migrated all of the company sites to Laravel-based CMSes. Waaaay better experience, users are happy, updates are a breeze, and the sites are fast and reliable.
WordPress has become so tacky and this drama is exacerbating the problem. I don't see a bright future for WordPress, unfortunately.
It’s based on Python/Django and has an excellent developer and user experience. They pay a lot of attention to detail, including a block-based content editor, similar to Gutenberg, and first class accessibility support.
My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is.
Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks.
I have a hard time being sympathetic for Matt given what I've read so far. The C&D WPR sent shows plenty of quotes about Matt threatening to talk poorly about WPE unless they pay up.
If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them.
This is one of the worst attempts to handle a corporate dispute that I have ever seen. Forget all of the he said he said arguments for a second and see what a random person who decided to use WordPress will see.
If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress.
I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.
Why not merge this with the existing thread on the official post that it references? This is a dupe. An after-the-fact submission talking about the source.
My empathy is with Automatic on this one, but I still think it's the wrong move.
"Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin
If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks.
However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.
But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.
Sure, but I think at minimum there's a reasonable realty where Automattic/the foundation:
1. Creates an official policy that states the level of usage of the public WordPress services/resources which constitutes requiring a business relationship with the Foundation (e.g. N terabytes transferred per month)
2. Attach a dollar amount.
3. Inform WP-Engine that they're in violation of this new policy and they have N days to comply or their access will be terminated (where N is at least 90 but ideally 180/360).
Matt's recent interview with the Primeagen suggests that while "discussions" with WP-Engine go back years, he couldn't give a straight answer for whether other services may be vulnerable to the same retribution WP-Engine faced, specifically and quantifiably why WP-Engine received retribution while other entities don't, and if specific prior notice of the actions Automattic took was given to WP-Engine. Instead, it was vibey: A bunch of "well, they use a lot, server resources, our trademark, yeah other entities use a lot too, but those other entities give back, stuff, to the community, WP-Engine gives back some stuff, but not enough." Prime tried to get more out of him multiple times but it just ended with him saying "I'm sorry, I'm sick and really tired".
Here's what I predict WP Engine will do next week in response:
1. They will scrape the entire WordPress.org plugin registry (people are already circulating scrapers around Mastodon)
2. They will open their own separate plugin registry, with blackjack and hookers
3. They will update their mu-plugin to hook the WordPress autoupdater and point it to their own infrastructure on every site they host
They can do this because WordPress is GPL and so are all the plugins. GPL can't be revoked unless you fuck up a source release, which is genuinely hard to do in PHP. And WordPress is GPLv2+, meaning GPLv3 with its way more lenient revocation terms are available.
I assume at some point Automattic will insist that scraping WordPress.org is now illegal or something, and then every plugin author will have to go through an annoying process of claiming their WP Engine Plugin Registry entries and updating everything in two places, fracturing the community because of the FOSS world's most petty trademark fight.
The software running on those servers was built by volunteers, some of which are now scrambling to help their clients who are blocked from using that software.
> Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way.
This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.
Companies can't use proprietary software without the risk of being banned or refused a licence renewal either.
IMO the craziest revelation in this whole ordeal is that Matt personally owns WordPress.org. I have worked with WP for close to a decade and I was always under the impression that it was owned by the nonprofit foundation.
So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.
If like Matt says, they contribute little back to Wordpress then I am with Automattic on this. If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid.
Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.
If you have such expectations then clearly state the rules.
- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free
- companies under $b have to pay $x
- companies under $c have to pay $y
Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)
I feel like there could be little need for rules if people had a little common sense, then if you have targets, other start doing the bare minimum, I'd rather have parasites like WPEngine put off
Does that mean every successful company needs to start financing Linux, curl, Postgres, Python, etc which are undoubtedly powering who knows how much internal infrastructure?
Ok but taxes that are invented on the spot by an all-powerful ruler, and imposed by surprise, under immediate threat, do not have a great history in modern society.
It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive. To require compensation of any kind for access and the right to use and distribute code is contrary to the spirit of free and open source software.
If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.
> It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive.
In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.
In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.
It’s not incoherent. It’s a rule that could be made and adhered to for a project.
It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.
I agree, if I would making bookoo bucks off of someone else’s “open”platform, you could be 100% sure I would be feeding the golden goose some grain to build some rapport. If I’m playing with it in my homelab, maybe not so much but try occasionally to donate if it’s an OSS project that $10-50 makes a difference for.
It's not retaliation to revoke free access to your web resources.
If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.
It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.
Of course it's retaliation. Wordpress.org said as much in the announcement - they don't like WP Engine's business model, don't think they contribute enough upstream, etc. And therefore they cut off access to the wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server.
Yes, retaliation for using web resources without paying.
> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server
Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.
WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.
in this case the "rules" you're talking about are licensing terms, so I have trouble interpreting your statement as anything other than "licenses wouldnt be needed if everyone would just use software the way the author wants"
How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL
Has absolutely nothing to do with the license, the code was and is GPL-2.
GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.
> But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Revenue is a red herring. It is not an appropriate measure to determine if and how much one should contribute to an open source project.
Instead, we should measure the need to contribute by the burden one places on the project.
Do you request features or bug fixes? Contribute appropriately.
Do you request support? Contribute appropriately.
Do you simply copy, install, and run the existing software? No need to contribute.
If you go down this path of creating rules that say people should pay to use open source, you’ll discover there are already laws in place sufficient to manage this situation. If a project uses these laws, then you’ll complain the project isn’t open source.
If you prefer the capricious nature of the politics of social shaming instead of the rules based system of laws and courts, I guess that is being consistent even if the actual process is very inconsistent and unpredictable.
If not, then it’s not clear to me how you’re taking a philosophical stance about open source if you’re demanding payment. Those ideas don’t work together.
What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.
However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.
The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.
This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.
Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.
I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.
However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.
Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.
(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)
What is Netflix's economic incentive to pay their AWS bill every month?
My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.
Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.
WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!
What do you mean? They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy?
They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.
> They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy
Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.
I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.
If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.
> I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.
Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
>It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine.
I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it.
>at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core.
Matt gave an interview to about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM and although he sounded very unprepared and showed no receipts, none of what he says sounds unreasonable.
A key point on the interview is that Matt has been trying to get WP Engine to contribute for years and they kept delaying on him. People called this "extortion," but in my view it's a way an open source project found to get a corporation that profits from open source to contribute. There is a "world-famous" trademark, and to use it you need to pay or contribute dev hours. He says various hosts had the same deal, and because he never had a problem with any of the other hosts, he ended up being "naive" and let WP Engine delay and delay for years because he didn't think they would just never agree to it. In the screenshots in the cease and desist by WP Engine you can even see messages from Matt including one where it sounds like WP Engine is telling him to set up a meeting next week instead of talking about it in the Q&A, to which he responds (paraphrased) "if you're saying next week you're saying no." Even up to the last minute he still tried to get an agreement, sending a photo of the audience, and got no favorable answer.
Ignoring the trademark violation allegations, and the whole "revisions" thing that some may think sounds ridiculous, there was a part he mentions Woocommerce has a Stripe code that gives part of the revenue to WP org, and WP Engine hacked the code to give the attribution to WP Engine, which means the money that would go to WP org (com?) goes to WP Engine. I think this is technically legal because it's GPL, but it doesn't look good if you're diverting millions of dollars that would go to WP org to yourself.
From what I've seen, it really feels like Matt tried everything he could to get a commercial entity to contribute to an open source project and now he's getting the blame because their customers are getting affected by it. It doesn't help that many who use Wordpress do not understand the separation between Wordpress, the source code (that WP Engine can still use), and the CDN that provides automatic updates (which WP Engine got banned from). The millions of WP Engine users using te CDN were costing WP org money that can now be invested in a different way. I've seen some even say a court could issue an injunction to force WP org to provide the updates for free. The "free ice cream" analogy Matt uses in the interview is really apt here.
If this goes to court I suppose allegations will start getting receipts behind them and we'll have a clearer view of what happened. To me, based on Matt's allegations, WP Engine is not being targeted for being a competitor like some say, but they have been given an exceptionally favorable treatment that was unjust to the other Wordpress hosts who were agreeing to pay for the trademark, and all of this was just WP org making things fair again.
In fact, Matt even says that if they do agree to contribute 8% of their revenue in cash or dev hours, they will get unbanned. I'm not sure if they will capitulate, but just the fact it isn't just "money" but "dev hours is okay" sounds to me that this isn't about money.
> Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction.
We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.
This is a horrible way to go about it though. WP Engine users are still WordPress users, and cutting them off without notice is very shitty. I wouldn't trust WordPress for anything after this, if all that it takes to cut you off from updates - potentially security updates - is Matt Mullenweg not liking you (or your ISP).
If you're running a large business and you don't have a plan in case a free resource provided by someone else goes away, you shouldn't be in business. It really is that simple.
Those small businesses are purchasing something from WP Engine. It's up to WP Engine to deliver, and it's ridiculous if a company that size fails to deliver because they were freeloading without having a backup plan in place. The fault is entirely on WP Engine (who sold the service) not Wordpress (who made no promises at all to WP Engine customers).
So it's okay for WordPress.org to damage a bunch of WordPress users because they're not customers of Automattic and therefore WordPress.org has no obligations to them?
It's this kind of blurring of lines between Automattic and the foundation that has people very very concerned here.
Got it. So Free Software means that the ostensibly-distinct foundation supporting the project can act to defend the interests of the for-profit entity run by the same person.
Yes, why not? If it's not something prohibited by the license, it is permitted.
Also, if open source companies wouldn't do it, some open source projects would never reach any kind of maturity if the company creating such project faces the competition who just live off the work of the original team who don't contribute back to the project.
WordPress.com started out as a WordPressµ (WordPress Multi User) provider. Just a place for people to quickly start their own blogs, mainly hosted on a WordPress.com subdomain. To learn more about WordPress MU: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_MU
"WordPress hosting" is a relatively new option on WordPress.com. Pressable is a more advanced WordPress hosting provider, built by Automattic.
Obviously you don’t have to answer, but it feels like with Pressable as a product, WPE suddenly became a big competitor to the bottom line. It is here where the optics suddenly become shady. Like WPE has been running like they do for years, and now suddenly it is a big problem? Like why now?
Personally I also don’t like that the .org suddenly becomes weaponized. If this can be done to WPE, it can be done to anyone else really.
WordPress.com is actually doing the exact shady things that WP Engine does. Confusing WordPress.org users that they need a paid account to run WordPress.
Sure WP also has some freemium model, but I do not consider that shady.
Have you seen the Automattic CEO talk (link to YT in other comment in this thread). I dont think he's in shady business: he's releasing loads of source code under the GPL!
He’s also using the foundations copyright to target the primary competitor to his for-profit business, demanding that they invest in the profits of the for-profit company, at the expense of the WordPress open-source community. None of this looks altruistic or for the good of wordpress.org.
How is it anti-competitive to stop people smashing your APIs? That shit costs money man. It's not free to provide web resources to hundreds of thousands of people.
WPE is essentially DDOSing WP for free. Obviously that shit doesn't fly. Either pay up or get your own server and host your own shit.
Most likely my tone, but I'm frustrated because I don't even understand how this is a conversation.
If any one of us was hosting a FREE service and some corporation came around and hit us with hundreds of thousands of requests, we too would demand money or ban them. Any one of us. So I really, truly, don't understand why we're all sitting here having this conversation.
Sorry? Their service is... their service! They can extend of refuse service to whom they want.
Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.
services (like the plugin registry, but there are many more) cannot be GPL. they are served by someone and that someone pays for hosting/bandwidth/etc and that someone is free to stop providing that service (to one party or all together).
* https://thephp.foundation/ one of three platinum level sponsors
* MySQL doesn't take sponsorships afaict
* https://mariadb.org/about/#stakeholders one of several silver sponsors of MariaDB
* https://x.com/SlexAxton/status/1839091643338862828 "I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor"
>If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
For example Sony sold more than 100 million units of PS4 and made billions of dollars from it and how much they contributed to the open source projects they've used in PS4? Take a look at OSS projects used in PS4: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/
Did they contribute anything? Did they contribute 100% enough or just 20% or 30%?
If the software is open sourced and if license allows you to do anything with it then you are indeed free to do anything with it including selling products which include OSS.
You're free to do it but nobody has to help you certainly.
Ultimately it's a matter of common sense. Sure, if I leave out my "take one" bowl on Halloween and someone takes it all, there's no rules against that. But next year I might be more cautious and hand out the candy myself - now what?
If you've built a business off taking all my candy and reselling it, you're fucked! If you had just been less greedy and taken, say, 10 instead of the whole bowl I might not have cared.
If the rule is "take one" and someone takes everything, than a rule is in fact breached. In your example the candy bowl is explicitly marked as "take as much as you want" and someone does. If you don't want that, label it appropriately next year.
I'm this case, the license explicitly allows everyone to use the software for free. I don't understand your candy analogies. If you're not OK with people using your software for free, use a commercial license (or a dual licensing model, or one of a hundred possible solutions other than a free license).
I think this issue is complicated and I have no answers. However, I do feel Wordpress is much more central to WPEngine's business than e.g. FreeBSD is to Sony's.
1. This is pure whataboutism. Just because Sony doesn't contribute (I don't know whether they do or don't), doesn't make it right.
2. There is obviously a difference between "selling products that include OSS" and "selling OSS 1:1". It's not like Sony's firmware/dashboard is maintained by "OpenGamingConsoleDashboard" and they are selling a 95% repackage of that to their end users (also ignoring the hardware). This pertains to the software maintenance logistics layer and not the licensing layer. Sure, both in the Sony and WPEngine cases they are in the clear on the licensing, but that doesn't make for sustainable development of the underlying software. I'd also wager that if the OSS projects used in the PS4 would drum up enough of a social media stink, they'd have decent chances of getting some compensation (e.g. the TLDraw maintainers did that quite a few times successfully).
>But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Where does the GPL state this requirement? It doesn't.
If WordPress doesn't like this, they should have licenced their software under the AGPL or some other licence with stronger copylefting.
Plenty of large commercial entities use BSD licenced software and make a fortune off the software, with little given in return. Take FreeBSD and the significant commercial operations it drives. They never whinge. Because that's the choice they made, and they stick to their principles.
GPL doesn’t, but as others have already said, this discussion is not about that. If they want to keep using someone else’s free server capacity, maybe they should be giving something in return.
If you're providing your servers for free and include them as the primary update mechanism to an open source project for millions of websites, maybe you shouldn't use that as an extortion mechanism holding millions of websites hostage.
Taking away access to those servers is one thing, doing it without warning putting millions of sites at risk is another.
Totally agree with you. That is the issue at the heart of the situation.
WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.
First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.
They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.
Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.
As someone who wrote OS software in the past and had little no people contributing back except the core team, i total disagree.
If you write OS and put it out there for the world to use, you should be doing it because you want to _give_ to the world. you should not expect _anything_ in return. the is the essences of giving, to not expect something back.
if Matt wants WPEngine to require a contribution to WordPRess, then he should relicense it under a license that requires this or close the code and charge subscriptions.
what he is doing is giving a bad name the OS community in general. this is not how you act.
You don't get one. It's a matter of discretion. Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.
> Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
Unless you accidentally end up doing business with an asshole. Matt is definitely making himself look like a danger to do business with—maybe WP Engine just successfully baited him into acting against his community and killing trust and he's not actually as unhinged as he sounds here... but few people would be willing to bet money on that.
They were issuing presumably hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not offering a penny. You will get banned for that on absolutely any service. Any of them, GPL or not.
That's not the complaint that Matt made against them, though. His complaint in public is all about trademarks and revisions, but then when they sent him a cease and desist asking him to cut it out he decided to cut them off of the plugins store to hit their customers (who are WordPress users).
> Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
It seems like that is not really up to me.
When Matt Mullenweg gets up one morning and does not like my commercial product for WP, he might think of me as an asshole and will try to extort money from my business or just ruin it just like he did here.
Hard rules might be fine to take care of things like these.
it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.
It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.
It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
You realize "I won't tell you the rules" is an asshole move in and of itself, right?
There's 8 billion people on this planet, from hundreds of different cultures. Everyone has different intuitions, different values, different cultural expectations.
I'm not saying the rules have to be hard rules or anything. But if you can't even articulate the basic shape of the rules, then it's really 100% on you when people don't follow the magic ideas in your head.
> You realize "I won't tell you the rules" is an asshole move in and of itself, right?
I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.
I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.
If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.
What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.
This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
> Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back?
It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.
> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?
I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.
It’s in your own self interest to know what you’ve built your business on and have a backup plan if the bottom falls out. I don’t really have any compassion for them, but I do for their users.
ethically or legally? because they both matter, but they are decided in the court of public opinion and of law, respectively, but only one carries actual fiscal weight.
Personally, and I need to read more, is that ethically the problem lies with sharing. Is Matt/automattic ethically obliged due compensation? I think not. WP Engine is its own company like automattic. Would it grace WPE if they do compensate with money or resources? Obviously, but then you might also want to put them in the foundation oversee committee if they do half of the work.
The law, I have no idea in what direction this is going to go!
This went from "hey you guys shouldn't use WP Engine because it's not Real WordPress" to "WP Engine is violating trademarks and isn't welcome in the WordPress community anymore" really f'in quick!
Just as an FYI: this is a really really bad look from the outside. Your CEO's comments and the new trademark policy sound borderline deranged, and this step of banning them dangerously destabilizes the ecosystem.
WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.
Yes - I don’t use WP and have no experience with either of those companies but everything I’ve heard about this has been people looking into alternatives because this raises the question of whether it’s motivated by a desire to boost revenue and merely the first step in the process.
OK. But do you really think this public bullying abuse of power from your increasingly unstable-sounding CEO is going to play out well? Good luck I guess.
Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo and now WordPress - it seems that Open source is as good and only good when you and only you can sell it. The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort, does things better than you to market/host/package your open source project, the moment things to start to fall apart.
None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
Postgres, notably, has not had these problems. There's a thriving ecosystem, despite the trademark, and many providers offer "Postgres" services without Postgres' core organizations or contributors getting their undies in a twist over it.
Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.
I think a difference there is that Postgres doesn't have a for-profit semi-attached to it.
There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution.
That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project.
Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.
> The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort
Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
The solution is to ask Company B to pay up (in cash or resources), and not be leeching.
> Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
Then don't make an open source product.
What you can't do is try to earn the goodwill that comes with open source, but also expect the profitability of a proprietary product.
Don't try to base a company around developing and selling open source is a lesson that folks will keep learning again and again. You have to make money doing something else and if your core competency isn't that something else you'll lose to someone where it is.
WP Engine is not winning because it’s cheaper. It is a better product than what Automattic offers.
That’s why this action by Matt is ridiculous. WP Engine has grown the overall WP market through good product development and investment. That has produced positive effects for the many companies and people who make their money developing and supporting WP sites for clients.
WordPress has been around for a long time, and there is no change to how open it is. It is GPL code, Automattic is not forking it and selling access to the fork.
We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on.
This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
As long as competitors of Automattic does not infringe on the trademarks owned (in the case of WooCommerce) or licensed (WordPress) by Automattic, I don't see any reason for us taking any action.
I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
Ethically it may be the right thing to do, but there is no obligation to do so unless it's in the license. If you want to thumb your nose at WPEngine for that, fine, but that's about as far as that goes.
I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem.
But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.
Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.
But a database can handle tens of millions of rows with those resources.
If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.
Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves?
We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog.
Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text.
Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem.
Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why.
The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.
I understand why Matt is frustrated and I sympathize with the situation, but I don't think his approach is going to win him any public favor nor have a long term positive payout.
Anyone who may have had sympathies for his arguments are all turned off now that he's gone on a "scorched earth" path. He dragged the non-profit foundation into a business spat involving Automattic and WP Engine, or maybe even between two rich guys, Matt Mullenweg and Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, who owns WPE.
Using the org website to make a nasty post slandering WPE. Spreading it via the built-in news metabox on every WordPress dashboard. The org's plugin repository to block WPE's domains/IPs specifically.
That's a single person wielding power in his domain, maybe all legal, but the org should be making decisions as a group and community.
Sure, but that won't make the problem go away. The (most recent) issue is that WP is blocking downloading of extensions, so WPEngine would have to find a way to mirror every extension (and that might not be permissible by licensing?)
I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries.
There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this.
Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project.
Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest.
Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
WP Engine is also claiming that Mullenweg tried to "extort" them. He allegedly asked WP Engine to pay astronomical amounts of money to WordPress, or he'd go on a smear campaign against them. THe demands were allegedly refused, and it seems that he has indeed started such a campaign.
The claims were made in an official letter to Automattic that included proof in the form of screenshots, and that was written by a legal professional[1]. I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.
> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
Conflict of interest, perhaps. Reading about the issues though, gimping the product for pennies and then modifying customers sites to censor things.
At some point, every bad behaviour in a software ecosystem affects other parties and even if his personal role does cause a conflict of interest all the things mentioned seems to point to a party that doesn't respect the ecosystem.
I see. What a BS. It's obvious that this is a business move by Automattic.
Akismet was (is?!) bundled with every fresh WP installation. That is a product by Automattic, so why is it bundled with the Open Source "product"? It's an unfair competitive advantage over every other company/person that provides a plugin for that. Nobody cared or was just feared to pick up that fight.
Drawing the line at WPEngine seems random, too. There are so many bigger or smaller competitors in that space, it's just somewhat random to pick them out and complain that they don't give back.
This is the equivalent of NPM, Maven or PyPi cutting off an enterprise artifact repository because they don't donate enough to keep those services running. Especially the lack of notice makes it an unprofessional garbage move.
Does the notice need to be public? They are fighting for a while, I think WPEngine knew what Automattic demanded (and hence could foresee what happens if they continue). They were/are probably already working on an alternative.
Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service.
Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
That's pretty much what happened here. I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Automattic offers more than just the source code of WP.
Anyone is still free to use the source, but the services they provide are not free.
> Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service. Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
It's a good analogy. AWS does it a lot, but it does so with open source projects that do not have much paid services. Reading from the article, Automattic provides many services (possibly paid, in some freemium model).
I'd welcome if some projects manage to get AWS to give back. They do way too little if you ask me.
> I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Yes. Giving back could be a deal that involves money.
I understand it would be ideal for business to give back with money to open source projects, but this issue is being handled in the worst possible way by Matt.
So WordPress code is FOSS, so you can theoretically change the code, except when you change the line that will keep revisions to cut your costs, if you do that he will yell at you.
WordPress' repository is free as in beer, you can download all you want without paying. Heck, even WP code is setup so it downloads from there by default. Except when you happen to host in a company that has a very specific set of issues (alleged trademark issues + profits over a particular threshold + not giving back to community; other companies who have only one of those issues but not all of them are fine), then he'll block you.
The main issue here is the lack of a clear contract of what you can or cannot do. Seems like he is just figuring out the rules along the way. This gives to external observers the impression that the whole thing is unreliable.
Open source makes absolutely zero distinction about how the source code is provided. You aren't required to keep a free-to-use service up to download your code. You only must produce it when requested.
Not too long ago you would pay for disks containing open source software.
1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com.
2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.
This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control?
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
Well, hang on, all over this discussion you have a Automattic employee being quite clear (in their understanding) that wordpress.org is something Matt benevolently lets the Foundation use.
But as you'll read, there is so much murkiness to this that a mud bath would be positively transparent. The .org is not the foundation, but the foundation says that it pays for the .org, the .org is not the foundation but lives on the foundation's AS.
I doubt much if anything will happen, but all this seems to be doing to me is shining a light on how the distinction between Matt, Automattic, WP.org, WPF, and WP.com all vary depending on Matt's needs, wants and priorities on any given day.
Because in a few months, people won't remember the details, but they will remember "the time the Wordpress guy abused his influence to damage the Wordpress ecosystem".
Or, alternatively they could remember "the time the Wordpress guy smacked freeloader leeching off the Wordpress ecosystem"
Apart from that - major turbulences in the WP and in general CMS world could be a positive thing. Maybe it's time for a new player in the space. Wordpress absolute dominance for basically decades kind of sucks air out of the space for competitors, there are some like Ghost and others but they are barely crawling compared to WP market share.
Apart from that even fork within WP itself wouldn't necessary be a bad thing - some decisions and direction of the WP itself are questionable looking from developer standpoint like bringing to life insanely complicated React-based toolkit as WP editor building block, archaic conventions in the PHP codebase, lack of standardized patterns and guidelines for plugins creation and many more.
Personally I would love to have PHP-based CMS, built either based on Symphony or Laravel with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and resonable market share.
Yeah, I recently looked into their "Starshot"[0] initiative to make their CMS more appealing and it's interesting to some degree, but we'll see when it comes out - presumably ~ Jan 15, according to the video
Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...
The community should fork Wordpress so that is no longer controlled by Automattic, thus eliminating the conflict of interest. They would have to pick a different name, such as LibrePress (just like LibreOffice vs OpenOffice), in order to avoid copyright or trademark claims by Automattic.
If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad.
WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed.
But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims.
Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example)
This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.
I also don't have a dog in the fight but reading for a few minutes I have the impression there have been previous attempts to engage with WPE to contribute. I might be wrong.
I think WPE committed to contributing 40h per week of work on WordPress. I'm not clear if they didn't fulfill their commitment or Matt thinks that is not enough.
Infra, services and trademarks. They are not part of the GPL license. Everyone is welcomed to use any GPL code as they see fit, as long as they are within their limits as outlined in the license.
But this does not mean W.ORG has to keep providing these free services to you and your customers, and it does not mean you are free to use trademarks in a misleading way.
I only know about this from the two hn threads I've read, but it seems like he could have at least announced this publicly a week in advance or so and given them a bit of time to self-host all this stuff before cutting off their access. Right now seems like he's trying to harm WPEngine by harming their customers and that doesn't make him look good.
It's not about WP in the company name. It's about loosely using the words "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce" all over their website in ways that violate trademarks.
For there to be a violation there has to be a reasonable prospect of consumer confusion by the consumers in the target market. The page is labelled "Choose your WordPress Hosting plan"
Someone who is in the market for Wordpress hosting is almost certainly aware they have Wordpress and that they need hosting for it. Wordpress is a nominative use to refer to the entity, and Core is an adjective which in context means central.
Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself? That would be the standard. Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis.
Fair enough on wordpress.com. It still doesn't strike me as plausible that any reasonable person in a purchasing decision thinks WPengine is wordpress itself. I certainly haven't seen any such confusion online.
Would you agree that WPE automatically makes a mental connection to WordPress? I dare say this would not be the case if it was named Josh Mutton Engine JME
Would it be a good or bad look for the Fedora project if they went after a popular and commercially ruthless hosting provider offering "Fedora Hosting" for trademark infringement, while cutting off repo and update access to that provider specifically, unless they paid up some % of revenue?
Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.
I don't think it is at all reasonable to claim that the name of a GPL 2.0 project is off-limits. This license goes back to 2003 and the name is the first word in the license. It is displayed all over the software. The community is full of commercial and open-source tools that include variations of the name. Automattic is betraying the spirit of the license at best, and I would _hope_ flat-out wrong legally to weaponize the name.
From an operational standpoint, this is completely WP Engine's fault. You should not depend on other people's services, doubly so if they're public and free, when your big as Wordpress Engine is. Wordpress is completely within its rights, morally or otherwise, to block free access to its services.
The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.
I've never heard of Wordpress.org banning any legitimate WordPress site from accessing their plugins and themes repository. It would have made zero business sense for WP Engine to prepare for being banned like this.
I've used Wordpress self-hosted for a long time and this seems like a non-issue. WPEngine can use the Wordpress codebase but why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? I say this is a good thing.
> why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress?
They are not entitled to them, but Wordpress has previously decided to offer those services. Wordpress donors most probably expected that these services will continue to be provided to anyone.
The controversial part is that now they apparently establish a policy that Matt Mullenweg (the owner of for-profit Wordpress.com) can arbitrarily ban competitors in case he doesn't like them.
Isn't WordPress.org connected to WordPress foundation? They have a Donate link in the footer.
What about all of these: "user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase" – are all of those services provided by WordPress.org without funding from WordPress foundation?
Interesting, so then who pays to run wordpress.org?
I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
WordPress.org is operated by Matt Mullenweg as a free service that hosts plugins, themes, docs and more. It does not take donations, or as far I am aware, make any profits.
Instead, people are encouraged to donate to the Foundation, which helps with the development of WordPress the software and organizes things like WordCamps.
Wait, so if somebody goes to WordPress.org, clicks the donate button, arrives at a page to donate to the WordPress Foundation, and donates, that money does not go towards funding WordPress.org?
The blurb on the donation page reads:
> Money raised by the WordPress Foundation will be used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs.
“Supported software projects” is a link that leads to a page that lists these software projects:
- WordPress
- WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes
- bbPress
- BuddyPress
It sure looks like the WordPress infra and plugins are supported by the donations from the WordPress.org footer link. If the money is going elsewhere, where is it going?
The funniest outcome to this little internecine WP fight would be an IRS investigation into the intermingling of Wordpress.org, Foundation, Automattic, Matt, etc.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I asked people who are helping with the infra of WordPress.org and they are not sure why Singlehop is showing "The Wordpress Foundation" for those IPs. They belong to the hosting provider W.ORG is using and this is just mislabelling on their part. Relevant people will get in touch and ask them to correct it.
And, quick side note, no one from Automattic or WordPress Foundation would ever misspell WordPress!
I believe that you're mistaken and have flipped them the wrong way round: Wordpress.org is the official website of the open source project owned by the WordPress Foundation, while WordPress.com is the company owned by Automattic.
I asked how WordPress.org is funded and will get details on that but I can tell you WordPress.org is not part of the foundation.
Open source project and the WordPress trademark are owned the WordPress Foundation. WordPress.org has a license to use the name from the Foundation, as does Automattic.
In short: wordpress.org is just a personal homepage of Matt Mullenweg, not legally or financially related to neither Foundation nor Automattic? There could be technical relations but who has not "forgotten" your personal homepage to your employee's machine, just a honest mistake.
The WordPress Foundation links to wordpress.org as the official site for their project called WordPress, and wordpress.org directs donors to donate at wordpressfoundation.org so it's hard to see how you could be right, but if you can come back explaining that then I'll happily admit to having been confused by it all.
> Matt Mullenweg, the director of the WordPress Foundation, has been directly involved in the creation of, or coordination of volunteers around, a number of WordPress projects that espouse the core philosophy
I'll admit this might sound confusing. Foundation came years after some of these projects were already established.
says "a violation of our domain policy." and links to wordpress.org, why would their domain policy be on a site that isn't theirs?
And then wordpress.org says "For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark", how can wordpress.org say "our" if the foundation owns the WordPress trademark and .org is not run by the foundation?
But their site does say that money raised will be "used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs." and links to the projects page that contains wordpress.org... but you said it isn't funded by the donations from the foundation
Ironic how this whole thing started with an allegation that WP Engine makes things confusing. I wonder if Matt's mom can tell the difference between WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org.
If https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ had a page titled "Projects" that listed "death camps" as the first item, you would assume they're up to something, right?
Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content).
Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.
Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence.
I agree, and thank you for the username shout-out! In the past I would agree with you about Umbraco, and I guess I still partially agree because Wordpress is in PHP which is easier to learn, modern Umbraco should be very easy to learn. Part of that is probably that I favor making things very explicit and easy to read, over performance benefits. For a CMS, there aren't a TON of performance benefits other than not pulling all your data from the CMS in your view templates. This is very common in Umbraco code, but often the same code works in services called by one-liner controllers. I still write mostly MVC code, but have written my own "to-disk" caching layer, as well as built APIs to make use of Cloudflare to do per-page or global cache-breaking.
I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations).
I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).
It's weird Matt would generate all this drama. By not allowing WP Engine to use the plugin ecosystem he is first and foremost damaging the actual WP users hosting there. Probably millions of users.
I'm a WordPress (WP) developer and avid user of WP Engine. I just tested some of my WordPress sites hosted on WP Engine and can confirm that it's currently not possible to take some actions that pull data from https://wordpress.org/, such as not updating WP plugins or installing new WP plugins.
I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage:
[quote]
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software.
...
People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
[/quote]
After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software.
Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core.
I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.
I think that is exactly Matt’s problem with the conduct of WP Engine—they have done next to nothing to support the infrastructure that they profit from.
It’s like a person who uses ad block saying they won’t watch YouTube if google breaks the ad blocking. That is exactly what they want, you have negative value.
Somewhat off-topic: WordPress has proven that there is still a market for WordPress-style CRM and managed solution even in 2024. Why hasn't a strong, open source competitor emerged over the years? Because if there is an alternative, this article would be much less relevant, and the events may not have happened in the first place. Is it because CRM, especially the dynamic kind, is no longer cool, and developers are not interested in this area any more?
Part of it is that there are more choices these days in terms of highly customizable CMSs. I stopped building new WordPress sites when I discovered Wagtail. There's also Payload which I've heard good things about. The other part is that agencies are being squeezed out of the side of the custom website market where WordPress offers appropriate trade-offs. Most agencies that build on WordPress anymore are theme chop shops.
WordPress has done a good job of taking the top ideas and incorporating them quickly into its CMS. Many times not right away, but under the hood they are there and they can easily built a UI for it later.
They got a lot of ideas from Drupal, Tumbler, SquareSpace, Ghost, Headless CMSes, etc.
Just checked out the original version of b2 Wordpress was forked from and could immediately spot a SQL injection which I can use to take over the whole site:
$log = $HTTP_POST_VARS["log"];
<..>
$user_login=$log;
<..>
SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM $tableusers WHERE user_login = '$user_login' AND MD5(user_pass) = '$password'
Later it also stores the hashed password as a cookie.
Wordpress.org should change it's license like Mongo did to protect itself from Amazon. The license should allow free hosting for indiduals and organiation bt for profit hosting should pay something. It's okay for third party hosting to pay a fee to help maintaining the original open source software.
Bad leadership from Wordpress.org , you cannot bans company that use modified version of Wordpress and promote using that name ( choice of plugins installed and feature example maximum history ), your company also dosing that ( limit plugin installed on Wordpress.com/Automatic ).
Really saddened by the FOSS landscape. Docker, Terraform, Redis, and now Wordpress. Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, the sheer drama and rug pulls make it feel like the beginning of an end to open source as a viable business model.
All parties are making millions off open-source WordPress.
Matt's team are upset because they only make tens of millions, whereas purportedly, WP-engine makes hundreds of millions. Matt gives back much more than WP-engine.
All their clients are businesses also making money through their WordPress-hosted websites.
I don't think there is a problem with open source and viability. It is raining money.
It's simply an in-house fight over inequities in giving back to the open source pot of gold.
Not this specifically, but I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Redis, elastic, openai, wordpress. Each came to realize that the open source benefit has a glaring issue with their corporate interests.
Always found it interesting that the core WP lacks CDN support, caching, multilingual etc out of the box and leverages the paid WP.com, while using open source contributions.
Big lawsuit against Automattic incoming. Which WPEngine will easily win. Given that Automattic is clearly desperate for funds it will probably bankrupt them.
I don't see how this is WordPress' fight to win, given that WP Engine has the backing and resources of private equity (not to mention, while also being in the right). This is like David coming up against Goliath, except Goliath isn't stupid and wore armor and a helmet.
I don't use any their products, so I don't have any community insider insights, but based on what I've read so far, it seems like WordPress did the right thing.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.
