Executive Director of WordPress.org is simply a job title at Automattic. Josepha found out about the WP Engine ban from wordpress.org in real time along with the rest of the community.
There is a wordpressfoundation<dot>org, so I doubt it. In my opinion <dot>org is software repo/wp-inc HQ.. and <dot>com is commercial and hosting enterprise. But of course, let's hear from the horse's mouth himself!! :-P
Wordpress.org isn't a legal entity. It's simply a domain owned by Matt. It seems Matt has a license to use the Wordpress trademarks.
The Wordpress Foundation is a non-profit legal entity with a tiny budget. It appears the only thing it does is serve as a holding entity for the trademarks and the for-profit company than operates the WordCamp conferences.
I suspect that Automattic is the one who foots the bill for the infrastructure behind Wordpress.org, but that's not clear.
Matt talks about transparency, but how everything operates is a muddled mess.
> The Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that facilitates access to WordPress-related software.
He's far too used to just referring to, and treating, all these entities synonymously, and now that someone is pointing out all these glaring little admissions of exactly that, he is frantically trying to alter the record.
He's obviously paying close attention to HN, even when he's not on a posting binge making things worse. One can only imagine WP Engine's lawfirm is doing the same.
Can you clarify when you're going to cease your public tantrums and your erratic idiotic behavior that is causing problems for Wordpress users worldwide?
This was more generous than both the Basecamp and Coinbase buyout offers, I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant. I can be a little ASD so sometimes my written communication doesn't come through the best.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
So what you're saying is that Matt is a tyrant because he isn't as an effective communicator as DHH is? That's quite an unusual take on tyranny.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
There is no objective measure of what makes a tyrant. If one comes across as a tyrant, they are a tyrant!
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
What personal attacks are you referring to? There are no personal attacks found anywhere in this thread, nor would there be any logical reason to bring emotions into it at all.
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
The whole point of this thread is that you're defending what you perceived to be a personal attack against Matt (calling him a tyrant) and the other poster was trying to explain that it was not, in fact, a personal attack.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
It looks to me like passive aggressive lynch mobbing. Putting the issues aside, you seem to be doing a good job not letting the comments that charge you with medical and psychological issues get to you.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
I don't care about wordpress or this situation. I may be, just maybe, being too generous. Somehow people feel it's proper to question someone's sanity, provide armchair legal advice, and even suggest carbon monoxide intake is involved. Maybe people should be a little self aware of their critiques of others. Maybe.
We have a special stock program called A12, and one cool feature of it is that you can still sell stock after you've left, with windows every six months. (You can only buy if you're currently employed, and it's downside protected, so you effectively have a 1x liquidation preference just like sophisticated investors.
As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
Please don't make assumptions on time zones, it's rude.
Also, I am very much listening to the advice from my friends and lawyers, and even some random internet strangers. Happy to change my mind if presented with new information.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
Yes this is part of their smear campaign, just like their last C&D. They're cherry-picking stuff to try and make me look bad, while not addressing the core issue of their trademark violations. They want me to stop telling their customers about their bad behavior.
Man... You are still talking on the internet publicly, obviously without any lawyer checking out what you say before you post comments. You will inevitably end up posting a lot of things that can make you look bad or sink the case for your side. Just stop talking about this anywhere online and offline. Let the lawyers talk.
As someone who had to handle four websites that suddenly stopped getting Wordpress security updates and updates for plugins because of how you handled this I don’t very much care to hear about “their” bad behavior.
You have no checks and balances so we paid the price. I hope people stop using Wordpress in droves. I hope you have to worry about your business the same way you suddenly made people have to worry about theirs.
> How is it even legal for wordpress.org (a public nonprofit) to take these actions on behalf of a for profit?
There are three (or more) entities using the WordPress name now and confusing the heck out of a bunch of commenters, all of them controlled by Matt:
- The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the owner of the WordPress trademark.
- WordPress.com/Automattic is the company suing and being sued, and the exclusive commercial licensee of the trademark. They also pay people to work on the Foundation, and on WordPress.org.
- WordPress.org is a website personally run by Matt [1], through another company he owns called Mobius Ltd.
I'm sorry, _their_ smear campaign? That's rich, considering you've been the one on the "scorched earth nuclear" crusade to get rid of a "cancer" from the WP community.
They didn't have to cherry-pick anything to make you look bad. You did that by yourself. While also making a criminal case for extortion.
And regarding their trademark violation: WP Engine was founded in 2010. You've been OK with the trademark violation for 14 years, and suddenly decided to take legal action just now? C'mon. The optics of this don't put you in a good light no matter how you spin it.
You are giving them more options and a bigger legal attack surface by writing online. If it turns out not to be a smear campaign and a court decides that, that alone is an attack surface for you getting surely convicted of slander.
