> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.

There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.

> The problem I have with this is simple and has to do with the lack of separation of entities. > Automattic is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.com is a competitor with WPEngine. Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation IS NOT a competitor with WPEngine.

> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine. The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.

> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.

Can an action like this put the WordPress Foundation's 501c(3) at risk?

And if so, how likely is it to actually become a legal problem?

> The resources of Wordpress.org and the Wordpress Foundation should not be leverage in this dispute.

I honestly wonder if it crosses any legal boundaries. From what I can tell, it's essentially the non-profit acting on commands from the for-profit.

Basically the equivalent in my mind to a "in-kind donation".

> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.

I think the fact those boundaries have been crossed will be a massive legal issue for WordPress.org and Automattic since they'll have problems proving they're two separate entities and they will have been using that as a charity as a tax write-off. What is the penalty for tax evasion where you create a fake charity to write tax off of? It's prison, right?

Have you read this? https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/23/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-...

>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.

It seems to me that it isn't a simple "dispute." Automattic is contributing to WP org, but WP Engine isn't. If WP org was completely neutral, they still would have reasons to side with Automattic over WP Engine on this.

this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately.

even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.

the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.

Wordpress is past its prime. A nice api based platform will replace it very fast. The whole wp concept is wrong from 2024 perspective, cause much of it is API calls from web already and not PHP/html loads.

They will try to move towards enterprise infrastructure with v7 but will probably fail as their (third party) devs are not that good.

I’ve actually seen a lot of PHP code for Wordpress, wrote some, and the only way to get it right today is to make use of a GPT, cause their (WP’s) internals are so many and so weird and inconsistent sometimes.

> There is a dispute between Automattic and WPEngine

I think the dispute is in fact between the org and wpengine.

Wpengine doesn’t contribute to the core as much as they promised, and prohibits their employees to do so.

Gets even more wild when you consider Automattic invested in WP Engine's Series A in 2011, despite all this insidious trademark abuse commencing in 2010.

No chance this is personal.

Isn't that the same what MS does with VS Code?

Open Source so that VS Codium exists but Codium can't access MS's extension store.

Does Automattic follow wordpress.org's copyright rules? If not then I see the hypocrisy. If so then I don't.

Also it seems wordpress.org kept their resources open to WPEngine until WPEngine sued wordpress.org[1] (not wordpress.com according to the blog post).

So if wordpress.org is getting sued, why would they keep their resources open to the litigant?

[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

100% - i raised exactly this issue in the legal claim concerns.

This is a remarkably bad plan from a legal perspective.

True, but in this case we can simply judge based on the actions taken.

The claims (trademark violation, no contributing anything back) seem pretty sensible and borne out in practice.

WordPress is an open source project stewarded by a foundation that set rules for its use. If you don't follow them there are consequences. As simple as that, really.

These rules (paying a license or contributing back) seem sensible too.

Normalizing people leeching off the work of other doesn't seem like a good approach.

Some people might disagree with the philosophy — perfectly fine! They can write their own blog engine and release it in a permissive open-source license and make copyrights freely available to anyone. This is a blog engine, not exactly antitrust material.

It's not really crossing the boundaries, in this kind of situations I don't know if people is misunderstanding genuinely or they do the interests of corporations because they have interests in WPEngine. WordPress.org is not going against all competitors of WordPress.com, is going against a competitor that has high load towards free resources of WordPress.org, having many customers, but not contributing anything towards those free resources. And WordPress.org has banned that leecher from keep stressing their systems for free with no contributions. When Matt said to go to pick another WordPress hosting instead of WPEngine, WordPress.com wasn't mentioned either.

Wouldn't that risk be mitigated if WPEngine were more engaged with supporting development?

[dead]

Agree. The fundamental differences between Free Software and Open Source but Commercial Software were always tricky.

The "we'd like you to contribute to our code base, but we want to be the only people making money from it" position of a lot of Open Source companies is untenable. And you can easily see how the original "anyone can make money off this code" position would get warped over time and board meetings to "these parasites are stealing our revenue".

