This is not going to end well for Matt. Remember the dispute is between WP Engine and Automattic, not the WordPress foundation (the .org). Blurring the lines between the foundation and his for-profit competitor to WP Engine (confusingly called WordPress.com) is not at all in the spirit of open source. Maybe he will be successful in his trademark claim, despite the foundation saying that using "WP" was okay for a decade, and then deciding to update the trademark terms to say it is confusing (again, ironic). His other claims about WP Engine not being "real wordpress" is one of the silliest arguments I've ever heard, considering his own competitor also disables features unless you pay. The feature he is upset about (post revisions being disabled), is literally a one line change in the config. Isn't the whole point of wordpress to be super customizable and moddable? It's one of the greatest strengths of the software, and it's open source, changing the defaults should be expected.
Edit: Oh I forgot about the part where all of these posts are being published on the .org, so they appear in the dashboard of every wordpress install (including WP Engine, until they disabled the news). I'd love to hear from a lawyers perspective on how this sabotage gets into unfair competition and tortious interference. I think that is going to make the trademark thing more difficult to take to court, knowing that WP Engine probably has good grounds to countersue for actual damages at this point.
> not the WordPress foundation (the .org). Blurring the lines
Hmm. Matt (and at least one employee of Automattic) says "wp.org has nothing to do with the foundation, it's run benevolently by Matt"...
wp.org does live on the Foundation's IP space, though...
Also, why does he feel that WP Engine should pay licensing fees to Automattic?
Matt seems like he's far too comfortable with just picking and choosing whether he's acting on behalf of the Foundation, the .org site, Automattic (and the .com) completely interchangably depending on what his needs or messaging is to be (not to mention the fuzzy accounting that could easily be seen to be happening).
At what point is snide, petulant, childish, vengeful or blackmail ever a good way to do business?
Reading this, the last thing I'd want to do is ever be in business with this person.
The WP Engine side seems much more reasonable to me. There are approaches where he could present the "low contributions" grievance, and even take some action on it, without seeming awful, but this isn't it. Even this "gesture," which could have been almost magnanimous, comes off as still awful because of the childish screed.
Matt says that WPEngine doesn't contribute as much as he thinks they should (also, curious where he comes up with 8% of gross revenue as a licensing fee), but describing WPEngine as a "leech" is a little ... off.
Just a few weeks ago WPEngine donated $75,000 to the Foundation for their conference. And then were booted from the conference. Didn't hear about the Foundation returning the donation though.
And why were they booted from the conference? Because they are in dispute with wp.org (which remember, Matt, Automattic, insist wp.org is nothing to do with the Foundation, but a benevolent gift)?
I don't know - Matt is the one who comes off shitty. I also like how you quoted snide and petulant as if disagreeing - you should perhaps read his text messages to WPEngine that amount effectively to extortion. There's precious few ways to read some of those and his other communications as NOT snide, petulant, or both.
> Just a few weeks ago WPEngine donated $75,000 to the Foundation for their conference.
Conferences are generally sponsored, and not merely donated to.
I'm not at all familiar with Wordpress, the foundation or the company. If I look at the Foundation's financial report of 2023 [1] they expended $4,275,813 for their conferences, and got 88% of it covered by sponsorship – so there were a lot more or bigger sponsors. It doesn't seem that the development of Wordpress is covered by conference sponsorship.
In fact, there doesn't seem to be any money going into the development of Wordpress at the foundation at all. So again, I don't know much about Wordpress, but a quick glance seems to imply that much of the 'official' development is going
on at Automattic.
> I also like how you quoted snide and petulant as if disagreeing
Not at all. I consistently use double quotes for exact quotes, and single quotes for such emphasis.
I mostly agree to your original post about dumb communication and not wanting to do business like that. But I don't follow your conclusion at all that 'the other party' therefore seems more reasonable.
> extortion
> blackmail
Again, not sure about the details in this case or Wordpress, but businesses are generally allowed to withhold services or (threaten to) make (true) statements that put their competitors in bad light. Also in horrible "snide and petulant" communication style.
"Extortion" and "blackmail" are explicitly criminal acts, mostly against persons, that have a higher bar. It could be tortious interference. Another commenter raised that CA unfair business practices laws can be bad for Automaticc. In Europe perhaps as well (also around tort?), but no clue.