Makes no sense. Everyone is profiting off WordPress and probably 0.1% of those ever contributed back.
Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
I keep not getting it. WordPress.org is offered as a free download and it accesses the website FOR FREE. Complaining that people don’t pay for free stuff is not a healthy mental state.
WP Engine is no different from the million hostings that auto-install WordPress and “abuse” their resources.
I heard that there was an old handshake agreement that WPEngine should contribute so-and-so many developer hours to Wordpress per employee, but doesn't now and hasn't for a while. At some point the CEO of Automattic, which does contribute developer hours, blew up.
Yep, Matt (wordpress guy) has a dramatic writing style, but in essence WPE is using plugins, their security research, user system, theming store etc, without contributing back that much.
Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
Does your company offer a competitor to what Automattic is offering, taking revenues from them, and make 500+ millions in revenues a year? If the answer to those is yes then I’d probably keep quiet before Matt notices you :)
That is a really problematic question to ask. Because remember, Automattic is not the Foundation or the open source project...
so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"
We are talking about yearly revenues here, and something tells me that your company is not in the business of selling services that depend on WordPress code being developed
Open source is a gift. There's etiquette involved.
Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?
Hiding the widgets isn't the main issue. If you infringe the WordPress trademark in commercial use, and ignore any attempt to make it right, and pursue legal action, W.ORG does not have to provide those free services to you.
I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
WordPress Foundation is paying for the servers, so I guess they have the right to choose who gets access or not. Using the resources as a single person or a small business is not the same as using them from a hosting company with millions of websites. Other hosting companies contribute to the foundation which keeps the service running. If WPEngine isn't contributing anything, it would be unfair for other contributors/sponsors. Especially that they are making a large amount of money from it.
As so often I think it would be beneficial for the conversation to provide some more context. Single user install generated load VS WP generated load on the infrastructure of WordPress.org
It's not at all a dick move to block IPs that essentially DDOS your free services.
Google, Amazon, you name it do this infinite times a day with crawlers.
If you build a business on taking resources from some public source, on a large scale, you could very well be out of a business at any time. This has been the case for a long, long time. And nobody seems to take issue with it.
Was there ever any attempt to reach some sort of agreement on what appropriate usage would be?
I imagine if this was the real issue, then WPEngine could probably sort out some fair solution to not use more than their fair share. I dont know much about this ecosystem but surely a caching proxy is not hard to setup.
However reading between the lines, it sounds like the real issue is that WPEngine is more succesful which is making other players jealous, who are using their control over other parts of the ecosystem to give WPEngine the middle finger. In such a case its not really about resourse usage.
Well, I hope the blow to the reputation was worth it. Regardless of what is claimed to have happened behind the scenes, the very public meltdown is what's going to live on. It's already sowing doubt internally, where I work, about recommending WordPress in general going forward.
They're not though, WPEngine's users are the ones installing plugins. If I host my own WP site and profit off of it I'm
sure I'll be allowed to download plugins. Why does that change when I hire someone to host it for me?
what do you mean profiting. .org is open source. where in the open source licenses you are supposed to pay the original maintainer a share of your revenue or contribute back in code?
free software gives 4 freedoms. none of them say about contributing back. they only talk about freedom of source code.
same for OSI approved licenses. they are either permissive, MIT aka, do whatever you want or like AGPL provide source code but none that i can think of forces downstream users to contribute back to main.
Think in infrastructure costs. A simple VPS is around $5/mo which is enough for some users. When you're running a company which has tons of users, all of them are doing updates, theme pulls and whatnot.
..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org.
This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software.
SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management.
I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.
Yes, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean it isn't a dick move.
If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability).
In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off.
Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested.
Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is.
It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good.
Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away.
But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
> Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is.
The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person.
Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal.
Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block.
> But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they?
Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.
> The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
Right, discrimination based on protected classes is illegal.
Discrimination based on other needs is not illegal, and is in fact how all businesses work. They discriminate based on income, based on how you're dressed, based on how nice you are.
> This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws.
Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level. Sorry, in my opinion it's not even close to comparable.
If Amazon was your competitor and they also issued hundreds of thousands of requests to one of your FREE APIs would you foot the bill? Fat chance, right? That's what we're talking about here.
> Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level.
Sure, the debate is because its not really believable that that was happening, and sounds like a pretense.
> If Amazon was your competitor
That's the core dispute though. WPEngine is not a competitor of word press foundation. It is a competitor of automattic. For word press foundation to treat competitors to automattic as competitors to themselves seems highly unethical and possibly a violation of fiduciary duty.
Matt seems incapable of clearly separating his roles as:
Person involved with WP foundation
Person who is head of Automattic
Person who contributes/whatever to wordpress
This is highly dangerous from a legal/conflicts of interest perspective, and will result in problems for the Foundation, and the Community, and for Matt.
I don't support it because it's private equity grab or whatever, instead i don't support it because it's dangerous, arguably highly unethical, and appears like using your power against a competitor you don't like more than it looks like "trying to save the open source community from a private equity grab"
He could easily solve all of these things by recusing from actions the foundation considers against his company's competitors, etc.
That would be the clearly ethical thing to do.
Instead he doubles down and appears to use all power available to him to stomp out a company that is the main competition for his business.
The argument was that HN supports a "private equity grab" over an OSS-supporting person.
I'm simply pointing out for plenty of people it's not about OSS or private equity but about the behavior of the person.
It looks like Matt is using the WordPress non-profit to attack a competitor. Additionally, he cut off services to that competitor with the clear intent of disrupting their service and customers and talks about trademark infringement, despite their use of the trademark clearly being covered by their very own guidelines, and, to literally add insult to injury, he describes the situation in very emotional language.
It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.
You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.
If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day.
Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.
"You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation."
If you choose to accept all comers, you get to accept all comers. If you decide to then boycott one specific group, particularly when it is a competitor of the person announcing the boycott, it may in fact be illegal.
This is easily solved by having principles ahead of time and adhering to them (IE we only serve people/companies meeting the following criteria). This did not happen here - instead they have applied a boycott to a specific group after the person involved threatened them as competitor.
Buddy, among other things, i'm licensed as an IP/antitrust lawyer, have actually worked on some of the most recent antitrust cases in tech, and am trying to help you understand what the law actually says.
You don't want to know, that's fine.
But to say "i just made it up" is beyond silly. I don't have an urge to make up anything to win internet points. If i did I'd be on reddit :)
I'm not gonna continue this since it's clear you aren't interested in actually learning anything as much as winning an argument. That's not interesting at all, and not what HN is for.
> You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.
I'm not arguing that they are obligated to provide free services. What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor. Also, this was without any announcement and clearly intent on interrupting the service for mostly unrelated third parties (namely WPEngines customers), just to hurt WPEngine.
As to them being hostile to negotiation, we don't know what happened behind close doors. But from the facts that were publicly presented, Matt wanted an amount of money, has (so far) not presented any reasonable legal basis for it and has overall been pretty emotional, so I do believe WPEngine when they claim that the demand was unreasonable and in bad faith on his side.
If this would have been a calm announcement that WP will cede any free hosting services to for-profit WordPress resellers, with a reasonable timeline for migration, he would have my full support. Maybe I could even get behind singling out WPEngine, if the case was solid. But the way this happens, Matt just looks like the bad guy.
> If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege.
But someone allows free passage on a toll bridge for everyone and suddenly decides to just deny your transport business specifically and publicly insult you, it looks a bit different. Especially if the owner of the bridge just happens to run a competitor for your business, things do look a bit fishy. I mean, fair enough, but this move was clearly intended for maximum damage and someone doing that does not at all look like the reasonable party, sorry.
> What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor.
Or, to rephrase:
They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.
Which, when you phrase it that way, not only sounds reasonable, it sounds obvious.
What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers. Using your free resources is expensive. Like, money expensive.
This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?
Get real. You would 100% do the same thing in that situation.
Agree 100 percent. Perhaps the present generation doesn't know about the early days of Wordpress. Also, all this wording may be because Matt is very committed and so emotional about the protection of open source projects
What harm is done to the free software by WP Engine using it? Is it somehow more difficult to share WordPress code than if they didn't exist? Are they breaking the license terms?
This conflict doesn't feel like a Free Software conflict, it feels like a repeat of what we saw with Mongo & Elastic & Hashicorp—a company that founded itself on being Open Source came to regret the side effects.
I don't care who's right or wrong; I’m just glad WP Engine is finally facing some consequences. Their treatment of clients is appalling—lying through their teeth, charging absurd prices, and offering abysmal support. My company lost many clients because of them.
I’ve been following this closely. Not to be a scaremonger, but after Matt Mullenweg’s last post on WP Engine, the underlying financier Silver Lake started doing opposition research on MM trying to undermine him. I view this as a pretty scummy tactic, but not unexpected from a PE firm trying to squeeze as much profit out of whatever it is investing in.
That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.
The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities.
Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
It is very poor taste and changes the perspective of the product. Instead of a professional entity who will engage professionally it is now a form of leverage that a single person could wield against anyone who crosses them.
To be clear these same exact actions can be taken against anyone who insults one individual. This look is embarrassing.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.
If that’s the case, I’d like to hear from Matt about this. I’ve known him for years, and I don’t think he is unaware of conflicts like these. In fact I’ve seen him be deeply thoughtful about complex problems in the past. He’s not perfect (who is?), but he really does try.
Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.
Am I off?
> Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.
there is a level of actions that are so bad that intent doesnt actually matter anymore. i would say matt has crossed that line here.
ThePrimeagen just did an interview with him, the video is also available on youtube now too.
Not the best interview IMO since prime didn't have much time to prepare questions / topics, and so he is very much "firing from the hip" but you'll get to hear matt go into detail about this topic.
video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
Compare and contrast with the OpenAI old board vs sama drama the other day. And the end result of non-profit being steered by the for-profit entity.
You could also draw parallels from Drupal's death spiral that kicked off when (at the behest of corporate clients) Aquia decided to pivot to "large core" architecture and tossed the bulk of the community overboard in the process.
> they hide behind when people get their sites exploited
It's all in the GPL under "no warranty" and the license is attached to the WP source.
> The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. > Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?
And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?
Were it to go to trial, legal discovery would be fun. How many internal conversations were had about, “Those jerks at WPEngine are eating our lunch”. Rather than, “I am truly concerned about how the trademark is being confused by this one specific successful company. Whatever can we do?”
Civil discovery isn’t a public process. The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public, and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public,
Not directly, but they can enter it as evidence into the lawsuit, in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it. Absolutely parties try to get embarrassing information exposed to the media in this way. They only can do that if it is plausibly relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit-but internal conversations in which executives are attacking the company suing them very likely are.
> in which case it gets publicly released unless the other side can convince the judge to seal it.
Motions to seal evidence are routinely granted by courts in civil matters. Parties can try to get embarrassing information entered into the public record, but they have to convince a judge, and that’s often an uphill battle. Courts don’t like to be used as a tool for private parties to air the others’ dirty laundry.
I was more thinking that this would be government intervention regarding the non-profit status. Discovery would still be secret, but probably a smoking gun there that the organization is not independent of the commercial entity.
As far as I am aware, the WP.org”s (or is it the foundation?) actions are distasteful, but they are allowed to ban whomever they like.
> The parties don’t get to share what they discovered with the public
Well certainly.
> and sensitive information is frequently redacted before documents are provided to the opposing party.
In this case that kind of sensitive information absolutely wouldn't be able to be redacted (successfully) because those conversations would be entirely germane.
I kind of want discovery to happen in this situation.
WP Engine could file a complaint with the IRS about tax exempt status abuse. But that would be a heck of an escalation, and even more damaging to the WordPress ecosystem than Matt’s ridiculous actions so far.
But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.
There is a standard, numbered IRS form for this exact purpose. Having once drafted a copy once, they do indeed require you to submit some kind of narrative and supporting documentation that there is some kind of impropriety in relation to their particular tax exempt status.
It’s not clear to me that WordPress.org has done that. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask WP Engine to pay WordPress.org some kind of fair compensation for the infrastructure demands they induce.
Sure, if they put the same requirements to pay on everyone. But specifically targeting one major competitor to the for profit company that is controlled by the same person who controls the nonprofit?
That gets into a pretty.sticky situation real quick.
Does it?
The fundamental question is: is the non profit going outside the boundary of its status?
I’m not fully convinced that’s the case even in the context of the for profit disagreements with its competitor.
I agree. And whether or not Automattic gets the money or WordPress.org does matter, but so does the way any such transaction is structured.
If Automattic is an infrastructure vendor (in a technical sense at least) to WordPress.org, it’s still reasonable that Automattic doesn’t want to just give its competitors free infrastructure.
I own a hosting business that’s heavily built upon WordPress and even I — at a scale immensely smaller than WP Engine - CDN some of my critical plugins and themes myself. (For a lot of reasons.)
WP Engine is absolutely massive. The load they put on systems that they consume from isn’t trivial. Asking for remuneration from a competitor that is using your services, according to their means, isn’t anticompetitive.
I'm not fully convinced either, but it certainly raises eyebrows, and might attract an investigation to gather more facts.
That's just it. WPEngine are not being asked to pay WordPress.org. They are being asked to pay Automattic.
Why is this standard being applied to only one user, and a competitor at that?
Should Automattic be compelled to subsidise their competitors?
If a8c wants WPE to mirror the plugin and theme repos, they maybe should have asked for that. MM led out of the gate with his now-well-worn "existential threat" rhetoric and actually managed to escalate it from there. As one reddit commentator put it, "you catch more flies with honey than with lighter fluid".
The WP ecosystem needs mirrors anyway, but at this point I think it needs outright alternate repos, not under control of a8c in any way. This could be an attractive proposition to plugin/theme devs, because in this case, MM has been poisoning his own well for some time now (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511). What are the odds that MM will accept a patch to WP core that allows alternate plugin/theme stores?
At the rate things are going though, a hard fork of the GPL'd core is looking more attractive every day. It just needs a catchy name. ClassicPress is already out there, but ... meh. How about FreePress?
> The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.
I honestly wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries. From what I can tell, it's essentially the non-profit acting on commands from the for-profit.
Basically the equivalent in my mind to a "in-kind donation".
To me, I think it's more that it shows they're one entity and then it is a massive issue about the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years. But, I guess we'll see because WP Engine is going to come out swinging on this. They have to.
There is also the fact that WP Engine sponsored a WordPress Foundation event and then was kicked out of it because of this dispute. The WordPress foundation accepted 75k knowing what WP Engine was doing and then didn't honour the deal.
This is also the most shocking thing to me, that Matt seems to be very blasé about using Automattic and the foundation more or less interchangeably and in a very public way to further his goals. So other than the tax writeoffs what was the point of creating the foundation? Where is this guy's legal counsel? Surely they have to be screaming their heads off right now because from the outside every indication now is that the Foundation is really just an extension of Automattic that exists to dodge taxes and whether it is claiming its nonprofit status legally is now becoming a question mark. This is so far for Matt to have fallen and taken WordPress with him
> Where is this guy's legal counsel?
They're represented by Perkins Coie. Who, even as someone from the EU who doesn't do any legal stuff, I have heard of and know are very good. I think they'll be kind of loving this mess. Because even though this is a mess, they're going to get paid to deal with the mess.
> the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years
How? There's exactly zero dollars of donations from Automattic in the Wordpress Foundation financials. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
(It would be quite defensible for Automattic to claim they're donating many millions in-kind every year, but they don't seem to be doing it.)
They'll be writing off all those contributions 4000 hours is a lot of hours.
Says who?
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
It’s a guess since they’re keep track of hours of contributions. Development services are services under that irs doc, afaik.
If the non-profit is doing something for the benefit of the for-profit it’s the reverse of a donation - unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company.
> unless you really meant a “donation” from the foundation to the company
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Essentially laundering money through the 501c3 to try and negate taxes. In this case actual money never changed hands, but what is the financial value of cutting off your competitor from the theme/plugin repo?...
Not an insignificant amount.
Ah, I misunderstood your "wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries" as "it seems it doesn't" rather than "it seems it does". I completely agree.
this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately.
even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.
the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
It also explicitly says you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that. I thought it might be common, but the other big providers do not use WordPress in their product names.
Essential Wordpress
Core Wordpress
Enterprise Wordpress
https://wpengine.com/plans/
> you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that
WP Engine is explicitly not doing that.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GYPsyoSbwAACO7X?format=jpg&name=...
If you are selling "Core Wordpress" WP Engine is explicitly naming a product using "Wordpress". If it was "Core WP" that would be fine.
Wow, you're right. That page is a undeniably an infringement.
Looks like those are just headings, not product names.
Looks like product names to me. It’s certainly confusing at least, which is an issue either way.
Wut? In what are are those not product names? Any reasonable person would assume so.
Probably (the trademark equivalent of) fair use, because WordPress is what they are selling. If I have a basket of windows disks to sell, I can write Microsoft Windows on my price list because the thing I'm selling is called that.
This analogy came up recently when discussing Elasticsearch. It's flawed.
Free and open source software does not, and has never, required giving up trademark rights. I think the GPLv3 is even explicit about this.
In the Windows case it's fair use of the trademark because you're reselling something you previously bought. That's not applicable here.
WordPress is open source software, but a hosting service has a variety of characteristics unrelated to the nominal software. Besides, WP Engine are disabling key features of the product: of course that's misleading.
The hosting company sells WordPress hosting services. The rest of the arguments are nonsense, such as the one about revisions being disabled.
And yet, here is Godaddy doing the same thing:
https://www.godaddy.com/en-ph/hosting/wordpress-hosting
Or a recent hosting provider I interacted with in a 3rd world country:
https://client.absolutehosting.co.za/store/wordpress-hosting
Come now, this seems to be a huge abuse of "trademark" of a term. Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move. I'm gonna start adding it to my list... OpenAI, Mozilla Foundation, Wordpress.
