I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive.
Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.
I don't use WP Engine or WordPress, so I don't have a side in this fight.
As an outsider, that context seems a bit dubious to me.
@photomatt has tweeted [5135]: "[...] Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. [...]"
If this was true, I would think that @photomatt's twitter feed would be loudly boosting this disgruntled employee's story of WP Engine-imposed limits and subsequent retaliation. Yet @photomatt's twitter feeds seems silent to me. This makes me skeptical of this context.
A. He accuses “WP Engine” for being confusing branding. He literally owns WordPress.com; which confuses tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. (“Are you on the WordPress login page?” “I swear that I am!”)
B. He complains about the post revisions not being limitless. But until recently, WordPress.com had a limit of 25.
C. If post revisions matter, surely plugins matter, right? WordPress.com requires going up two tiers to use any unapproved plugins.
D. Matt was an investor in WP Engine, and even appeared on their podcast last year, even though this revisions system limitation has been in place for a decade?
E. This is the same Matt who wrote the WordPress Bill of Rights, complete with specifically saying “The freedom to run the program, for any purpose” and
“The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.”
F. The same Matt who wrote in the WordPress trademark policy that “WP” is not a WordPress trademark and anyone may use it however they wish?
G. The same Matt who forked B2, and if B2 was still around, would be quite vulnerable to B2 potentially complaining about Matt’s lack of contribution to them?
It goes on. I hate to say it, but every sign points to Matt being a hypocrite. Even an extortionist.
Have you taken a look at wpengine.com? The name WordPress is everywhere with them declaring they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider" and that "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". The WP Engine C&D insists they're allowed to use 'WP' (as you echo) but the dispute could be partly related to this broader marketing, which possibly creates confusion (a court will likely have to decide).
Edit: To your first point, Automattic, who originally registered the trademark, apparently has a license from the trademark owner (the Foundation) to use the mark (at least for that domain). https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/ WP Engine, by their own admission, does not have a license. It also seems odd to call Matt perverse in what seems to be a trademark dispute without any acknowledgment that he is the inventor of the software, as such the founder of the community, that his friend Christine Tremoulet coined the name, and that his company originally registered the trademark.
> For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering WordPress consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The WordPress Consulting Company.” Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
If WordPress specifically says that using the tagline “the world’s best WordPress themes” is okay, it’s hard to show anything WP Engine has done as being unacceptable.
Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense: That’s an interesting point; but if that were true, Matt should have used that as his argument, after sending a polite letter first explaining that was going too far. This did not happen; and considering Matt was on their podcast and didn’t give a darn until lately, it appears to not be a real problem.
>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project.
Not to mention his text messages. It's clear that if they were willing to pay, he was willing to not even mention them in his keynote. It looks quite clear that he wanted money and was willing to let everything slide if they got it.
(1) The WPE C&D is, in my opinion, sloppily written, full of equivocation/fallacious reasoning. The situation is not "clear". (2) We haven't heard Matt's explanation of the text messages. (3) The WordPress name was registered in 2006 by Matt's company Automattic. In 2010 it was generously (no good deed is unpunished) transferred to a 501(c)3 and Automattic was given a license to the mark (at least in WordPress.com). According to WPE themselves: "the payment ostensibly would be for a 'license' to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license". That's a potentially disputed claim: they very well may need a license as they are (currently) possibly in violation of the (generous) trademark policy by advertising services they've titled "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It's unwise to malign Matt publicly – a court will be sorting out the necessity of the license.
I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece.
I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself.
I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.
I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.
Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off, as Automattic offers.
WP Engine offers headless WP CMS to static, for one, and it’s pretty slick. I don’t believe Automattic offers that, yet. But I bet Automattic builds it in, in the near future, and that’s probably what this WP Engine beef is really all about: money.
Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.
> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web.
The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
me neither but it pays; when we get called, bad things already happened, so it's always an emergency which means we can ask for 400-500$/hr to fix it. And there are so many bad wp sites that we can retire on that alone. But let me tell you about OpenCart, Drupal, etc which also are all lovely targets and more niche so higher hourlies!
As someone with a formal verification and static typing background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is very good business.
I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress.
For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish? PHP and Apache come up a lot too.
It's like any other system designed to be used by people that are not technically savvy. Lots of things have default values that are not sane. That's why the script kiddies hit every server they can with known defaults and vulns. Otherwise, it's like any other publicly facing internet server in that it takes maintenance with patches and updates and being informed on what you're running and changes being made.
So because the majority of users are not savvy, it's become a cesspool. Then you read about it on a tech forum like HN and it is derided as an inferior product rather than allowing improper use by the user/operator.
