[munbun]

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.

[safety1st]

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.

[eXpl0it3r]

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.

[chiefalchemist]

> 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.

[cranium]

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.

[robertjpayne]

I reckon they will change the license terms much like Facebook licenses llama.

[rafark]

They cannot. Wordpress is a fork of cafelog which was gpl iirc.

[chilldsgn]

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.

[gazsp]

Can I ask what you migrated to?

[brylie]

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.

[chilldsgn]

Statamic. Really enjoying working with it, makes templating so easy and the REST & GraphQL api makes it easy to use with a framework like Nextjs or Nuxt.