Edit. Side note:
I looked up the Linux trademark usage guidelines. Looks like half the internet is infringing on this one too if you squint. So maybe this all boils down to a case of "Don't be a jerk" that some entities adhere to when it comes to protecting their trademark, whilst others like Automattic use it to bully competitors.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/trademark-usage
Or it's WP Engine being a jerk, and this is just a way to put some pressure on them.
Look at it this way - WordPress is the #1 platform for websites. It is a free, Open-source, and huge asset to the community. Are you going to shit on the guys who made it and gave it away because you have some sympathy for some overpriced, hosting company?
If the Wordpress team disappeared, it would be a tragedy. If WP Engine disappeared it would be nothing.
> Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move.
I get the "ick" factor here, but there doesn't really seem to be a better alternative. If "OpenSourceWare" isn't trademarked by non-profit "OpenSourceSoft", the options are either a) no trademark, and it's a free-for-all where the biggest marketing budget and SEO teams get the biggest return on mindshare and search results or b) Oracle gets the trademark and nobody else is allowed to use it.
The page you linked applies to trademarks owned by the Linux Foundation. The Linux trademark is actually owned by Linus Torvalds, not by the Linux Foundation; and different rules apply to it, as your link notes.
>For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy.
Which links to this page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark
if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service.
and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
Up until this dispute the WordPress trademark policy contained this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Now it's been updated to say this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
It's pretty clear that WP Engine has been in compliance with the old trademark policy and that the new one is acknowledging that they don't have legal standing to demand anything about the WP abbreviation (not least because they waited so long to complain about the usage) so they're instead inserting a petulant and childish slight.
http://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpressf...
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks
Straight from the Wordpress trademark page that was just recently changed to talk shit about a competitor:
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
microsoft doesn’t have a trademark on “ms” either. like i said, if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
this is going to be just as flimsy of a defense as “mikerowesoft”
> if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
Of course not. They will (if it goes that far) point out that their use of WP is explicitly in line with the trademark holder's public guidance on that exact point.
You can't tell everybody that it's fine to use wording like that and then sue them when they do it.
yeah but Wordpress.org explicitly said "using WP is okay". if they turn around and say "no it's not" that's promissory estoppel
There's also "estoppel by laches", which boils down to "you waited too long". Guarantee that's going to be part of WPE's defense too. Then there's the fact that a8c actually invested in WPE while this supposed infringement was taking place.
I am already running out of popcorn.
Trademarks are largely (but not exclusively) about preventing consumer confusion. I can offer a course called "Learn how to use Excel like a pro" and not get sued by MS, as long as I'm not making it seem like I'm Microsoft.
Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.
I've been thinking about this all week since this WP stuff kicked off. You know what's funny, as far as I know I was the first senior person to have a conversation with Ubuntu about that from the DO side, and as far as I recall it (granted it was a long time ago) it was basically them: "Uhm, you can't do that"- me: "maybe, not sure, but probably better to be friends tho yah?" them: "yah" me: "k" - dunno how it is today, but at least till I left, that was how it remained, always earned a shit load of respect in my book, not sure how it'd have gone for us if they decided to really get nasty, but either way, super grateful they didn't, good job Ubuntu people!!!!
Earlier this month, WordPress explicitly said that their trademark didn't cover "WP"
https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.
In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".
Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.
They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.
I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).
The whole standard for trademark law is whether it causes confusion in commerce.
Sounds like they might have a not-great ip lawyer.
Your don't have to claim WP to claim it's being marketed as an abbreviation for your trademark, within your market.
I'm not saying it's a winning argument, but better than whatever the legal framing/ posturing of 'WP isn't our TM' is. Bad PR, if not bad legal take.
Except Wordpress even explicitly suggests using wp in the domain: https://wordpress.org/about/domains/
>>>we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. Try using “wp” instead, or another variation...
Yea- same point though. Bad IP advice / strategy.
Don't condone confusing ip policy if you don't want to end up with confusing product names, especially in a resurgence of 'the domain name is the product' of unlimited tlds.
Definitely bad IP advice, but I think it helps WP Engine to be able to say "look even all the various 'official' Wordpress sites said our name was fine for years".
Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
They will try to move towards enterprise infrastructure with v7 but will probably fail as their (third party) devs are not that good.
I’ve actually seen a lot of PHP code for Wordpress, wrote some, and the only way to get it right today is to make use of a GPT, cause their (WP’s) internals are so many and so weird and inconsistent sometimes.
> Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.
I wonder are you very young? People were saying this a decade, even 15 years, ago
I can confirm WordPress felt like it was fundamentally flawed in 2009, yet it amazingly continues to grow in market share.
I think they’ve succeeded by staying stable with minimal large changes for 20 years and maintaining strong backward compatibility. Meanwhile the rest of the web chases the latest technology cycles, where everything needs to be redone every 5 years because there’s a new way to do things.
The developers who make WordPress understand and are pretty empathetic to their audience / user base, and don’t expect them to put in much work to install and maintain their website.
Other technologies seem to almost intentionally create backwards compatibilities in order to set user expectations that, yes you need to put in work to continue use our framework.
Not much younger anymore but still following Wordpress. This time the difference is GPT which writes and modifies html static site as if it was WP render.
> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine
I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.
Wpengine doesn’t contribute to the core as much as they promised, and prohibits their employees to do so.
WPEngine has no obligation to contribute anything.
This is not how open source has or is supposed to work.
If they had an informal development in exchange for server access type relationship then that would qualify as some sort of obligation.
Doesn't really have anything to do with open source though. Haven't seen anything about matt/wordpress.org/Automattic trying to prevent them from using open source code.
Exactly.
Conclusion: This isn't about OSS, it's about money (and power).
Shamelessly, MM has dug himself a hole. If X is any indication, going forward there are few in the community who will trust him. A leader who isn't trusted is no leaser at all. Evidently he realizes this and is stuck doubling down on stupid. Rinse and repeat.
If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
>If feel bad for the people who took off work, went to WordCamp US and they keynote they got was a complete turd.
I feel like this is a half empty half full kind of situation. Some people might think like you but others might view it as probably the most memorable keynote in Wordpress history (because if all the drama).
> I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.
Automattic sent the cease and desist to WP Engine.
Incorrect. Dot org is not involved. https://x.com/wpengine/status/1839246341660119287
True, but in this case we can simply judge based on the actions taken.
The claims (trademark violation, no contributing anything back) seem pretty sensible and borne out in practice.
WordPress is an open source project stewarded by a foundation that set rules for its use. If you don't follow them there are consequences. As simple as that, really.
These rules (paying a license or contributing back) seem sensible too.
Normalizing people leeching off the work of other doesn't seem like a good approach.
Some people might disagree with the philosophy — perfectly fine! They can write their own blog engine and release it in a permissive open-source license and make copyrights freely available to anyone. This is a blog engine, not exactly antitrust material.
Gets even more wild when you consider Automattic invested in WP Engine's Series A in 2011, despite all this insidious trademark abuse commencing in 2010.
No chance this is personal.
Isn't that the same what MS does with VS Code?
Open Source so that VS Codium exists but Codium can't access MS's extension store.
VS Code is a product of Microsoft Corp, not a nonorofit foundation. Wordpress.org is a nonprofit foundation, and as a nonprofit, there are rules they have to follow that for profit organizations don't have to.
Sure, but one of those rules is not "you must allow other entities to use your resources for free".
Sure, but see this comment I made in another thread- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665361
If MS Does it, does it make it right ?
Nobody is asserting this.
Does Automattic follow wordpress.org's copyright rules? If not then I see the hypocrisy. If so then I don't.
Also it seems wordpress.org kept their resources open to WPEngine until WPEngine sued wordpress.org[1] (not wordpress.com according to the blog post).
So if wordpress.org is getting sued, why would they keep their resources open to the litigant?
[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
Part of what's so weird about the communication from Matt here is that WordPress.org is not getting sued by anyone—indeed, as far as I can tell WP Engine isn't suing anyone.
All that happened is that WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic. WordPress.org misrepresenting the situation is not a good look.
The dispute (on the surface) is about trademark not copyright and Automattic has an exclusive license to the trademark.
I went to WP Engines website and on it they say "Host your WordPress site with the WordPress experts".
It feels confusing to me. The word "the" makes me explicitly think this is Wordpress themselves. They are "the" experts. WP Engine makes it pretty clear they are Wordpress. It is front and center. It has a different meaning than "Host your WordPress site with WordPress experts".
Arg, thanks for clarifying that. I misused that term.
No-one is being sued (yet) and wordpress.org was not targeted in any way. Matt is being dishonest by repeating this lie anywhere and everywhere. Including on the very page you linked.
WPEngine sent a cease and desist letter addressed to, and targetting only, Matt Mullenweg and his for profit company Automattic. WPEngine are explicitly not targeting wordpress.org in the letter. You can read it here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Side note: wp.org is indeed mentioned a couple times in the letter but only when referencing Matt's blog post on the site, the trademark rules, and some technical information around the revisions feature. The "demands" part of the letter address Matt and Automattic exclusively.
Matt knows that an attack on dot org would rally everyone to his side, which is why he is repeating this lie over and over. He is trying to use the community as shield.
This is also (IMHO) why he shut off access to dot org. He wants WPEngine to be seen taking some sort of action against the community.
Matt is constantly shifting between "Matt from Automattic" and "Matt from the WP Foundation" wherever it suits him. It's sickening. He needs to be removed from the foundation immediately.
https://x.com/wpengine/status/1839246341660119287
100% - i raised exactly this issue in the legal claim concerns.
This is a remarkably bad plan from a legal perspective.
> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.
I think the fact those boundaries have been crossed will be a massive legal issue for WordPress.org and Automattic since they'll have problems proving they're two separate entities and they will have been using that as a charity as a tax write-off. What is the penalty for tax evasion where you create a fake charity to write tax off of? It's prison, right?
Not that I think it would happen, but that would some outcome. Attempting to squeeze a competitor only to land in jail for tax fraud.
Have you read this? https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.
That’s really not a fair statement from him given:
1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.
2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.
3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.
I suspect that his figure on the number of hours is somewhat cooked up and biased. Did he cite a reliable and reasonable source of data that we can all consult to check the veracity of this claim?
The numbers are on WordPress.org's Five for the Future website:
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/automattic/
- https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledge/wp-engine/
The quote says WP Engine is contributing. WP Engine also gave WP.org 75k in sponsorship money, I would say that's a contribution. It's also important to know that after WP.org took that 75k sponsorship money, they kicked them out of the event they sponsored.
Wouldn't that risk be mitigated if WPEngine were more engaged with supporting development?
What difference would that make?
Because they would be represented in the org. If you choose to stay on the sidelines, should you be surprised to find out your not important to the action?
It's not really crossing the boundaries, in this kind of situations I don't know if people is misunderstanding genuinely or they do the interests of corporations because they have interests in WPEngine. WordPress.org is not going against all competitors of WordPress.com, is going against a competitor that has high load towards free resources of WordPress.org, having many customers, but not contributing anything towards those free resources. And WordPress.org has banned that leecher from keep stressing their systems for free with no contributions. When Matt said to go to pick another WordPress hosting instead of WPEngine, WordPress.com wasn't mentioned either.
[dead]
This will someday be an MBA case study on how to blunder a PR campaign.
WPEngine is _not_ a sympathetic character by default. They’re a decent hosting provider with an ambitious enterprise sales team…they have nowhere near the level of accumulated goodwill that WordPress had. It doesn’t take a genius press team to make them look like a playground bully.
Nothing that has happened over the past week has been executed well from a comms standpoint.
That’s why I want to ask…is Matt ok? Executives are people too, and his decisions make him seem very isolated. If he’s psychologically unwell, I hope he gets the help he needs. If he is ok, I hope he’s fired by the board tomorrow.
A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
A couple of hours ago Matt dropped into a twitch stream and offered up an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"
> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"
I think being banned for a post like this is fair enough:
> [I hope] that the CEO dies a forever painful death involving a car […]
Can't disagree, but the huge mistake started at “We generally do not comment on individual cases, but". A CEO recklessly copy pasting information from his platform's internal moderation portal into a public forum should really put into question their ability to stay level headed while running the business and the effectiveness of their company's policies and security practices. I genuinely cannot think of any other case this mind boggling.
> dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
Full quote. This is ridiculous, and to me looks more than a little tongue in cheek.
Hoping for people's death isn't good, but this isn't a threat. It's an expression of frustration, and people think these things, and sometimes say them out loud. And there's a huge power imbalance here.
Open Source outgrew the Free Software movement by being intentionally pragmatic and business-oriented, but the seams are really starting to show, and I'm increasingly interested in seeing a resurgence of the principles of the Free Software movement.
> To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy. [0]
The constant battles in Open Source communities over who is allowed to use "their" software and for what seem to stem from a completely different outlook on freedom than the FSF puts forward. Free Software is produced out of a desire to ensure maximal user freedom and freedom of information—it's an ethical stance one takes, and as such it doesn't become less valuable when people make money using your work, if anything it becomes more valuable. You contribute to it because it matters, not because you expect to get anything out of it besides the software itself.
I'm not sure if Open Source is another casualty of the increasing commercialization of the web or if it's always been this way, but I think it's high time we take a second look at the ethically-driven development principles of GNU and the FSF.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
Agree. The fundamental differences between Free Software and Open Source but Commercial Software were always tricky.
The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".
I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.
I think there’s a place for “we did 99% of the work here, but we want you to be able to tweak things if you need, read the code, and compile it for new systems without us in the loop.”
In that case I see no problem with the main sponsor company not wanting just anyone to come and make money off their work. They might accept contributions if offered up, but they are not hoping to gain much from them.
That’s in stark contrast to a project like Linux where it much more heavily relies on outside people getting into the development cycle.
To your point actually, I think it can be sticky for an open source maintainer of a small project when someone comes along and tries to be a more active contributor and treat your project like the latter when you’re really intending it to be more like the former. There’s no great signal of what type of open source you’re intending to create apart from saying “I don’t really want significant contributions” in your readme.
From the article:
> WordPress’s GPL code
Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?
It's a question of philosophy, not license. The whole "release code under GPL but get angry when other people besides you start making more money than you do from it" thing is strikingly different from the attitude in the GPL FAQ:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...
The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.
It's also worth noting that WordPress is a descendent of the B2/cafelog blogging software. Automattic, themselves, are the other people making money off of someone else's project...and now they're mad that other other people are doing the same.
The issue at hand seems to be WP Engine using Automattic-sponsored infrastructure for their own for-profit services, not modifications to free software.
That's the place that Matt decided to hit them, but that's not where the complaint lies. The complaint as laid out in the blog posts [0][1] is nearly identical to the complaints that Elastic had against AWS: trademark use causing confusion and drawing customers away from the "official" offerings.
Beyond that, Matt absolutely has beef with modifications that WP Engine has made to the free software, going so far as to say that these modifications mean that what they're offering is "not WordPress". Never mind that WordPress.com is likewise a bastardized modification—that's okay because it's "us" doing the modifying!
> This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
This kind of attitude is incompatible with the premise of Free Software, which places a strong emphasis on encouraging reuse and modification to suit user needs.
[0] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
I haven't been following the drama since the beginning so thanks for the perspective. Totally agree this isn't good.
What people say is one thing but one should draw conclusions instead from what they do. Too often the GPL is used to enforce a two-tier system in which everyone is free but some are more free than others. The original creators of a work retain proprietary and commercial relicensing rights while everyone else gets serfdom.
That's not because of the GPL. The GPL has little to do with barring access to a platform on which code is published. Arguably, if a copy existed elsewhere, say GitHub, then WPEngine is free to use that code according to the GPL.
In other words: once code is published with the GPL and someone has a copy, the original creators can do little to nothing to stop them from using said code however they see fit. That's what drives forking.
In the same vain, original creators always have, and will have, the freedom as rights holders over creative works, to change the license on new versions published. Of course, the caveat being holding the rights over contributions made by third parties (hence the existence of contested contributor agreements).
The real issue here is a for-profit entity driving the governance of a non-profit entity. There's not just the ethical but also legality at play here. And this has little to do with copyright.
Agreed. And the communications I'm seeing out of WordPress.org around this very much suggest that WordPress is firmly in that category.
You're trying to come up with distinctions between Open Source and Free Software where there are practically none, except for the politics of Free Software, which is inconsequential BS.
I guess what I'm saying is that the politics (I phrased it as ethics, but I think we're talking about the same thing) are far more consequential than people give them credit for, and isolating the mechanics from the ethical framework is why Open Source is losing coherency as a movement—it's a religion with no doctrine, and in the absence of a strong inward-facing ethic it doesn't have enough staying power to hold out in the face of monetary incentives.
The whole point of Open Source was for it to not be a religion.
If anything, it is the indoctrination in Free Software that led many young people to believe that proprietary software is immoral. Coupled with zero-interest rates, this led to companies founded without sustainable business models. The companies making it work are usually doing so by selling products and services where the OSS parts are complementary and not the main product being sold, and it's a good thing they do.
I'd say that the doctrine part doesn't help at all.
Let’s call this what it is:
Automattic shaking down the biggest competitor to his hosting business.
But a service disruption like this is bad strategy.
WPEngine runs accounts for many very recognizable brands and large orgs - kinds of clients Matt wants to see switch over.
Given disruptions like this, those clients are far more likely to see Wordpress as unreliable software before their hosting provider.
And Matt might not realize it but almost all of those large accounts already have multiple devs who are _eager_ to migrate away from Wordpress.
1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities.
All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days.
In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself.
But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately.
He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction.
To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.
My guess is, that he knows, that his trademark claims will likely not hold up in court and he'd need to spend some money to get to court in the first place.
As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way.
Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted.
I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation.
Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.
In the end, he really took the "scorched earth nuclear approach". Small problem: the land become inhabitable and nobody wants to touch this radioactive dump.
