Exactly. This comes off as a totally unhinged and immature rant, unbecoming of the CEO of a company that likely has a 8 or 9 figure revenue.
I didn’t know (or really care) about this battle, but I’ve always passively seen Matt as one of the insightful grandfathers of the blogging era, having insights from the observations from his perch.
Something about these CEOs becoming or at least showing in public how unhinged they are. We’ve had quite a few in the last couple years. Almost like they think it’s cool.
According to his recent interview on Primeagen, he argues that WPEngine operations incur high costs to his company, due to the millions of installations consuming resources from Wordpress.org. And despite being a very large player, they contribute nothing back to the ecosystem. He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic. The fact that it took, apparently, so long for him to take some action can be interpreted in his favor, because he tolerated a lot along the years. Add the fact that they had somewhat good relations before WPEngine being taken over by private equity. So this is not about trademark, trademark is the best weapon he has to fight back against a very bad neighbor. And being the sole trademark holder, Automattic can enforce it arbitrarily, as it sees fit. Taking side with WPEngine I think is not only rationally baseless, but also immoral, since they put nothing and only take, which is in the very opposite of what Matt represents, whether or not you like Wordpress.
> He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic.
From reviewing the code, this is not "attribution" in the sense of "here's who wrote this code" but specifically and literally an partner code.. aka an affiliate code or what we'd normally call "a setting"
As GPL'd software, they cannot prevent people from modifying this code and - if they do - Automattic's only counter is to complain about it.
Further, since it's a revenue-generating code, it should be disclosed in the README, etc of the plugin and changeable via the Admin. It doesn't appear either is true.
IANAL, but If they are making trademark licensing deals with other companies, and periodically pestering the infringer without taking it fully legal I think that counts as "using it". A judge is likely to be lenient since legal costs are pretty bad and a PITA
According to elsewhere the for profit had the trademark first, and then handed it over to the nonprofit while remaining a licensee. (Automattic founded 2005, WordPress foundation founded 2010) That's a very above board move. And it makes sense for the for profit to take on the legal aspects, because the extraordinary spend won't ruffle donors feathers.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning here. Either they are licensee or they're not. The history leading up to that doesn't convey any special rights or exceptions.
And referring to that transfer as "very above board" makes it sound like you're talking about the same thing as the commenter above when in fact you're talking about different things. Because however gracious you find that decision to be, that's a different subject than whether it's above board to, subsequently commingle those responsibilities. And whether or not you feel it's practical, in some sense, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. Either Automatic has The authority to collect licensing payments on behalf of WordPress or they don't and that should be reflected in a charter or something, somewhere.
I don't think referencing the history of Automatic previously owning the trademark has anything to do with anything in this context.
There's pretty broad license for for-profits to share IP with non-profits, e.g. Novartis + GNF, or generally speaking, any university and any spinoff (I refuse to call them startups) created by professors thereof. If you think what automattic is doing seems legally sketchy, you may want to recalibrate your expectation of what sketchy is and just how much the industrial complex of the US would simply not work (for better or worse -- i for one think it would be better, fwiw) if it adhered to your standards.
The issue here is that Mullenweg is on record everywhere (including on HN) saying that the "WP" is not the trademark problem; it's "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce".
But a cursory glance at Google results for "Wordpress hosting", "woocommerce hosting", or "managed wordpress hosting" will lead you to hundreds of results from a plethora of web hosting companies that have been doing this, many for more than a decade.
The Wordpress Foundation (that owns the "Wordpress" trademark) has not taken any legal action against any of these companies for precisely the same use it's accusing WPEngine of. A judge could well rule that they have not defended their trademark and this claim holds no water.
