This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I...
This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I attended Wordcamps, I made connections with members of the community, and I was very quick to defend WP against a lot of the flak it gets in the larger web development community. The WP Community is fantastic. Just a ton of people dying to to help each other out, share knowledge, and build something awesome together.
To see something I care deeply about (even now, YEARS removed from it being relevant to my career) thrown into chaos by some dork is infuriating. Just the fact that he made moves to fuck over large, innocent swaths of the development community by restricting access to the theme/plugin repos is mind-boggling to me. It's not the fault of any developer that chose WPEngine that he has some made-up beef with them. They chose WPEngine (or Flywheel) because they offer a lot of dead-simple features that most generic web hosts don't. They chose WPEngine because it was the better product. And whether or not WPEngine should or shouldn't be contributing more to the community is incredibly irrelevant because at the end of the day Matt is hurting DEVELOPERS way more than he's hurting WPEngine.
Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market. Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones. Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal?...
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market.
Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones.
Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal? Apache vs Nginx?
Who is going to pop up and suddenly step into WP's shoes, and do the mile walk?
I'd be very curious as to how much Ghost.org is affecting WordPress (as well as Substack) revenues in the blogging/newsletter/small website space. It's nowhere near as customizable, and isn't...
I'd be very curious as to how much Ghost.org is affecting WordPress (as well as Substack) revenues in the blogging/newsletter/small website space. It's nowhere near as customizable, and isn't optimized for anything but subscription revenue. OTOH, it's good enough for the millions of self-publishers of text, with very low technical barriers to entry if you use Ghost.org's hosting.
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes...
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes WordPress.org?) Even the whole sock puppetting a 501c to help attack a competitor of your for-profit is suspect on its own, never mind the implications of the intermingled assets/power.
Automattic is also running a sale on Pressable, their direct competitor to WP Engine. (Wordpress.com does compete too, but Pressable is apparently a newer offering that is aiming more at WP Engine's customers.) There's a big banner at the top that says "Looking to switch from WP Engine?" and links to a page offering to buy out your WP Engine contract.
It's really not a good look.
Extra layer: WordPress is itself a fork of an older blog platform called b2.
Wishful thinking IMHO. I agree, but the IRS doesn't exist to work against the rich. It works for them.
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes WordPress.org?) Even the whole sock puppetting a 501c to help attack a competitor of your for-profit is suspect on its own, never mind the implications of the intermingled assets/power.
Wishful thinking IMHO. I agree, but the IRS doesn't exist to work against the rich. It works for them.
I've been seeing updates on this situation on Tumblr lately, and wow I can't believe how dumb Matt is being. Or, well, I wouldn't be able to if he hadn't established this exact type of bullying...
I've been seeing updates on this situation on Tumblr lately, and wow I can't believe how dumb Matt is being. Or, well, I wouldn't be able to if he hadn't established this exact type of bullying and stupidity plenty of times in the past.
For those who aren't on Tumblr (which is owned by Automattic) these days (aka most people here probably), Matt has come under a lot of flack for how the site disproportionately removes posts from and bans queer people (particularly trans women) for things that don't violate the site's rules -- this has been a big enough problem in the past that they were sued by New York City's Commission on Human Rights. Earlier this year, one prominent transfem user was banned for generally bullshit reasons. Matt made a public post personally explaining why she'd been banned (already a questionable decision imho) and provided one example of her "harassment violations": a post in which she says she hopes he dies a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes.
Needless to say this was memed upon to a staggering degree, but it was only one in a series of childish and unprofessional decisions he made during the course of this particular controversy (which occurred while he was supposed to be on sabbatical). The most egregious choice was following the aforementioned banned user to Twitter to argue about how her ban was justified in the replies to her tweets, including listing a ton of empty sideblogs she had with a variety of lewd names (such blog names being extremely common on Tumblr and not against any code of conduct, fwiw). This is something he could only do with the administrative access he has to Tumblr, fwiw, since which sideblogs are associated with which account is not publicly displayed to any normal users other than the account that directly owns them.
