> I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.

> If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine.

This post should be named "Holiday Breakdown" rather than "Holiday Break". In particular, one thing stood out to me:

> I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year.

He can't prevent WP Engine from getting access to Automattic services, so he acts out his revenge on the rest of the world instead?

A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars crying poverty while throwing a months-long temper tantrum. Hilarious if you don't have any stakes at play.

Not a fan of Mullenweg either, but let's be realistic. For anyone who isn't completely detached from reality, dealing with lawsuits is draining, emotionally and mentally.

It's easy to point fingers and assume motives, but unless you're in the trenches, it's hard to truly know what's going on in someone's head. Given the circumstances, his decision to take a break isn't exactly out of the ordinary.

Most people would probably do the same if they were in his shoes.

I’m sorry for the other people affected and am amazed that he was willing to trash a reputation and business decades in the making, but it was his repeated choice to do so.

Actually tempted.

He slaps the WordPress community in the face, out of nowhere, then he points at WP Engine, and says: "Isn't it a shame that these a*holes made me slap you... again?".

I'm just speculating in this whole comment, but this is how I interpret this current chapter of the drama.

Yes men make you feel better, but they're nowhere to be seen whenever you actually need help.

I’ve been chatting to my partners about this, and we aren’t planning to deploy anything net new on WordPress indefinitely.

In one respect it’s a shame to give Matt that power. On the other hand, I can’t control that he’s showing his ass, and I’m not risking my business or client deliverables on an unstable ecosystem.

I can't wait for him to lose millions of dollars for a hissy fit. It's going to be delicious.

It's run entirely by Mullenweg. The Board is clearly unable to have a big-boy conversation.

https://projectdmc.org/regarding-mullenwegs-mother-the-wpe-l...

He wouldn't be able to do any of that with volunteers that aren't operating under his authority.

Big productions still have a director. The point is Mullenweg--not Automattic--has control.

Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities is fake, and actions like this may backfire in a big way (and I'm not even talking about the taxes aspect of it at the end).

Again, I doubt any lawyer with any once of competency validated this move, let alone write it publicly like this that it's because of the legal case and WP Engine. That's very dumb. What are the lawyers supposed to say when the case will be reviewed ? Nothing to do with the case ? Reasons unrelated to WP Engine ? Their client put it in writing without even being asked to.

Against .com (Automattic) and .org (Mullenweg as an individual)

> Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities

Three, actually: WordPress Foundation, Automattic Inc., and Matt Mullenweg (as an individual)

> If it was actually ran by volunteers, he couldn't make any of it stop... because people volunteer their time without being told what to do.

...this doesn't really follow. Just because someone is a volunteer for an organization doesn't mean the people at the head of that organization have no control over what they do. As a library volunteer, for instance, I can't just take all the books off the shelves and start building forts out of them (unless the library board is into that sort of thing).

He can't force them to show up and do things he tells them that they don't want to do, but he absolutely could stop all operations, including those run by volunteers.

Let’s not take pleasure in someone destroying their life because they don’t have the support they need.

Honestly, though, the weirdest thing to me about all of this is that corporations already behave like Matt every day, yet when a human starts doing so, we consider involuntarily removing them from society. Perhaps we ought to be less forgiving of his behaviors from the non-humans, too.

That boring grind just isn’t going to get attention the way an exploding dumpster does even though it’s more extractive.

He's made his millions. He could leave wordpress completely and have a great rest-of-life. In fact, he probably should.

I knew him when he was working out of CNET's basement on 2nd st in SF, doing the initial commercialization of wordpress. I honestly don't see anything inconsistent in his current behavior with who he was back then.

No new users means Typepad's revenue will only ever shrink, which bodes poorly for the service's future. Having a massive intricate Perl codebase doesn't help either – it was designed to scale relative to aughts-era hardware, for a much larger audience than it currently has. Its future was already bleak in 2010 when Six Apart (its original owner) was acquired by VideoEgg, which came about largely because WordPress/Automattic absolutely won out over Movable Type and Typepad for blogging software market share.

As a former Six Apart employee, I'm glad that Typepad is still around 14 years after all that, but I'd be surprised if it continues to exist for much longer.

Money truly can't buy everything.

Can a court sue a person for lying/libel about the court itself?

Now I'm imagining like how doctors and psychiatrists need to go to other doctors and psychiatrists for themselves.

Normally if you lie about me we both go to a court, but if you lie about the court, where does the court go?

IANAL but if this is execution of a court order it would be CoC if it counts as failure to follow orders to include false claims. I don't know if a judge can charge CoC for disrespect of the court when not actually in it. If an ongoing case, might get a warning to remove contravening commentary and only a CoC on failure to do so.