I can see Matt’s point of view. Data transfer fees are expensive, especially at WordPress scale. Automattic probably covers a lot of that cost that wordpress.org is incurring and wants WP Engine to pay their fair share.
WP Engine also seems to do some other “not in good faith” things such as change the woocommmerce Stripe attribution from wordpress.org to their own Stripe account.
While the legal dispute is on trademark, I think it’s really on WP Engine profiting on wordpress.org without giving back. It’s not illegal, but blacklisting WP Engine isn’t illegal either.
Automattic is essentially subsidizing a private equity backed company. I’d be upset and frustrated too if I was in Matt’s position.
If you support WP Engine, you’re supporting Silver Lake Private Equity.
If Matt had wanted to, for example, tell WPEngine they're own their own for hosting these services with a cutoff date at least 4 weeks in the future, then fair play. Or to demand to bill them some reasonable cost share of the price to operate (and let's not play games, a reasonable cost for the humans involved, which likely far exceeds servers or bandwidth), then still fair play.
To pitch a tantrum, cut them off with no notice, then gloat about it online... oof. I can't understand why anyone would want to be in business with someone like that.
This position rests pretty heavily on the idea that Wordpress.com is subsidizing wordpress.org, which is a charitable foundation that accepts donations. Do you have any specific reason to believe this is true? I don’t recall seeing that complaint directly here but maybe I missed it.
When I say subsidizing I mean financially subsidizing (i.e. paying for wordpress.org bandwidth costs) - that's the only way the comment makes sense, and I am not inclined to believe it to be true without evidence. As the other response notes though wordpress.org isn't even the foundation apparently, so is wordpress.com subsidizing wordpress.org? Have they asked WPEngine to cover their costs?
> Wordpress.com is subsidizing wordpress.org, which is a charitable foundation that accepts donations
Nope. There goes Matt, muddying the waters. Contrary to many people (including myself's belief) wp.org is very explicitly, in his words, NOT the Foundation, just a benevolent gift of his to the community. You could be excused, given all the links to donate to the Foundation and accompanying text, or the fact that it lives on the Foundation's ASN, though.
Great work making the train-wreck worse, Matt. This whole situation is cringeworthy and makes me 100% dedicated to never trusting Matt or Wordpress with any important project, ever again.
I've found myself staring at this in-progress train-wreck of a spat in the past 24/48 hours. Honestly, the childish tone of @matt's posts on this, the silly C&D from WPE, all show real immaturity from people and companies that should know better.
"Remember the dispute is between WP Engine and Automattic, not the WordPress foundation (the .org)."
While you can disagree with Matt's approach, it actually feels like this dispute is more between WP Engine and the WordPress project than it is between WP Engine and Automattic. WP Engine not contributing to the project hurts Automattic a little, but the largest, most profitable companies in the WordPress ecosystem not contributing to the project are an existential threat to the sustainability of the Open Source project.
Companies will always optimize for profits, and contributing to an Open-Source project is only profitable when you are in it for the long run. And we all know that PE firms (which play an important role in our economy) are not in the game for long-term gains. Silver Lake is doing what they are meant to do — maximize profits in the short-term so that they can turn around and sell WP Engine for as much as possible.
Matt is using the leverage he has to ensure Silver Lake is forced to do something that is good for the WordPress project but will never happen because it cuts into WP Engine's P&L.
I think that is at least an approximation of what he is trying to do with the trademark issue.
If you want to use the trademark, you have to contribute to the success of the project.
There are plenty of Open Source projects that billion-dollar companies completely rely on without contributing back, and this situation puts those projects and companies at risk. An imperfect analogy might be what happened with the XZ Utils backdoor in Linux. The person maintaining the utility seemed overwhelmed, so he was pressured into accepting malicious actors as maintainers. They were able to introduce a backdoor into the utility. If more of these companies would have contributed to help with the maintenance and development of the utility, this would not have been possible.
If WP Engine starts contributing 5% of their revenue to the WordPress project, it helps protect the project that their entire business is built around.
So I think the questions really should be, "Why does Matt feel like this was necessary in the first place? Why wasn't WP Engine contributing more than 40 hours a week to the project?"
