Compare and contrast with the OpenAI old board vs sama drama the other day. And the end result of non-profit being steered by the for-profit entity.

Were it to go to trial, legal discovery would be fun. How many internal conversations were had about, “Those jerks at WPEngine are eating our lunch”. Rather than, “I am truly concerned about how the trademark is being confused by this one specific successful company. Whatever can we do?”

WP Engine could file a complaint with the IRS about tax exempt status abuse. But that would be a heck of an escalation, and even more damaging to the WordPress ecosystem than Matt’s ridiculous actions so far.

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.

To me, I think it's more that it shows they're one entity and then it is a massive issue about the tax write offs Automattic will have been claiming for years. But, I guess we'll see because WP Engine is going to come out swinging on this. They have to.

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.

Part of what's so weird about the communication from Matt here is that WordPress.org is not getting sued by anyone—indeed, as far as I can tell WP Engine isn't suing anyone.

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.

The dispute (on the surface) is about trademark not copyright and Automattic has an exclusive license to the trademark.

WPEngine has no obligation to contribute anything.

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

The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.

Earlier this month, WordPress explicitly said that their trademark didn't cover "WP"

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).

I suspect that his figure on the number of hours is somewhat cooked up and biased. Did he cite a reliable and reasonable source of data that we can all consult to check the veracity of this claim?

The quote says WP Engine is contributing. WP Engine also gave WP.org 75k in sponsorship money, I would say that's a contribution. It's also important to know that after WP.org took that 75k sponsorship money, they kicked them out of the event they sponsored.

Not that I think it would happen, but that would some outcome. Attempting to squeeze a competitor only to land in jail for tax fraud.

Sure, but I think at minimum there's a reasonable realty where Automattic/the foundation:

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".

The software running on those servers was built by volunteers, some of which are now scrambling to help their clients who are blocked from using that software.

What is Netflix's economic incentive to pay their AWS bill every month?

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!

> What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit?

Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

I think the problem isn't just that WP Engine doesn't contribute. I read that they pledged to, then had an internal policy not to contribute, and fired an employee for telling this to Matt on Twitter.

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.

I feel like there could be little need for rules if people had a little common sense, then if you have targets, other start doing the bare minimum, I'd rather have parasites like WPEngine put off

  * 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"

But nor does the WordPress foundation need to allow WP Engine, or any user, access to the plugin library.

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

As far as I could tell, they weren't denied use of the code, just a bunch of other services that are not covered by the GPLv2.

GPLv2 licenses the Wordpress code, not trademarks or the right to use Automattic's APIs.

You're free to do it but nobody has to help you certainly.

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.

Sony contributes back. To FreeBSD even, they are even listed in their list of contributors.

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...

I think this issue is complicated and I have no answers. However, I do feel Wordpress is much more central to WPEngine's business than e.g. FreeBSD is to Sony's.

1. This is pure whataboutism. Just because Sony doesn't contribute (I don't know whether they do or don't), doesn't make it right.

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).

If you're running a large business and you don't have a plan in case a free resource provided by someone else goes away, you shouldn't be in business. It really is that simple.

They could move their sites over to the WordPress.com, can't they?

Since they offer competing services in the first place.

You don't get one. It's a matter of discretion. Don't be an asshole and you won't have problems.

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.

> Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back?

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.

It’s in your own self interest to know what you’ve built your business on and have a backup plan if the bottom falls out. I don’t really have any compassion for them, but I do for their users.

Apparently that’s Matts problem, he says Automattic is giving a lot more back (4000 hours or so) and WPE is doing like 40 hours.

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.

Do they have to state it? I think you simply get a phone call to pony up some cash when Automattic has you on their radar.

Seriously, he spread it to every WP dashboard via the news widget? Thats pretty hilarious and insane at the same time.

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

Is it possible that WPEngine could do a WP fork?

It’s the excess, unaccessed content. The indexes haven’t been well optimized in MySQL (MariaDB is better).

