I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for.
I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue).
The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards the middle where they describe Mullenweg's keynote speech. It makes, according to WPE, these claims (numbers mine):
1. Claiming that WP Engine is a company that just wants to “feed off” of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back.
2. Suggesting that WP Engine employees may be fired for speaking up, supporting Mr. Mullenweg, or supporting WordPress, and offering to provide support in finding them new jobs if that were to occur.
3. Stating that every WP Engine customer should watch his speech and then not renew their contracts with WP Engine when those contracts are up for renewal.
4. Claiming that if current WP Engine customers switch to a different host they “might get faster performance.”
5. Alleging that WP Engine is “misus[ing] the trademark” including by using “WP” in its name.
6. Claiming that WP Engine’s investor doesn’t “give a dang” about Open Source ideals.
Under a US defamation analysis, claims (1), (3), and (6) appear to be statements of opinion. Statements of opinion, even when persuasively worded and authoritative, are generally not actionable as defamation. It might depend on the wording; in corner cases, an opinion can be actionable if it directly implies a conclusion made from facts known to the speaker and not disclosed to the audience --- but the facts involved have to be specific, you can't just imagine that I've implied I have secret facts (or my audience expects me to) because I'm Matt Mullenweg.
Claim (4) seems like it's probably just a fact? Is WPE assuredly the fastest possible provider at any given price point? The "might" also seems pretty important there.
That leaves (5) the allegation about the trademark dispute, which doesn't sound like an especially promising avenue for a lawsuit, but who knows? and (2) the bit about employee and former employee reprisals. The thing about (2) is if there's a single example of a disgruntled WPE employee who thinks they missed a promotion because they stuck up for the WordPress Foundation or whatever, WPE might have a hard time using that claim.
You'd think that before WordPress/Automattic started directly demanding funds from the board of WPE, they probably had some kind of counsel review this stuff and figure out what they could and couldn't safely say?
Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").
This is one of those times where I'm saying a lot of stuff in the hopes that someone much more knowledgeable will set me straight. :)
People in this thread seem to be focused on the defamation angle, but is the more important allegation not the alleged demand for large amounts of money to not destroy WP Engine's business? Matt sounds like a wannabe mob boss in the screencapped texts, sending photos of the crowd before his keynote and talking about how he could still "very easily" make it just a Q&A session if WP Engine agrees to pay up.
The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have a chance of winning such an argument). If Automattic was purely producing open source software with no vested interest in profit, that would be a different story perhaps.
I have never thought of WPE as a competitor to WordPress.com but perhaps weirdly I think of WordPress.com as a competitor to WordPress.org.
For example, if I have a WordPress site I've built from scratch out of WordPress.org, I am just going to assume trying to put it on WordPress.com will be annoying (and possibly even impossible?), because of issues with themes or plugins or whatever due to the fact that WordPress.com is a separate, hosted SaaS-style CMS, and not a hosting environment for WordPress sites.
WPE, by contrast, is Just Another Webhost to me, with some special bells and whistles for WordPress.
It's quite possible to host a "normal" WP installation with custom themes and plugins on WordPress.com (on the more expensive plan), I've done it a few times. But as much as I want to like it, I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. Some stuff that should be easy is just ridiculously difficult, like pulling logs programmatically. I think the main audience it caters to is people hosting a basic site with off the shelf themes.
Sorry could you expand on this, how can they "put a banner in [...] WordPress instances hosted by WPE"?
I was under the assumption that WordPress is OSS, and WPEngine is running this software on their platform, so there was an update to this software, contributed by Automattic developers which included a banner denouncing WPE, and the WPE people decided to just deploy that update to their platform?
I don't think that means they "put the banner on their instance" does it? If they are unhappy with the management of the open source software they are using on their platform they presumably could fork it, or decide to not deploy the version that includes this banner, no?
There's is a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his rant, making it show up everywhere.
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying!
I have seen the mentioned blog post now [1] the whole thing is starting to make more sense to me.
"Abuse of position" is not generally an actionable claim.
