Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.

Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.

Am I off?

But it wouldn’t have to be them. Any U.S. citizen can file such a complaint, even anonymously. That said, it would likely not be pursued by the IRS unless it was written based on detailed accurate knowledge of tax exempt regulations, and clear proof of abuse.

There is also the fact that WP Engine sponsored a WordPress Foundation event and then was kicked out of it because of this dispute. The WordPress foundation accepted 75k knowing what WP Engine was doing and then didn't honour the deal.

Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.

In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".

Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.

They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.

I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).

All that happened is that WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic. WordPress.org misrepresenting the situation is not a good look.

WPEngine sent a cease and desist letter addressed to, and targetting only, Matt Mullenweg and his for profit company Automattic. WPEngine are explicitly not targeting wordpress.org in the letter. You can read it here: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...

Side note: wp.org is indeed mentioned a couple times in the letter but only when referencing Matt's blog post on the site, the trademark rules, and some technical information around the revisions feature. The "demands" part of the letter address Matt and Automattic exclusively.

Matt knows that an attack on dot org would rally everyone to his side, which is why he is repeating this lie over and over. He is trying to use the community as shield.

This is also (IMHO) why he shut off access to dot org. He wants WPEngine to be seen taking some sort of action against the community.

Matt is constantly shifting between "Matt from Automattic" and "Matt from the WP Foundation" wherever it suits him. It's sickening. He needs to be removed from the foundation immediately.

https://x.com/wpengine/status/1839246341660119287

This is not how open source has or is supposed to work.

1. Based on their github orgs, there is effectively no separation between wordpress.org and Automattic.

2. The core WP contributors trac has a long history of not really being welcome to new contributions. Outside of the design decisions coming from Automattic, third party contributions either die in multi-year deliberations or get directed to the plugin system.

3. The development culture around WP, which largely revolves around the plugin ecosystem - has always trended towards paid plugins over OSS software.

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.

> Matt [7:18]: "They [wp engine] fired a incident report against me that said I berated them and cursed at them in their [wordcamp] booth now if you ask anyone who knows me I actually don't curse like I don't use curse words at all and they put information out there saying that I told them to f off you know which is not true and there were witnesses there"

> Matt [23:19]: "um you know WP enginer is going to lose a lot of customers. Silver Lake stands to lose billions of dollars so they are going to pull out every dirty trick smear campaign Cambridge analytica stuff Palantir. They're going to try to attack and smear me and automattic wordpress. Working as much as possible so you know if you see terrible stuff about me coming out I don't know like just know that there's probably someone paying for that um that's that's one thing I'll say"

> [I hope] that the CEO dies a forever painful death involving a car […]

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...

The difference I'm flagging is about why you write the code, not just what license you choose. Free Software is about user freedoms, which freedoms are in no way hampered by the existence of an entity like WP Engine but are hampered when you go scorched earth against said entity.

1. Creates an official policy that states the level of usage of the public WordPress services/resources which constitutes requiring a business relationship with the Foundation (e.g. N terabytes transferred per month)

2. Attach a dollar amount.

3. Inform WP-Engine that they're in violation of this new policy and they have N days to comply or their access will be terminated (where N is at least 90 but ideally 180/360).

Matt's recent interview with the Primeagen suggests that while "discussions" with WP-Engine go back years, he couldn't give a straight answer for whether other services may be vulnerable to the same retribution WP-Engine faced, specifically and quantifiably why WP-Engine received retribution while other entities don't, and if specific prior notice of the actions Automattic took was given to WP-Engine. Instead, it was vibey: A bunch of "well, they use a lot, server resources, our trademark, yeah other entities use a lot too, but those other entities give back, stuff, to the community, WP-Engine gives back some stuff, but not enough." Prime tried to get more out of him multiple times but it just ended with him saying "I'm sorry, I'm sick and really tired".

1. They will scrape the entire WordPress.org plugin registry (people are already circulating scrapers around Mastodon)

2. They will open their own separate plugin registry, with blackjack and hookers

3. They will update their mu-plugin to hook the WordPress autoupdater and point it to their own infrastructure on every site they host

They can do this because WordPress is GPL and so are all the plugins. GPL can't be revoked unless you fuck up a source release, which is genuinely hard to do in PHP. And WordPress is GPLv2+, meaning GPLv3 with its way more lenient revocation terms are available.

I assume at some point Automattic will insist that scraping WordPress.org is now illegal or something, and then every plugin author will have to go through an annoying process of claiming their WP Engine Plugin Registry entries and updating everything in two places, fracturing the community because of the FOSS world's most petty trademark fight.

My point is: The single thing the Wordpress side appears (to me) to have fucked up is that they seem to have made this personal. If they made a policy that when partners/consumers of the code/trademarks/services reach a certain well-defined size/usage threshold/etc then charge them X%/require a certain contribution back/etc; give proper notice; even if this policy were "silently" selectively enforced against WP-Engine because someone in Automattic has a grudge to grind: Their goodwill would be much higher.

Because then every single conversation about this starts with "Well, we have this policy, and we told WP-Engine about it six months ago and they ghosted us, oh well what other option do we have?" and not he-said she-said we've been talking for years blackmailing conference talks mess.

WP-Engine is a business. Treat them like one. Because you're exactly right, WP-Engine has no economic incentive to give back: So freakin bill them!

Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

If that is really the case, WP Engine had to be exceptionally antagonistic against WP dot org for things to end up like this, but most people are treating it as if it is a simple conflict of interest between WP dot com and WP Engine.