The only part of this recent WP Engine drama that surprises me is that Matt typically targets those who are weaker than he is in terms of social or financial capital (or both). This makes it far easier to get away with his variety of bullying. But this is absolutely not the case with WP Engine. Maybe he really thought the public would be with him bc they're owned by venture capital or smth? But that very fact is why they have the financial means and motive to actually fight him on this in court, where he will almost certainly lose abysmally if it gets far enough.
yeah tbqh the only reason I heard about this situation prior to this Tildes post was people on Tumblr essentially cheering for him fucking himself over. Especially as someone who doesn't work with...
yeah tbqh the only reason I heard about this situation prior to this Tildes post was people on Tumblr essentially cheering for him fucking himself over. Especially as someone who doesn't work with Wordpress at all, it's just a good Schadenfreude to see what happens when he tries to bully someone who can afford to fight back.
Well and when the bullying becomes extortion so they can do something! I did see some speculation that he had been talking a lot of shit about GoDaddy and then suddenly stopped. Either that was a...
Well and when the bullying becomes extortion so they can do something! I did see some speculation that he had been talking a lot of shit about GoDaddy and then suddenly stopped. Either that was a cease and desist from somebody with a lot of money or they paid him what he wanted I suspect.
WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg (WP Engine Inc v Automattic Inc and Matthew Charles Mullenweg)...and Mullenweg keeps posting on Hacker News about it, reinforcing...
WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg (WP Engine Inc v Automattic Inc and Matthew Charles Mullenweg)...and Mullenweg keeps posting on Hacker News about it, reinforcing things that will probably come back to haunt him in court.
The filing also makes allegations about Mullenweg's intermingling of assets, which means they've probably also informed the IRS.
It also accuses him of perjury against the IRS and state of California, where he wrote on legal documents that Automattic does not have any contractual relationships with the WordPress foundation, while otherwise claiming that Automattic has a perpetual, irrevocable and sub-licensable license to use the trademark ostensibly held by the nonprofit foundation. It also calls out that he executed those forms himself, and details cases where assets were enumerated on IRS forms that indicated that the foundation held assets to the tune of <$50K in one case and a specific dollar value around $14K in another, specifically not reporting valuable IP...a trademark which he recently demanded WP Engine pay millions of dollars per year (to Automattic, not the Foundation) to use. Thus establishing value.
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
Any chance you have a link to the vod? I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally...
Any chance you have a link to the vod?
I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally handing proof of financial damages to the lawyers on a silver platter. I don’t get how he thinks any of this is okay.
From that, a writeup to Github with a bullet point summary of everything going on, including links to relevant posts and the like. I hadn't heard about any of this until this thread, and that...
Matt truly is the Elon of Wordpress EDIT: Welp ignorant mistake... lol... this is the OP article being discussed in the first place... sigh... i was so deep in reading comments and other links...
EDIT: Welp ignorant mistake... lol... this is the OP article being discussed in the first place... sigh... i was so deep in reading comments and other links that I overlooked this.
Oh god... welp. Egg on my face on that one, hahaha. Got enough into the weeds and focused on comments and their links that I completely didn't click the original post... until I found it on that...
Oh god... welp. Egg on my face on that one, hahaha. Got enough into the weeds and focused on comments and their links that I completely didn't click the original post... until I found it on that github discussion...
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective. He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called...
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective.
He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called “Core Wordpress” is confusing consumers. If AWS sold a plan called “Core Postgres”, nobody would think that it was somehow official Postgres foundation sponsored hosting. It just means it’s the central Wordpress features. This would be like Amazon suing all the object storage companies for having “s3 apis”.
He also claims that the Wordpress trademark is free to use if they give back to the community without any details of what that means. Basically if he feels like it’s okay to use their trademark, you are allowed to. But if he doesn’t like you, you don’t get the trademark. I am not a lawyer, but I am almost positive that isn’t how trademark law works.
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But...
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But yeah his inability to articulate that...
Relevant/related news: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg offered employees $30,000, or six months of salary (whichever is higher), to leave the company if they didn’t agree with his battle against WP...