Generally, but also especially when the position is "WordPress".
just for monopolies right? And for hosting online and software that does it(two verticals of wordpress) there are hoardes of options.
> just for monopolies right?
I suspect that's still not actionable in the way the parent poster means, since AFAICT there no private right of action: You can't sue, only petition some government agency to bring their own lawsuit.
US antitrust laws grant private rights of action for monetary damages and injuctive relief. They’re unlikely to apply to Automattic/Wordpress though.
(Most other governments don’t grant these rights though)
Yes, but being the editor of the software used by your competitor is certainly funny.
Isn't this completely fine? If you and I both make aspirin, but we both put a little something extra in it (me vanilla, you salt) and I put banners on my web page saying "bastawhiz's salty aspirin puts the ass in aspirin", doesn't this just seem like typical rivalry? My point here is that defamation is defamation no matter the scale. I think scale is relevant re: damages, but not as to whether or not rivalry escalated to defamation in the first place.
> Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE
> I put banners on my web
There's a large difference between putting up a banner on _your_ site and abusing your position to put a banner on _every_ site you can.
If you sell my aspirin in your shop, you will have to accept what I put on the packaging or stop carrying my product.
That's true, but does not apply to this situation.
Automattic is not the owner of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation is. Even though many employees of Automattic work (maybe full-time) on WordPress [1].
So I sell your aspirin in my shop, and a friend of yours helped you package your aspirins and while doing that put some stickers onto your aspirin.
[1] https://www.df.eu/blog/wer-steckt-hinter-wordpress-ueber-die... (German)
Nah. Putting disparaging claims directly on the dashboard of my customers seems pretty abusive, and if it happened to me I'd be looking at legal options too.
There is simply no need to preserve documents given how public this was. If pressed the grievance can be corroborated externally.
The letter in entirety is a warning of potential legal action. That is the next action if the other party neither ceases or desists.
Maybe this is normal, but we're glorified animals trying to find justice out of a made up process. It's arbitrary, hence arbitration. Not a lawyer either. You probably know more terminology than I do; I just deal with them a lot :/
edit: I think it's a little strange to be placing judgements at this stage. We'll hear the facts if this goes to court. There's enough to know several are upset. Another consideration: by placing the numbers you're kind of trying to make their argument. Why? Let them.
It seems pretty likely that there’s communications internal to Automattic or the Wordpress Foundation where they talked about their objectives and plans, assuming the details in the claim are accurate.
That’s what they’re talking about preserving.
I'm also not a lawyer, pleased to meet you.
> I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D
I believe, as a non lawyer, in some places to be able to sue for defamation you must first contact the defamer and demand they take it down.
I have no idea and no opinion if there is a case. If there is a case a C&D might be a necessary step.
I assume the real goal here is to have the letter exist and be public, as a counterpoint in customer conversations.
Matt is predictable. WPE wrote this letter for the community. They knew Matt would throw a fit and they would be able to take the high ground while also releasing an assassination of Matt’s character. The Wordpress community doesn’t care about Wordpress.com, Matt just blew what little credibility he had left. Worthless as a legal letter, brilliant as a response for the Wordpress community. Matt will inevitably step down within a few weeks, and a few years from now, this will be seen as a pivotal moment enabling WPE to dominate Wordpress.com. Matt could not have played this worse.
Matt has no reason to step down. He will explain where the monetary claim is coming from - probably the development time promised and not delivered, or the use of the trademark - and then you have two competing narratives. One by the Foss software maker, one by a big enterprise. Why would a relevant part believe wp engine? And even if, how would that harm internal automattic structures in a way that he loses control?
Also, I see no way how this going forward even in front of courts could end up with wp engine replacing WordPress.com.
Automattic benefits greatly from their close relationship to Wordpress. Using the power they have to threaten a commercial competitor that has a good reputation in the community will push the Wordpress community to reevaluate that relationship. The contributions Automattic makes to Wordpress are valuable but valuable contributions do not excuse bad behaviour. Souring the relationship between Automattic and Wordpress is a major blunder, which Matt will be responsible for. If Automattic lose their preferential treatment and are forced to compete with WPE based only on service then they will be crushed because Automattic’s offerings are not as good — there’s a reason Matt is so sensitive about WPE. Automattic are just as dependent on venture capital as WPE, even more so because of how their business has been losing focus. Automattic’s value is based on its relationship with Wordpress, whereas WPE’s is entirely based on the service. Matt is threatening Automattic’s most valuable asset, removing him may be seen as the only option to rescue the relationship.