Not sure if Matt ever reads HN, but in case he does I’d like him to know that I will never use or recommend Wordpress again as a result of all of this garbage. I hope the internet at large can move to something else and WP can eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history.
I do read! And I hope you consider WordPress for something in the future and don't let a PE firm's bad behavior forcing us into a public fight cloud your user experience.
You were not forced into anything. You chose to take these actions.
Furthermore, you stealthily edited your trademark policy to make it appear as if the name "WP Engine" was violating it, when in fact you specifically called out (with no caveats) that the "WP" initials were okay to use for a decade. This demonstrates bad faith on your part.
If your company is harmed from these actions, then the blame will be squarely on your shoulders, and I hope your board of directors does the right thing and fires you.
Edit: To be crystal clear, and to address the rest of your comment directly, the only way I would consider Wordpress for anything of my own or recommend it to my clients at any point in the future is if you issued an unconditional apology and resigned from your position.
I never said that was THE problem, I was simply using it to show that Automattic is acting in bad faith.
Besides, that’s BS and if you don’t already know it you need to speak with a competent attorney. Trademarks must be defended in a timely manner to be maintained, and they’ve been using those terms for years. That ship has sailed.
Stop digging yourself a deeper hole and start thinking about what you can do to repair the goodwill you’re burning.
Not that many, frankly a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of WordPress[0] users, but I hope that others will take the same position. I have spoken to others who generally feel the same way that I do.
[0] This is nominative trademark fair use. Please don’t sue me, Matt!
> It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.
He blocked IPs with no warning, that's why they're impacted.
> WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access
He doesn't say ~"we warned them we could could remove access" and speaks that volumes.
> Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk.
I very much doubt they choose to take this risk.
> We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00.
The timing of this is designed to have maximum impact on WordPress users hosting on WP Engine. They now have to work the weekend to update their site and this tyrant can say he restored access just long enough to negate any security impact.
All this reminds me of a much more minor spat years ago when Matt got upset Chris Pearson made a configurable premium theme (Thesis) which controversially went against the GPL license. Matt then purchased the domain thesis.com and tried unsuccessfully to revoke Chris’ 3 trademarks related to the name and ‘diy themes’.
In this current case, it looks like Matt is thankfully trying to ensure end customers don’t get unreasonably affected. But nonetheless, it certainly appears WP.org should at least be relationally more of an independent entity with a separate leadership, or at least appear to be so.
Or ... in 2022 when Mat called GoDaddy "Parasitic" and an "existential threat to [WordPress's] future." And then to argue at GoDaddy employees ... attempting to convince them they're working for a bad organization. All hovering around his presumption about the quantity and quality of GoDaddy's contribution back to WordPress, while GD simultaneously profits by being in the broader marketplace.
it looks like Matt is thankfully trying to ensure end customers don’t get unreasonably affected.
No, WordPress' lawyers almost certainly told Matt he was committing tortious interference of contract, and opening up WordPress, Automattic, and himself to tens of millions in damages claims from WP Engine and their affected customers.
Given his behavior in prior such tantrums, it's clear that the decision to be reasonable was not Matt's choice. It was an ultimatum given to him by others.
I'm not sure "We have given you 72 hours (starting on a Friday afternoon) to figure out how to mirror everything you need, and to have completed the mirroring process, and then the block is back. And updates? Sucks to be you." qualifies as "reasonable" in any sense of the word, though.
The page no longer includes that language. It now simply states "We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us."
So, the original draft (which you saw/see?) clearly came from Matt; the reasonable version that's now on their website almost certainly came from Legal/the rest of the board.
>So, the original draft (which you saw/see?) clearly came from Matt; the reasonable version that's now on their website almost certainly came from Legal/the rest of the board.
I believe the person you're responding to was creatively summarizing Matt's sentiment, not providing a direct quote from the post.
Matt's behavior is the reason I stopped making plugins for WordPress years ago and went into law.
Not surprised to see more of the same from him, and this farce that WordPress is granting WP Engine a "reprieve" when it's really the case that WordPress is doing this to avoid a lawsuit that would result in the loss of its nonprofit status.
WordPress is run primarily for the benefit of Matt. The IRS regards that as "private inurement" and it has bad consequences for both the organizations at the individual(s) receiving those benefits.