My thoughts are to the devs with clients on these platforms; they are going to take the heat for all the problems in place of the real disrupter.
I reckon they will change the license terms much like Facebook licenses llama.
They cannot. Wordpress is a fork of cafelog which was gpl iirc.
I'm one of those devs who migrated all of the company sites to Laravel-based CMSes. Waaaay better experience, users are happy, updates are a breeze, and the sites are fast and reliable.
WordPress has become so tacky and this drama is exacerbating the problem. I don't see a bright future for WordPress, unfortunately.
Can I ask what you migrated to?
I’m not GP, nor using PHP, but can highly recommend WagtailCMS:
https://wagtail.org/
It’s based on Python/Django and has an excellent developer and user experience. They pay a lot of attention to detail, including a block-based content editor, similar to Gutenberg, and first class accessibility support.
> And Matt might not realize...
My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is.
Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks.
It's about money.
I have a hard time being sympathetic for Matt given what I've read so far. The C&D WPR sent shows plenty of quotes about Matt threatening to talk poorly about WPE unless they pay up.
If WPE is abusing WordPress infrastructure then sure, block them. It seems like corporate politics with WordPress.com are deeply entwined here.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's very unclear what the relationship between Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation are. In the very least, it seems a conflict of interest to have the same person running all of them.
From Matt, they were asking for 8% of revenue to license the WordPress trademark and donations to Automattic. https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/
Why not ask for donations to the WordPress Foundation or donate infrastructure/mirrors if that were the actual point of contention...
This is one of the worst attempts to handle a corporate dispute that I have ever seen. Forget all of the he said he said arguments for a second and see what a random person who decided to use WordPress will see.
If Automatic gets mad at the company I use to host this site, they will randomly start holding my site hostage by deactivating services. No host is safe. I probably shouldn't use WordPress.
I don't care who is wrong or right here. This is peak "cutting off your nose to spite your face" behavior.
Related. Others?
Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578 - Sept 2024 (84 comments)
WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760 - Sept 2024 (53 comments)
Automattic has sent a cease and desist to WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642974 - Sept 2024 (10 comments)
Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642597 - Sept 2024 (48 comments)
WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912 - Sept 2024 (254 comments)
Also: WP Engine Must Win -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480
(Disclaimer: my submission and post. I am a WordPress core committer and built the REST API for it.)
Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 (31 comments)
Why not merge this with the existing thread on the official post that it references? This is a dupe. An after-the-fact submission talking about the source.
My empathy is with Automatic on this one, but I still think it's the wrong move.
"Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid."-jeswin
If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source. Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way. Companies can already view Open Source projects as risky in a number of ways: lots of drama/turnover in a project, a single BFDL controls everything, viral license. For many projects the rewards from using it outweigh these risks.
However, all the above risks can be evaluated before a company decides to build using an Open Source project. If projects are seen as able to block availability unilaterally without a license violation, that's a risk that can't be evaluated before investing perhaps millions using it. Of course, this would all be evaluated and we'd live in a better world if companies heavily using an Open Source project decided to allocate 1% of the software engineering budget as a donation to that project.
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.
But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.
Sure, but I think at minimum there's a reasonable realty where Automattic/the foundation:
1. Creates an official policy that states the level of usage of the public WordPress services/resources which constitutes requiring a business relationship with the Foundation (e.g. N terabytes transferred per month)
2. Attach a dollar amount.
3. Inform WP-Engine that they're in violation of this new policy and they have N days to comply or their access will be terminated (where N is at least 90 but ideally 180/360).
Matt's recent interview with the Primeagen suggests that while "discussions" with WP-Engine go back years, he couldn't give a straight answer for whether other services may be vulnerable to the same retribution WP-Engine faced, specifically and quantifiably why WP-Engine received retribution while other entities don't, and if specific prior notice of the actions Automattic took was given to WP-Engine. Instead, it was vibey: A bunch of "well, they use a lot, server resources, our trademark, yeah other entities use a lot too, but those other entities give back, stuff, to the community, WP-Engine gives back some stuff, but not enough." Prime tried to get more out of him multiple times but it just ended with him saying "I'm sorry, I'm sick and really tired".
Here's what I predict WP Engine will do next week in response:
1. They will scrape the entire WordPress.org plugin registry (people are already circulating scrapers around Mastodon)
2. They will open their own separate plugin registry, with blackjack and hookers
3. They will update their mu-plugin to hook the WordPress autoupdater and point it to their own infrastructure on every site they host
They can do this because WordPress is GPL and so are all the plugins. GPL can't be revoked unless you fuck up a source release, which is genuinely hard to do in PHP. And WordPress is GPLv2+, meaning GPLv3 with its way more lenient revocation terms are available.
I assume at some point Automattic will insist that scraping WordPress.org is now illegal or something, and then every plugin author will have to go through an annoying process of claiming their WP Engine Plugin Registry entries and updating everything in two places, fracturing the community because of the FOSS world's most petty trademark fight.
Sounds exactly like what will happen.
With a lot of people not coming back to update all add-ons in multiple places so just a mess.
Fast forward this mess makes for a worse customer experience and people ditch WordPress for better CMSs.
The software running on those servers was built by volunteers, some of which are now scrambling to help their clients who are blocked from using that software.
Is the .org infrastructure built or operated by volunteers? It doesn't seem like that part is even open source.
Sure. The software is free. Why should the server be free?
I'm do not want to talk about whole thing, I do not know what to think about that but:
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it...
Isn't this more about infrastructure (wordpress.org)? All plugins are still downloadable and able to install via SFTP.
> Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way.
This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.
> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.
Companies can't use proprietary software without the risk of being banned or refused a licence renewal either.
IMO the craziest revelation in this whole ordeal is that Matt personally owns WordPress.org. I have worked with WP for close to a decade and I was always under the impression that it was owned by the nonprofit foundation.
So this means that a large chunk of the functionality (plugin directory and updates) of a standard WP install relies on a website controlled by one man. No way this dynamic can be allowed to continue after this whole mess.
If like Matt says, they contribute little back to Wordpress then I am with Automattic on this. If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Now one could say that the license allows that and it's legal. Sure, but so is cutting their free access off. If WPEngine is just leeching and spending nothing on improving the product, there's no way anyone can compete with them on price. Open Source is expensive, people need to be paid.
Bottom line: Size matters. Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction. FOSS projects should adopt it more widely where it matters.
If you have such expectations then clearly state the rules.
- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free
- companies under $b have to pay $x
- companies under $c have to pay $y
Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)
I feel like there could be little need for rules if people had a little common sense, then if you have targets, other start doing the bare minimum, I'd rather have parasites like WPEngine put off
Does that mean every successful company needs to start financing Linux, curl, Postgres, Python, etc which are undoubtedly powering who knows how much internal infrastructure?
Either you are a free license or not.
Its not a crazy concept , the real world non-idealized version of your statement is called tax. We pay taxes for access to free public services.
Ok but taxes that are invented on the spot by an all-powerful ruler, and imposed by surprise, under immediate threat, do not have a great history in modern society.
I have no clue how you extrapolated all that from my claim that free public services aren't free and are, in fact, paid for by taxpayers.
Free public services are a finite resource. Already existing software is not.
Software maintenance is a finite resource too.
Software maintenance is not already existing software though.
It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive. To require compensation of any kind for access and the right to use and distribute code is contrary to the spirit of free and open source software.
If people want to do that, then fair enough, just don't call if free or open source. And don't license your code under free or open source licenses if you care about getting credit or compensation or anything but maximizing software freedom.
> It is a crazy concept, because taxes are coerced by governments under the threat of violence, whereas the freedoms of FOSS software are intended to be entirely non-coercive.
In doubt, you will have to enforce the freedoms of FOSS by going to a court (i.e. use the governmental "violence enforcement system"). On the other hand, if you pay your taxes "voluntarily", you won't be coerced by the government.
In other words: in both cases threats of violence are involved.
There is already the shared source model.
What people call things is a marketing phenomenon. You can complain all you want.. and you should.
It’s not incoherent. It’s a rule that could be made and adhered to for a project.
It’s not possible for GPL projects to restrict the code this way, but the peripheral assets like trademarks, servers, conference slots, board seats, core contributor status could be restricted.
I would actually say yes, they should start doing exactly that.
What you describe constitutes an ideal scenario, frankly. Similar to paying taxes for using roads for deliveries.
I agree, if I would making bookoo bucks off of someone else’s “open”platform, you could be 100% sure I would be feeding the golden goose some grain to build some rapport. If I’m playing with it in my homelab, maybe not so much but try occasionally to donate if it’s an OSS project that $10-50 makes a difference for.
And if you didn't want to do that it would be appropriate for the OSS project to retaliate?
It's not retaliation to revoke free access to your web resources.
If I scrape some website, I could be IP banned at any time. That's just how it goes.
It's one thing to use web resources on a small scale, as a user. It's another to milk them dry and practically DDOS their servers. That can, and will, get you banned. Open source or not.
Of course it's retaliation. Wordpress.org said as much in the announcement - they don't like WP Engine's business model, don't think they contribute enough upstream, etc. And therefore they cut off access to the wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server.
Yes, retaliation for using web resources without paying.
> wordpress.org update servers. Nothing about "practically DDOS" of the server
Yes, when you have hundreds of thousands of users this is expensive. What you're describing is expensive.
WPE doesn't maintain these servers, presumably because it's hard and expensive. You can't expect to hit someone's servers with, I'm guessing, hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not pay a dime. If you did that, you would be banned. From just about any free service.
It is if they get mad you sent a cease and desist.
in this case the "rules" you're talking about are licensing terms, so I have trouble interpreting your statement as anything other than "licenses wouldnt be needed if everyone would just use software the way the author wants"
How is WPEngine a parasite? If you don't want people to use your code don't release it GPL
Has absolutely nothing to do with the license, the code was and is GPL-2.
GPL-2 doesn't force you to allow free access to web resources. This is a separate problem altogether. You'd get banned even if they were closed source.
> But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Revenue is a red herring. It is not an appropriate measure to determine if and how much one should contribute to an open source project.
Instead, we should measure the need to contribute by the burden one places on the project.
Do you request features or bug fixes? Contribute appropriately.
Do you request support? Contribute appropriately.
Do you simply copy, install, and run the existing software? No need to contribute.
If you go down this path of creating rules that say people should pay to use open source, you’ll discover there are already laws in place sufficient to manage this situation. If a project uses these laws, then you’ll complain the project isn’t open source.
If you prefer the capricious nature of the politics of social shaming instead of the rules based system of laws and courts, I guess that is being consistent even if the actual process is very inconsistent and unpredictable.
If not, then it’s not clear to me how you’re taking a philosophical stance about open source if you’re demanding payment. Those ideas don’t work together.
What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.
However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.
The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.
This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.
Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.
I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.
However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.
Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.
(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)
What is Netflix's economic incentive to pay their AWS bill every month?
My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.
Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.
WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!
> What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit?
Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business
What do you mean? They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy?
They have 0 duty to do anything for WP. And thats also how WP got big. If everyone had to contrbute back, would the ecosystem be so big and WP be used everywhere? I doubt it.
> They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy
Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.
This situation might kill one of WP Engine or Wordpress.com, but I sure wouldn't bet on it being WP Engine that ends up in the grave.
>Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business
This situation is not going to kill WP Engine.
I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.
If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.
>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...
I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.
> I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.
Can you share a link? I haven't been able to find that. A prohibition on contributions seems like a bad policy, because at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
I'm referring to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406
>It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
If you check Wordpress' Youtube channel, they uploaded the Q&A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
There is a part Matt talks about protecting employees who speak up about WP Engine. This was also cited in the cease and desist letter by WP Engine.
I don't how much of it is true, but I don't think he would do all of this if there wasn't some truth to it.
>at some point WP Engine will want a change in Core and they need the political capital to make that happen.
Why would they need a change in Core? WP Core is already a very stable piece of software that supports half of the internet. It's extensible enough that you can add all "changes" you want through plugins. In fact that is another issue in all of this. WP engine says they "contribute" by creating plugins, while WP org insists that a contribution needs to be a contribution to WP core.
Matt gave an interview to about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM and although he sounded very unprepared and showed no receipts, none of what he says sounds unreasonable.
A key point on the interview is that Matt has been trying to get WP Engine to contribute for years and they kept delaying on him. People called this "extortion," but in my view it's a way an open source project found to get a corporation that profits from open source to contribute. There is a "world-famous" trademark, and to use it you need to pay or contribute dev hours. He says various hosts had the same deal, and because he never had a problem with any of the other hosts, he ended up being "naive" and let WP Engine delay and delay for years because he didn't think they would just never agree to it. In the screenshots in the cease and desist by WP Engine you can even see messages from Matt including one where it sounds like WP Engine is telling him to set up a meeting next week instead of talking about it in the Q&A, to which he responds (paraphrased) "if you're saying next week you're saying no." Even up to the last minute he still tried to get an agreement, sending a photo of the audience, and got no favorable answer.
Ignoring the trademark violation allegations, and the whole "revisions" thing that some may think sounds ridiculous, there was a part he mentions Woocommerce has a Stripe code that gives part of the revenue to WP org, and WP Engine hacked the code to give the attribution to WP Engine, which means the money that would go to WP org (com?) goes to WP Engine. I think this is technically legal because it's GPL, but it doesn't look good if you're diverting millions of dollars that would go to WP org to yourself.
From what I've seen, it really feels like Matt tried everything he could to get a commercial entity to contribute to an open source project and now he's getting the blame because their customers are getting affected by it. It doesn't help that many who use Wordpress do not understand the separation between Wordpress, the source code (that WP Engine can still use), and the CDN that provides automatic updates (which WP Engine got banned from). The millions of WP Engine users using te CDN were costing WP org money that can now be invested in a different way. I've seen some even say a court could issue an injunction to force WP org to provide the updates for free. The "free ice cream" analogy Matt uses in the interview is really apt here.
If this goes to court I suppose allegations will start getting receipts behind them and we'll have a clearer view of what happened. To me, based on Matt's allegations, WP Engine is not being targeted for being a competitor like some say, but they have been given an exceptionally favorable treatment that was unjust to the other Wordpress hosts who were agreeing to pay for the trademark, and all of this was just WP org making things fair again.
In fact, Matt even says that if they do agree to contribute 8% of their revenue in cash or dev hours, they will get unbanned. I'm not sure if they will capitulate, but just the fact it isn't just "money" but "dev hours is okay" sounds to me that this isn't about money.
> Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction.
We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.
This is a horrible way to go about it though. WP Engine users are still WordPress users, and cutting them off without notice is very shitty. I wouldn't trust WordPress for anything after this, if all that it takes to cut you off from updates - potentially security updates - is Matt Mullenweg not liking you (or your ISP).
If you're running a large business and you don't have a plan in case a free resource provided by someone else goes away, you shouldn't be in business. It really is that simple.
“The market is merciless” is something a business should always keep in mind, at least when their existence isn’t guaranteed for some reason.
OP isn't talking about large businesses, they're talking about the hundreds of thousands of small businesses using WP Engine as a host.
Those small businesses are purchasing something from WP Engine. It's up to WP Engine to deliver, and it's ridiculous if a company that size fails to deliver because they were freeloading without having a backup plan in place. The fault is entirely on WP Engine (who sold the service) not Wordpress (who made no promises at all to WP Engine customers).
So it's okay for WordPress.org to damage a bunch of WordPress users because they're not customers of Automattic and therefore WordPress.org has no obligations to them?
It's this kind of blurring of lines between Automattic and the foundation that has people very very concerned here.
Yes it's OK. Free Software means that users have freedoms, not that the developer is obliged to provide them free services forever.
Got it. So Free Software means that the ostensibly-distinct foundation supporting the project can act to defend the interests of the for-profit entity run by the same person.
Yes, why not? If it's not something prohibited by the license, it is permitted.
Also, if open source companies wouldn't do it, some open source projects would never reach any kind of maturity if the company creating such project faces the competition who just live off the work of the original team who don't contribute back to the project.
They could move their sites over to the WordPress.com, can't they?
Since they offer competing services in the first place.
WPCOM is a very limited WordPress - much more limited than Mullenweg is accusing WP Engine of being.
The real competitor in Automattics portfolio is Pressable. Who are currently running a poaching campaign on their frontpage.
WordPress.com started out as a WordPressµ (WordPress Multi User) provider. Just a place for people to quickly start their own blogs, mainly hosted on a WordPress.com subdomain. To learn more about WordPress MU: https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_MU
"WordPress hosting" is a relatively new option on WordPress.com. Pressable is a more advanced WordPress hosting provider, built by Automattic.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
Obviously you don’t have to answer, but it feels like with Pressable as a product, WPE suddenly became a big competitor to the bottom line. It is here where the optics suddenly become shady. Like WPE has been running like they do for years, and now suddenly it is a big problem? Like why now?
Personally I also don’t like that the .org suddenly becomes weaponized. If this can be done to WPE, it can be done to anyone else really.
Their title is fitting at least: "Truly Incredible WordPress Hosting by Pressable". Yes, it's hard to believe their antics.
And herein lies the conflict of interest. WordPress.org is acting in the interests of Automattic at the expense of the community.
WordPress.com is actually doing the exact shady things that WP Engine does. Confusing WordPress.org users that they need a paid account to run WordPress.
You need to pay for hosting right? Nothing new.
Sure WP also has some freemium model, but I do not consider that shady.
Have you seen the Automattic CEO talk (link to YT in other comment in this thread). I dont think he's in shady business: he's releasing loads of source code under the GPL!
He’s also using the foundations copyright to target the primary competitor to his for-profit business, demanding that they invest in the profits of the for-profit company, at the expense of the WordPress open-source community. None of this looks altruistic or for the good of wordpress.org.
If wordpress.com offered a good product then the likes of wpengine, kinsta, etc would never have gotten off the ground.