I've had an interview last week for a company doing WordPress stuff, and their tech lead, computer science guy, said their next project was a monitoring tool running unit tests in production to understand the health of the app
It's not only the non-tech-savvy, even CS guys become trash when they go too close to WP
Yeah I run wp2static on those, shut it down then stick the files on vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages.
This PHP version is old and let's anyone attack the site. If you upgrade it, that plugin breaks. If you manually upgrade the plugin, the pesky developer now requires a subscription. Just a nono. I build on Hugo.
Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.
And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT.
Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer for WordPress cancer plugins… I don’t know. I wish someone would have the conversation. I don’t even care whether it’s Rust.
> Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business is.
I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking about how to run their business website.
(I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while being identical in use to WordPress so all the people currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to make it. )
Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great.
However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically.
Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…
> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need
Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.
The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."
Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!"
Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."
> The problem is that marketing wants a website that
... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress.
Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.
No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions without IT involvement for obvious security and stability reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job and why the dept exists.
Those concerns are kinda the raison d'être for WPEngine.
For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department, or so large and where the IT department has effectively become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let them do their thing.
I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized businesses do not have an IT department, and also that there are people and departments in their own organisations who's IT needs are real but are not considered a priority by the IT Department.
(Often understandably not the IT departments priority, the people in a bank IT department who're securing financial systems from continuous attacks almost certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_ frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things" they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)
This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.
Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.
WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.
We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.
Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.
I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."
I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.
The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.
I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.
The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.
I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."
He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."
I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.
This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.
Kinda leaning towards this too. Changing the domain in WordPress is 1 command "wp search-replace marketingtempdomain.ext blog.officialcorp.ext" (2 if you sensibly --dry-run it first) and I've yet to have any trouble setting up SSO and MFA with the sites I maintain that need it.
Like I get it, it's a pain in the arse situation to have some random new site dumped on you for sure, but hardly the end of the world.
Then again I make my bread and butter by building and maintaining sites in WordPress for BD and marketing depts where it'd take a corp's internal IT 3 years just to come up with the spec, so I'm a little biased :P
I love an IT dept that says something is impossible - they keep my bills paid haha
I'd love to get your feedback on https://hub.scroll.pub/. Create new sites in 0.1 seconds. No signup required.
It's a new stack, but it's pretty revolutionary foundation, and as we get some good templates and imrpove the UX, I think it should bring a lot of joy to people who currently suffer with wordpress. It's all open source/public domain. Having started my programming career in Wordpress ~17 years ago, I have been able to take my favorite parts from it and get rid of all the annoying parts (like requiring a database, php/javascript hybrid, etc).
Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text messages are so much worse.
I know it's not considered "contribution" in the sense that Matt was talking about, but WPEngine owns and maintains some of the most popular and powerful Wordpress plugins on the planet. I'm not sure why he chose to pick a fight with them. My best guess is that he wants Wordpress.com (hosting) to be what WPEngine became.
I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for.
I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue).
The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards the middle where they describe Mullenweg's keynote speech. It makes, according to WPE, these claims (numbers mine):
1. Claiming that WP Engine is a company that just wants to “feed off” of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back.
2. Suggesting that WP Engine employees may be fired for speaking up, supporting Mr. Mullenweg, or supporting WordPress, and offering to provide support in finding them new jobs if that were to occur.
3. Stating that every WP Engine customer should watch his speech and then not renew their contracts with WP Engine when those contracts are up for renewal.
4. Claiming that if current WP Engine customers switch to a different host they “might get faster performance.”
5. Alleging that WP Engine is “misus[ing] the trademark” including by using “WP” in its name.
6. Claiming that WP Engine’s investor doesn’t “give a dang” about Open Source ideals.
Under a US defamation analysis, claims (1), (3), and (6) appear to be statements of opinion. Statements of opinion, even when persuasively worded and authoritative, are generally not actionable as defamation. It might depend on the wording; in corner cases, an opinion can be actionable if it directly implies a conclusion made from facts known to the speaker and not disclosed to the audience --- but the facts involved have to be specific, you can't just imagine that I've implied I have secret facts (or my audience expects me to) because I'm Matt Mullenweg.
Claim (4) seems like it's probably just a fact? Is WPE assuredly the fastest possible provider at any given price point? The "might" also seems pretty important there.
That leaves (5) the allegation about the trademark dispute, which doesn't sound like an especially promising avenue for a lawsuit, but who knows? and (2) the bit about employee and former employee reprisals. The thing about (2) is if there's a single example of a disgruntled WPE employee who thinks they missed a promotion because they stuck up for the WordPress Foundation or whatever, WPE might have a hard time using that claim.