How does one spin up a mirror of the entire WordPress.org registry, not to mention keeping up with plugin/theme updates that are uploaded there by the respective maintainers?
Furthermore, does WordPress even support custom resource registries?
There's also https://themes.svn.wordpress.org. I started cloning them on my laptop, then realized I didn't have the free terabytes they likely would take.
None of that is documented, if it's even supported at all. Beyond using network trickery to reverse-engineer API calls, I don't see how it can be expected that it should already be in place.
Does Matt really want to risk creating alternative repositories and losing the central role wp.org is providing (yes, free of charge)? What about plugin authors who want to ensure their stuff is available on all WordPress hosts, what will they have to do to push to all stores? WPEngine acquired some pretty popular plugins (acf, deliciousbrains), it'd be a shame to see them exclusively available outside of the wordpress.org ecosystem as a retaliation.
> Beyond using network trickery to reverse-engineer API calls, I don't see how it can be expected that it should already be in place
Don't worry, though, Matt has generously given them 72 whole hours to figure out exactly how to do it, and complete the whole mirroring process, too! Oh, he did that on a Friday afternoon, just before the weekend? Extra generous!
I think it’s abundantly clear at this point that Mullenweg does not recognize an operational distinction between his roles as CEO of Automattic, founder of the WordPress foundation, and operator of WordPress.org.
Hopefully this aides WordPress’s slow but definite walk toward irrelevance. Maybe what we end up with will have proper governance instead of what can only be described as a deranged child at the helm.
What's outlandish about this situation is that Matt blocked WP Engine customers, not WPEngine itself.
It would be one thing if WPEngine had an API key so that customers on its servers could access wordpress.org. Even then, it would be a slimy move to cut off access by surprise as part of this dispute rather than offering 30 days to migrate away.
But Matt is offering this free service to the world to encourage growth of WordPress, and now that he's in this dispute with WPE, he's acting as if WPE is a client who's not paying.
Meanwhile, Matt designed WordPress so that it takes a hard dependency on wordpress.org and doesn't make plugin servers configurable. If it's such a burden on Matt to serve traffic to WPE customers, why is there zero support for mirroring the repository or pointing WordPress instances at third-party mirrors?
You are commenting on the HN thread for this very blog post. Do you think the person you're replying to doesn't know that you offered a "reprieve"? Why are you not actually answering any questions asked here?
Automattic auto-rejects applications to sign up to their Jetpack WordPress plugin's non-commercial free tier if your blog has so much as a single contact link[1]. This behavior feels greedy in my opinion, and may reflect on other behaviors expressed by Automattic.
Hey Matt, ex-Automattician here. I don't have any comment on the issues themselves (haven't touched PHP or WP since I left) but please consider that the fallout of these actions may hurt your own employees in ways you can't see.
This has turned into a legal situation and I'd have to guess it's making people very uncomfortable. From the outside, it seems to have happened so suddenly that anyone employed at Automattic wouldn't have time to consider their options beforehand. Some people I really respect and enjoyed working with are in a tough spot right now and there's no way they can be fully honest with you given the circumstances.
Why go through trademark rather than licensing agreement for access to wp.org resources?
If they are in violation of trademark why not just file a case against them?
Why the selective enforcement of your trademark? Doesn't that essentially void your trademark?
If wpengine renamed would you leave them alone or is the trademark dispute just a form of leverage?
What entity is at the heart of this dispute? Wordpress foundation, automattic, wp.org, or you personally? Is there any difference between those entities or are they essentially the same when it comes to this dispute?
I am a wpengine user. Why should I trust my building needs to the wordpress ecosystemgoing forward if access can be revoked for what appears to be any reason?
Matt, you currently have three roles. You are running Automattic, the WordPress Foundation and wordpress.org. It seems that this is a huge conflict of Interest and a dispute with one seems to quickly become a dispute with all. eg a Trademark dispute with The Wordpress Foundation results in a ban from wordpress.org.
Will you be resigning from one or more of these roles?
A pity. But I guess people now know that wordpress.org and The Wordpress Foundation are subordinate to the aims and profits of Automattic and yourself.
You want to make your pick while you seemingly still have options open, unless you'd rather go down with the ship.