I'm confused why you think it did.

That was a lie. I'm not confused. It's just that the obvious explaination is not flattering.

[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25451524-wp-engine-v...

The court ordered that IF you want to enjoy the benefits of operating a business within the framework of services and certainties provided by the country, you can't mysteriously always be out of flour just for the black family. If you offer a service for published terms, then anyone meeting the terms gets to procure the service.

This is not compelled labor or materials or anything, because you are not compelled to operate a business.

So either he stopped listening to the people around him (including lawyer in a legal case), or the people around him are chosen based on their ability to say yes rather than be useful.

I don't know about the ownership of Automattic to know if there is a board not doing its job either or if they can't do anything anyway.

And ultimately the legal cases "doesn't matter" grand scale, but the damage he is doing to public perception is immense. There are a bazillion marketing agencies out there being affected by his emotionnal breakdown, so if WP Engine were to put themselves in the middle as a separate, "safe" provider they might even benefit even more from the situation. People don't like it when you touch their wallet.

Have worked for someone like that before - it is not fun.

They even look the same.

"Holiday Break"

Either get rid of the guideline or enforce it all the time.

The removal of "why" and "how" from the start of titles automatically is also fucking stupid.

In cases like this where the original post title is pretty useless, I'm in favor of expanding it a bit.

It's HN's stupidest guideline.

Eg Apple is kinda screwing with Spotify and claim it's their general rules, and it's a long complicated case. But if Apple came out and said "yeah, we do this specifically because we don't like Spotify and to hurt them in particular", that case would be open and shut.

That's why it's so obvious Matt is not listening to the lawyers. Everything in this case is because he said it, putting it in writing when no one asked him to.

If they wanted to legally stop WPE from accessing their servers then adding a policy to the effect of limiting how much traffic a single company is allowed to do without a explicit contract would do that. Many companies has similar conditions added to their TOS at some point after an unconditional free-for-all. They might want to allow small companies to continue use their service for free, but start demanding payment from large companies who can afford to pay and who also have real impact on server and network costs. They don't explicitly write who those large companies are.

Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Meta Llama 3 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.

https://www.llama.com/llama3/license/

It’s absolutely about both. If Apple kicked Spotify off the App Store right after launching Apple Music, we’d have a better comparison.

The matter is that this "freeloading" is subjective as the GPL license does not really place any contribution requirements. Matt says it is about trademarks but the court stated TMs were not violated either. Dura lex sed lex, he will have to deal with it.

This is just my personal opinion.

...whereas Matt's being a jerk in a way that involves collateral for the general community of people who use WordPress. So everyone is more concerned about him, because he's threatening a lot more people.

You could like Matt and think he's basically right about freeloaders, yet you would still be horrified and absolutely powerless as you watch him shred his once-whole community into halves, then quarters, then eighths as he doubles down and doubles down some more...

I don't think Matt should ever be required to provide the live services of wordpress.org, but as for WP Engine, the license is supposed to be free for them and that's pretty clear.

Those usernames say it all really.

Trans shitposting is an art form, and it often involves silly names.

This is why it's a problem when platforms get too big. Context collapses because they can't have enough moderators to understand and appropriately handle every little niche goof. It looks a certain way from a naive analysis, but is obviously not (necessarily) what it looks like to that analysis with the tiniest bit of extra information.

Also they were banned for wishing death on Matt, “a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.”

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/man-arrested-making-minecraft-dea...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/tumblr-ceo-transphobic...

For example, see the similarly violent threats and abuse being aimed at journalist Jesse Singal via the Bluesky platform in the past couple of weeks. The parallels are striking.

If sanctions work so well for other countries, why wouldn't they for WP Engine ? /s

I was in the process of setting up a simple Wordpress site for my wife’s business, to replace the Adobe portfolio she is currently using… so thanks, I guess?

Didn’t the court order have a whole section about WP Engine covering the cost of providing the required services?

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in...

> Defendants [Matt's side] counter that a bond of $1.6 million is appropriate. Opp. at 32. They assert that “the continued maintenance and operation of the Website incurs an estimated $800,000.00 in administrative, server and developer costs per year[,]” and that allowing WPEngine to access the developer resources of the Website permits WPEngine to benefit from the distribution of its products on the Website[,] which “carries with it a separate value.”

> [...]

>In reply, WPEngine argues that if the court is inclined to require a bond, “it should be a de minimus amount, not wordpress.org’s entire budget for two years.”

> [...]

> Under these circumstances, the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024. Accordingly, the Court declines to require WPEngine to post a bond.

Mullenweg and whoever his law firm is certainly appear to think that this dispute is going to be resolved outside the courtroom. It won't.