WPE isn't cheap and subscriptions are typically yearly contracts, so it's not that simple for those operating on a specific budget
Is that supposed to make this blatantly anti-competitive behaviour okay?
How is it anti-competitive to stop people smashing your APIs? That shit costs money man. It's not free to provide web resources to hundreds of thousands of people.
WPE is essentially DDOSing WP for free. Obviously that shit doesn't fly. Either pay up or get your own server and host your own shit.
I dont know why you are down voted. I feel exactly the same about it.
Most likely my tone, but I'm frustrated because I don't even understand how this is a conversation.
If any one of us was hosting a FREE service and some corporation came around and hit us with hundreds of thousands of requests, we too would demand money or ban them. Any one of us. So I really, truly, don't understand why we're all sitting here having this conversation.
Sorry? Their service is... their service! They can extend of refuse service to whom they want.
Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors. It seems to me you are holding the good guys (that release under FLOSS licenses) to a higher standard than any other company that keeps the source to them selves.
> Automattic is releasing source code, which, in my book, is being super friendly to competitors.
WordPress is a GPL project.
the code is GPL.
services (like the plugin registry, but there are many more) cannot be GPL. they are served by someone and that someone pays for hosting/bandwidth/etc and that someone is free to stop providing that service (to one party or all together).
WordPress.org is not "apparently" Automattic
That happens everywhere.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*OVEEYB4H...
Under GPLv2, WP Engine has no obligation of pay the ransom Matt is demanding no matter the revenue they make.
But nor does the WordPress foundation need to allow WP Engine, or any user, access to the plugin library.
Chromium is Open Source, but Google is not required to allow Add On store access (even if they tolerate it from chromium forks).
Requiring they pay the for-profit company to access non-profit resources seems problematic.
As far as I could tell, they weren't denied use of the code, just a bunch of other services that are not covered by the GPLv2.
GPLv2 licenses the Wordpress code, not trademarks or the right to use Automattic's APIs.
Before this week, I didn't realise that the WordPress.org servers and plugin repositories fell under Automattic, and not WordPress Foundation.
Some clarity would be nice.
I wonder how much does Automattic contribute to the PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, jQuery, ... organizations?
>If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
For example Sony sold more than 100 million units of PS4 and made billions of dollars from it and how much they contributed to the open source projects they've used in PS4? Take a look at OSS projects used in PS4: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/
Did they contribute anything? Did they contribute 100% enough or just 20% or 30%?
If the software is open sourced and if license allows you to do anything with it then you are indeed free to do anything with it including selling products which include OSS.
You're free to do it but nobody has to help you certainly.
Ultimately it's a matter of common sense. Sure, if I leave out my "take one" bowl on Halloween and someone takes it all, there's no rules against that. But next year I might be more cautious and hand out the candy myself - now what?
If you've built a business off taking all my candy and reselling it, you're fucked! If you had just been less greedy and taken, say, 10 instead of the whole bowl I might not have cared.
If the rule is "take one" and someone takes everything, than a rule is in fact breached. In your example the candy bowl is explicitly marked as "take as much as you want" and someone does. If you don't want that, label it appropriately next year.
I'm this case, the license explicitly allows everyone to use the software for free. I don't understand your candy analogies. If you're not OK with people using your software for free, use a commercial license (or a dual licensing model, or one of a hundred possible solutions other than a free license).
> I'm this case, the license explicitly allows everyone to use the software for free.
Has absolutely 0 to do with open source. The software was, and is, GPL.
This is about using free web APIs. Yes you will get banned for that, on absolutely any service. Don't believe me? Try it out.
Sony contributes back. To FreeBSD even, they are even listed in their list of contributors.
Hell they're one of the only 2 companies that let you compile android with their firmware for their phones. They even have instructions on their site.
This is whatabouttism, but damn, they don't deserve this kinda talk.
Example: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/0abe05aeac29d997...
>Sony contributes back. To FreeBSD even, they are even listed in their list of contributors.
I just used Sony as an example to tinker what is the definition of contributing enough that Matt Mullenweg was talking about:https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/#:~:text=(To%20....)
I don't have anything against Sony.
I think this issue is complicated and I have no answers. However, I do feel Wordpress is much more central to WPEngine's business than e.g. FreeBSD is to Sony's.
1. This is pure whataboutism. Just because Sony doesn't contribute (I don't know whether they do or don't), doesn't make it right.
2. There is obviously a difference between "selling products that include OSS" and "selling OSS 1:1". It's not like Sony's firmware/dashboard is maintained by "OpenGamingConsoleDashboard" and they are selling a 95% repackage of that to their end users (also ignoring the hardware). This pertains to the software maintenance logistics layer and not the licensing layer. Sure, both in the Sony and WPEngine cases they are in the clear on the licensing, but that doesn't make for sustainable development of the underlying software. I'd also wager that if the OSS projects used in the PS4 would drum up enough of a social media stink, they'd have decent chances of getting some compensation (e.g. the TLDraw maintainers did that quite a few times successfully).
They're not "selling OSS 1:1", they're selling managed hosting.
>But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.
Where does the GPL state this requirement? It doesn't.
If WordPress doesn't like this, they should have licenced their software under the AGPL or some other licence with stronger copylefting.
Plenty of large commercial entities use BSD licenced software and make a fortune off the software, with little given in return. Take FreeBSD and the significant commercial operations it drives. They never whinge. Because that's the choice they made, and they stick to their principles.
GPL doesn’t, but as others have already said, this discussion is not about that. If they want to keep using someone else’s free server capacity, maybe they should be giving something in return.
If you're providing your servers for free and include them as the primary update mechanism to an open source project for millions of websites, maybe you shouldn't use that as an extortion mechanism holding millions of websites hostage.
Taking away access to those servers is one thing, doing it without warning putting millions of sites at risk is another.
Totally agree with you. That is the issue at the heart of the situation.
WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.
First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.
They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.
Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.
As someone who wrote OS software in the past and had little no people contributing back except the core team, i total disagree.
If you write OS and put it out there for the world to use, you should be doing it because you want to _give_ to the world. you should not expect _anything_ in return. the is the essences of giving, to not expect something back.
if Matt wants WPEngine to require a contribution to WordPRess, then he should relicense it under a license that requires this or close the code and charge subscriptions.
what he is doing is giving a bad name the OS community in general. this is not how you act.
> If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making [...] contribute back in a very significant way.
I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?
You don't get one. It's a matter of discretion. Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.
> Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
Unless you accidentally end up doing business with an asshole. Matt is definitely making himself look like a danger to do business with—maybe WP Engine just successfully baited him into acting against his community and killing trust and he's not actually as unhinged as he sounds here... but few people would be willing to bet money on that.
> end up doing business
That's the point, they weren't doing business.
They were issuing presumably hundreds of thousands of requests a day and not offering a penny. You will get banned for that on absolutely any service. Any of them, GPL or not.
That's not the complaint that Matt made against them, though. His complaint in public is all about trademarks and revisions, but then when they sent him a cease and desist asking him to cut it out he decided to cut them off of the plugins store to hit their customers (who are WordPress users).
> Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.
It seems like that is not really up to me.
When Matt Mullenweg gets up one morning and does not like my commercial product for WP, he might think of me as an asshole and will try to extort money from my business or just ruin it just like he did here.
Hard rules might be fine to take care of things like these.
> It seems like that is not really up to me
it is. Don't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then refuse to pay and you're good.
It's impossible to accidentally do this. Go ahead, write a script to send maximum requests to any free API of your choice. And then track how long before you're banned.
It's that simple and you're all over thinking it. The open source nature has absolutely zero to do with this.
You realize "I won't tell you the rules" is an asshole move in and of itself, right?
There's 8 billion people on this planet, from hundreds of different cultures. Everyone has different intuitions, different values, different cultural expectations.
I'm not saying the rules have to be hard rules or anything. But if you can't even articulate the basic shape of the rules, then it's really 100% on you when people don't follow the magic ideas in your head.
> You realize "I won't tell you the rules" is an asshole move in and of itself, right?
I disagree, the asshole move is actually playing stupid. You don't need someone to tell you the rules because the assumption is you're a human adult with a functioning brain, who has the discretion to tell right from wrong and can make good decisions.
I think this incessant hand-holding is rather pathetic.
If I go into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees, they could very well turn me away.
What, but I'm paying! And there's no rule, right? Sure if we decide to play stupid, and pretend this is our first day on Earth. But it isn't our first day on Earth, and this outcome is not only reasonable - it's obvious.
This scenario is even worse, because here WPE isn't even offering to pay. You can't issue hundreds of thousands of requests and then go "what little ole me? I didn't do anything teehee". Stop. They knew what they were doing and they knew they were pushing it way past what a normal user would do.
Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back? What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?
> Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back?
It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.
> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?
I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.
It’s in your own self interest to know what you’ve built your business on and have a backup plan if the bottom falls out. I don’t really have any compassion for them, but I do for their users.
Apparently that’s Matts problem, he says Automattic is giving a lot more back (4000 hours or so) and WPE is doing like 40 hours.
So yeah, is WPE in the right to not give back?
At the heart of this is the same song of making money and the idea of fairness. I honestly don’t know the groundrules here.
ethically or legally? because they both matter, but they are decided in the court of public opinion and of law, respectively, but only one carries actual fiscal weight.
Personally, and I need to read more, is that ethically the problem lies with sharing. Is Matt/automattic ethically obliged due compensation? I think not. WP Engine is its own company like automattic. Would it grace WPE if they do compensate with money or resources? Obviously, but then you might also want to put them in the foundation oversee committee if they do half of the work.
The law, I have no idea in what direction this is going to go!
> Is Matt/automattic ethically obliged due compensation?
This question here goes straight to the heart of things.
WP.org is a 501(c)3 organization. Ostensibly, it has absolutely nothing to do with Automattic. Reality... appears to be somewhat different.
If there were compensation due, it would not be to Automattic.
WP.org has a board of directors, not a dictator. Ostensibly, Matt is the Chairman. Why would he be due compensation?
The fact that such questions even arise shows just how ... murky ... Matt/WP.org/WP.com/Automattic's interactions are.
Do they have to state it? I think you simply get a phone call to pony up some cash when Automattic has you on their radar.
[flagged]
This went from "hey you guys shouldn't use WP Engine because it's not Real WordPress" to "WP Engine is violating trademarks and isn't welcome in the WordPress community anymore" really f'in quick!
Publicly, perhaps but we've been trying to resolve these issues with WP Engine for at least 18 months now.
Just as an FYI: this is a really really bad look from the outside. Your CEO's comments and the new trademark policy sound borderline deranged, and this step of banning them dangerously destabilizes the ecosystem.
WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.
Yes - I don’t use WP and have no experience with either of those companies but everything I’ve heard about this has been people looking into alternatives because this raises the question of whether it’s motivated by a desire to boost revenue and merely the first step in the process.
What are the issues? Nothing publicly articulated so far appears to have breached any licensing terms or trademark law.
If there are issues then Matt would do well to clearly articulate the problem.
Therein lies the problem. Why is a8c even involved? This is a WordPress Foundation problem.
Why does your team think that leveraging resources of the nonprofit is an appropriate response to conflict?
OK. But do you really think this public bullying abuse of power from your increasingly unstable-sounding CEO is going to play out well? Good luck I guess.
Redis, Elasticsearch, Mongo and now WordPress - it seems that Open source is as good and only good when you and only you can sell it. The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort, does things better than you to market/host/package your open source project, the moment things to start to fall apart.
None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
EDIT: typos
Postgres, notably, has not had these problems. There's a thriving ecosystem, despite the trademark, and many providers offer "Postgres" services without Postgres' core organizations or contributors getting their undies in a twist over it.
That's largely true, but there definitely have been incidents/drama in the recent past. Two that come to mind:
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos...
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai...
Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.
I think a difference there is that Postgres doesn't have a for-profit semi-attached to it.
There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution.
That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project.
Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.
> The moment someone else starts to make money or more money then you could have off your effort
Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
The solution is to ask Company B to pay up (in cash or resources), and not be leeching.
> Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.
Then don't make an open source product.
What you can't do is try to earn the goodwill that comes with open source, but also expect the profitability of a proprietary product.
Don't try to base a company around developing and selling open source is a lesson that folks will keep learning again and again. You have to make money doing something else and if your core competency isn't that something else you'll lose to someone where it is.
If you want to sell software then sell software.
WP Engine is not winning because it’s cheaper. It is a better product than what Automattic offers.
That’s why this action by Matt is ridiculous. WP Engine has grown the overall WP market through good product development and investment. That has produced positive effects for the many companies and people who make their money developing and supporting WP sites for clients.
It is not about the code. It is about using other company's server resources.
But they're OK with the use of those resources if WP Engine contributes more code, which makes it... at least partially about the code?
WordPress has been around for a long time, and there is no change to how open it is. It is GPL code, Automattic is not forking it and selling access to the fork.
We are just asking WP Engine to contribute back to the project that they are basing their entire business on.
This is primarily a trademark infringement issue, we asked them to give back to be able to use the trademark we have the license for.
> This is primarily a trademark infringement issue…
There’s a pretty standard way of fighting those out.
Are you going to be "just asking" other businesses as well? Or does it only apply to competitors of Automattic?
As long as competitors of Automattic does not infringe on the trademarks owned (in the case of WooCommerce) or licensed (WordPress) by Automattic, I don't see any reason for us taking any action.
I would personally ask everyone to at least try to contribute back to the open source projects they rely on though.
Honestly I tried at one point, but the community was rather hostile and unwelcoming.
I help out with Godot sometimes and it’s far more welcoming and low friction.
> None of the Open source ethos survive of sharing together, learning together etc.
Could be because of that missing part of "sharing together" replaced with "taking and not giving back anything in return"
Ethically it may be the right thing to do, but there is no obligation to do so unless it's in the license. If you want to thumb your nose at WPEngine for that, fine, but that's about as far as that goes.
I have used and developed in Wordpress since 3.2. Mullenweng is a dictator and maverick, and I’m not convinced that he’s good for the Wordpress ecosystem.
But neither are highly customized WP hosting platforms.
Revisioning, especially since the post_meta table was added, is a huge burden on the DB. I’ve seen clients add 50 revisions, totaling thousands of revisions and 200k post meta entries. Important enough to call disabling it by default a “cancer”? Chill out Matt.
Revisions aren’t relevant past revision 3-5.
What database is burdened by 200k rows? That’s tiny.
It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better).
But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …
But a database can handle tens of millions of rows with those resources.
If you’re worried about excess, why even use Wordpress? My god - serving rarely updated static content with a database? Stupid. The entire thing is excessive and wasteful.
Maybe you misunderstand the market my employer serves?
We've built sites for clients both huge and small. Our clients like WordPress because it's well supported, easy to roll out, and easy to find someone to work on. Lots of people have experience with it, from having their own blog.
Even infrequently updated content can go through a logjam of revisions. And this is the failure of WordPress's versioning model: there's no way to "check in" a revision. So you can't mark what's approved/reviewed. Instead of a "check in" that nukes the middle revisions ... now you have 5-7 revisions where someone updated a button text.
Add in ACF fields (which uses approx 2.5 rows in post_meta PER FIELD) and now you've got a complex page with lots of rows that build it up. Now each "revision" is 1 post row + 20 - even 1000 post_meta rows. You see the problem.
Over time the DB bloats, and the index isn't partitioned in any way. That page a cheap dev built to query something? Runs 5x slower after a year, and the client doesn't know why.
The only reason we use WP over other platforms is: support, maintenance, but most importantly to the client COST.
I understand why Matt is frustrated and I sympathize with the situation, but I don't think his approach is going to win him any public favor nor have a long term positive payout.
Anyone who may have had sympathies for his arguments are all turned off now that he's gone on a "scorched earth" path. He dragged the non-profit foundation into a business spat involving Automattic and WP Engine, or maybe even between two rich guys, Matt Mullenweg and Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, who owns WPE.
Using the org website to make a nasty post slandering WPE. Spreading it via the built-in news metabox on every WordPress dashboard. The org's plugin repository to block WPE's domains/IPs specifically.
That's a single person wielding power in his domain, maybe all legal, but the org should be making decisions as a group and community.
Seriously, he spread it to every WP dashboard via the news widget? Thats pretty hilarious and insane at the same time.
I’m really interested to see how this plays out.
Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?
Sure, but that won't make the problem go away. The (most recent) issue is that WP is blocking downloading of extensions, so WPEngine would have to find a way to mirror every extension (and that might not be permissible by licensing?)
Would they just move the external call client side and use customers ips to download extension data or use proxies or tor to avoid ip ban?
Here's Matt Mullenweg's post on Wordpress.org announcing this: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
There is some further discussion in the HN thread on the WP Engine incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41655578
I don't understand what the actual problem is. What did WPEngine do to use "wordpress.org resources"? That article is very... non-informative.
I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries.
There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this.
Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project.
Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest.
Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.
WP Engine is also claiming that Mullenweg tried to "extort" them. He allegedly asked WP Engine to pay astronomical amounts of money to WordPress, or he'd go on a smear campaign against them. THe demands were allegedly refused, and it seems that he has indeed started such a campaign.
The claims were made in an official letter to Automattic that included proof in the form of screenshots, and that was written by a legal professional[1]. I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631912
> I personally think it's unlikely that an actual lawyer would risk their reputation and fabricate something like that.
The various disbarred folks from Trump’s 2020 legal team serve as a pretty effective counter example.
Trump is notorious for not paying his lawyers, so as representation goes, he’s left with a bag of mixed nuts to say the least.
"How much can I poison the well of public opinion about my high paying client and get away with it."
> He allegedly asked WP Engine to pay astronomical amounts of money to WordPress...
If we use the word “astronomical” to represent a percentage of profits, what word do we use to describe the profits?