The legal game is a different one. Get a lawyer and don't write online. Otherwise you will learn to lose everything you've built in your life over some stupid comments online.
Again, get a lawyer. Now. Stop writing. Now. Everything you will write or say will be used against you in the court of law.
There is a damn good reason this is mandatory for every cop to tell you if they arrest you.
You are mounting up the evidence for them. For free. They ragebaited and played you like a fool. Don't be that guy. Play the smart move.
Dude, your "trademark violations" claim is going to get absolutely destroyed in court. I obviously don't have all the details, but I would expect that if you did have more evidence against WPEngine, given how much you're posting in online forums I would expect you would have put forth something that helps your case, and I sure haven't seen it. How can you counter:
1. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks.
2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first.
3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way.
I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.
It seems less like they're cherry-picking and more like you've attached one of those giant tree-shaker machines to your cherry tree and all they are doing is just standing underneath it catching everything.
Do you think your ego may have gotten in the way of doing what was best for your business and users here? How was harming so many sites and the WP name justifiable here?
You've been doing that to yourself, since you brought up the FBI in response to "a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." months ago
Of course -- and he should keep his temper tantrums to his poor behavior on that platform (like he's done in the past), because it's obvious he can't handle being grown up and handling Wordpress.
So they're "cherry picking" things that you said which make you look bad, which are true and accurate - and that's a "smear campaign".
While you are telling lies about trademark violations and extorting money specifically from WPEngine and have publicly admitted you're not doing that to anyone else that provides Wordpress hosting? And you've used terms like "war" and "nuclear option" when threatening the lies you subsequently told?
And somehow you still think _you're_ the good guy here?
:boggle:
Just resign. Make the WordPress Foundation into everything you've pretended it is over the years, including rightful and permanent owner of the trademarks and .org domain, and complete seperate from you personally and Automattic and it's related businesses. _Maybe_ that'll save WordPress. Maybe...
What would you like me to answer? I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. I've only been releasing things I've said or sent.
"May 2024 May 30: Automattic shares first term sheet with WP Engine via email."
Share the term sheet that you sent to WPEngine in May. The lawsuit suggests that this term sheet is to do with a (now cancelled) partnership between WPEngine and Automattic in regards to WooCommerce. Your blog post suggests that it's a term sheet regarding WPEngine paying the 8% trademark fee for WordPress. You can significantly undermine WPEngine's argument by proving that you presented a WordPress trademark licensing term sheet to them months ago.
Sure, it was a few text messages at the end of a months-long negotiation about a licensing deal. We posted the timeline and the final term sheet here: https://automattic.com/2024/10/01/wpe-terms/
WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
He polls his audience and 54% of the thousand people watching thought WP Engine was an official thing, based on visiting their website that day. They have since updated their website a lot, including rewriting customer testimonial quotes without permission:
If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.
The context you need to share isn't that there exists a document that you wanted to sign and that they knew existed before you made the threats, the context you need to share (Edit: in court, you should really shut up here for your own good) is context that makes those texts not look like threats to drag their name through the mud in a massive smear campaign if they didn't agree to sign.
No one here is disputing that you might have been in the right until September. It's your actions in September that you need to account for.
That's a weird analogy. It'd be more like your natural gas provider trying to negotiate a deal and then when you don't reach an agreement they turn off the valve to your house.
I'm not talking about him cutting them off from WordPress.org (that's problematic for other reasons), I'm talking about the repeated texts and phone calls threatening to launch a smear campaign against them if they don't sign a deal. That is what looks like extortion.
>” If you offer someone a contract, they stall for a few months, and you show up at their house with gasoline and a match and threaten to burn their house down if they don't agree to sign the contract, you're guilty of extortion.”
This analogy seems tangential, and I don’t think it supports the rest of your post.
> I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk: "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
> I've got quotes from current and former employees, some may even stand up and speak as well.
There's the gasoline and matches. And then, while he's on stage:
> I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WordPress very easily
In isolation this sounds very much like "nice community goodwill you have there... would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." In the context of the other texts and phone calls WPE cites it sounds more like an explicit threat with no subtly.
Since when did relaying employee experience constitute an existential threat to a businesses ability to operate? This forum is littered with people who engage in "threats" as a mode of business every single day.
Seriously, read the complaint before commenting. What the parent says isn't "a reductive read", it's literally what WP Engine is alleging (with extensive documentation) and Matt is pointedly not denying.
Read the complaint before commenting any further, please.
Matt why are you only targeting them? Trademark must be defended against all not just one. Do you really believe they are the only ones? Are you going to go after everyone next?