As an aside, people don’t usually act like this when things are going good. Perhaps Matt is lashing out because of pressure he is already under.
edit: and to close the loop, Matt is demanding benevolence from WPE that Automattic themselves don’t engage in. Automattic own the Wordpress.com domain and promote their hosting service through Wordpress.org (which causes the exact confusion Matt accuses WPE of benefiting from). The money Automattic spend on supporting Wordpress project is not a donation, it’s quid pro quo. Would WPE pay $10m a year to own all that? Of course, any rational company in the space would… but that’s not what Matt is offering.
I don’t follow the WP ecosystem very close since I left it years ago when I found better tools but I very much look forward to see if your confident prediction holds true.
> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web.
The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
That's on the customers. I used to work at a shop that used WP and it was a huge force multiplier. We were WP Engine customers and at some point we moved to Pantheon.io and then we moved to a static site with an internal-only WP frontend for content editors.
We had 2 developers, a PM, 20-30 content writers and $5B ARR. Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen. Even when we switched to building a static site, we still had our content editors write markdown in WordPress because it was easier to do that and pull all of the content from the database on deploy than train them.
The absolute worst part of being a WP Engine customer was being on Linode and the yearly Christmas Eve DDOS.
> That's on the customers
No that’s on the various design agencies that sell “custom websites” and instead they just slap together a 59$ theme and a dozen plug-ins. Most customers don’t know shit about the web and they just trust the agency to do a professional job. And in my 10+ years of experience as a freelancer I’ve seen plenty of agencies taking advantage of clients.
> Websites were strictly for marketing/leadgen.
So they weren't web sites but spam.
What I'm curious about though is if your former workplace still exists or is now AI generating the spam...
That’s pretty unfair. Most of the work I do can be considered “marketing” since it’s corporate sites and portfolios. Businesses need to have an online presence of some sort and someone has to create one for them. Not everything is SEO spam.
> as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
me neither but it pays; when we get called, bad things already happened, so it's always an emergency which means we can ask for 400-500$/hr to fix it. And there are so many bad wp sites that we can retire on that alone. But let me tell you about OpenCart, Drupal, etc which also are all lovely targets and more niche so higher hourlies!
As someone with a formal verification and static typing background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is very good business.
I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress.
For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish? PHP and Apache come up a lot too.
Way back in 2013, Matt Cutts from Google said in a talk:
“WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”
Agencies really latched onto that!
SEO was the new hotness.
An industry was then built around WordPress.
Clients would hear that it was the best at SEO, and they wanted a CMS they could update themselves.
Agencies could churn out variations of the same WordPress site and plugin stack, and then charge clients for ongoing hosting and maintenance fees to keep it updated.
Then there are all the plugins that get added depending on the whims of the 'developer' at the time.
The WordPress website then languishes when the agency or dev vanishes, WordPress gets hacked, and the client gets charged again.
The WP GUI builder plugins are a whole separate hellscape all to themselves!
It's like any other system designed to be used by people that are not technically savvy. Lots of things have default values that are not sane. That's why the script kiddies hit every server they can with known defaults and vulns. Otherwise, it's like any other publicly facing internet server in that it takes maintenance with patches and updates and being informed on what you're running and changes being made.
So because the majority of users are not savvy, it's become a cesspool. Then you read about it on a tech forum like HN and it is derided as an inferior product rather than allowing improper use by the user/operator.
I've had an interview last week for a company doing WordPress stuff, and their tech lead, computer science guy, said their next project was a monitoring tool running unit tests in production to understand the health of the app
It's not only the non-tech-savvy, even CS guys become trash when they go too close to WP
> I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality
Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server.
Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.
I think your response can be said of any application made before now.
