I think both sides more or less see this as a case of standing up against a bully — they may lose out in the short run (in terms of money), but they think that they will discourage future bullying by fighting back.
I’m not sure if either side is right, but that’s why they both drew a line in the sand, imho.
It's probably a case where their version is so heavily customized they don't spend much time on the fundamentals. But still. I wonder if that had a petty rationale as well. Relationships are important in business.
...and then exactly when a company is profiting from someone's open source project and that person is crying foul, the whole board is piling on the creator of that project primarily because they don't like _his tone_.
Bunch of hypocrites.
When Matt says "contribute" he means monetarily. Probably (speculation) because his company is about to be bankrupt without finding a way to get more money.
Unrelated organizations coming in, soaking up all the profit, and not contributing back is horrible. "Open source" needs to be amended to prevent this.
Something like MAU, MRR, or market% seems like a healthy way to limit big time corporations from taking over.
[1] Hindsight is 20/20.
I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day. I have not threatened to take down WordPress.org. WPE's preservation requests do complicate things, legally, though, for the Slack and forums that W.org offers.
Both Cloudflare and Fastly have reached out offering CDN services to W.org, which we're considering. Cloudflare also serves a lot of WP Engine. We do like controlling our infrastructure, though, for a variety of reasons, and have run it without problems or downtime for 21 years. Currently the only outside vendor we use is Slack/Salesforce, which donates free Slack Pro accounts for 49k users. (I think that would cost ~5M/yr.) We also use some Github, which is free for open source.
If you're "right" and "on the side of good and freedom", what are you worried about in Slack/forums/whatever?
Because everything made public so far in their filing is pretty fucking bad (for you), I can only assume that discovery is gonna reveal some even worse behaviour on your part - or you'd have responded in public with some of that instead of whining about "preservation requests complicating thing"...
See paragraphs 32 and 33
Matt wins this case, having the court determine the trademarks are "worth" so much that WPEngine - one out of thousands of WP hosting companies - owes licence fees of 10mil per year. Lets ballpark that at a billion dollar a year in licence fees worth of revenue, maybe 5 or 10 billion value.
The IRS then steps in and "Al Capones" Matt and Automattic for tax evasion by moving billions of dollars of assets between a non profit and a for profit company without disclosing or paying tax on it. IRS wins punitive damages, wipes out every company asset Matt's ever been involved with.
WPEngine and Silver Lake buy the remains of these companies (including the trademarks) at fire sale prices.
Everybody loses.
If those trademarks are asserted to be worth billions, there are presumably reporting and tax obligations for both the ownership transfer and the licence grant agreement.
Automattic: Owns the commercial right to use and sell the license
This is done because the WordPress Foundation is non-profit. The legal intricacies of this have been worked out a long time ago. You want to use the WordPress license? Then you'll have to buy it from Automattic.
Doesn't sound like. Most people are still confused.
It's like saying AWS is one of dozens of cloud providers. The sad thing is that there are FAR BETTER WP hosting services out there, like Pantheon.io, and the majority of the WordPress community does not even know that they exist.
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/capital_...
Did not know that.
Your chance to do that was before you threw a grenade into the WordPress ecosystem and injured hundreds of thousands of innocent WordPress developers over a {trademark|giving back|general bad vibes} dispute. No one here is buying your attempts to pawn responsibility for your actions off onto WP Engine.
They may have legitimately been the bad guys until a month ago, but you've thoroughly stepped into that role now and you're making no effort to step back.
WP Engine is not entitled to any service provided or distributed by the Matt or the WordPress Foundation.
WP Engine and their owners, Silver Lake, are setting a dangerous precedent by refusing to contribute and getting away with it. And the only way for Matt to stop this cancer from spreading is to hit them where it hurts: their bottom line, which means their clients.
You can cry for the lost lives of "compassionate and dedicated fathers" who fought against the Alliance during World War II. It doesn't mean that the USA was wrong when attacking Normandy. Likewise, Matt isn't wrong here.
If you're legitimately new to HN, welcome! I hope to see you around engaging with other topics.
All of WordPress's reputation and goodwill transformed into luxury cars and 3rd holiday chalets for lawyers...
Second, consider that you may be going through a midlife crisis, and projecting it onto this issue as a struggle for your LIFE's work. This midlife transition and maturing is perfectly normal, its largely hormonal and psychological, and it provides a chance for a person to review his or her life, making some people properly do that and making some people react strongly by rejecting to do that. It does feel like you are doing the latter by identifying yourself with Wordpress and taking this incident as an assault on your persona.
You are not Wordpress. You are a person called Matt, who has infinite facets in him like any other person and like any other person, you just cant be simplified and described by any singular thing, including things like open source projects, like Wordpress. So stop identifying yourself with Wordpress and calling it your 'life's work'. You are just 40 years old for f*ck's sake. Based on the statistics today, your generation has another 50 to go.
Indeed, you have put a lot of time and effort into Wordpress and succeeded in making great positive change with much, much impact. This is great, it is a big success and all of us are grateful for it. But stop identifying yourself with it and projecting your persona onto it and entering into personal fights over it - for that is what this is starting to look like. You will keep existing as who you are with or without Wordpress. Hopefully, you will straighten things up and sort out this matter, learn a few things in the process and do even more contributions to Open Source and Wordpress.
But for now, just stop talking publicly about this, let your lawyers talk, and take some time to reflect on what is written above.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
You know comments here and on Twitter can end up as evidence in court as well, right?
---
The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a heavy heart.
"Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"
God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."
Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"
God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world, but even I cannot change public opinion."
---
Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the most influential and richest people on the planet. But they won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a doubt against them.
I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.
You’re a compulsive liar.
“I demand you give resources to your for profit competitor for them to use as they wish. And I’ll pretend to be wearing my non-profit, independent hat while demanding it.”
Is it any surprise this has gone the way it has?
[0] https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...
Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.