WP Engine asserts they demanded "a significant percentage of its gross revenues", not profits. I'm not sure we know what their margin is.
Matt Mullenweg confirmed:
> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
— https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/cease_de...
Automattic also has a very direct competitor in Pressable - who are currently running a WP Engine contract buyout promotion in their header.
Horrid look.
Conflict of interest, perhaps. Reading about the issues though, gimping the product for pennies and then modifying customers sites to censor things.
At some point, every bad behaviour in a software ecosystem affects other parties and even if his personal role does cause a conflict of interest all the things mentioned seems to point to a party that doesn't respect the ecosystem.
Reminds me of the whole Elastic search vs Amazon stuff that seems to have mellowed down now. https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-aga...
I see. What a BS. It's obvious that this is a business move by Automattic.
Akismet was (is?!) bundled with every fresh WP installation. That is a product by Automattic, so why is it bundled with the Open Source "product"? It's an unfair competitive advantage over every other company/person that provides a plugin for that. Nobody cared or was just feared to pick up that fight.
Drawing the line at WPEngine seems random, too. There are so many bigger or smaller competitors in that space, it's just somewhat random to pick them out and complain that they don't give back.
Lousy move.
This is the equivalent of NPM, Maven or PyPi cutting off an enterprise artifact repository because they don't donate enough to keep those services running. Especially the lack of notice makes it an unprofessional garbage move.
Does the notice need to be public? They are fighting for a while, I think WPEngine knew what Automattic demanded (and hence could foresee what happens if they continue). They were/are probably already working on an alternative.
Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service.
Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
That's pretty much what happened here. I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Automattic offers more than just the source code of WP.
Anyone is still free to use the source, but the services they provide are not free.
> Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service. Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.
It's a good analogy. AWS does it a lot, but it does so with open source projects that do not have much paid services. Reading from the article, Automattic provides many services (possibly paid, in some freemium model).
I'd welcome if some projects manage to get AWS to give back. They do way too little if you ask me.
> I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.
Yes. Giving back could be a deal that involves money.
I understand it would be ideal for business to give back with money to open source projects, but this issue is being handled in the worst possible way by Matt.
So WordPress code is FOSS, so you can theoretically change the code, except when you change the line that will keep revisions to cut your costs, if you do that he will yell at you.
WordPress' repository is free as in beer, you can download all you want without paying. Heck, even WP code is setup so it downloads from there by default. Except when you happen to host in a company that has a very specific set of issues (alleged trademark issues + profits over a particular threshold + not giving back to community; other companies who have only one of those issues but not all of them are fine), then he'll block you.
The main issue here is the lack of a clear contract of what you can or cannot do. Seems like he is just figuring out the rules along the way. This gives to external observers the impression that the whole thing is unreliable.
Open source makes absolutely zero distinction about how the source code is provided. You aren't required to keep a free-to-use service up to download your code. You only must produce it when requested.
Not too long ago you would pay for disks containing open source software.
No dog in this fight, but
1) this extremely makes me want to use anything else for my next sites. This added a a lot of ecosystem uncertainty. Will any hosts other than Wordpress.com be allowed this time next year? Who knows, perhaps the plan is to squeeze them all out and then raise prices as the monopoly provider. Smells like the potential for sudden, unplanned site migrations unless you use Wordpress.com.
2) Mullenweg carping about private equity investing in WPE is rich given the capital stack for Automattic. BlackRock, Tiger, Insight, etc. all in the mix. If WPE's investors are bad for business, WPE's customers will leave (which Mullenweg should want!). But broadly, I think most customers generally do not give much consideration to who invests in their vendors.
This destroys the Wordpress ecosystem in one move. Who is going to pick Wordpress after this for a project if the Wordpress leader can hamstring their site for reasons completely outside of their control?
This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community. Look, if you think there's a trademark violation then sue them for it by all means (but since they let this go for so many years the outcome of this likely will be cancellation of the trademark) but the rest? just don't.
Edit: by "the entire debacle" I meant not this specific even but how WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
> This entire debacle also hurts the entire open source community
How so? IIUC, WordPress blocks access to their servers. Those are not part of "open source".
How about using the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit, to attack a for-profit's competitors. They could lose their tax-exempt status.
A nonprofit removed access to resources from a for-profit, with whom they did not have a contract. That's a non starter.
There is more to the story than just this event. For context:
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
https://automattic.com/2024/wp-engine-cease-and-desist-exhib...
Well, hang on, all over this discussion you have a Automattic employee being quite clear (in their understanding) that wordpress.org is something Matt benevolently lets the Foundation use.
But as you'll read, there is so much murkiness to this that a mud bath would be positively transparent. The .org is not the foundation, but the foundation says that it pays for the .org, the .org is not the foundation but lives on the foundation's AS.
I doubt much if anything will happen, but all this seems to be doing to me is shining a light on how the distinction between Matt, Automattic, WP.org, WPF, and WP.com all vary depending on Matt's needs, wants and priorities on any given day.
Because in a few months, people won't remember the details, but they will remember "the time the Wordpress guy abused his influence to damage the Wordpress ecosystem".
Or, alternatively they could remember "the time the Wordpress guy smacked freeloader leeching off the Wordpress ecosystem"
Apart from that - major turbulences in the WP and in general CMS world could be a positive thing. Maybe it's time for a new player in the space. Wordpress absolute dominance for basically decades kind of sucks air out of the space for competitors, there are some like Ghost and others but they are barely crawling compared to WP market share. Apart from that even fork within WP itself wouldn't necessary be a bad thing - some decisions and direction of the WP itself are questionable looking from developer standpoint like bringing to life insanely complicated React-based toolkit as WP editor building block, archaic conventions in the PHP codebase, lack of standardized patterns and guidelines for plugins creation and many more.
Personally I would love to have PHP-based CMS, built either based on Symphony or Laravel with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and resonable market share.
A PHP based CMS based on Symfony with extensive plugins and theming, capabilities and some market share? https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/cm-drupal,cm-wor...
Yeah, I recently looked into their "Starshot"[0] initiative to make their CMS more appealing and it's interesting to some degree, but we'll see when it comes out - presumably ~ Jan 15, according to the video
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wce6FkNN2Io
Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...
I meant the entire debacle not this specific one. WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.
The community should fork Wordpress so that is no longer controlled by Automattic, thus eliminating the conflict of interest. They would have to pick a different name, such as LibrePress (just like LibreOffice vs OpenOffice), in order to avoid copyright or trademark claims by Automattic.
Kind of been done (in a minor protest against the change to the back-end editing system: https://www.classicpress.net/
TBH i don't mind this, open-source means you can use the code, but you're not entitled to infra and services.
If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad.
WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed.
But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims.
Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example)
This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.
I also don't have a dog in the fight but reading for a few minutes I have the impression there have been previous attempts to engage with WPE to contribute. I might be wrong.
I think WPE committed to contributing 40h per week of work on WordPress. I'm not clear if they didn't fulfill their commitment or Matt thinks that is not enough.
Infra, services and trademarks. They are not part of the GPL license. Everyone is welcomed to use any GPL code as they see fit, as long as they are within their limits as outlined in the license.
But this does not mean W.ORG has to keep providing these free services to you and your customers, and it does not mean you are free to use trademarks in a misleading way.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
I only know about this from the two hn threads I've read, but it seems like he could have at least announced this publicly a week in advance or so and given them a bit of time to self-host all this stuff before cutting off their access. Right now seems like he's trying to harm WPEngine by harming their customers and that doesn't make him look good.
I've been a WPE customer for about 3 years and have never been confused by the "WP" in their name.
It's not about WP in the company name. It's about loosely using the words "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce" all over their website in ways that violate trademarks.
Could you please explain in which way trademarks were violated? Nominative use is explicitly allowed according to long established caselaw.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
I'm not a lawyer, but WP Engine is selling products on their website literally named "Core Wordpress". That seems like it might be a violation.
For there to be a violation there has to be a reasonable prospect of consumer confusion by the consumers in the target market. The page is labelled "Choose your WordPress Hosting plan"
Someone who is in the market for Wordpress hosting is almost certainly aware they have Wordpress and that they need hosting for it. Wordpress is a nominative use to refer to the entity, and Core is an adjective which in context means central.
Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself? That would be the standard. Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis.
"Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself?"
Yes.
"Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis."
Wordpress.com has a license to use the Wordpress trademark. I don't believe we should be comparing Wordpress.com to WP Engine here.
Fair enough on wordpress.com. It still doesn't strike me as plausible that any reasonable person in a purchasing decision thinks WPengine is wordpress itself. I certainly haven't seen any such confusion online.
I just found out today that WPEngine is not the same legal entity as WordPress.
So yeah, from my perspective there's a real case for confusion of marks here.
I have no opinion about the drama one way or the other, just providing a datum.
Would you agree that WPE automatically makes a mental connection to WordPress? I dare say this would not be the case if it was named Josh Mutton Engine JME
Would it be a good or bad look for the Fedora project if they went after a popular and commercially ruthless hosting provider offering "Fedora Hosting" for trademark infringement, while cutting off repo and update access to that provider specifically, unless they paid up some % of revenue?
Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.
Then the registry URL has to become null and the user has to enter a registry of his choice when installing wordpress.
I don't think it is at all reasonable to claim that the name of a GPL 2.0 project is off-limits. This license goes back to 2003 and the name is the first word in the license. It is displayed all over the software. The community is full of commercial and open-source tools that include variations of the name. Automattic is betraying the spirit of the license at best, and I would _hope_ flat-out wrong legally to weaponize the name.
Interview with Matt Mullenweg about his side in all this a little bit ago:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
From an operational standpoint, this is completely WP Engine's fault. You should not depend on other people's services, doubly so if they're public and free, when your big as Wordpress Engine is. Wordpress is completely within its rights, morally or otherwise, to block free access to its services.
The silver lining here is that this will force them to do the right thing by their customers and host their own shit.
I've never heard of Wordpress.org banning any legitimate WordPress site from accessing their plugins and themes repository. It would have made zero business sense for WP Engine to prepare for being banned like this.
I've used Wordpress self-hosted for a long time and this seems like a non-issue. WPEngine can use the Wordpress codebase but why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress? I say this is a good thing.
> why should they be entitled to the services provided by Wordpress?
They are not entitled to them, but Wordpress has previously decided to offer those services. Wordpress donors most probably expected that these services will continue to be provided to anyone.
The controversial part is that now they apparently establish a policy that Matt Mullenweg (the owner of for-profit Wordpress.com) can arbitrarily ban competitors in case he doesn't like them.
WordPress.org (the service that banned WP Engine) is not funded by donors. WordPress Foundation is the non profit entity that has donations.
Isn't WordPress.org connected to WordPress foundation? They have a Donate link in the footer.
What about all of these: "user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase" – are all of those services provided by WordPress.org without funding from WordPress foundation?
> are all of those services provided by WordPress.org without funding from WordPress foundation?
As far as I am aware, this is correct.
Interesting, so then who pays to run wordpress.org?
I notice a donate link in the footer, which goes to the foundation, but to your point, the foundation seems to avoid saying outright that the funding goes to running .org (instead saying that Matt has been involved with them) https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
WordPress.org is operated by Matt Mullenweg as a free service that hosts plugins, themes, docs and more. It does not take donations, or as far I am aware, make any profits.
Instead, people are encouraged to donate to the Foundation, which helps with the development of WordPress the software and organizes things like WordCamps.
Wait, so if somebody goes to WordPress.org, clicks the donate button, arrives at a page to donate to the WordPress Foundation, and donates, that money does not go towards funding WordPress.org?
The blurb on the donation page reads:
> Money raised by the WordPress Foundation will be used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs.
“Supported software projects” is a link that leads to a page that lists these software projects:
- WordPress
- WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes
- bbPress
- BuddyPress
It sure looks like the WordPress infra and plugins are supported by the donations from the WordPress.org footer link. If the money is going elsewhere, where is it going?
So why is it hosted on IP addresses associated with the foundation?
>>> network:Organization:The Wordpress FoundationThe funniest outcome to this little internecine WP fight would be an IRS investigation into the intermingling of Wordpress.org, Foundation, Automattic, Matt, etc.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I asked people who are helping with the infra of WordPress.org and they are not sure why Singlehop is showing "The Wordpress Foundation" for those IPs. They belong to the hosting provider W.ORG is using and this is just mislabelling on their part. Relevant people will get in touch and ask them to correct it.
And, quick side note, no one from Automattic or WordPress Foundation would ever misspell WordPress!
This is stupid, something like WordPress.org should obviously be under the foundation, as it's an essential part of the entire wp ecosystem.
I believe that you're mistaken and have flipped them the wrong way round: Wordpress.org is the official website of the open source project owned by the WordPress Foundation, while WordPress.com is the company owned by Automattic.
https://wordpress.org/about/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress#WordPress_Foundati...
https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic
I work at Automattic, owner of WordPress.com.
I asked how WordPress.org is funded and will get details on that but I can tell you WordPress.org is not part of the foundation.
Open source project and the WordPress trademark are owned the WordPress Foundation. WordPress.org has a license to use the name from the Foundation, as does Automattic.
So you have:
Wordpress.org which is directly controlled by Matt Mullenweg
Automattic (ie wordpress.com) whose CEO is Matt Mullenweg
and The WordPress Foundation which is run by (checks notes) Matt Mullenweg
Yet you seem to think we should treat all three of those entities (Matts?) as separate and independant
In short: wordpress.org is just a personal homepage of Matt Mullenweg, not legally or financially related to neither Foundation nor Automattic? There could be technical relations but who has not "forgotten" your personal homepage to your employee's machine, just a honest mistake.
We should expect the non profit foundation to be independent from the for profit company, yes.
The WordPress Foundation links to wordpress.org as the official site for their project called WordPress, and wordpress.org directs donors to donate at wordpressfoundation.org so it's hard to see how you could be right, but if you can come back explaining that then I'll happily admit to having been confused by it all.
Projects page of the Foundation (https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/) does not say those projects belong to the Foundation. It states:
> Matt Mullenweg, the director of the WordPress Foundation, has been directly involved in the creation of, or coordination of volunteers around, a number of WordPress projects that espouse the core philosophy
I'll admit this might sound confusing. Foundation came years after some of these projects were already established.
They do link to wordpress.org outside of that.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/contact/
says "a violation of our domain policy." and links to wordpress.org, why would their domain policy be on a site that isn't theirs?
And then wordpress.org says "For various reasons related to our WordPress trademark", how can wordpress.org say "our" if the foundation owns the WordPress trademark and .org is not run by the foundation?
> Projects page of the Foundation (https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/) does not say those projects belong to the Foundation. It states:
But their site does say that money raised will be "used to ensure free access to supported software projects, protect the WordPress trademark, and fund a variety of programs." and links to the projects page that contains wordpress.org... but you said it isn't funded by the donations from the foundation
Ironic how this whole thing started with an allegation that WP Engine makes things confusing. I wonder if Matt's mom can tell the difference between WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org.
If https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ had a page titled "Projects" that listed "death camps" as the first item, you would assume they're up to something, right?
Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content).
Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.
Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence.
(Nice username, btw!)
I agree, and thank you for the username shout-out! In the past I would agree with you about Umbraco, and I guess I still partially agree because Wordpress is in PHP which is easier to learn, modern Umbraco should be very easy to learn. Part of that is probably that I favor making things very explicit and easy to read, over performance benefits. For a CMS, there aren't a TON of performance benefits other than not pulling all your data from the CMS in your view templates. This is very common in Umbraco code, but often the same code works in services called by one-liner controllers. I still write mostly MVC code, but have written my own "to-disk" caching layer, as well as built APIs to make use of Cloudflare to do per-page or global cache-breaking.
I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations).
I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).
It's weird Matt would generate all this drama. By not allowing WP Engine to use the plugin ecosystem he is first and foremost damaging the actual WP users hosting there. Probably millions of users.
I’m a little surprised WPE didn’t have some kind of contingency plan for this in place already, even if it was just to handle a Wordpress.org outage.
I'm a WordPress (WP) developer and avid user of WP Engine. I just tested some of my WordPress sites hosted on WP Engine and can confirm that it's currently not possible to take some actions that pull data from https://wordpress.org/, such as not updating WP plugins or installing new WP plugins.
I'm furious at Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic, as they control wordpress.org as Auttomatic hosts wordpress.org and one or both of them probably decided to block some important WordPress features on WP Engine servers. Also below is text from the https://wordpressfoundation.org/ homepage:
[quote]
The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project: to democratize publishing through Open-Source GPL software.
...
People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base so that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.
[/quote]
After this event, Matt Mullenweg needs to be blocked from being involved with WordPress.org and the development of WordPress open-source software.
Since this probably won't happen, WP Engine (and other WordPress web hosts and developers) need to create their own mirrored https://wordpress.org/ source to download plugins and update the WordPress core.
I know this is a big job, but Matt Mullenweg and Auttomatic can't be trusted anymore not to block the WordPress functionality of another company, not just WP Engine.
I think that is exactly Matt’s problem with the conduct of WP Engine—they have done next to nothing to support the infrastructure that they profit from.
It’s like a person who uses ad block saying they won’t watch YouTube if google breaks the ad blocking. That is exactly what they want, you have negative value.
ThePrimeagen did an interview with Matt regarding his response and demands.
He's coherent, but he doesn't directly answer any questions and the evidence he shares is circumstantial at best.
He doesn't make a case why any company leveraging WP should pay or support WP at all (other than, "it's the right thing to do").
He comes across as delusional, conspiratorial and slowly spiraling out of control.
Likely the aftermath of https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...
Between all the threads, this video is the best for context I think. Juicy part start around 10min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU
This is _so_ rich coming from Wordpress who offers a bastardized version of Wordpress themselves on Wordpress.com
I wish I had never given Wordpress any money.