You've proven yourself to be too much of a central point of failure and the longer this position is maintained, the more risk-conscious customers will feel forced to start thinking about their options.
How would one replicate privately the entire WordPress.org infrastructure, from plugins and theme hosting and updates, core storage and update calls? Can you point to any documentation that would allow WPEngine or any other host to stop using wordpress.org capabilities and keep using WordPress functionality as you are asking WPEngine? How do you envision that affecting plugin and theme authors? Core contributors? "Extend" Stores?
You think that's very doable in 72hrs? Can you provide documentation? Do you think that's a reasonable delay to do this thing that's never been done before?
When do you plan to add support in the admin UI for alternate source urls for plugins and themes, so that others can more effectively mirror your apparently overtaxed infrastructure?
You are making a public display out of your ability to harm those who you feel have wronged you. It is understandable that some users might want to, in light of this, reduce your ability to harm them. It is also, in a way, understandable that you would not want to help them do this.
> your ability to harm those who you feel have wronged you
Importantly, also his complete and utter inability to separate soldiers from civilians. You can't even be safe knowing that you haven't personally offended Matt—if you do business with anyone who has or with anyone who does business with anyone or...
There's no way for a rational company to keep Matt in their supply chain anymore, he's too volatile.
Because with what you are asking WPEngine, that will be the result. Other hosts will follow to not be taken hostage by your opinions. So if WPEngine creates another repository for their customers and the very popular plugins they acquired, how do you plan on reconciling their solution with WordPress'? What happens once there's several Extend stores? What happens to authors who need to push plugins to all stores? What happens if I'm hosted on wp.com (and I am paying whatever tier allows me to install plugins) who doesn't use WPEngine's plugins repository and I want an updated ACF?
I just want to say I think what you did was right.
I started using Wordpress last year, in 2023. The first version of WP came out in 2003. Someone had to make sure this project stayed alive for 20 years just so I could use it. I think you're trying to make sure it stays alive for another 20 so someone like me could pick it up in the future. I think that's very noble.
The only conclusion that I can draw from all drama is that the legal and PR teams at those teo companies are not doing a good Job. Or that they are not given the chance to do their job.
I'm so glad to see such a positive step in this conflict. It really shows how much Matt genuinely cares about the community and how he's willing to take the higher ground. WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist to WP.org, and Matt decided to keep providing the free service to them temporarily, prioritizing end users, even though it increases his costs for WP.org, and without WP Engine stepping back on the trademark infringements.
> I'm so glad to see such a positive step in this conflict. It really shows how much Matt genuinely cares about the community and how he's willing to take the higher ground.
Yes. Saying "We have generously decided to give you 72 hours to figure out how to mirror all this content, actually mirror it, and then plug it in, before we reinstate a block affecting your end users again. Oh, yes, I do realize it's 3pm PT on Friday afternoon and the clock is ticking, no, not 3 business days, we're turning the block back on at 4pm PT on Monday afternoon" is entirely positive, empathetic to those users, and shows genuine care for the community...
Or maybe not.
> WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist to WP.org
Despite you saying so in multiple places here, WPEngine did not fire the first shots in this shitshow.
This is an unfortunate situation. While WP Engine could have been a better actor here, the way Automattic have gone about this has made things vastly worse for everyone using Wordpress.
As an aside, I’m curious if Wordpress.org are bound to allow WP Engine access to their plugin SVN under some sort of estoppel theory in U.S. law? 72 hours seems like it’d be too short notice for WP Engine to mirror everything, no?
This is messed up at another level. Never thought there would be so much anger and abuse in this space. Matt Mullenweg needs to be removed or something else needs to change for the community to survive.
Are other providers safe? How do I know they are not going to block other sites that offer Wordpress as a service? At least this will give me some leverage to tell management to move away from Wordpress.
Edit: Oh I forgot about the part where all of these posts are being published on the .org, so they appear in the dashboard of every wordpress install (including WP Engine, until they disabled the news). I'd love to hear from a lawyers perspective on how this sabotage gets into unfair competition and tortious interference. I think that is going to make the trademark thing more difficult to take to court, knowing that WP Engine probably has good grounds to countersue for actual damages at this point.