I think it reflects the other side of the problem, the way that maintainers of open source packages get abused and taken advantage of. We need to work out some way of funding and rewarding software development that allows it to be freely used and also adequately compensated. This is not easy.

From the article:

> WordPress’s GPL code

Which, is a FSF license. What change are you advocating for in this situation?

You're trying to come up with distinctions between Open Source and Free Software where there are practically none, except for the politics of Free Software, which is inconsequential BS.

A couple months back Matt had a personal feud with a Tumblr user and proceeded to harass them across platforms which included posting their private account information on twitter in an inflammatory response (which he deleted some 15 minutes later after realizing the several laws he must've broken). This is his usual behavior. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities.

All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days.

In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself.

But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately.

He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction.

To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him.

> And Matt might not realize...

My sense is he does realize it. The pie is no longer expanding. This is a preemptive strike to get more of what there is.

Let's not be naive. This isn't about WPE contributing to core. It's not about trademarks. No one connected to an OSS project goes nuclear over trademarks.

It's about money.

In the end, he really took the "scorched earth nuclear approach". Small problem: the land become inhabitable and nobody wants to touch this radioactive dump.

My thoughts are to the devs with clients on these platforms; they are going to take the heat for all the problems in place of the real disrupter.

I'm one of those devs who migrated all of the company sites to Laravel-based CMSes. Waaaay better experience, users are happy, updates are a breeze, and the sites are fast and reliable.

WordPress has become so tacky and this drama is exacerbating the problem. I don't see a bright future for WordPress, unfortunately.

> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.

But access to wordpress.org's servers has nothing to do with Open Source. WP Engine is free to use and modify the WordPress code to their heart's content. They just don't get to use the wordpress.org servers for free anymore.

> Most companies I've dealt with would rather pay for commercial software and offload the risk onto the software company that use an Open Source project they view as risky in any way.

This seems less applicable when the company is using the software to offer it as that commercial cut-out.

I'm do not want to talk about whole thing, I do not know what to think about that but:

> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it...

Isn't this more about infrastructure (wordpress.org)? All plugins are still downloadable and able to install via SFTP.

> If companies can't use Open Source without the risk that the project could ban them from using it, even if the company adheres to the letter of the license (if not the spirit), then most companies won't use Open Source.

Companies can't use proprietary software without the risk of being banned or refused a licence renewal either.

Also: WP Engine Must Win -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41653480

(Disclaimer: my submission and post. I am a WordPress core committer and built the REST API for it.)

Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620051 (31 comments)

Why not merge this with the existing thread on the official post that it references? This is a dupe. An after-the-fact submission talking about the source.

If you have such expectations then clearly state the rules.

- individuals and companies under $a yearly revenue can use the product for free

- companies under $b have to pay $x

- companies under $c have to pay $y

Pretending that something is free to use and then getting disappointed when someone rich indeed uses that thing for free and fighting with them doesn't help anyone at all. (This is not specific to Wordpress.)

> But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.

Revenue is a red herring. It is not an appropriate measure to determine if and how much one should contribute to an open source project.

Instead, we should measure the need to contribute by the burden one places on the project.

Do you request features or bug fixes? Contribute appropriately.

Do you request support? Contribute appropriately.

Do you simply copy, install, and run the existing software? No need to contribute.

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? Anything they contribute to core will immediately be available to their competitors, so the naive read is that there's no competitive advantage in contributing back.

However, if they can influence the direction of the project, they can align it with your business goals. That gives them a competitive advantage, that gives them an incentive.

The challenge is that Matt is acting as a BDFL of the open source project. If Matt doesn't want your change added, your change isn't going to get added. There is no one to appeal to, Matt has absolute authority over the code that goes into the open source project that WP Engine's business is built on. Matt is also the CEO of WP Engine's competitor, Automattic.

This conflict of interest has come to a head in the past week and shone a spotlight on the lack of community stewardship of the WordPress project.

Keep in mind that Automattic requires its employees to get approval for any paid side gigs related to software because Matt believes that it creates conflicts of interest. You cannot work on WordPress for Automattic during the day and then freelance making paid WordPress plugins at night, due to the misaligned incentives. The fact that Matt isn't being paid a salary for his work on WordPress is irrelevant, given Automattic's equity is tied to the value of WordPress.

