Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore? Just because I bought something from Amazon doesn't mean I'm now affiliated with Amazon. "Affiliation" (usually) means something like a formal association, partnership, or close connection, not that you're just a customer.
Besides that, dump Wordpress regardless, clearly they've lost focus from the actual users and Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for.
I have a competing product and shouldn't get too far in the weeds on what I truly think here, but the predominant feeling across people that have to interact with this is that it's done on purpose.
It's not so much that people don't understand what the word "affiliation" means, it's that you'd have to be completely certain that a lawyer, hired from what is clearly a litigious org, would have the same understanding.
For example, say your company ends up on Matt’s legal radar and he trawls the logs looking for accesses from your IPs and says you violated CFAA – even if you’re totally comfortable that you’d prevail in court, that could be an expensive process and discovery might turn up things you’d prefer not to be public. In situations like that it’s easier simply not to risk dealing with him since people who are focused on vengeance will often waste resources on pointless activity just to prove a point.
Somebody should really force the issue to "have standing" to fight the ridiculousness. I'm shocked WP Engine hasn't already
I could see a breach of contract argument too.
IANAL.
For example, if you register on wordpress.org while claiming you have no affiliation with WPE, but you did have any sort of affiliation, they could consider the contract null/void, and claim the access was unauthorised because the contract wasn't valid.
(Or, much less charitably, the intentional use of vague language in bad faith.)
No? If my employer asks me to clarify my employment agreement, I don't have an obligation to be their armchair counsel.
It's totally reasonable to ask the party introducing "shall not associate with" into a contract exactly WTF "associating" is supposed to cover.
I’ve made edits to employment agreements. It would be totally inappropriate for the other side to demand legal advice from me. It would be polite for me to clarify. But I’m under no obligation to.
I suspect most people asking Mr. Mullenweg "what do you mean by X" are doing so with a subtext or next-step of "now go fix the text to correctly capture what you really meant."
> with a subtext or next-step of "now go fix the text to correctly capture what you really meant"
That’s unreasonable. An e-mailed clarification is a reasonable ask. (Adding a clarification is nice. But not a reasonable expectation. Especially from a proven nutjob.)
Matt was just asked if the spirit of the checkbox was to keep out customers and wouldn't answer. That's not really the same as asking him for legal advice.
This is fair.
He cannot tell you what Matt means by it. The question stands.
https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...
His responses to perfectly sensible questions about this ridiculous box has been awful.
In securities, yes. In general use, not necessarily.
It looks like it's a legitimate legal issue [1][2].
TL; DR It may make sense to explicitly clarify when you're using the term 'affiliate' as it is defined in 17 CFR § 230.601 / Rule 144 [3] versus "affiliate, including but not limited to []," or whatever.
[1] https://www.sackrosendin.com/blog/2017/03/landlord-loses-ove...
[2] https://casetext.com/case/iqbal-v-ziadeh-2
[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?width=840&...
Matt also refuses to provide any elaboration on intent and instead says “you should talk to a lawyer”.
This has the chilling effect he is looking for. No-one is “talking to a lawyer” to create or use a Wordpress.org account. Anyone who has sniffed the same air as WPE knows the intent.
Boilerplate words have all been litigated. Boilerplate clauses are well understood.
Affiliate, affiliated, affiliation, words like these are boilerplate, unless you go to the trouble of locally redefining.
Boilerplate is good but definitions are best, even with boilerplate words that have boilerplate definitions. Incorporating those definitions into the document at the time of execution benefits all parties. Again: minimize ambiguity, anticipate what will make dispute resolution easier.
Source: have worked through a lot of contracts, license agreements, labor agreements, and disputes over the same.
We see the reason. That reason is money. The lies / gaslighting aren't for OSS, etc. It's about MM's bottom line.
If you use WP Engine, you have an ongoing agreement with them to provide and support a service on which your business depends. A reasonable and literate person could construe that to be an affiliation.
I have neither a WordPress.com account (I mean, that I know of, anyway) nor an affiliation with WP Engine. However, can we back up for a minute? If a website is asking me to make an assertion that may have legal consequences, it should absolutely be spelling out the intention and meaning of the language it uses. If you ask me what "affiliation" means, I'll give you my best answer as to what I understand it means. If you ask me to sign a document that says I do or do not have affiliation with some entity, I will tell you to clarify what an affiliation is and refuse to sign without it.
It’s a well trodden path used by tons of nonprofits like the Smithsonian, Mozilla, OpenAI, etc. when they need to operate something that the IRS won’t grant tax exemption.
They formed WordPress Community Services PBC, which now runs the "official community" WordCamps, so sponsors didn't have to restrict their messaging:
https://wordpressfoundation.org/news/2016/introducing-wordpr...
Someone's getting paid something for the hosting referrals here:
https://wordpress.org/hosting/
I quote from the page:
> If you do decide to go with one of the hosts below and click through from this page, some will donate a portion of your fee back
https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/10/28/matt-mullen...
