What's sad here is that this dispute isn't likely to make Wordpress any better, but rather send money to lawyers and reduce enthusiasm for the OSS project.
And what is more sad is that it really appears that the WordPress figurehead is to blame.
Matt has made so many unforced errors in the last month, in addition to revealing, one way or another, that he basically considers WordPress, the .org, the .com, the Foundation, and Automattic, all to be synonymous, which is news to a significant portion of the community, let alone to the incorporation and other founding filings.
He claimed in an interview there's context to the texts that makes it look better, but he hasn't actually released that context, just said that it exists and he wishes WP Engine would [0]. I'm having a hard time imagining context that would make this not extortion, and if there really is context that makes it better I'm unsure why he's not releasing it himself. He's certainly not gone into no-comment-on-legal-matters mode, so his silence there speaks volumes to me.
What would you like me to answer? I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. I've only been releasing things I've said or sent.
"May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email."
Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May. The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to them months ago.
Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
He polls his audience and 54% of the thousand people watching thought WP Engine was an official thing, based on visiting their website that day. They have since updated their website a lot, including rewriting customer testimonial quotes without permission:
If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.
The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here for your own good) is context that makes those texts not look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
No one here is disputing that you might have been in the right until September. It's your actions in September that you need to account for.
Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be defended against all not just one. Do you really believe they are the only ones? Are you going to go after everyone next?
Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to use the trademark approach, I think your actions are going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have in time.
I was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the chat replay before deciding whether the results of any poll taken during that stream are credible.
>>>WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8% being typical? For what kind of franchise?
If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert", do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
I’m an arm length removed from all this drama having not used Wordpress in a while, but to be honest this opinion feels overblown. To an outsider, it just looks like some legal issue between two entities irrelevant to my concerns on whether I’d use or contribute to Wordpress in the future. Something that happens between corporations all the time
My guess is there will be some settlement, one party will walk away with a better position than before, and that will be that
One of the two entities completely controls the plugin ecosystem and wielded that control against the other entity (the largest WordPress host except, possibly, Automattic itself) to block them and all of their customers out of the ecosystem over this dispute.
That's why this matters to average developers. WordPress is the plugin ecosystem, and messing around with it does as much damage to the WordPress ecosystem as left pad did to npm—it's not unrecoverable, but it's a major setback that could quickly become unrecoverable.
Note that one of the most popular plugins, to the point many WordPress people suggest it's the only plugin that should be part of core, is acf. Which is a plugin contributed by wp engine.
I believe WPEngine is actually larger than Automattic. This is an attempt to get the bigger (and likely better) company to pay the bills of a company that took a bit too much VC money and now needs the revenue to support it.
The more you press the nuclear button, the more you damage your reputation. I’m of the opinion that the circumstances here are exceptional and rationality will prevail
The damage to your reputation comes because pressing the nuclear button even once is an unhinged thing to do. The reputational damage is because once you've pressed it once we consider it more likely that you'll press it again because you've shown yourself to be the kind of person who presses that button.
Yep. We no all know not to trust anything that Matt or any of his businesses or non-profits are involved with.
Unless WordPress, both the open source codebase and the plugin/theme publishing/distribution channels, are completely free of Matt's influence - they are now a serious risk any business using Wordpress needs to address and mitigate.
Matt seems to have jumped on WP Engine essentially because they were making a lot of money. So now, any other company that is making a lot of money (or hoping to make a lot money) with Wordpress may wonder whether Matt will target them too.
What's the criteria? Is there some exact revenue or profit number a company needs to stay under to avoid this sort of attack? Does Matt only get mad at hosting companies, or do other companies making a lot of money with WP (e.g. big creative agencies) need to be concerned?
Without clarity, it's hard to quantify the risk. And companies might decide to shift their CMS work elsewhere rather than deal with it. The drama undercuts one of the big advantages of WP: it was free and permissively licensed.
I agree it might not have much effect on random people using or contributing to WP. But open source projects actually need a lot of investment to grow and survive. And anything that depresses that investment can depress the overall project trajectory.
