from Hacker News

Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit

by kif on 10/3/24, 9:05 PM with 120 comments

• by next_xibalba on 10/3/24, 9:23 PM

  When this story first emerged, I was somewhat sympathetic to Matt/Automattic. But geeze, he is just looking worse and worse. Between this tantrum and threatening a former employee over a very innocuous statement [1], his credibility is pretty low in my opinion.

  [1] https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-c...

• by swores on 10/3/24, 9:41 PM

  > "Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case."

  I don't think I have ever before seen, in an official public statement, a "The lawyer we just hired always beats the lawyer they just hired!" boast, and it seems ridiculous - it's almost even hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer rather than that their case should win on merit.

• by gamblor956 on 10/3/24, 9:43 PM

  From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.

  Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers.

  That's why they forced the new boondoggle editing UI that everyone hates. For the good of the customers.

  That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.

  Matt also seems very proud of his new, shady lawyer, who failed to disclose that he had cases before the Supreme Court when he endorsed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for open spots. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have since reciprocated by ruling for this guy's clients every time, in several cases with decisions that confounded even conservative legal experts. So, it would seem Matt found a dirty lawyer to represent his dirty case. (EDIT: Katyal is the lawyer who suggested corporations should be immune from anti-trafficking laws because it would be bad for business and got his endorsee pals to bless corporate wage theft. He's the kind of lawyer companies turn to when they want to get away with something truly evil.)

  We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality

  Based on Matt's gross misrepresentations of reality on yesterday's thread, the only party to this case making gross mischaracterizations of reality is Matt.

  If WordPress were truly an independent, community-led organization like Matt claims, he would have been forced out by now for the harm he's inflicted upon it.

• by legitster on 10/3/24, 11:24 PM

  The legal victory is almost moot, even if Automattic is found to have acted in their rights. How does any Wordpress developer know they are not going to be next? Or all of the third party plugin providers? Or theme makers? All of them heavily use Wordpress branding in their services, few contribute to the open source.

  The precedent being set here is wild, and every Wordpress organization becoming a Mullenweg personal mouthpiece account defending him personally is just so, so, bad.

  This is one of the the most needless self-destructive acts I have ever seen in the world of business.

• by Molitor5901 on 10/4/24, 12:31 AM

  WP Engine should consider challenging the Wordpress Foundation's 501(c)(3) status by filing a complaint with the IRS. IANAL but I have run nonprofits, and they must be very careful about how it interacts with a for profit entity, especially when they share staff.

  https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/How%20to%20Lose%20Your%20Ta...

• by yawnxyz on 10/3/24, 9:20 PM

  > "WP Engine can hardly say the same"

  So much of Automattic's corpospeak drips with spite. Makes me understand why other companies are so "bland" — to protect themselves

• by rglover on 10/3/24, 9:20 PM

  This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?

• by woah on 10/3/24, 9:20 PM

  # A Statement from Automattic

  Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us. Mr. Katyal stated, “I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.”

  Our focus is and has always been protecting the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.

• by trog on 10/3/24, 9:30 PM

  Regardless of which side you're on, so far the one thing that seems clear here is that the lawyers are going to be the real winners here.

  When that is happening between two companies I generally don't care about it that much, but I hope open source doesn't turn out to be collateral damage here.

• by klelatti on 10/3/24, 9:28 PM

  Like many here I suspect I care less about who wins the litigation than about the third parties - businesses, individuals and at least one major charity - who will have been affected by Matt’s and Automattic’s actions.

  Where is the blog post about the affect this has had on them?

• by FlamingMoe on 10/3/24, 9:21 PM

  Hopefully his first advice was to tell Matt to cease the hotheaded tweets, livestream interviews, and hn comments.

• by elAhmo on 10/3/24, 9:39 PM

  This feels like a classic "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". It appears the more Matt talks, the more he tarnishes the reputation Wordpress has.

• by dumbledoren on 10/4/24, 4:53 AM

  Nobody seems to have noticed that Matt Mullenweg stopped responding to everyone everywhere (including HN) after they hired the external law firm. They likely told him to shut up.

• by slenk on 10/4/24, 6:55 PM

  Does this mean I should remove "Powered by Wordpress" everywhere? I don't want to accidentally infringe on copyright.

• by 0cf8612b2e1e on 10/3/24, 9:17 PM

  They already took it down?

• by n3storm on 10/3/24, 9:23 PM

  After ClassicPress fork here comes: DramaPress

• by nineteen999 on 10/4/24, 1:41 AM

  I get it that there are probably a lot of people here to depend on Wordpress for their work or personal blog or whatever but ... do we really need daily updates and discussion on this spat between two companies?

  I've probably answered my own question already because evidently a lot of people here find this kind of schoolyard scrap intriguing ... I just wonder ... why. I guess the answer is to just upvote everything else on the front page.

• by handfuloflight on 10/3/24, 9:15 PM

  What percentage of WPEngine does Automattic own? Why do not they donate to Wordpress Foundation out of that?

• by everfrustrated on 10/3/24, 10:08 PM

  The popcorn value on this saga is awesome!

  As far as I can figure, from watching Matt's recent interviews and my own conjecture...

  Matt's seen his open source creation go, over the course of 20 years, from a hobbyist product to now one with a multitude of companies creating billions of revenue from it.

  But as it's grown certain companies are now huge and flush with VC cash. Which does change the equation. In the early days it might be reasonable to turn a blind eye to trademark infringement when it helps all boats rise, but now things are very imbalanced.

  IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress. But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way. If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been.

  As Wordpress itself is open-source Matt doesn't have any levers except the name Wordpress. As anybody in open-source should know - the code might well be open for forking but the name is very protected. Just because the trademark hasn't been entirely well enforced doesn't mean the protection is lost - the right always belongs to the trademark holder to use and enforce how they please as unilaterally as they wish. Trademarks can lose their protection if they start referring to generics but that's not the case here. Wordpress doesn't mean generic CMS - it's always referring to a Wordpress source code hosted by various companies.

  Matt's clearly acting emotionally and not terribly logically - that's clear for everyone to see. But I do think its with the long term intention of making a more sustainable community.

  Ultimately WPEngine can just rename their company and the only lever Matt has over them goes away.

  Or they can embrace the name and pay a fair licensing cost - a rate significantly lower than if they were licensing some other commercial CRM software.

• by rodgerd on 10/3/24, 9:13 PM

  Yesterday: "My lawyer says I can say what I want."

  Today: "We have hired a lawyer."

• by annoyed_eng on 10/3/24, 11:33 PM

  Medium term WordPress itself and the participants in its ecosystem are going to be the losers here.

  As a normal WordPress user who is a current client of Automattic AND WP Engine (for different sites), I’m simply far less likely to use WordPress at all for anything new. Why would I at this point? Why would anyone?

• by jdubz79 on 10/4/24, 2:52 PM

  Who is actively using Wordpress in 2024? It’s been a shithole product for shitty websites since it’s been a thing………

  Shitty performance, shitty themes, borderline malware plugins……

• by blackqueeriroh on 10/4/24, 4:27 AM

  I’m always impressed at how many lawyers apparently exist in the comments of HN posts /s