Somewhat off-topic: WordPress has proven that there is still a market for WordPress-style CRM and managed solution even in 2024. Why hasn't a strong, open source competitor emerged over the years? Because if there is an alternative, this article would be much less relevant, and the events may not have happened in the first place. Is it because CRM, especially the dynamic kind, is no longer cool, and developers are not interested in this area any more?
Part of it is that there are more choices these days in terms of highly customizable CMSs. I stopped building new WordPress sites when I discovered Wagtail. There's also Payload which I've heard good things about. The other part is that agencies are being squeezed out of the side of the custom website market where WordPress offers appropriate trade-offs. Most agencies that build on WordPress anymore are theme chop shops.
WordPress has done a good job of taking the top ideas and incorporating them quickly into its CMS. Many times not right away, but under the hood they are there and they can easily built a UI for it later.
They got a lot of ideas from Drupal, Tumbler, SquareSpace, Ghost, Headless CMSes, etc.
*CMS -- I don't know what I was thinking
> Mullenweg set up in 2005 to monetize the project he’d created two years previous
Wordpress is a fork of an older project which was not made by Matt.
It's important to point out, since probably the whole automattic is still leeching from b2 and hasn't added anything
Just checked out the original version of b2 Wordpress was forked from and could immediately spot a SQL injection which I can use to take over the whole site:
Later it also stores the hashed password as a cookie.Some quality 2003 code :)
Not necessarily if magic quotes are enabled!!
Oh "magic quotes", we hardly miss you.
2003? If I remember correctly, SQL injection has been in OWASP Top 10 until 2016
The code is from 2003.
Yeah, I got that, it's just that could as well be more recent^^
Slight OT: I thought WordPress.com migrated away from using “WordPress” nearly a decade ago (to a custom nodejs app)
https://wordpress.com/blog/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-the-n...
So basically they are not WordPress too.
Matt's really out here with the cars covered in hammers that explode more than a few times and hammers went flying everywhere.
Wordpress.org should change it's license like Mongo did to protect itself from Amazon. The license should allow free hosting for indiduals and organiation bt for profit hosting should pay something. It's okay for third party hosting to pay a fee to help maintaining the original open source software.
What does Wordpress.com contribute upstream to THEIR dependencies I wonder…
There are some financial contributions listed at https://opencollective.com/automattic
Bad leadership from Wordpress.org , you cannot bans company that use modified version of Wordpress and promote using that name ( choice of plugins installed and feature example maximum history ), your company also dosing that ( limit plugin installed on Wordpress.com/Automatic ).
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
As a developer, I'll take this opportunity and ask my clients to move away from WordPress.
Really saddened by the FOSS landscape. Docker, Terraform, Redis, and now Wordpress. Aside from who’s right and who’s wrong, the sheer drama and rug pulls make it feel like the beginning of an end to open source as a viable business model.
All parties are making millions off open-source WordPress.
Matt's team are upset because they only make tens of millions, whereas purportedly, WP-engine makes hundreds of millions. Matt gives back much more than WP-engine.
All their clients are businesses also making money through their WordPress-hosted websites.
I don't think there is a problem with open source and viability. It is raining money.
It's simply an in-house fight over inequities in giving back to the open source pot of gold.
Not this specifically, but I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Redis, elastic, openai, wordpress. Each came to realize that the open source benefit has a glaring issue with their corporate interests.
Emphasizes that build on another platform even one that claims a healthy ethos and open source you can be cutoff and left to die in the cold.
This is all very problemattic.
Related:
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
Wordpress, the thing keeping PHP alive!
Sounds like people should start migrating off of WordPress altogether. See: Elastic and Redis.
Seems very similar to AWS and Elastic, Mongodb, etc.
Always found it interesting that the core WP lacks CDN support, caching, multilingual etc out of the box and leverages the paid WP.com, while using open source contributions.
Oh nerds, stop fighting.
This feels like someone is mad that a business makes money off open source, and they didn’t think about how to make money first. True?
Big lawsuit against Automattic incoming. Which WPEngine will easily win. Given that Automattic is clearly desperate for funds it will probably bankrupt them.
I'm long on this backfiring
Petty, and befitting
WP is trash, always has been
WPEngine is a functional product on the other hand
I have a feeling the gap of opportunity has just opened for an alternative to WordPress.
Question: what other OS blogging software would you recommend?
PS. Drupal, don't get your hopes too high.
I don't see how this is WordPress' fight to win, given that WP Engine has the backing and resources of private equity (not to mention, while also being in the right). This is like David coming up against Goliath, except Goliath isn't stupid and wore armor and a helmet.
I don't use any their products, so I don't have any community insider insights, but based on what I've read so far, it seems like WordPress did the right thing.
If another company is profiting from the '.org' ressources (very heavily I'd imagine) without contributing back, then they need to be cutoff.
Makes no sense. Everyone is profiting off WordPress and probably 0.1% of those ever contributed back.
Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
I don't think the issue is about WordPress, the open source software, but rather about using up ressources on the wordpress.org servers.
I keep not getting it. WordPress.org is offered as a free download and it accesses the website FOR FREE. Complaining that people don’t pay for free stuff is not a healthy mental state.
WP Engine is no different from the million hostings that auto-install WordPress and “abuse” their resources.
I think the issue is using a non-profit (WordPress) to suppress a for-profit's (Automattic's) competition.
I heard that there was an old handshake agreement that WPEngine should contribute so-and-so many developer hours to Wordpress per employee, but doesn't now and hasn't for a while. At some point the CEO of Automattic, which does contribute developer hours, blew up.
Yep, Matt (wordpress guy) has a dramatic writing style, but in essence WPE is using plugins, their security research, user system, theming store etc, without contributing back that much.
Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
My company is also a heavy user of WordPress and never have contributed. We also hide those widgets. Do we need to be blocked as well then?
Does your company offer a competitor to what Automattic is offering, taking revenues from them, and make 500+ millions in revenues a year? If the answer to those is yes then I’d probably keep quiet before Matt notices you :)
That is a really problematic question to ask. Because remember, Automattic is not the Foundation or the open source project...
so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"
Is your company building a business with half a billion of dollars in revenue out the uncountable amount of man-hours put into Wordpress development?
We probably made a lot more then that in the past 20 years.
We are talking about yearly revenues here, and something tells me that your company is not in the business of selling services that depend on WordPress code being developed
Seems like you should act as if you will be.
Open source is a gift. There's etiquette involved.
Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?
I keep seeing people refer to this tweet. Can you share a link to it, please?
I'm afraid not. I look at twitter only in incognito mode and don't have any history, and can't find anything now.
Hiding the widgets isn't the main issue. If you infringe the WordPress trademark in commercial use, and ignore any attempt to make it right, and pursue legal action, W.ORG does not have to provide those free services to you.
I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
> Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity
How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
WordPress Foundation is paying for the servers, so I guess they have the right to choose who gets access or not. Using the resources as a single person or a small business is not the same as using them from a hosting company with millions of websites. Other hosting companies contribute to the foundation which keeps the service running. If WPEngine isn't contributing anything, it would be unfair for other contributors/sponsors. Especially that they are making a large amount of money from it.
How would you feel if WordPress.org suddenly decided to lock ALL installations across the world and ask for $800/site/month to access it?
Is it their right? Sure. I don’t think you’d be here defending them though.
As so often I think it would be beneficial for the conversation to provide some more context. Single user install generated load VS WP generated load on the infrastructure of WordPress.org
What I find fascinating is that people in this thread and elsewhere are saying that Matt funds the WordPress.org servers personally.
You’re moving the goalposts. We aren’t talking about who has a right to what. We’re talking about what is and what isn’t a deranged dick move.
It's not at all a dick move to block IPs that essentially DDOS your free services.
Google, Amazon, you name it do this infinite times a day with crawlers.
If you build a business on taking resources from some public source, on a large scale, you could very well be out of a business at any time. This has been the case for a long, long time. And nobody seems to take issue with it.
Was there ever any attempt to reach some sort of agreement on what appropriate usage would be?
I imagine if this was the real issue, then WPEngine could probably sort out some fair solution to not use more than their fair share. I dont know much about this ecosystem but surely a caching proxy is not hard to setup.
However reading between the lines, it sounds like the real issue is that WPEngine is more succesful which is making other players jealous, who are using their control over other parts of the ecosystem to give WPEngine the middle finger. In such a case its not really about resourse usage.
We made many attempts to communicate and solve these issues long before it was made public.
They were asked to contribute back, either in cash or in people hours and they refused.
Well, I hope the blow to the reputation was worth it. Regardless of what is claimed to have happened behind the scenes, the very public meltdown is what's going to live on. It's already sowing doubt internally, where I work, about recommending WordPress in general going forward.
They're not though, WPEngine's users are the ones installing plugins. If I host my own WP site and profit off of it I'm sure I'll be allowed to download plugins. Why does that change when I hire someone to host it for me?
what do you mean profiting. .org is open source. where in the open source licenses you are supposed to pay the original maintainer a share of your revenue or contribute back in code?
free software gives 4 freedoms. none of them say about contributing back. they only talk about freedom of source code.
same for OSI approved licenses. they are either permissive, MIT aka, do whatever you want or like AGPL provide source code but none that i can think of forces downstream users to contribute back to main.
Think in infrastructure costs. A simple VPS is around $5/mo which is enough for some users. When you're running a company which has tons of users, all of them are doing updates, theme pulls and whatnot.
..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org.
This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software.
SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management.
I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.
Yes, but just because you can do something, doesn't mean it isn't a dick move.
If you are offering an API to the public, generally its considered nice if you document what is considered reasonable traffic and if someone is going above it, give them some notice before cutting them off (unless the amount of traffic is so much its affecting availability).
In this case, it doesn't seem to be about the amount of traffic at all. It doesn't seem like WPEngine was abusing the service at all but using it in the way it was expected to be used. It seems like the operator of the service has a financial interest in making WPEngine's life difficult, so they suddenly cut them off.
Do they have the right to do that? Sure. Is it a dick move? Definitely. Especially since no notice was given and it doesn't really seem like the amount of traffic or other policy violation was the issue at hand.
> Especially since no notice
I believe that for a long time there's been talk between wordpress and WPE. My understanding is that WPE is incredibly hostile when it comes to providing compensation. Their overuse of free resources wasn't a secret - it was known, and money was requested.
Naturally WPE said no. But of course then your IPs get banned.
Was it publicly posted what "acceptable usage" of the api is? Was the same standard applied to other users of the api?
Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is.
It's obvious and up to the maintainer's discretion. If you're nice to them and contribute that's no problem. If you're not, then your hundreds of thousands of requests a day are no good.
Software engineers are often overly analytically minded, but this is not just a technical problem, but a social one. Naturally if I walk into starbucks and order 500 iced coffees they'll turn me away.
But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they? No. It's a matter of courtesy and discretion. Now if I was, say, a shareholder of starbucks, they could very well make me my 500 iced coffees.
> Probably not, but I'm of the opinion you don't need to publicly post what "acceptable usage" is.
The allegation here is that the acceptable usage thing is basically entirely made up and instead WPEngine is being cut off due to a business dispute with a separate entity controlled by the same person.
Arguably if such a thing is true, it is pretty unprofessional. There could be other legal issues involved (ianal), but i think the primary argument is moral not legal.
Having a public policy and applying it equally would be strong evidence that this really is the reason for the block.
> But they don't have a sign saying what their coffee limit is, do they?
Sure, but if they enforced that policy arbitraily they could very easily get in trouble if it looks like there is an unacceptable ulterior motove. The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
An example more close to the one at hand would be if one of the board members of starbucks was also on the board of a bulk coffee company and starbucks only refused bulk coffee orders in locations where this other retailer operated. This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws. It would probably be a violation of the board's fiduciary duty. Having a public policy that is enforced equally may not be technically required but it is a good defense against allegations of various tyoes of unsavory behaviour.
> The most obvious example would be if they only applied it specific racial groups or something like that - highly illegal.
Right, discrimination based on protected classes is illegal.
Discrimination based on other needs is not illegal, and is in fact how all businesses work. They discriminate based on income, based on how you're dressed, based on how nice you are.
> This would almost certainly be considered a violation of antitrust laws.
Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level. Sorry, in my opinion it's not even close to comparable.
If Amazon was your competitor and they also issued hundreds of thousands of requests to one of your FREE APIs would you foot the bill? Fat chance, right? That's what we're talking about here.
> Not allowing abuse and DDOS of your free services is just not on this level.
Sure, the debate is because its not really believable that that was happening, and sounds like a pretense.
> If Amazon was your competitor
That's the core dispute though. WPEngine is not a competitor of word press foundation. It is a competitor of automattic. For word press foundation to treat competitors to automattic as competitors to themselves seems highly unethical and possibly a violation of fiduciary duty.
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You really don't get it.
Matt seems incapable of clearly separating his roles as:
Person involved with WP foundation
Person who is head of Automattic
Person who contributes/whatever to wordpress
This is highly dangerous from a legal/conflicts of interest perspective, and will result in problems for the Foundation, and the Community, and for Matt.
I don't support it because it's private equity grab or whatever, instead i don't support it because it's dangerous, arguably highly unethical, and appears like using your power against a competitor you don't like more than it looks like "trying to save the open source community from a private equity grab"
He could easily solve all of these things by recusing from actions the foundation considers against his company's competitors, etc.
That would be the clearly ethical thing to do. Instead he doubles down and appears to use all power available to him to stomp out a company that is the main competition for his business.
And you're entitled to your opinion.
The argument was that HN supports a "private equity grab" over an OSS-supporting person. I'm simply pointing out for plenty of people it's not about OSS or private equity but about the behavior of the person.
It looks like Matt is using the WordPress non-profit to attack a competitor. Additionally, he cut off services to that competitor with the clear intent of disrupting their service and customers and talks about trademark infringement, despite their use of the trademark clearly being covered by their very own guidelines, and, to literally add insult to injury, he describes the situation in very emotional language.
It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.
You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.
If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day.
Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.
"You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation."
If you choose to accept all comers, you get to accept all comers. If you decide to then boycott one specific group, particularly when it is a competitor of the person announcing the boycott, it may in fact be illegal.
This is easily solved by having principles ahead of time and adhering to them (IE we only serve people/companies meeting the following criteria). This did not happen here - instead they have applied a boycott to a specific group after the person involved threatened them as competitor.
Look up "concerted refusal to deal", etc.
> If you choose to accept all comers, you get to accept all comers
Incorrect, you just made this up. I can individually ban people whenever I want, however I want, because I own the server and it's MY resources.
If I setup a free lemonade stand and you request 5,000 cups of lemonade, yes I can turn you away. And I will.
> instead they have applied a boycott
Incorrect, because your thinking is backwards. A boycott is a refusal to buy, not sell. There's no boycott here.
It's also not illegal, and that should be obvious. Not only is it not illegal, I don't even think its unethical.
Buddy, among other things, i'm licensed as an IP/antitrust lawyer, have actually worked on some of the most recent antitrust cases in tech, and am trying to help you understand what the law actually says.
You don't want to know, that's fine.
But to say "i just made it up" is beyond silly. I don't have an urge to make up anything to win internet points. If i did I'd be on reddit :)
I'm not gonna continue this since it's clear you aren't interested in actually learning anything as much as winning an argument. That's not interesting at all, and not what HN is for.
> You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.
I'm not arguing that they are obligated to provide free services. What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor. Also, this was without any announcement and clearly intent on interrupting the service for mostly unrelated third parties (namely WPEngines customers), just to hurt WPEngine.
As to them being hostile to negotiation, we don't know what happened behind close doors. But from the facts that were publicly presented, Matt wanted an amount of money, has (so far) not presented any reasonable legal basis for it and has overall been pretty emotional, so I do believe WPEngine when they claim that the demand was unreasonable and in bad faith on his side.
If this would have been a calm announcement that WP will cede any free hosting services to for-profit WordPress resellers, with a reasonable timeline for migration, he would have my full support. Maybe I could even get behind singling out WPEngine, if the case was solid. But the way this happens, Matt just looks like the bad guy.
> If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege.
But someone allows free passage on a toll bridge for everyone and suddenly decides to just deny your transport business specifically and publicly insult you, it looks a bit different. Especially if the owner of the bridge just happens to run a competitor for your business, things do look a bit fishy. I mean, fair enough, but this move was clearly intended for maximum damage and someone doing that does not at all look like the reasonable party, sorry.
> What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor.
Or, to rephrase:
They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.
Which, when you phrase it that way, not only sounds reasonable, it sounds obvious.
What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers. Using your free resources is expensive. Like, money expensive.
This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?
Get real. You would 100% do the same thing in that situation.
Agree 100 percent. Perhaps the present generation doesn't know about the early days of Wordpress. Also, all this wording may be because Matt is very committed and so emotional about the protection of open source projects
100%
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What harm is done to the free software by WP Engine using it? Is it somehow more difficult to share WordPress code than if they didn't exist? Are they breaking the license terms?
This conflict doesn't feel like a Free Software conflict, it feels like a repeat of what we saw with Mongo & Elastic & Hashicorp—a company that founded itself on being Open Source came to regret the side effects.
As a follow up, explain how Wordpress.com isn't using free software for their own profit.
I don't care who's right or wrong; I’m just glad WP Engine is finally facing some consequences. Their treatment of clients is appalling—lying through their teeth, charging absurd prices, and offering abysmal support. My company lost many clients because of them.
seems pretty clearcut in favor of Automattic
I’ve been following this closely. Not to be a scaremonger, but after Matt Mullenweg’s last post on WP Engine, the underlying financier Silver Lake started doing opposition research on MM trying to undermine him. I view this as a pretty scummy tactic, but not unexpected from a PE firm trying to squeeze as much profit out of whatever it is investing in.
That being said, HN seems like a prime place for astroturfing public opinion from a place like Silver Lake, so use some caution when taking some of the pro-WPE, or anti-MM, posts at face value.
[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760