Respectfully given the timing of waiting over a decade to use the trademark approach, I think your actions are going to destroy everything you worked hard to create. I hope you soon reflect on the domino effect this will have in time.
Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years, in a variety of arrangements. None have abused the WordPress and WooCommerce trademark as much as WP Engine has, hence our C&D against them.
> Other hosts have contributed significantly to WordPress.org and Automattic over the years
In reverse order:
1. Why on earth are other hosts obligated to contribute to Automattic, their competitor, just because Automattic also contributes to the open source project?
2. You have, on multiple recent occasions, spelt out unequivocally that WordPress.org is YOU, and not the Foundation. Again, why on earth are WordPress hosts obligated to contribute to you?
A couple posts up is claiming Mullenweg's singling out WP Engine, and here you're claiming he runs a protection racket against anyone who wants to make money running WordPress sites. Which is it?
This argument is pretty tedious. If I have a chicken, I don't have a dozen chickens, even though maybe that chicken could (or even will) lay eggs and make more chickens.
But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark, offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't give back to the community, and that's bad. I can understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I really don't understand why people are so against him here.
I mean, a protection racket tends to start that way. Give someone prominent a thumping with relative impunity, use the threat of that to get everyone else to comply
Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
I'm not 100% in the tank for Mullenweg, there's some inconsistencies I find troubling. But WordPress is an incredible, open project. Mullenweg's built an admirable community and business. There are so, so many WordPress hosting sites, and they're doing great. Mullenweg has outlined his issues w/ WP Engine (they turn off history). Does anyone honestly think a private equity firm would do better than he has? Does anyone in all these WordPress threads truly believe a good outcome here is PE firms can do as they like, giving back relatively very little to the community and slowly diluting the trademark? Who thinks this is sustainable? Who in his position would let this happen?
> Sure but which is it: Mullenweg behaves like a mafia boss extracting concessions from anyone trying to build a business on WordPress, or he's unfairly singling out WP Engine?
Success with the latter potentially encourages the former.
All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--either directly or through insinuation like you're doing here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?
The obvious unanswered question is “why just WP Engine?” Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and service providers would be wise to at least be anxious about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.
I don't understand why this matters. You were asking for a reason, that's the reason. You can call it a "thin excuse", but Mullenweg's been upfront about his position.
> Seems like a pretty thin excuse for taking 8% of gross revenue.
The 8% comes from the trademark licensing agreement [0]. They also offer to put them in the Five for the Future program if they do the contribution (they can also spend that 8% on people working on WordPress, which again enriches Mullenweg not at all, or some combo). This sounds pretty clearly like it's addressing the "you contribute very little back to the community" criticism Mullenweg has.
There's even more evidence in the "Forking" section, where they're basically like, "quit switching the attribution codes on our stuff".
Again, it sounds like WP Engine was being pretty uncool, and Mullenweg's trying to get them to be cooler.
You continue to suggest I’ve insinuated he is extorting others and I have done no such thing. Please stop that. A protection racket does not need a quorum of victims to be distasteful or illegal.
It does need to be a protection racket though. Mullenweg didn't walk up to WP Engine and say, "sure would be a shame if you somehow lost access to the plugins repo, if you pay me some $$$ I'll make sure that doesn't happen." He wrote a public blog post about how they turn off features he considers essential to WordPress. I'm not him, but it seems like if they just flipped that feature on (which would enrich him not at all) he'd be cool.
You've admitted a number of times in this thread that you consider the nonprofit organization to be just an extension of the for profit company. There are serious consequences for that for the organizations and you personally.
I was there for that stream; I'd suggest others watch the chat replay before deciding whether the results of any poll taken during that stream are credible.
I have to wonder how many people that voted even know what WordPress is or even use it. It’s easy to click a button on the screen to vote one way or another during a stream while being completely uninformed.
Sure it’s in use by a large portion of websites (43% I think I saw last) but that doesn’t mean that 43% of people know what WordPress is.
That stream wasn’t on a WordPress-centric channel.
>>>WP Engine's business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they're official WordPress.
You make three claims here, I'm honestly not sure about the 1st and 3rd, but can you go into more detail about 8% being typical? For what kind of franchise?
If a local mechanic claims to be a "Volkswagen expert", do you think they're paying 8% back to Volkswagen?
A new car dealership pays 3-8% back to their parent company plus a 1-2%
marketing fee, upto 500,000 as an initial fee. They get logo rights and inventory.
If this wasn't open source they could ask for those fees but they decided to give away their software with an open license. Without that license they would have never grown into what they became. But Matt sees another company doing well and he gets jealous and demands a piece of their success and goes postal when he doesn't get his way.
I think he needs to step away from wordpress.org because the conflict of interest is too great.