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

Just as an FYI: this is a really really bad look from the outside. Your CEO's comments and the new trademark policy sound borderline deranged, and this step of banning them dangerously destabilizes the ecosystem.

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.

What are the issues? Nothing publicly articulated so far appears to have breached any licensing terms or trademark law.

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

That's largely true, but there definitely have been incidents/drama in the recent past. Two that come to mind:

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.

I think a difference there is that Postgres doesn't have a for-profit semi-attached to it.

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.

> Company A spends X% of their revenue on improving the product. Company B spends nothing. Company B will be able to price their product lower, and take Company A's customers. It's not sustainable.

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.

WP Engine is not winning because it’s cheaper. It is a better product than what Automattic offers.

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.

But they're OK with the use of those resources if WP Engine contributes more code, which makes it... at least partially about the code?

> This is primarily a trademark infringement issue…

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

Are you going to be "just asking" other businesses as well? Or does it only apply to competitors of Automattic?

Ethically it may be the right thing to do, but there is no obligation to do so unless it's in the license. If you want to thumb your nose at WPEngine for that, fine, but that's about as far as that goes.

I believe in this instance he’s referring to WP Engine installations of WordPress pulling from the WP.org plugin & theme registries.

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.

Imagine aws offers a hosted node application service.

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.

This is the equivalent of NPM, Maven or PyPi cutting off an enterprise artifact repository because they don't donate enough to keep those services running. Especially the lack of notice makes it an unprofessional garbage move.

I only know about this from the two hn threads I've read, but it seems like he could have at least announced this publicly a week in advance or so and given them a bit of time to self-host all this stuff before cutting off their access. Right now seems like he's trying to harm WPEngine by harming their customers and that doesn't make him look good.

I've been a WPE customer for about 3 years and have never been confused by the "WP" in their name.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example)

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

WordPress.org (the service that banned WP Engine) is not funded by donors. WordPress Foundation is the non profit entity that has donations.

Just checked out the original version of b2 Wordpress was forked from and could immediately spot a SQL injection which I can use to take over the whole site:

    $log = $HTTP_POST_VARS["log"];
    <..>
    $user_login=$log;
    <..>
    SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM $tableusers WHERE user_login = '$user_login' AND MD5(user_pass) = '$password'

Some quality 2003 code :)

How about using the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit, to attack a for-profit's competitors. They could lose their tax-exempt status.

Because in a few months, people won't remember the details, but they will remember "the time the Wordpress guy abused his influence to damage the Wordpress ecosystem".

Open source has nothing to do with free support/development and... now apparently it needs to be said out loud that it has nothing to do with free hosting...

I meant the entire debacle not this specific one. WP Engine claimed Mullenweg demanded money, slandered them , all that.

We made many attempts to communicate and solve these issues long before it was made public.

They were asked to contribute back, either in cash or in people hours and they refused.

I don't think the issue is about WordPress, the open source software, but rather about using up ressources on the wordpress.org servers.

WordPress Foundation is paying for the servers, so I guess they have the right to choose who gets access or not. Using the resources as a single person or a small business is not the same as using them from a hosting company with millions of websites. Other hosting companies contribute to the foundation which keeps the service running. If WPEngine isn't contributing anything, it would be unfair for other contributors/sponsors. Especially that they are making a large amount of money from it.

Think in infrastructure costs. A simple VPS is around $5/mo which is enough for some users. When you're running a company which has tons of users, all of them are doing updates, theme pulls and whatnot.

..and WPEngine channels all these requests to wordpress.org.

This creates tons of load on said .org servers. When you singlehandedly can increase the load number on an infrastructure, the owner of the infrastructure can tell you to stop. This is nothing to do with the four freedoms of software.

SourceHut had to endure something similar due to Go package repository, and they made an agreement about the bandwidth management.

I'm ha huge GPL fan, but this doesn't mean somebody can abuse their servers' resources while making tons of money because of freeloading on somebody else's servers.

You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.

If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege. And this happens literally thousands of times every single day.

Still, entitled business owners try it out and then want to turn around and cry when their free cash cow turns away.