There are degrees of bad. All code bases are bad.
But I've been writing web software for 30 years and WordPress is among the worst mainstream applications. It's worse than its PHP competitors at the time, and it's worse than Ghost and many of the competitors that came after it.
You can't just dismiss all criticism of the past because it was the past. Some people wrote worse software than others in the past, just as they do today.
Personally I’m think a big issue is the insistence of wanting to keep everything as backwards compatible for as long as possible. It becomes a burden. At some point you have to accept to make substantial changes in order to improve the situation but it’s not going to happen in the WP ecosystem because that’s one of their selling points.
It shows the code base rarely matters compared to user adoption.
Excuse me. phpwiki did exist before mediawiki and wordpress, and allowed no custom php in plugins and themes. It was all safe. Already 20 years ago.
And as worse is better predicted, all new ones went insecure, with less features, but nicer looking themes.
I run my own Wordpress server for a blog, and IMO it's basically fine if you use reasonable deployment management practices and don't install 500 random crap plugins and themes. The basic install is about as bulletproof as it gets in the mainstream web software business.
I don't particularly love PHP, but you don't need to touch it if you don't try to write any plugins. Yes, some of its practices are pretty wacky, like every plugin has full access to the filesystem and database to do basically anything, and the system expects to be able to update code files in place from web requests, but meh, just give it it's own $5 server and let it do its thing, and definitely be very careful which plugins you use and how you get them.
What you get in return for this is a perfectly fine CMS that anyone with basic computer skills can run. Yeah, static site generators are cool and all that from a tech expert's perspective, but nobody who isn't a tech expert can actually do anything with them, and oh, by the way, the ability to make any changes at all typically involves at the very least SSH access to the host server with full write permissions.
And so nice it looked at the beginning…
Instead of WordPress, what solutions do you use?
Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Webnode and other wysiwyg ones are even worse imho.
Are there any non-Nodejs or non-React open source CMS that don’t vendor lock you?
Because I feel that WP somehow sucks in details and maintenance, but I can’t find anything comparable without being sucked into development hell. :)
Thanks for suggestions.
After a few years building on WP I switched to https://getkirby.com/ and never looked back.
Thanks. It seems really good. PHP, files and folders instead of db, easy templating, plugins, admin interface built on Vue.js, open source at GitHub and a commercial license as well. Since 2012.
The only issue is to have more themes available, at getkirby-themes_com there are 22 only.
Because it's not designed with a theme approach. It's designed to build custom sites. Themes aren't really a thing inside kirby because of the tight relationship between content itself and admin interface. I like to think at it as an in between something like Laravel and WordPress.
I got it. But explain this to people who are spoiled by $59 themes :)
More themes that you can choose from -> more Kirby users -> stability -> more users coming from other solutions etc…
It's an entirely different target audience. Kirby is a tool that's designed mostly for developers, and not really for end users. There's no one-click install, there's no pressing a button to install plugins. And that's by design.
Well, in fact it was two clicks install :) I’ve downloaded it, unzipped into a folder and with PHP running I was ready… No Nodejs and React needed. These are so painful to maintain.
So Kirby is really nice to run.
And I understand your point.
Are the good old PHP CMS dead ? Things like Joomla, Dotclear, Drupal …
They are not dead. The reason why WP took web by storm and Joomla and Drupal became less visible is that WP did a lot of work in instant usability - their 2 minutes’ installation changed the game imho.
I personally don't like block themes.
Similar experience here. Poorly documented and inflexible.
Yeah I run wp2static on clients, cancel the hosting then push the files to vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages.
A PHP version is vulnerable. If you upgrade it, some plugin breaks. If you manually upgrade the offending plugin, the pesky developer now wants a subscription. Just a nono. I build on Hugo.
Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.
Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as a CMS.
I think your question answers itself if you look from the perspective of a non-technical marketing person who's used to WYSIWYG tools, rather than a programmer who's reading a site called Hacker News.
Yes, I know, I use it too. But github is hardly usable by non technical users , nor is markdown. We are talking about marketing deps of billion$ companies.