I watched the interview by Matt regarding the situation between WP and WP engine. It sounds to me like WP engine just wants everything for free and doesn’t wanna contribute back to the community...
I watched the interview by Matt regarding the situation between WP and WP engine. It sounds to me like WP engine just wants everything for free and doesn’t wanna contribute back to the community personally I think that sucks and WP engine should step up and Support WP it cost money to host and access API if WP engine doesn’t wanna do that then they could just host their own repositories. I think Matt has taken the right action to protect WP from being taken advantage of.
This comment is misinformed on so many levels -- technical, legal, grammatical -- that I honestly cannot fathom that someone with any knowledge of the situation that didn't come from Matt himself...
This comment is misinformed on so many levels -- technical, legal, grammatical -- that I honestly cannot fathom that someone with any knowledge of the situation that didn't come from Matt himself would post it. I would highly suggest you actually read the linked article, as it has an extremely detailed section about why what Matt is doing is both wrong and incredibly stupid even if many criticisms of WP Engine are valid.
This comment in particularly reminded me of one paragraph of the linked article:
There are some people who just keep reading about all this and saying “but, but WP Engine…” and my dude (it’s always a dude), it does not matter. We’re past that point.
Yeah when I read that comment my first thought was "Did Matt or one of his employees write this?". I didn't know anything about this topic 48h ago, so I don't have a dog in this fight. Now after...
Yeah when I read that comment my first thought was "Did Matt or one of his employees write this?". I didn't know anything about this topic 48h ago, so I don't have a dog in this fight. Now after reading several articles and posts about all the drama, I don't know how anyone can come away from this thinking what Matt is doing is remotely in the right. Being somewhat familiar with antitrust laws, I also don't know how Matt will walk away from this judicially unscathed. It's downright egregious.
I'll fully admit I'm watching with bated breath hoping for the eventual legal consequences for Matt and/or Automattic. He more than deserves his comeuppance.
I'll fully admit I'm watching with bated breath hoping for the eventual legal consequences for Matt and/or Automattic. He more than deserves his comeuppance.
This whole thing makes me angry. I "specialized" in WP development for years and made a decent bit of money doing so before I switched to Laravel and eventually to mostly frontend development. I attended Wordcamps, I made connections with members of the community, and I was very quick to defend WP against a lot of the flak it gets in the larger web development community. The WP Community is fantastic. Just a ton of people dying to to help each other out, share knowledge, and build something awesome together.
To see something I care deeply about (even now, YEARS removed from it being relevant to my career) thrown into chaos by some dork is infuriating. Just the fact that he made moves to fuck over large, innocent swaths of the development community by restricting access to the theme/plugin repos is mind-boggling to me. It's not the fault of any developer that chose WPEngine that he has some made-up beef with them. They chose WPEngine (or Flywheel) because they offer a lot of dead-simple features that most generic web hosts don't. They chose WPEngine because it was the better product. And whether or not WPEngine should or shouldn't be contributing more to the community is incredibly irrelevant because at the end of the day Matt is hurting DEVELOPERS way more than he's hurting WPEngine.
What a fucking tool.
Somewhat an aside, but man, as someone who has to deal with WordPress stuff at work, this has been a week. I expect there to be real fallout from this fiasco, one way or another.
Get ready for the replacement WordPress to hit the market.
Every time a software stack gets to the top and starts shit, a contender rises and dethrones.
Do you remember when it was WP vs Drupal? Apache vs Nginx?
Who is going to pop up and suddenly step into WP's shoes, and do the mile walk?
I'd be very curious as to how much Ghost.org is affecting WordPress (as well as Substack) revenues in the blogging/newsletter/small website space. It's nowhere near as customizable, and isn't optimized for anything but subscription revenue. OTOH, it's good enough for the millions of self-publishers of text, with very low technical barriers to entry if you use Ghost.org's hosting.