Again, IANAL, but it's generally not the case that you are required to go after all infringers of your trademark (I imagine because that would be overly burdensome requirement, as someone nefarious could spin up even a blatantly offensive use in some remote town in Alaska for example and go "ha-haw you failed to defend"). You just have to not never defend it.
it is absolutely the case that you are required to go after infringers if you want to be able to enforce your trademark. A trademark isn't just another word for copyright. It's a signifier of a brand with consistent quality. If you let thousands of sites slide for a decade+, then it no longer conveys a consistent level of quality and when you try to enforce it the judge is likely to shut you down.
> A claim I've heard is that the for-profit company has the exclusive commercial license (along with the right to grant sub-licenses).
That sounds about right, and is what's written on the WordPress Foundation's trademark page [1]:
> If you would like to use the WordPress trademark commercially, please contact Automattic, they have the exclusive license. Their only sub-licensee is Newfold.
I read something different [2] while reading up on this whole debacle:
> The WordPress Foundation was launched in January 2010. Automattic transferred the trademarks later that year in September. As part of the transfer, Automattic was granted use of WordPress for WordPress.com, but not for any future domains. Matt was granted a license for WordPress.org and WordPress.net.
Wordpress is using their trademark though… do you mean to say that you must enforce a trademark to keep it? That’s different, and a subject of some controversy; I’m not sure that it’s been decided conclusively.
It's been decided conclusively, but it is also relatively rare in a practical sense. Trademark law requires the owner to protect their trademark to avoid dilution or genericide, which occurs when a trademark becomes so common it loses its distinctiveness (like what happened with "Aspirin" or "Escalator").
Not a lawyer, but talked about it at length with a trademark attorney when having to defend over the years. It was conveyed that if we aren't willing to legally defend a mark, we could potentially lose it.
Do you think WordPress is diluted? It definitely doesn’t seem to generically refer to blogging or website building software. It seems to me that even WP Engine isn’t diluting it, they’re hijacking it.
"We offer WordPress hosting" is a perfectly legal thing for people to say if they actually offer WordPress hosting, and no amount of trademarks can prevent that. This is specifically called out to try to avoid trademark fuckery.
Sure, everyone refers to the "Big Game" versus the "Super Bowl", but that's largely because the NFL can afford more lawyers than they can, and it's not worth the fight.
Agreed, but that goes back to defensibility. WP Engine has been doing their thing since 2011 without a peep from Matt. He should have been issuing cease and desists, etc. back then.
Maybe it’s that WP Engine operates differently now. They got a massive investment from Silver Lake, a terrible private equity firm with a track record of doing evil things. They probably have changed how they support Wordpress (the open source project), how they pollute the ecosystem, how they make it harder to leave, etc. In other words, they’re free riding on Matt’s creation and extracting all they can from it.
Oh yes, Matt's all about how evil Private Equity is and how they leech from communities and add zero value...
It's an interesting take, given that the three board members of the WordPress Foundation are Matt and a ... managing partner of a PE firm (the third is a retired coder, I believe).
> He argues that they even illegally modified code attributions (stripe plugin) which diverts millions from Automattic.
Which turned out to be blatantly false, quelle surprise
I'm currently asking @photomatt elsewhere what his plans are to help others lift the load from wp.org by way of supporting alternate plugin/theme repositories. I'll keep you posted.
i think the point of TFA was that those allegations are a gross distortion of the record, and MM’s ultimate actions are grossly inappropriate and harm the community he is pretending to stand up for.
> the WordPress logo is prominently displayed next to the "WP Engine" title
Pretty sure that Wordpress logo is just the stock logo that came with every Wordpress installation. The name wp engine was the website name of that Wordpress installation.
Giving Matt the benefit of the doubt, the answer to “Why now?” is that enough is enough. Why does Matt deserve the benefit of the doubt? Because his companies have been contributing to WordPress while WP Engine has not.
Matt claims he has been privately discussing with WP Engine for ~18 months about their level of contribution. Automatic contributes the equivalent of 75 full time employees to WordPress and WP Engine contributes 1, despite the companies being comparable in size.
Matt’s actions may have been bad for optics, but I do not fault him for using the resources at his disposal to correct what he sees as injustice.