There are other plugins that generate static sites. Not sure if they would work for your use case, but worth looking into if you haven't.
Must clarify: not wp2static, but a random plugin breaking on php upgrade, sometimes requiring a subscription in new versions.
And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT.
Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer for WordPress cancer plugins… I don’t know. I wish someone would have the conversation. I don’t even care whether it’s Rust.
> Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business is.
I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking about how to run their business website.
(I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while being identical in use to WordPress so all the people currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to make it. )
Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does.
I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up.
There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.
Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great.
However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically.
Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…
Drupal is trying for basically this with its Starshot project. It might just work, if they can get enough people to build third-party themes.
> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need
Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.
The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."
Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!"
Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."
> The problem is that marketing wants a website that
... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress.
Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.
> Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue
Please reread. I said the website brought zero revenue.
The website for our company never broke 5 digits in total views. I could almost precisely correlate who was looking at our website with who marketing was currently talking to. Scaling was useless. Dynamism was useless. etc.
All resource spent on the website was worse than useless as it took marketing away from doing anything else which would could result in revenue.
A lot of businesses are in the same boat where the website brings in zero revenue. A static website would be more than good enough but somebody in mangement chain has a "Must Keep Up With The Joneses" streak. And then you wind up on WordPress.
No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions without IT involvement for obvious security and stability reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job and why the dept exists.
Those concerns are kinda the raison d'être for WPEngine.
For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department, or so large and where the IT department has effectively become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let them do their thing.
I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized businesses do not have an IT department, and also that there are people and departments in their own organisations who's IT needs are real but are not considered a priority by the IT Department.
(Often understandably not the IT departments priority, the people in a bank IT department who're securing financial systems from continuous attacks almost certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_ frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things" they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)
I'll just ignore the "IT pushback comments", as if we don't have real actual reasons for pushing back against the stupid shit people with no experience think is a good idea.
The main problem, security aside, is when shit goes south (and it will at some point), IT will be asked to handle something they didn't set up, don't know anything about, and will be looked down upon when they can't get it working quickly.
As long as there is ownership of any problems by whomever set it up, yeah, go nuts, but experience also tells me that's never how it works.
And then people bypass IT for things that IT would be happy to help them with and end up getting called in to fix some non-standard thing that has become critical to their work.
> Response from IT
This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.
Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.
WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.
We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.
Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.
I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."
I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.
The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.
I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.
The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.
I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."
He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."
I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.
This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.
* yes the images would be an easy fix
* their CRM plugins did not support Salesforce
* even if it did, they didn't realize that was like an extra $1500/month for API connection (something like that), which was also balked at, but just a plain fact
* they already built everything out and changing plugins was not an option
* I have almost no experience with WordPress and 0 time to figure it out alongside the myriad of other projects on my plate
* 0 thought went into authentication and that was also something I couldn't change
* this was not built by a team with WordPress experience, or any technical experience
They said "it's set up like this, make it work". I couldn't, not without dropping everything and hiring someone to do it, and managing a contractor(s) which was also not an option.
We had that problem in barebones WP with no plugins at all.
Once we installed a few security plugins, it worked out just fine!
I'd love to get your feedback on https://hub.scroll.pub/. Create new sites in 0.1 seconds. No signup required.
It's a new stack, but it's pretty revolutionary foundation, and as we get some good templates and imrpove the UX, I think it should bring a lot of joy to people who currently suffer with wordpress. It's all open source/public domain. Having started my programming career in Wordpress ~17 years ago, I have been able to take my favorite parts from it and get rid of all the annoying parts (like requiring a database, php/javascript hybrid, etc).
Disclaimer WP Engine Customer -
I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece.
I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself.
I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.
I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.
> cheap reliable hosting
I can't speak to the reliability, but it's definitely not cheap
Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off, as Automattic offers.
WP Engine offers headless WP CMS to static, for one, and it’s pretty slick. I don’t believe Automattic offers that, yet. But I bet Automattic builds it in, in the near future, and that’s probably what this WP Engine beef is really all about: money.
Which particular service of Automattic?