Making a lot of money and contributing effectively nothing back to Wordpress (the open source project).
In WP Engine's own complaint they say that they've "invested hundreds of millions of dollars and 14 years of hard work building a successful business to serve that community", and nothing about contributing to the project itself. Which to me indicates that they indeed have contributed very little to the project they've made a huge amount of money from.
You can argue WPE doesn't need to and that this is a feature (not a bug) of open source. But Matt Mullenweg seems to disagree and wants to use the fact that they are also capitalizing on a trademark they have no license to in order to press the issue.
From my perspective, however, it seems unlikely Automattic will win this. Automattic seems to only be enforcing their trademark as a response to WPE not contributing back to Wordpress, which is not something WPE is legally obligated to do. Trademarks need to be defended universally and without reservation.
You’re welcome to your opinion, but my company is in the market for a large enterprise CMS management contract, and this situation has taken every WordPress option off the table due to uncertainty about the business and technical stability of the ecosystem. I highly doubt we’re the only ones feeling that way.
Can you explain your reasoning? Wordpress is pretty scalable, if done right. Even Microsoft uses Wordpress in some of its microsites. I know some of the new federal government sites even use it (for instance whitehouse.gov as part of the USDS project). It's highly supported and has been tested vigorously for decades now. It can at least be considered for various projects, even large ones.
Sometimes you don't need a complex solution for various projects, this thought process reminds me of people building highly scalable configurations for projects that just don't need it then overrunning in costs and overengineering it all.
Exactly. That's not a large scale enterprise CMS. WordPress is fine for that.
But if you wanted to do something that requires fine-grained access control, publishing control, audit logs etc, you're not going to use WP, or you're building a CMS on top of WP. I'm doing that all day because I work in an industry that loves WP and everybody knows WP, so it's easy to collaborate. I've built dozens of plugins to accommodate for our various needs because you will hit some hard walls if you scale to large amounts of URLs, and you will run into problems with the code quality in popular plugins when you're going beyond "I just want it to look nice and work okay".
I don't hate WP. I'd consider myself a WP veteran, I've worked a lot with WP over the years, I've contributed code to core, I've found various bugs. I wouldn't ever consider it for anything that I'd call "enterprise" or "large". It's like when somebody talks about building an enterprise data management system and then says "the fact that the inventor of the CSV format liked pineapple of pizza will make sure that I won't consider CSV as the data store for my system". If they considered CSV before finding that out, they really shouldn't be making decisions in that type of project.
I guess I don't really understand what you consider "large" or "enterprise" there are very large sites that use Wordpress. I just gave you enterprise level consumers using it. You obviously aren't going to use it to build the next eBay or Amazon, but if you're a publisher or need a CMS that does publishing well? I don't really see your issue with it, if it's the right fit. Too many people try to reinvent the wheel. In my experience that more often than not leads to massive overhead and long run problems when it's in venues where it's unnecessary.
I adopted someone's node.js project once, overengineered and cost the company tons of money to run, I rebuilt it in Wordpress for a fairly large regional grocery chain and not only was it vastly cheaper, but the end product was also better and more reliable. So, I'm leery of anyone that writes something off, right off the bat. Pick the best tool for the job, not the ones that is suddenly in vogue to avoid judgement from random devs on HN or Reddit. You can't pigeonhole solutions, be it Wordpress or whatever you decide on.
I don't think there was ever any expectation that the Firefox/Iceweasel trademark dispute would "kill" either organization. About the most serious it got, IIRC, was some heated discussions on the Debian bug tracker; there were never any legal threats involved, and the situation was ultimately resolved to everyone's satisfaction by the name change.
Matt is usually the lead developer at WP.org you can find his references in almost all changelogs. I still think, attention and resources will be diverted.
Matt has made so many unforced errors in the last month, in addition to revealing, one way or another, that he basically considers WordPress, the .org, the .com, the Foundation, and Automattic, all to be synonymous, which is news to a significant portion of the community, let alone to the incorporation and other founding filings.