I run a WordPress agency and I'm absolutely horrified by all of this. It's not cutting through to our clients yet, but building on WordPress suddenly feels incredibly risky when one person can throw their toys out of the pram - the pineapple checkbox is just fucking ridiculous - and derail an entire ecosystem. I really wish there was some kind of mechanism to cut Matt entirely out of WordPress because he deserves to be completely ostracised.
Planning to set up a new customer-facing website next year, and there is 0.0% chance that it will be based on WordPress, even though several of our existing websites are WP.
I wish he had someone who he trusted who could help him get therapy. So many people have benefited from his project but now anyone with a business is going to ask whether he’s about to do something wild, which is a tragic end for such a popular open source project.
That's also what happens when you clear house of everyone but the yes men (which he did with his large severance offer for anyone not willing to say yes to anything he said).
Yes men make you feel better, but they're nowhere to be seen whenever you actually need help.
The problem is that paranoids trust NO ONE, so this is impossible. Same reason rock stars implode from time to time: the money, fame, and ALL ACCESS pass to drugs create a solipsistic world view.
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.
Oh stop it. That kind of snark is pointless. WordPress with the correct hosting setup and good coding practices is absolutely fine. It's the cheap hosting and throwing insecure plugins that causes issues with WordPress sites.
This is just a play to pretend that WordPress.org is run by volunteers when in truth it's entirely run by Automattic. 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.
I can't wait for him to lose millions of dollars for a hissy fit. It's going to be delicious.
WordPress.org is way too big to be a one-man show. I am absolutely certain that Mullenweg has nothing to do with plugin or theme validation, account creation or even packaging new WordPress versions, but also certain that he can tell his employees what to do. Hell, all of that should be automated by now.
He wouldn't be able to do any of that with volunteers that aren't operating under his authority.
I don't think there's a difference between the two, even if it was WordPress Foundation who claimed control, it's all Mullenweg's for-profit company that performs the work because Mullenweg's employees are all Automattic, and Mullenweg is at the head of all of it.
Except the injunction was against .com, not the .org
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.
> 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.
Damn, reading all this makes me feel terrible. I wonder what goes on in somebody’s mind to make them self-sabotage their lives like Matt has over the past couple of weeks.
It’s not about success or failure, it’s about investing your ego so deeply into your business that morality and sanity end up seeming like reasonable currencies to spend as a last resort to viewing yourself as a failure. He is the Matt in the company name Auto-Matt-ic, so of course he’s taking it poorly. There are serious downsides to Cult of Personality meets Cult of Infinite Annual Growth.
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.
I think part of it is that corporations tend to be lawful evil, not chaotic. We shouldn’t forgive that but it’s not as dramatic when Oracle or Broadcom jacks up their prices because they don’t target one company with unhinged rants like they kicked the CEO’s dog, and it follows a legal contract process.
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.
My working theory is that investors are pulling up ladders now that interest rates are VC-unprofitable, and so either he finds a way to increase growth in profit y-o-y or they bail and let him crash like TypePad did years ago. (Except TypePad had paying customers, so their bandwidth bills weren’t anywhere near the looming threat WP is presumably facing.)
Yeah, exactly! No reason for it to collapse into ashes like the Wordpress “I dream of ruling an ecosystem by refusing to charge money” plans will, even if certainly as an old thing it’s old.
You might want to visit https://www.typepad.com/pricing as a logged-out user, and read the entire pop-up (which has been present for 4 years now) before saying that...
I'm aware, but to explain the parent comment for the other readers of the site: Typepad wasn't able to continue operating through one of the dotcom crashes as an independent concern, but their hosting servers and customers were sold intact to another business, which continues to operate the TypePad servers for existing paying customers only.
My point was more re: "refusing to charge money" is an ironic criticism of WP when comparing to Typepad, a service whose owners are outright refusing to accept new paying users... and who have a pop-up directing prospective new users to instead use WordPress hosting on BlueHost (which is owned by the same parent company who bought Typepad).
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.
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 this statement stood out to you. Isn't that exactly what the court ordered? WP Engine could no longer be denied access to wordpress.org services, and thus he is now legally compelled to provide them with the services of wordpress.org.
The court order is at [1]. On page 41 and 42 it orders WP Engine's access to wordpress.org services to be reinstated to what it was on September 20, including all that entails. Thus he is now legally compelled to provide the wordpress.org services to WP Engine. He also provides those services to everyone else and used to provide them to WP Engine, but that doesn't make the statement false.
The court ordered him not to discriminate and not to interfere.
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.
The court does not force him to provide free labor and services period, it forces him, if he decides to provide free labor and services to anyone on his own volition, to not discriminate against specific entities.
Does he really believe he can convince people that the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.com is a different Matt Mullenweg from the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.org?