Like Wordpress.com in hindsight seems to offer it, but its not clear to me that I'm their customer target.
Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.
Wordpress.com is very limited and locked down relative to the .org variant hosts like WPE.
Just as an observation this reminds me of the dynamic that other open-source software distributors are tasked with defending.
Let's say you were distributing a browser, let's call it Firefox. You might have a corporation and a nonprofit and call them the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation.
Maybe in this scenario you would allow certain commercial uses of your registered trademarks so that the software could be distributed by others. Parameters in this policy might only allow the commercial use of the trademarks in certain ways, enabling others to advertise their product like "Grammarly for Firefox" or even their service "Download Firefox from CNET" without infringement. But these parameters would go on to disallow one from using the terms in a way that implied a direct connection to the Mozilla Foundation or caused confusion with regards to the root product such as advertising your site, CNET, as "The Firefox Store".
Then let's say someone renamed their CNET site FFXSource. And then advertised themselves as "The Most Trusted Firefox Tech Company" and that their download was "The most trusted Firefox build". They might be told this violated the terms that don't allow implying official connection to the wider project. (And then let's say the download they were offering had the browser History pane feature stripped out.)
In this scenario, it seems it would be the duty of the trademark owner, the Foundation, to seek that FFXSource either come into compliance or, to continue use that exceeded the blanket guidelines, to acquire a dedicated, more-expansive commercial license. (Of course none of my thoughts on this are legal advice.)
> Then let's say someone renamed their CNET site FFXSource.
This is addressed on page 5, where they quote the trademark policy[0], which until a few days ago said: "The abbreviation 'WP' is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit".
The current policy[1] has since been modified to specifically mention WP Engine and make seemingly irrelevant accusations towards them, but it still retains the part about "WP" not being covered by their trademarks.
> And then advertised themselves as "The Most Trusted Firefox Tech Company" and that their download was "The most trusted Firefox build".
Using that sort of phrasing would clearly be misleading and looks like it would have been disallowed by the trademark policy, but is that what WP Engine actually did?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240912061820/https://wordpress...
First, I'm not sure your example comes close to infringing the trademark, but even if it does: Wouldn't the correct step be to inform the infringing party that you see it as infringement and give them a date by shich they have to rebrand, and give it to your lawyer after that? Why would you make threats about destroying their reputation by doing a keynote about them if you are legally in the right? That's just childish.
I don't think any of those issues you raised passes the bar. ffxsource.. no. The most trusted build. no many people build their own and it could be trusted more because someone is testing the official build and making changes and ensuring it works. The most trust Firefox Tech company is accurate. It implies many firefox tech companies exist and they are the best one.
Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text messages are so much worse.
It's not uncommon for a license being required to use a registered trademark. WPE denies they need one. Matt apparently disagrees.
Automattic invested in WP Engine in the early days, why didn't they acquire it, or WP Engine didn't want to sell. But why did Matt choose the open source license that he chose, it seems like that at the end of the day he only cares for money and not the WordPress community.
The fact that he wants money for Automattic suggests that Automattic are now hurting financially in some way.
They are both "hurt" financially but that's the competition which is normal and which should drive more innovation and lower the prices for customers.
I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
You can't prevent someone from using your Trademark as a description with your trademark policy. Everyone can use your Trademark to identify the thing, they don't need your permission. I could call myself the best Linux admin ever and the Linux Mark Institute can do nothing.
You’re making no sense. Those words are just marketing, they’re not shitting on Automattic like Automattic is doing.
The policy says,
...a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
It sounds like "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond" would be allowed.
Not to mention, wouldn't this be allowed generally? Like you are allowed to use trademarks if it is the correct description of the products you sell.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
[Ianal]
exactly the link was cited and that citation directly refutes the claim
To me, it seems they have been using the mark to describe a product and the policy says clearly:
> but they cannot use them as part of a product
I mean, just go to wpengine.com and look at the first menu item: Products --> WordPress Hosting.
>>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services
I think the policy is somewhat vague on this; does 'Wordpress Hosting' refer to and explain the offered service? Clearly. Is 'Wordpress Hosting' a "product" WP Engine is selling? Kind of, yah?