I think private equity skews heavily towards value extraction over value creation. I think that people who build businesses off of open source have a moral obligation to give back to the projects. I think that giving Automattic money to spend on WP core work will make WordPress better.

However, breaking the trust of the community does exponentially more damage to the future of WordPress than any freeloading company. The community trusts that the trademark licenses will not change to target them. The community trusts that their software will benefit from security updates and the plugin ecosystem. That trust is the foundation of WordPress and this week's actions have done damage.

Matt talked about going nuclear, and I think that the metaphor is apt, because when the smoke clears we may be left with no winners.

(I'm a former Automattic employee who roots for open source, WordPress, Automattic, and the vision of the open web Matt Mullenweg has shared.)

> Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction.

We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.

If you go down this path of creating rules that say people should pay to use open source, you’ll discover there are already laws in place sufficient to manage this situation. If a project uses these laws, then you’ll complain the project isn’t open source.

If you prefer the capricious nature of the politics of social shaming instead of the rules based system of laws and courts, I guess that is being consistent even if the actual process is very inconsistent and unpredictable.

If not, then it’s not clear to me how you’re taking a philosophical stance about open source if you’re demanding payment. Those ideas don’t work together.

This is a horrible way to go about it though. WP Engine users are still WordPress users, and cutting them off without notice is very shitty. I wouldn't trust WordPress for anything after this, if all that it takes to cut you off from updates - potentially security updates - is Matt Mullenweg not liking you (or your ISP).

Under GPLv2, WP Engine has no obligation of pay the ransom Matt is demanding no matter the revenue they make.

>If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.

For example Sony sold more than 100 million units of PS4 and made billions of dollars from it and how much they contributed to the open source projects they've used in PS4? Take a look at OSS projects used in PS4: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/

Did they contribute anything? Did they contribute 100% enough or just 20% or 30%?

If the software is open sourced and if license allows you to do anything with it then you are indeed free to do anything with it including selling products which include OSS.

I wonder how much does Automattic contribute to the PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, jQuery, ... organizations?

>But if you're making half a billion in revenue every year on top of someone else's tech, you need to stay involved and contribute back in a very significant way.

Where does the GPL state this requirement? It doesn't.

If WordPress doesn't like this, they should have licenced their software under the AGPL or some other licence with stronger copylefting.

Plenty of large commercial entities use BSD licenced software and make a fortune off the software, with little given in return. Take FreeBSD and the significant commercial operations it drives. They never whinge. Because that's the choice they made, and they stick to their principles.

Totally agree with you. That is the issue at the heart of the situation.

WP engine aren't keeping up with their moral obligations to fund WP development or associated services, so Matt is clearly trying to strong-arm them into doing so.

First they were asked to contribute fairly - which they refused and then they were called out on, then they were told that they cant call their fork of wordpress "wordpress" (technically no different than selling an android phone and calling it an iphone) without paying for a license - so they decide to threaten legal action, and now they have been cut off from free access to wordpress services.

They are nothing but money-grubbing hundred-billion-dollar private-equity parasites, who are trying (and seemingly succeeding on HN...) to distort the perspective on the whole situation.

Its clear to me that matt isnt after their revenue, he just wants them to play fairly and support wordpress as others do.

As someone who wrote OS software in the past and had little no people contributing back except the core team, i total disagree.

If you write OS and put it out there for the world to use, you should be doing it because you want to _give_ to the world. you should not expect _anything_ in return. the is the essences of giving, to not expect something back.

if Matt wants WPEngine to require a contribution to WordPRess, then he should relicense it under a license that requires this or close the code and charge subscriptions.

what he is doing is giving a bad name the OS community in general. this is not how you act.

> If you're a tiny org, you don't need to contribute back. But if you're making [...] contribute back in a very significant way.

I'd like to see the price list on this beforehand, so I can decide whether I want to be a tiny org or a big one. Where's that pricelist?

Where does it state that if you profit x amount of profit you should contribute back? What is the maximum amount of profit you can make?