>Last week, in a blog post, Mullenweg said WP Engine was contributing 47 hours per week to the “Five for the Future” investment pledge to contribute resources toward the sustained growth of WordPress. Comparatively, he said Automattic was contributing 3,786 hours per week. He acknowledged that while these figures are just a “proxy,” there is a large gap in contribution despite both companies being a similar size and generating around a half billion dollars in revenue.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...

I really think they could have handled the PR better by providing more information about the decision on the official announcement. "Uses WP but doesn't contribute back" is something that applies to too many. "Built whole business on WP, pledged to contribute, but then didn't" is something that applies to very few.

Chromium is Open Source, but Google is not required to allow Add On store access (even if they tolerate it from chromium forks).

  * https://thephp.foundation/  one of three platinum level sponsors
  * MySQL doesn't take sponsorships afaict
  * https://mariadb.org/about/#stakeholders one of several silver sponsors of MariaDB
  * https://x.com/SlexAxton/status/1839091643338862828 "I was on the board of the jQuery foundation during some of the glory years and @photomatt was the ~largest donor"

Ultimately it's a matter of common sense. Sure, if I leave out my "take one" bowl on Halloween and someone takes it all, there's no rules against that. But next year I might be more cautious and hand out the candy myself - now what?

If you've built a business off taking all my candy and reselling it, you're fucked! If you had just been less greedy and taken, say, 10 instead of the whole bowl I might not have cared.

Hell they're one of the only 2 companies that let you compile android with their firmware for their phones. They even have instructions on their site.

This is whatabouttism, but damn, they don't deserve this kinda talk.

Example: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/0abe05aeac29d997...

2. There is obviously a difference between "selling products that include OSS" and "selling OSS 1:1". It's not like Sony's firmware/dashboard is maintained by "OpenGamingConsoleDashboard" and they are selling a 95% repackage of that to their end users (also ignoring the hardware). This pertains to the software maintenance logistics layer and not the licensing layer. Sure, both in the Sony and WPEngine cases they are in the clear on the licensing, but that doesn't make for sustainable development of the underlying software. I'd also wager that if the OSS projects used in the PS4 would drum up enough of a social media stink, they'd have decent chances of getting some compensation (e.g. the TLDraw maintainers did that quite a few times successfully).

Since they offer competing services in the first place.

You'll find that the real world is filled to the brim with exceptions, discretion, and the under-the-table deals. The ones who succeed know how to coax and build them. The ones who fail demand hard rules. Typically, those "hard rules" start at 0, and you get nothing.

It doesn't. But it doesn't say anywhere that you should get resources (like storage and compute) for free either.

> What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?

I don't know. But I can argue that someone bringing in 500 million a year in revenue should be acting differently from someone bringing in 500k a year. If they contribute back little or nothing, no other player (such as Automattic) who contributes back will be able to compete with them.

So yeah, is WPE in the right to not give back?

At the heart of this is the same song of making money and the idea of fairness. I honestly don’t know the groundrules here.

WP Engine may be just as bad as you say, but if so they just successfully baited you into making yourselves look like the bad guys.

If there are issues then Matt would do well to clearly articulate the problem.

But still. A lot of small companies only pay $20/mo for hosting …

I’m really interested to see how this plays out.

Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?

https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/statement-from-the-pos...

https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai...

Also worth considering that EDB is backed by Private Equity, and there was some other very recent incident that seemingly directly resulted in OtterTune folding.

There are certainly companies that do work on Postgres, but Postgres wasn't founded by people looking to make a business and its development isn't driven by one primary company (to my knowledge). Postgres started as an academic research project by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. Berkeley released it under a BSD/MIT-like license. It just has a long history of being independent of any company that's the primary driver of its evolution.

That's not to say there aren't companies like EnterpriseDB, Neon, Citus, and others that haven't driven certain aspects of it, but they just don't get the same kind of control over the project.

Crucially, no one can really feel like someone else is making money off a project that's primarily their work. I think companies in the Postgres ecosystem all understand that even if they're a big fish in the Postgres ecosystem, they aren't coming anywhere close to having built 25% of the value in Postgres. It's hard to "get your undies in a twist" if you acknowledge that you've probably gotten more from the historical contributions than you've contributed - even if you're a stellar contributor today.

Then don't make an open source product.

What you can't do is try to earn the goodwill that comes with open source, but also expect the profitability of a proprietary product.

That’s why this action by Matt is ridiculous. WP Engine has grown the overall WP market through good product development and investment. That has produced positive effects for the many companies and people who make their money developing and supporting WP sites for clients.

There’s a pretty standard way of fighting those out.

There is a longer story in which Mullenweg has claimed that WP Engine does not contribute sufficiently to the WordPress open-source project, and that the use of “WP” in their name supposedly created confusion and infringes the trademarks of the WordPress open-source project. WP Engine disputes this.

Of course the elephant in the room is that Mullenweg is the CEO of a rival for-profit WordPress host (Automattic), but has made his claims against WP Engine from his position in the open-source WordPress project.

Perhaps a board of non-Automattic WordPress project people would come to the same conclusions about WP Engine, but the current situation reeks of conflict of interest.

Ultimately the ones paying the price here are the users of WP Engine-hosted WordPress installations, who have been cut off from plug-in and theme updates with no warning.

Then, because aws doesn't give anything back, npm blocks the aws ip range, and suddenly existing aws customers can't install modules or security updates.

That's pretty much what happened here. I get the "you should give back" ideal, but make no mistake, this is because wp engine is eating their lunch.

I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations).

I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).

Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.

This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.