My understanding of trademark is also that "we've been doing this for ages and you didn't say anything" is a pretty solid defense, and "Wordpress Hosting" is about the most generic hosting service offered on the internet at this point, everyone and their dog offers it.
It doesn't matter what the policy says if there is no legal basis for it. WordPress can't prevent Nominative Use, everyone can call the thing they are doing "WordPress hosting" if it is WordPress hosting. If the policy doesn't allow that, the policy can be ignored.
could someone articulate that wordpress.com is more trusted then wpengine?
Eh, sounds like mere puffery to me.
This reads more like a blog post than a cease and desist. Why do they take so long to get to the point of their demands. Matt is entitled to have opinions , and they should stick to the opinions they find unlawful instead of rambling on about everything he said
When I read the title I was wondering "strange, wasn't Automattic the company behind wordpress? Who knows maybe they split and now they sued them for XYZ". Crazy.
Instead of going through all this, can't Automattic do like what most companies are doing now? Dual License (e.g., Redis, etc).
I'm just confused about the whole thing. Aren't WP hosts a dime a dozen? And if you don't like how they conduct their business, just set up one yourself. I set up one for a friend on AWS, and while it requires some tech savvy, it's not exactly hard for someone with basic tech literacy and ability to follow instructions.
This is funny considering WP Engine has been the only thing that kept me developing wordpress sites for years.
This seems like it will be relevant...
My slightly earlier submission with a direct PDF link for people who aren't able to view Twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631920
some of the comments here are exceptionally biased towards the party that does the "open source washing".
just look at the childish way automattic acted. that's not a way to lead an organization or deal with your competition. you compete by building a better product, take legal action in an adult way if you think they are warranted and in general take the high road - not display your immaturity.
the conflict of interest around the governance of wordpress is icky on top. so he just puts on his "open source" hat to gain favour for his for-profit company?
semi-off-topic: Does anyone have alternative links to twitter? I'm in Brazil and don't wanna go around and risk a fine just for a tweet...
nitter
thank you very much
Well, there's that context we were all asking for.
It sounds like Automattic was desperate for money and played a desperate hand badly.
The receipts in the C&D don't leave one with a positive impression of Matt.
I'll wait for Matt's response, but I can't imagine it's anything more than "well, we deserve the money I was demanding!"
Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive.
Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.
There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406
I don't use WP Engine or WordPress, so I don't have a side in this fight.
As an outsider, that context seems a bit dubious to me.
@photomatt has tweeted [5135]: "[...] Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. [...]"
If this was true, I would think that @photomatt's twitter feed would be loudly boosting this disgruntled employee's story of WP Engine-imposed limits and subsequent retaliation. Yet @photomatt's twitter feeds seems silent to me. This makes me skeptical of this context.
That, and the whole thing about Matt M going on a scathing rant about how bad WPEngine supposedly is[0], supposedly because they don't support WP page revision control as well as he'd like. Seems a bit over-the-top and breathless to me.
I figure the whole thing is a corporate whine-fest over who makes more money from actually hosting Wordpress sites.
It’s kind of perverse of Matt considering:
A. He accuses “WP Engine” for being confusing branding. He literally owns WordPress.com; which confuses tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. (“Are you on the WordPress login page?” “I swear that I am!”)
B. He complains about the post revisions not being limitless. But until recently, WordPress.com had a limit of 25.
C. If post revisions matter, surely plugins matter, right? WordPress.com requires going up two tiers to use any unapproved plugins.
D. Matt was an investor in WP Engine, and even appeared on their podcast last year, even though this revisions system limitation has been in place for a decade?
E. This is the same Matt who wrote the WordPress Bill of Rights, complete with specifically saying “The freedom to run the program, for any purpose” and “The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.”
F. The same Matt who wrote in the WordPress trademark policy that “WP” is not a WordPress trademark and anyone may use it however they wish?
G. The same Matt who forked B2, and if B2 was still around, would be quite vulnerable to B2 potentially complaining about Matt’s lack of contribution to them?
