Agreed. I'm confused by a lot of the discourse in this thread. The extortion seems like the important thing. I would think (paraphrasing) "I'm going to destroy your business if you don't pay me" is extortion regardless of the merits of the claims used in carrying out the threat.

I mean if a business if built on top of your business, is it actually illegal to say "Pay me if you want continued access?" Is it the wording that makes it illegal?

Who built what business on whose business? It's not clear what you're referring to.

... to the open source project WordPress? 1) it'd be hard to forbid any one entity from using it, based on the licensing, and 2) the announcements and banners pushed to users referenced WP.com, Matt's for-profit competitor which WPengine doesn't use, and brings about elements of tortious interference.

Extortion does not look like an easy case to make. Pull up some of the state statutes: they all seem to have intent and malice requirements, and/or, like California, require the threat to be of an unlawful injury. Threatening to ruthlessly exploit capabilities you lawfully have, like the bully pulpit of leading the WordPress project or the strictness with which you license your trademark, is unlikely to meet that standard.

(But see below for the 'DannyBee comment on how UCL unfair competition might work even if you can't make a case under the extortion statute itself).

Exactly, the extortion is the most serious allegation, but WPE isn't providing a lot of background in terms of what and how much Mullenweg was demanding, only texts that came well after the demand was made. My guess is if there's a really damning email, WPE's lawyers served them a legal hold privately rather than make it public.

Alexa, order ten cases of popcorn...

Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/comment/...

He posted this after receiving the C&D.

Notably, Matt demanded that would need to be paid to Automattic instead of the WordPress Foundation. (that's according to WPEngine).

Automattic is Matt's private, for-profit company and a direct competitor to WPE.

There are things in that WPE C&D that make me question how candid they're being; for instance, the trademark dispute seems an awful lot more complicated than the letters "W" and "P".

Perhaps, but as I mentioned elsewhere, MM is putting on a master class on how not to resolve such disputes.

That's because Matt's Foundation gave Matt's Automattic the exclusive commercial trademark license. https://x.com/photomatt/status/1838671002529665394

Matt gave away the software he invented and founded a commercial venture to monetize his efforts despite this. Automattic originally registered the trademarks. Years later they donated them to the foundation, to make the marks available for noncommercial use and limited commercial use. In the process Automattic retained the exclusive commercial license to the marks.

Where is the invention? He forked b2/cafelog and continued work on it when the original project faded out. He had no choice but to give it away unless he wanted the only WordPress install in the world. Another fork like b2evolution or any of the billion blogging tools at the time would have taken the spot WordPress did instead.

>Where is the invention?

“it would be nice to have the flexibility of Movable Type, the parsing of Textpattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?” Synthesis is a type of invention: https://evanm.website/2016/03/synthesis-over-invention/

>Another fork like b2evolution or any of the billion blogging tools at the time would have—

People love to say things like this about any and all products but there’s this overwhelming counterpoint of what actually happened.

Matt's message reads:

> They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.

So they could have "paid" by just hiring a few WordPress devs to work on it. That is: not necessarily by transferring dollars to Automattic.

IMHO this is an important bit of nuance missing in this thread.

Right. But who gatekeeps the project focus, direction and spending? Automattic does.

This would be a different conversation if there was an independent and accountable foundation driving things.

They do the majority of the work, so they get to decide. That's how it works everywhere. If WP Engine wants to decide they should invest the same 4,000 hours/week.

That's the problem though. It's a chicken and egg issue. Those donated hours could be directed towards things that aren't in WPEngines interest. To use an analogy: it's taxation without representation. That seems counter to the open source ethos.

If everything was handled by an independent, transparent and accountable foundation then this would be a different conversation. It isn't. It's handled by a private, for profit, vc-backed company with a leader known for personal vendettas and holding grudges.

I want to be clear: I have no love for WPE and agree they should be doing way more. I'm just pointing out that the current arrangement is not exactly conducive to facilitating that.

> Those donated hours could be directed towards things that aren't in WPEngines interest

I have a hard time seeing how that can happen. WP-Engine still decides what bits of WordPress they work on – it's just a matter of having developers who work on it.

Cool, thanks for the link. I wonder how much of Automattic's board is made up of Matt's personal friends. He'd best hope it's a majority.

Out of five board members, one is Matt, one was the CEO of Automattic before Matt took over the role, and a third was an early investor. The other two are harder to pin down.

https://automattic.com/board/

No need to wonder: https://automattic.com/board/

I think this guy is having some sort of legit mental health crisis.

The "next week means 'no'" really stands out.

I've been wondering this since his Tumblr dust-up earlier in the year.