I wonder if, as a result of this, the IRS might end up looking into how Mullenweg is intermingling Automattic, the 501c WordPress Foundation and personal assets (which, I guess, includes WordPress.org?) Even the whole sock puppetting a 501c to help attack a competitor of your for-profit is suspect on its own, never mind the implications of the intermingled assets/power.
Automattic is also running a sale on Pressable, their direct competitor to WP Engine. (Wordpress.com does compete too, but Pressable is apparently a newer offering that is aiming more at WP Engine's customers.) There's a big banner at the top that says "Looking to switch from WP Engine?" and links to a page offering to buy out your WP Engine contract.
It's really not a good look.
Extra layer: WordPress is itself a fork of an older blog platform called b2.
Wishful thinking IMHO. I agree, but the IRS doesn't exist to work against the rich. It works for them.
I've been seeing updates on this situation on Tumblr lately, and wow I can't believe how dumb Matt is being. Or, well, I wouldn't be able to if he hadn't established this exact type of bullying and stupidity plenty of times in the past.
For those who aren't on Tumblr (which is owned by Automattic) these days (aka most people here probably), Matt has come under a lot of flack for how the site disproportionately removes posts from and bans queer people (particularly trans women) for things that don't violate the site's rules -- this has been a big enough problem in the past that they were sued by New York City's Commission on Human Rights. Earlier this year, one prominent transfem user was banned for generally bullshit reasons. Matt made a public post personally explaining why she'd been banned (already a questionable decision imho) and provided one example of her "harassment violations": a post in which she says she hopes he dies a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes.
Needless to say this was memed upon to a staggering degree, but it was only one in a series of childish and unprofessional decisions he made during the course of this particular controversy (which occurred while he was supposed to be on sabbatical). The most egregious choice was following the aforementioned banned user to Twitter to argue about how her ban was justified in the replies to her tweets, including listing a ton of empty sideblogs she had with a variety of lewd names (such blog names being extremely common on Tumblr and not against any code of conduct, fwiw). This is something he could only do with the administrative access he has to Tumblr, fwiw, since which sideblogs are associated with which account is not publicly displayed to any normal users other than the account that directly owns them.
The only part of this recent WP Engine drama that surprises me is that Matt typically targets those who are weaker than he is in terms of social or financial capital (or both). This makes it far easier to get away with his variety of bullying. But this is absolutely not the case with WP Engine. Maybe he really thought the public would be with him bc they're owned by venture capital or smth? But that very fact is why they have the financial means and motive to actually fight him on this in court, where he will almost certainly lose abysmally if it gets far enough.
I'm just now connecting this guy to that Tumblr situation.
Gods he's such a douche.
yeah tbqh the only reason I heard about this situation prior to this Tildes post was people on Tumblr essentially cheering for him fucking himself over. Especially as someone who doesn't work with Wordpress at all, it's just a good Schadenfreude to see what happens when he tries to bully someone who can afford to fight back.
Well and when the bullying becomes extortion so they can do something! I did see some speculation that he had been talking a lot of shit about GoDaddy and then suddenly stopped. Either that was a cease and desist from somebody with a lot of money or they paid him what he wanted I suspect.
Given his reaction to a cease and desist in the case, I suspect the latter.
I think GoDaddy is a level above this situation but I could misunderstand who would have the power in that scenario.
Either way
WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg (WP Engine Inc v Automattic Inc and Matthew Charles Mullenweg)...and Mullenweg keeps posting on Hacker News about it, reinforcing things that will probably come back to haunt him in court.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726197
The filing also makes allegations about Mullenweg's intermingling of assets, which means they've probably also informed the IRS.
It also accuses him of perjury against the IRS and state of California, where he wrote on legal documents that Automattic does not have any contractual relationships with the WordPress foundation, while otherwise claiming that Automattic has a perpetual, irrevocable and sub-licensable license to use the trademark ostensibly held by the nonprofit foundation. It also calls out that he executed those forms himself, and details cases where assets were enumerated on IRS forms that indicated that the foundation held assets to the tune of <$50K in one case and a specific dollar value around $14K in another, specifically not reporting valuable IP...a trademark which he recently demanded WP Engine pay millions of dollars per year (to Automattic, not the Foundation) to use. Thus establishing value.
