[photomatt]

Silver Lake and WPE's legal attacks may impact my ability to provide free services on WordPress.org in the future, especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery. I hope not, though. Going to fight this with everything I have.

[aimazon]

[flagged]

[photomatt]

Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. Co2 where I'm at is 572.

I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day. I have not threatened to take down WordPress.org. WPE's preservation requests do complicate things, legally, though, for the Slack and forums that W.org offers.

Both Cloudflare and Fastly have reached out offering CDN services to W.org, which we're considering. Cloudflare also serves a lot of WP Engine. We do like controlling our infrastructure, though, for a variety of reasons, and have run it without problems or downtime for 21 years. Currently the only outside vendor we use is Slack/Salesforce, which donates free Slack Pro accounts for 49k users. (I think that would cost ~5M/yr.) We also use some Github, which is free for open source.

[bigiain]

You do realise just how guilty people sound when complaining about preservation requests for discovery during lawsuits?

If you're "right" and "on the side of good and freedom", what are you worried about in Slack/forums/whatever?

Because everything made public so far in their filing is pretty fucking bad (for you), I can only assume that discovery is gonna reveal some even worse behaviour on your part - or you'd have responded in public with some of that instead of whining about "preservation requests complicating thing"...

[cdolan]

For you:

See paragraphs 32 and 33

[bigiain]

Yeah. I foresee a possible hilarious outcome here.

Matt wins this case, having the court determine the trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10 billion value.

The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars of assets between a non profit and a for profit company without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been involved with.

WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.

Everybody loses.

[kstrauser]

Whoa. I’m bookmarking this for later. That seems way too plausible to my not-a-lawyer ears.

[busterarm]

WPEngine isn't just one out of thousands of WP hosting companies. They're an absolute juggernaut dwarfing everyone else.

It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers. The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of the WordPress community does not even know that they exist.

[anon7000]

I think it was explained elsewhere, but Automattic has the commercial trademark rights, so licensing money wouldn’t be transferred to a non-profit foundation.

[dboreham]

> I do own a place in Montana

Did not know that.

[lolinder]

> Going to fight this with everything I have.

Your chance to do that was before you threw a grenade into the WordPress ecosystem and injured hundreds of thousands of innocent WordPress developers over a {trademark|giving back|general bad vibes} dispute. No one here is buying your attempts to pawn responsibility for your actions off onto WP Engine.

They may have legitimately been the bad guys until a month ago, but you've thoroughly stepped into that role now and you're making no effort to step back.

[snowwrestler]

I don't think folks want you to provide those free services, is the thing. I think most folks want those housed inside a foundation that can seek industry support in the normal ways. A lot of people seem to have thought they already were.

[bigiain]

As I see things, WPE's legal _responses_ to being attacked by you are what's going to grind your ability to provide "free services" into the ground.

All of WordPress's reputation and goodwill transformed into luxury cars and 3rd holiday chalets for lawyers...

[DataDive]

There is a parable that applies here,

---

The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a heavy heart.

"Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"

God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."

Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"

God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world, but even I cannot change public opinion."

---

Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the most influential and richest people on the planet. But they won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a doubt against them.

I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.

[jfdndbqirncnx]

Matt, the Wordpress Foundation (which you control) explicitly lists the Plugin Repository and Theme Repository as Foundation projects, but now you’re saying that they’re your personal projects: https://wordpressfoundation.org/projects/

You’re a compulsive liar.

[curiousgal]

lmfao my dude stop acting like a pariah, it's pathetic. You 100% brought this on yourself. Never thought anyone could be so reckless when extorting people.

[rideontime]

Who attacked whom?

[JimDabell]

> especially things like Slack or forums that are grounds for discovery

You know comments here and on Twitter can end up as evidence in court as well, right?