It goes on. I hate to say it, but every sign points to Matt being a hypocrite. Even an extortionist.
Have you taken a look at wpengine.com? The name WordPress is everywhere with them declaring they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider" and that "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". The WP Engine C&D insists they're allowed to use 'WP' (as you echo) but the dispute could be partly related to this broader marketing, which possibly creates confusion (a court will likely have to decide).
Edit: To your first point, Automattic, who originally registered the trademark, apparently has a license from the trademark owner (the Foundation) to use the mark (at least for that domain). https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/ WP Engine, by their own admission, does not have a license. It also seems odd to call Matt perverse in what seems to be a trademark dispute without any acknowledgment that he is the inventor of the software, as such the founder of the community, that his friend Christine Tremoulet coined the name, and that his company originally registered the trademark.
WordPress’s own trademark policy states:
> For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering WordPress consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The WordPress Consulting Company.” Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
If WordPress specifically says that using the tagline “the world’s best WordPress themes” is okay, it’s hard to show anything WP Engine has done as being unacceptable.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense: That’s an interesting point; but if that were true, Matt should have used that as his argument, after sending a polite letter first explaining that was going too far. This did not happen; and considering Matt was on their podcast and didn’t give a darn until lately, it appears to not be a real problem.
The paragraph prior:
>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project.
At https://wpengine.com/plans/ they appear to offer a product/service titled/branded "Essential WordPress" with others to choose from being "Core WordPress" or "Enterprise WordPress". (mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240921160743/https://wpengine....)
> Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense
It probably isn't you.
There is a short timeout of a few minutes on the Reply link in a thread. I think this to discourage hasty and unthoughtful arguments.
But if you click the timestamp on the comment, it takes you a page where you can reply immediately.
Not to mention his text messages. It's clear that if they were willing to pay, he was willing to not even mention them in his keynote. It looks quite clear that he wanted money and was willing to let everything slide if they got it.
(1) The WPE C&D is, in my opinion, sloppily written, full of equivocation/fallacious reasoning. The situation is not "clear". (2) We haven't heard Matt's explanation of the text messages. (3) The WordPress name was registered in 2006 by Matt's company Automattic. In 2010 it was generously (no good deed is unpunished) transferred to a 501(c)3 and Automattic was given a license to the mark (at least in WordPress.com). According to WPE themselves: "the payment ostensibly would be for a 'license' to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license". That's a potentially disputed claim: they very well may need a license as they are (currently) possibly in violation of the (generous) trademark policy by advertising services they've titled "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It's unwise to malign Matt publicly – a court will be sorting out the necessity of the license.
You don't end a trademark dispute with a blog post claiming a host utilizing a feature any sane host would utilize is a violation of some core tenant of WordPress.
You end it with lawyers talking to lawyers quietly.
You hit the nail on the head. Who knows what put a chili up his, but this debacle has started out of nowhere and he’s not the good party here.
I know it's not considered "contribution" in the sense that Matt was talking about, but WPEngine owns and maintains some of the most popular and powerful Wordpress plugins on the planet. I'm not sure why he chose to pick a fight with them. My best guess is that he wants Wordpress.com (hosting) to be what WPEngine became.
This is a pretty bad look for Matt, it comes off as yet another CEO who's mad that there's no first-party advantage to hosting OSS. Thanks to the GPL and no CLA he can't take it proprietary like others before him. When you're mad at someone for using their freedom-to-run and freedom-to-modify it doesn't come off as pro-OSS as you think.
Weaponizing the trademark that's more strongly associated with the software itself than the company Wordpress is a pretty low blow. WP Engine is hosting Wordpress, full-stop. There's maybe a discussion to have about when modifications constitute a fork that warrants a different name but we're about as far away from that as you can be.
I honestly don't know why Matt cares. His competitor is owned by PE, just wait for them to eat the business and offer a one-click migration. Play the long game.
I'm no fan of WP Engine and their outrageous prices for very average performance, but this is a terrible look for Matt M if true. reply
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in the court of public opinion I think I know who I'm going to side with.
I'm going to side with chaos: let both fail, let new products come up.