General Wordpress VS WP Engine (2 Viewers)

[Cpvr]

 

[Arantor]

This has been there since 2007. But it’s only now it’s being weaponised.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Cloudflare Blocks Automattic's WP Engine Tracker For Phishing

Automattic's WP Engine Tracker website blocked by Cloudflare for "suspected phishing"

www.searchenginejournal.com

Automattic, presumably under the direction of Matt Mullenweg, recently created a website called WP Engine Tracker on the WordPressEngineTracker.com domain name that lists how many WordPress sites have moved away from managed web host WP Engine. It also recommends web hosts that current customers can move to and offers a download of all domains that are hosted on WP Engine.

Interesting update!

 

[Arantor]

This just got absolutely wild.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/secure-custom-fields/ - this is ACF Pro (remember, owned by WPE), rebranded and put on the plugin site by WordPress.org itself.

And it is the pro version - it has features only the pro version has, but without the licence key requirement, and with the most minimal rebranding possible being done. They didn't even bother find/replace on ACF to SCF, and by removing the official copyright they also violate the GPL in so doing.

Good going, Matt, good going. WPE's lawyers are going to love you for this, as is the rest of the ecosystem that builds premium plugins/themes.

 

[Cpvr]

WP Engine Vs Automattic: Judge Inclined To Grant Preliminary Injunction​

• WP Engine's attorney on Mullenweg's $32M demand: "That's not how you calculate a royalty. That's how you set a ransom."
• Judge indicates she's leaning toward granting "some sort of injunction."
• Attorneys have until Tuesday, December 3, to present "dueling submissions," which will determine how the judge will rule.

WP Engine Vs Automattic: Judge Inclined To Grant Preliminary Injunction

Judge is inclined to grant preliminary injunction against Automattic, but WP Engine’s fight isn’t over yet

www.searchenginejournal.com

WP Engine had their day in court, but it didn’t go entirely in their favor, as Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled the request for a preliminary injunction was too vague. However, the judge said they were “inclined to grant some sort of injunction.”

An attorney who live blogged the hearing on Bluesky noted that the judge wasn’t up on the technical but commended her for asking a lot of questions.

“That’s How You Set A Ransom”​

The attorney for plaintiff offered new details about what happened behind the scenes on the day that Matt Mullenweg went “nuclear” on WP Engine at WordCamp USA. She first explained that Mullenweg’s demand for trademark license was a sham. Then showed how Mullenweg failed to enforce his trademark claim for fifteen years.

Among the new details was that Mullenweg’s demand for $32 million dollars was communicated in a one-page letter and that the agreement was for a seven year period that automatically renews “essentially forever.” She then revealed new details of how Mullenweg decided on the $32 million dollars, explaining that it was just “a number” that Mullenweg felt WP Engine was able to pay.

The point of this part of the plaintiff’s argument was to show that the royalty rate that Mullenweg was asking for was not based on any value of the mark but rather the rate was a figure that Mullenweg felt he was able to squeeze out of WP Engine, saying that the rate was “set in an extortionate manner.”

 

[Cpvr]

WordPress must stop blocking WP Engine, judge rules​

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Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg also have to quit interfering with WP Engine’s ACF plugin​

WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins.
The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of “multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm.” It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org.
Mullenweg waged a public campaign againstWP Engine in September, accusing the service of misusing the WordPress trademark and not contributing enough to the WordPress community. After blocking WP Engine from WordPress.org’s servers, Automattic took control of WP Engine’s ACF Plugin.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found merit in WP Engine’s claims that Automattic’s actions harmed business relationships, saying Mullenweg’s “conduct is designed to induce breach or disruption.” As for Automattic’s argument that blamed WP Enginefor relying on WordPress.org to power its business, Judge Martínez-Olguín didn’t find it very compelling.
“While Defendants characterize WPEngine’s harm as self-imposed because it built its business around a website ‘that it had no contractual right to use...’ Defendants’ role in helping that harm materialize through their recent targeted actions toward WPEngine, and no other competitor, cannot be ignored,” the ruling states.
The Verge reached out to Automattic and WP Engine with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.
The ruling found the WP Engine showed it will suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief, while also impacting members of the WordPress community. Under the preliminary injunction, Automattic will have to take down the list of companies it displayed on a site it created to track outgoing WP Engine customers, as well as remove the checkbox that asks WordPress users to verify they’re not affiliated with WP Engine when logging in.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318350/automattic-restore-wp-engine-access-wordpress

 

[2TonWaffle]

I bet Matt is just sitting there, arms crossed, fuming mad.

 

[Arantor]

The injunction is a pretty comprehensive smackdown of everything Matt has done to this point.

 

[CTS]

The world used WordPress. Are they too big to fail? But it sure sounds like some cracks are showing.

 

[Arantor]

Very few things are genuinely too big to fail, as 2008 proved very conclusively. (Much of what 2008 proved is that there are things that are too big to be allowed to fail, which is a different thing entirely)

WordPress's main issues here stem from single points of failure which were fine all the time Matt followed the "benevolent dictator for life" approach as is common in open source. In fact if you look most of the most successful open source projects operate under the BDFL approach because it's the only way to keep things sane.

What we have here is a BDFL who isn't so benevolent after all - we've seen examples in the past of him being petty and a nuisance but never anything on this scale.

Right now as it stands, WordPress is not, in itself, too big to fail: Matt is a single source of failure in the ecosystem because he, and he alone, controls the primary keys to wordpress.org itself where plugins et al live, and no-one would dispute that WordPress's strength as a platform comes from its add-on ecosystem. You start actively gatekeeping that in a way the community has significant issues with, and that's a problem.

The ultimate check and balance for open source has always been the fork - the final 'we do not agree with where you are taking the project' step - but most forks never thrive because most forks fizzle and die and the primary project picks up the slack. ClassicPress is a good example - it's never been able to keep the pace with WP even though it's just WP minus Gutenberg.

But in WP's case it isn't just the codebase you'd need to fork - it's the ecosystem, and then bring the ecosystem along for the ride, or try like hell to maintain compatibility otherwise you immediately put yourself on the back foot with it all.

Time will tell what happens but when this finally gets to court proper, I hope it ends up that Matt has to hand over the keys to w.org to the Foundation, and that he is forcibly removed from its board for defrauding the government over the state of the Foundation's assets. (Because, yeah, if you weren't paying attention, that's actually part of the drama: Matt is using trademarks as leverage, which he's entitled to do, I guess. The Foundation owns the trademarks, Automattic is the licensee and enforcer, but either way that implies the value of the trademarks is held by the Foundation, which is certainly not declared on the balance sheet as an asset, while he's claiming these trademarks are so valuable they need a multi-million dollar licence.)