He was here saying his lawyer validated everything he was saying when anyone with any little amount of experience with lawyers and B2B legal case could immediately tell no actual decent lawyer would have validated any of that. And what he said here on HN ended up being used against him in the injuction ...
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.
Been surrounding himself with yes men for years. I mean he literally said “commit to my ideas or leave with a half year of severance” and a lot of people took him up on the offer
Why would anyone do an intervention, when it neither benefits nor profits them to do it? Let the man break down as much as he desires. The law will eventually catch up; not to mention that the good will, if there was ever any, is but all gone.
> 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.
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?
He timed the initial meltdown perfectly, because it was just before the domains I'd transferred to WordPress.com's registrar when Google Domains got sold were up for renewal. So the net effect there was that Matt bought me a free year of domain hosting, and drove me away just in time for me to not start paying him.
Why is it a conflict at all? Does modifying the software go against the license? They don't have to follow Matt's philosophy. If Matt want to control the use he should have encoded it in the license. Isn't this a classical case of wrongly chosen license and assuming others
agree with you on unstated things.
I mean, if anything this sort of thing surely has to be pushing people towards WPEngine, rather than the service run by the guy who is visibly losing it?
> As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you.
> 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?
> thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers
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.
> 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.
I wouldn't say it's revenge, but this meant to cause a stir, so that the few people who don't know about this unfortunate legal battle will hear about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he was so delusional that he thinks this will gain him and his web of companies more sympathy.
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.
> 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?
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.
The lawsuit exists because he repeatedly chose to force it into existence. He will almost certainly lose it because he repeatedly made bad choices which had to have been against his lawyers’ counsel. He is likely going to lose the foundation’s non-profit status because he repeatedly made bad choices.
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.
I'm not criticizing his personal decision of taking a break. I'm criticizing the fact that he pulled wordpress.org's functionality along with him, as if those functionalities depeneded on him personally, and the way in which that break was announced - namely, by spending most of his announcement criticizing WP Engine instead of talking about breaks.
Sure, but he brought 100% of this on himself with his previous petty-tyrant tantrums. There was absolutely no reason he needed to be on the business end of a lawsuit.
I know it isn't necessarily hacker news standard, but I greatly appreciate when submitters summarize the actual content rather than post vague titles like "What's Next" or "The Real Story" or whatever.
It's not really editorializing, since that means adding opinions. The HN title is currently a factual summary of the situation, without any particular flavoring. It's not "Matt throws a tantrum, takes toys and goes home" or anything like that.
In cases like this where the original post title is pretty useless, I'm in favor of expanding it a bit.
I'm not Matt, but his description of events is consistent, and illuminates a pattern of abusive behavior that is often seen from that community.
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.
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.
Uh that's a pretty far leap from the practically libelous claim that he stalked somebody. From reading this source it sounds more like the drama spilled over from Tumblr to Twitter, that's hardly stalking in my book.
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.”
I think views are mostly uniform around here. Matt had a few valid points but they are overall meritless. WPE would have been nice to contribute more, but they are absolutely not required to. Rug-pulling an open-source project and making defamation like this is a very dangerous example, and as we will see, also illegal. Would be interested in your arguments, I haven't read much if any in his support.
Does google just have that much better lawyers that they can get away with Rug-pulling products and services? I know several examples, from youtube plugins to search optimization, that had their company being pulled from existence because google decided to remove or change their free services or api's. The google graveyard sits alongside a much larger graveyard of companies who got caught when the rug was pulled.
It doesn't need that much better lawyer to begin with. You just can't come out an say straight up "I'm doing this specifically to screw company X", which is what Matt did, essentially.
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.
That is a much better description than practically every other take I have seen on this issue. The legal issue is not about removing access, pulling the rug, or changing policy. It is all about the intention and making public statements.
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.
I liked Meta's Llama license. It's very general, but we know it's for particular companies in particular regions...
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.
It couldn't matter less whose "side" you are on is kind of the point.
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...
If you run a business on open source, you have to expect that some actors will contribute less than you would like. It is the price to pay for the advantages open source provides (contributions, widespread adoption etc).
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.
I think it's that WP Engine might arguably have been being a jerk, albeit in a way completely allowed by WordPress' licensing and directed entirely at extracting some benefit specifically from Automattic's work.
...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.
The preamble of the GPLV2 begins with:
"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. "
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.
That's Matt's whole argument, no? That anyone can grab it from e.g. Github, but he's not compelled to provide access to the wordpress.org servers or the WordPress trademarks under the GPL.
Not a lawyer but my opinion is the law shouldn't be used to compel anyone to provide unpaid services. With that said, I still think it's terrible for the community. If other package repositories like npm, PyPI, and others decided to randomly block people over grudges, it would create a lot of dysfunction. The consequences should come in the form of Matt no longer being reputable as a provider of services to the community
