[legitster]

https://ma.tt/2024/10/first-amendment/

The lawyer thing was hilarious. Someone actually claiming to be his lawyer was on the HN threads and anytime he was asked a question the response was a version of "Oh, I hadn't heard about this. I can't answer that."

[adolph]

what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.

I've heard about corporations being persons too but a person claiming to be a corporation is a new one. Has that regal "L'État, c'est moi" ring to it.

[demetris]

I don't think he claims to be a corporation here.

What he says is that, because wordpress[dot]org is his personal site, telling him what to do with it would violate his First Amendment rights.

[bawolff]

Its still stupid. The first amendment doesn't mean you can do literally anything you want.

[dboreham]

I've come to realize that for some people the law is considered in a Big Lebowski manner: "that's just, like, your opinion, man".

[moomin]

A billionaire who will remain nameless is reportedly very fond of saying “Sue them” when he’s not getting his way. It’s the lawyers job to figure out what to actually sue them _for_.

[rphillips]

First amendment right is against the government; not other companies and individuals.

[minimaxir]

> After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction.

Well, a judge did indeed rule on the injuction.

He just retweeted this tweet about the case: https://x.com/brian_essig/status/1866640985842692452

> This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What’s next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?

[smsm42]

That's not an accurate description. An accurate description is that the court is ordering an open source maintainer to stop treating one particular user in a hostile and exclusionary manner. Now, you can object to that too, but there's a serious difference. It's like fixing a bug, but intentionally excluding some particular user from getting the bug fix - it's not the same as fixing a bug. Fixing a bug anew requires additional work, and forcing somebody in un-contracted work is usually hard. Allowing a user to access the bug fix everybody else can access requires just stopping being a jerk, no surprise the court is much more willing to grant such kind of relief.

[x0x0]

Also, promissory estoppel, which an actual attorney explained as such:

Even though you don't have a contract, you make a promise (Matt: wp.org is free forever to anyone), someone (WP Engine) relies on that promise to their detriment, and the plaintiff's reliance on that promise was reasonable. Discussion of promissory estoppel at 44:17 (over the next 3 minutes or so) in [1].

And note that singling out WP Engine for very explicitly a payment is part of the rationale.

Shortly after Mike also discusses the same point made by /u/DannyBee [2], ie that the attorneys seem to be considering this case not in the context of the wordpress business, in which Matt being allowed to say you all have access to the code / updates / plugins at my whim is not great for wordpress the company outside of this narrow cirumstance.

[1] A discussion by attorney Mike Dunford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdwiZEhRS3o

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385083

[DannyBee]

It's funny because i literally explained in the original thread how this actually works legally, and that's exactly what happened.

[solardev]

Can you link to that explanation, please, for those of us not well versed in how this works?

[Kye]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726903

[ImPostingOnHN]

It's always lame when somebody's arguments get shut down in court and then they just repeat the same failed arguments after.

Like, come up with some new material.

[eqvinox]

The court is forcing the operator of wordpress.org into providing services, being an open source maintainer is entirely irrelevant here. This entire thing is closer to app store litigation than anything even vaguely open source.