Why, then, is he asking for WP Engine to pay licensing fees to Automattic, which is not the open source project, nor the Foundation, but his for-profit competitor. Ostensibly, Automattic has no ability to license WordPress (an open source project that it does not own).
That sounds like an injustice to me. That sounds like someone who has been using Automattic and WP.com (and Pressable), WP.org, and the Foundation interchangeably, depending on what best fits his needs.
Up until a couple of days ago, when Matt retroactively changed (which is going to be hard to make stick) the trademark license explicitly permitted the use of "WP" by anyone and everyone.
The trademark license also cannot prohibit nominative usage - that's protected. If you actually, factually offer WordPress hosting, you can say so, in those exact words. You may need to call out somewhere (and WPEngine does) "WordPress is a trademark of the WPF", but no license can prohibit you saying so. What they can't (but don't) say, is anything that implies that they are WordPress - which is exactly why Matt is trying to make some big deal in his head that "my mom thought they were us" (while ignoring the elephant in the room of "Well, wordpress.COM isn't WordPress, either, it's just a licensee", because of course, nobody could be confused by that).
I was only responding to the statement about the GPL, which simply does not apply to this situation, since it is a trademark dispute and not a copyright dispute.
I wasn't expressing an opinion one way or the other, regarding the validity of the trademark infringement.
Well as I said before, perception is downstream from the actions themselves. And attempting to reroute the conversation away from actions towards the phenomenon of how they're being perceived is, despite your protestation to the contrary, a way of reframing the conversation that focuses on something other than the merits of what he chose to do.
I really wonder what that mean contributing to WordPress... from the cybersecurity point of view in 2024, there is/were no contributions: it is common to be hacked when you use Wordpress (e.g. [1]).
WordPress is secure enough that whitehouse.gov runs on it and zero-day vendors pay $100,000+ if you have an exploit for the core WordPress software. It's not "magically secure" though -- you wouldn't say that AWS is insecure because some people set it up wrong or use bad integrations.
I'm curious, do you have any information on how much whitehouse.gov spends on cybersecurity testing and customization? I imagine it's considerably more than the $100,000 you mentioned for a WordPress exploit. I work in this space and have experience with offensive security tests, including on Amazon itself.
I believe WP Core and plugins should not be viewed separately in terms of security. Plugins are omnipresent. Integrating security measures across both could create a more robust system overall.
Consider that there are other hosting providers out there giving back to the community and he's not going after them. Reciprocity seems to be an issue along with proprietary jank that screws interoperability. Say what you want, but I'd question investing in anything that's built on a foundation that relies on reciprocity that doesn't put in their share. Healthy relationships involve creating more value than you capture. That's something that should resonate with the thickest of fountainheads. And if it doesn't, you can always turn off the tap, which seems to be the case.
> but I'd question investing in anything that's built on a foundation that relies on reciprocity that doesn't put in their share.
Look - I agree. However, there is not a single person that thinks twice about buying an Android or iPhone handset because it might not be contributing fully to upstream Linux or BSD. People don't care. They don't question it because this is the norm, and frankly neither should Matt if he's going to disagree with the terms of a license he's not qualified to change.
Even the Open Source community doesn't really care that much. Selling modified versions of a program is not inherently a violation of GPL, or even the intent of free software. Matt's disproportionately vocal uproar kinda proves that the only people who care in this instance are the ones trying to profit off Free Software. He's not being righteously cavalier, here - he's being courageously wrong.
There's a difference between picking up your ball and walking off the field and not dealing a hand to the empty seat at the table. Silverlake can buy the DVD.
He thinks the world has all the historical understanding and nuance of the situation. Why would they?
This looks like a world record speedrun attempt (any%) at destroying a legacy.
It's worth noting that WPEngine looked like this all the way back in 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110112043959/http://wpengine.c...
They have never pretended to be anything else.
Why now, Matt?