Whether or not Wordpress.org makes money is irrelevant to its for/non profit status. It’s a legal technicality due to IRS tax exemption rules for unrelated business activities. They have to put those operations into a separate subsidiary, even if it never makes any profit.
If the nonprofit can’t afford to run Wordpress.org then the whole nonprofit was a farce anyway.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
Are these supposed to be examples of how this kind of setup turns out well for the community? Because they are the opposite.
Mozilla Corporation is the one receiving the hundreds of millions of dollars from Google that funds almost all the the development of the Firefox browser. Without it, Mozilla would be a tiny fraction of what it is now and FF would be dead in the water.
This is entirely orthogonal from the community. It's an IRS requirement.
How do you know? I mean sure if the Mozilla Foundatio wouldn't have bothered with any alternative fundraising opportunities, but that's not exactly a realistic alternative realtity, is it?
> and FF would be dead in the water.
FF is dead in the water. It's market share is small enough that devs don't care about it anymore and it doesn't really provide any real advantages to users unless you really care about telemetry data going to Mozilla instead of Google. Mozilla has don't pretty much all it can to kill any kind of differentiation while refusing to innovate at all.
My interpretation of their story [1] is that holding the WordPress trademark wasn't enough for 501(c)(3) status, so they had to do something educational like promoting free software.
They transferred the trademark once they received 501(c)(3) status, and could have transferred the operation of dot org too if they wanted.
I believe the consensus among the moderate community is that Matt continues to hold onto dot org for "control", just like how the Foundation's board mostly comprises Matt's friends, and never had actual external community involvement.
[1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/
Matt tried to put Wordpress.org as a 501(c)(3) but they ran into problems, e.g. it was a lead gen for paid plug-ins that Automattic owned. So Matt has used his and Automattic resources for wordpress.org for a long time. You can read more about this in the WPEngine suit (page 12). [1]
[1] https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/10.18.2024-P...
> Matt tried to put Wordpress.org as a 501(c)(3) but they ran into problems, e.g. it was a lead gen for paid plug-ins that Automattic owned. So Matt has used his and Automattic resources for wordpress.org for a long time. You can read more about this in the WPEngine suit (page 12).
Where in the lawsuit does it mention that "they ran into problems" transferring operation of dot org to the 501(c)(3)? All I see on page 12 is:
> Until recently, Defendants had given the WordPress community the impression that wordpress.org—the repository for the WordPress software and plugins—was owned and controlled by the WordPress Foundation.
Edit: I found it from a link in a different comment:
https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/10/28/matt-mullen... (primarily https://x.com/photomatt/status/1840948013360910448)
A more appropriate question perhaps: can a lawyer specialising in US nonprofits corroborate Matt's claim?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g5o4n5/why_is_w...
You may not consider yourself an affiliate but if the lawyers decide you are a teapot then you are either a teapot or were very rich.
If only he'd said no as well - not doing so seems petty.
He needs us. We don't need him.
Unfortunately, anecdotally, there's a lot of group thinking in WordPress. It's one of the reasons "The WordPress way" is able to run counter to industry best practices. Most people don't know any better, and the handful who do don't speak up. It's a textbook case of toxic kindness.
Given the collective actions / behaviors / culture, I've been saying this for close to 10 years:
It's not a community. It's a cult.
It also leads to "big fish in a small pond" syndrome, where people in the inner circle start to think highly of themselves, to look down on the "newbies" and users. They value thier expertise in this niche without realizing its relative poverty and low quality in the larger context. It's a mix of arrogance and ignorance that insulates their ego.
I hope the collective disillusionment that WordPress is going through will be healthy for ecosystem in the long run. Let a hundred forks and alternatives bloom!
I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why someone might not want to split legal hairs with their leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win such an argument in court.
I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law.
(I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at press conferences they called.)
One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about. He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe this bullshit."
By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for billable hours I completely believe it."
Most commonly this comes in the form of false victimhood, e.g. look at how hard they are trying to shut me down. Other times it manifests like this. The problem is it's a logical attractor; whatever belief it first attaches to, it monotonically increases faith in.
Sounds exactly like one of the candidates running for POTUS!
yes!
bitkeeper tried licensing shenanigans and lost to git.
smalltalk did licensing shenanigans and lost to Java.
Qt almost died and motivated Gnome.
In software, inacceptable licensing gives birth to your worst competitor.
/s
Nope, that's a bus factor of one. I'm done.
Send a copy to your state AG [1]. Copy your governor’s office [2] and state representatives if you have the time.
Insert Twitter, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, etc... at the beginning of that quote. The people who own the social networks rarely give a shit about the users once they hit critical mass. And the owners will eventually burn it down or enshitify it beyond recognition.
Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my team can register for a WordPress.org account.
I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear business justification (aside from limiting competition).
Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-...