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf
This dude seems like a huge idiot. I don't really know any other way to put it
I uh, watched a lawyer twitch Livestream covering the summary of this and oh man. I think it's bad when a lawyer stops laughing to just be aghast at the situation
Any chance you have a link to the vod?
I watched Theo’s video on it. He pointed out that this guy was retweeting people cancelling their WPEngine accounts because of his bullshit. He is literally handing proof of financial damages to the lawyers on a silver platter. I don’t get how he thinks any of this is okay.
Bluesky post with twitch link!
From that, a writeup to Github with a bullet point summary of everything going on, including links to relevant posts and the like. I hadn't heard about any of this until this thread, and that writeup seems like it'll be updated with relevant news.
Contained in that is a link to one of the best writeups of the entire situation IMO:https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Matt truly is the Elon of Wordpress
EDIT: Welp ignorant mistake... lol... this is the OP article being discussed in the first place... sigh... i was so deep in reading comments and other links that I overlooked this.
A bit of a full loop, as that's the link we're discussing.
Oh god... welp. Egg on my face on that one, hahaha. Got enough into the weeds and focused on comments and their links that I completely didn't click the original post... until I found it on that github discussion...
Woops.
No worries. It really is a good summary.
Someone on the Orange Site said "He's like Elon Musk but implemented in PHP" 😂😂😂
Primeagen actually interviewed Matt about this. I haven't watched the video yet though
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM
Oh my god I am 4 minutes into the video and this guy is so full of himself! He needs to pull his head out of his ass and get some perspective.
He is claiming that WP Engine selling a plan called “Core Wordpress” is confusing consumers. If AWS sold a plan called “Core Postgres”, nobody would think that it was somehow official Postgres foundation sponsored hosting. It just means it’s the central Wordpress features. This would be like Amazon suing all the object storage companies for having “s3 apis”.
He also claims that the Wordpress trademark is free to use if they give back to the community without any details of what that means. Basically if he feels like it’s okay to use their trademark, you are allowed to. But if he doesn’t like you, you don’t get the trademark. I am not a lawyer, but I am almost positive that isn’t how trademark law works.
This is a grown man throwing a hissy fit.
They have, I think, a "donate coder time" to the non-profit arm of WordPress in exchange for trademark use deal (not that those entities are separate at all.) which he's probably referring to. But yeah his inability to articulate that...
Relevant/related news:
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg offered employees $30,000, or six months of salary (whichever is higher), to leave the company if they didn’t agree with his battle against WP Engine. In an update on Thursday night, Mullenweg said 159 people, making up 8.4 percent of the company, took the offer.
I watched the interview by Matt regarding the situation between WP and WP engine. It sounds to me like WP engine just wants everything for free and doesn’t wanna contribute back to the community personally I think that sucks and WP engine should step up and Support WP it cost money to host and access API if WP engine doesn’t wanna do that then they could just host their own repositories. I think Matt has taken the right action to protect WP from being taken advantage of.
This comment is misinformed on so many levels -- technical, legal, grammatical -- that I honestly cannot fathom that someone with any knowledge of the situation that didn't come from Matt himself would post it. I would highly suggest you actually read the linked article, as it has an extremely detailed section about why what Matt is doing is both wrong and incredibly stupid even if many criticisms of WP Engine are valid.
This comment in particularly reminded me of one paragraph of the linked article:
Yeah when I read that comment my first thought was "Did Matt or one of his employees write this?". I didn't know anything about this topic 48h ago, so I don't have a dog in this fight. Now after reading several articles and posts about all the drama, I don't know how anyone can come away from this thinking what Matt is doing is remotely in the right. Being somewhat familiar with antitrust laws, I also don't know how Matt will walk away from this judicially unscathed. It's downright egregious.
I'll fully admit I'm watching with bated breath hoping for the eventual legal consequences for Matt and/or Automattic. He more than deserves his comeuppance.