The only reason the lawsuit happened is because Matt started the feud. This is literally the "guy puts stick in own bike wheel then falls off" meme.
Even the staunchest Disney fans don't rally behind Disney when one of their "trademarks gets abused".
So, I get where you're coming from, but I also have some second-hand exposure here because my wife is a trademark agent (and has to put up with all my inane hypotheticals about trademarks) - while you can call it a "business-on business crime", the question of fact revolves around whether an average consumer would get confused.
As a consumer, I'd feel pretty miffed about being misled into purchasing a product due to trademark confusion.
Stop trying to rewrite history. There is documented evidence of what actually happened.
It's almost like if you had not so loudly and deliberately set out to destroy the company you wouldn't currently be so tied up in this litigation which is apparently such a massive drain on Automattic's resources. But yeah, this is all WPE's fault. For trying to stymie your campaign to destroy them by leveraging laws which exist for exactly this purpose. How dare they. There was just no way to see this coming.
Aside: in the last 15 years I have had to explain the difference between .com and .org to hundreds of people. I don't recall a single instance of having to explain that WP Engine is not affiliated with either the project or the commercial hosting company. And now so many parts of .org unexpectedly direct navigation to .com. Remind me again who is brazenly and unfairly profiting off of the WordPress trademark?
Oh, that didn't happen. Because you know you would lose that case.
If it was a simple matter of trademark abuse, your attorneys talk to theirs. If nothing good comes out of that, your attorneys file a suit. Have you done this? Nope.
This is not about the supposed trademark abuse.
This is an obvious next step — until revenue increases or expenses decrease, Mullenweg’s corporation is no longer investing in Wordpress beyond the critical minimum necessary to present as if everything is fine. The “until WPE concedes” bit is just redirecting the underlying cause, which is that Wordpress.com isn’t increasing their growth in revenue year-over-year, which makes VC-style investors uneasy — they want hockey sticks, not dividends.
The important thing when dealing with this sort of scenario is not to take the person’s accusations at face value, and not to let them distract you from discussing their own circumstances. If Mullenweg’s moves were intelligent and calculated, then what motivations would this psyops-style propaganda represent? That is the million dollar question that matters here, not the substance of whatever his latest attack is.
“Are you so strapped for cash that you can’t afford to pay your lawyers?” is probably the simplest example of the kind of question that needs to be asked of this latest post. “How many months of runway do you have left before the lawsuit bankrupts you?” is the sort of question that the tech press should be asking. Dissecting the surface-level statements feels vengeful and just; discussing the obvious implications and making them the focus of press responses is much more impactful.
> We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org *when the legal attacks have stopped*.
This is a move to show how much the development of WordPress depends on Automattic (some 4k hours per week) and how WP Engine is using the product of that effort without giving much back (45 hours per week) - "A Level Playing Field". It all started from this and it sends a message "don't take it for granted".
https://web.archive.org/web/20240927025102/https://wordpress...
https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/pledges/?order=hou...
While it’s possible he suddenly woke up one day and decided to become greedy and petty, it seems more likely that with the end of zero-percent interest rates, his investors are nagging him to increase his rate of growth of profit accordingly. Otherwise why rock the boat when, as you note, he’s already making money hand over fist? But it’s not rate of return annually that matters to investors, it’s the rate of growth of rate of return that matters, and that’s almost certainly trending negative by now.
We are not the target market for this product.
Not everyone here is building an AI based SaaS for YC
Usually reinventing every wheel is a waste of time and resources, and that’s why when you need a website, you might reach for WordPress, or Hugo, or Craft, or whatever else.
Not everyone wants to spend development time crafting a custom website platform. Unless you’re trying to craft a custom website platform of course. That’s not most businesses.
Otherwise, the very first commit should be removing all the personally identifiable information and other telemetry sent back to Matt's personal website (WordPress.org) and WooCommerce.com that isn't properly documented anywhere. [0][1]
At the very least, there should be code changes facilitating informed consent.
Of course, even though that is in the best interest of WordPress users, Matt Mullenweg won't let that happen. Because, money.
[0] https://duanestorey.com/posts/down-the-rabbit-hole-a-deep-lo... [1] https://x.com/SybreWaaijer/status/1875230654054752374
The fact that they snoop on your revenue is pretty outrageous.
This is one of the things I removed in our WordPress fork. I found it horrifying to learn that an open source software does such a user-hostile thing, and wondered why nobody but me objects.
Also fascinating that Mullenweg is willing to back away from the WordPress people love, but won’t let others engage to take up the slack. Has he been blocking WPE and others contributions if they don’t line up with his/Automattic’s commercial interests all along? Is there another shoe to drop?
If community members submit code to improve core by removing the dependency on .org and allowing users to choose will Mullenweg allow it in?