You'd think that before WordPress/Automattic started directly demanding funds from the board of WPE, they probably had some kind of counsel review this stuff and figure out what they could and couldn't safely say?
Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").
This is one of those times where I'm saying a lot of stuff in the hopes that someone much more knowledgeable will set me straight. :)
The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have a chance of winning such an argument). If Automattic was purely producing open source software with no vested interest in profit, that would be a different story perhaps.
Matt is predictable. WPE wrote this letter for the community. They knew Matt would throw a fit and they would be able to take the high ground while also releasing an assassination of Matt’s character. The Wordpress community doesn’t care about Wordpress.com, Matt just blew what little credibility he had left. Worthless as a legal letter, brilliant as a response for the Wordpress community. Matt will inevitably step down within a few weeks, and a few years from now, this will be seen as a pivotal moment enabling WPE to dominate Wordpress.com. Matt could not have played this worse.
I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Direct link to letter: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Related article on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/22/matt-mullenweg-calls-wp-en...
Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive.
Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.
There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406
I don't use WP Engine or WordPress, so I don't have a side in this fight.
As an outsider, that context seems a bit dubious to me.
@photomatt has tweeted [5135]: "[...] Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. [...]"
If this was true, I would think that @photomatt's twitter feed would be loudly boosting this disgruntled employee's story of WP Engine-imposed limits and subsequent retaliation. Yet @photomatt's twitter feeds seems silent to me. This makes me skeptical of this context.
[5135]: https://x.com/photomatt/status/1836862087320195174
It’s kind of perverse of Matt considering:
A. He accuses “WP Engine” for being confusing branding. He literally owns WordPress.com; which confuses tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. (“Are you on the WordPress login page?” “I swear that I am!”)
B. He complains about the post revisions not being limitless. But until recently, WordPress.com had a limit of 25.
C. If post revisions matter, surely plugins matter, right? WordPress.com requires going up two tiers to use any unapproved plugins.
D. Matt was an investor in WP Engine, and even appeared on their podcast last year, even though this revisions system limitation has been in place for a decade?
E. This is the same Matt who wrote the WordPress Bill of Rights, complete with specifically saying “The freedom to run the program, for any purpose” and “The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.”
F. The same Matt who wrote in the WordPress trademark policy that “WP” is not a WordPress trademark and anyone may use it however they wish?
G. The same Matt who forked B2, and if B2 was still around, would be quite vulnerable to B2 potentially complaining about Matt’s lack of contribution to them?
It goes on. I hate to say it, but every sign points to Matt being a hypocrite. Even an extortionist.
Have you taken a look at wpengine.com? The name WordPress is everywhere with them declaring they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", "The Most Trusted WordPress Tech Company", "[WordPress's] #1 managed provider" and that "WP Engine is the #1 platform for WordPress". The WP Engine C&D insists they're allowed to use 'WP' (as you echo) but the dispute could be partly related to this broader marketing, which possibly creates confusion (a court will likely have to decide).
Edit: To your first point, Automattic, who originally registered the trademark, apparently has a license from the trademark owner (the Foundation) to use the mark (at least for that domain). https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-wordpress-foundation/ WP Engine, by their own admission, does not have a license. It also seems odd to call Matt perverse in what seems to be a trademark dispute without any acknowledgment that he is the inventor of the software, as such the founder of the community, that his friend Christine Tremoulet coined the name, and that his company originally registered the trademark.
WordPress’s own trademark policy states:
> For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering WordPress consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The WordPress Consulting Company.” Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
If WordPress specifically says that using the tagline “the world’s best WordPress themes” is okay, it’s hard to show anything WP Engine has done as being unacceptable.
https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense: That’s an interesting point; but if that were true, Matt should have used that as his argument, after sending a polite letter first explaining that was going too far. This did not happen; and considering Matt was on their podcast and didn’t give a darn until lately, it appears to not be a real problem.
The paragraph prior:
>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services, but they cannot use them as part of a product, project, service, domain name, or company name and they cannot use them in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project.
At https://wpengine.com/plans/ they appear to offer a product/service titled/branded "Essential WordPress" with others to choose from being "Core WordPress" or "Enterprise WordPress". (mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240921160743/https://wpengine....)
> Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense
It probably isn't you.
There is a short timeout of a few minutes on the Reply link in a thread. I think this to discourage hasty and unthoughtful arguments.
But if you click the timestamp on the comment, it takes you a page where you can reply immediately.
Not to mention his text messages. It's clear that if they were willing to pay, he was willing to not even mention them in his keynote. It looks quite clear that he wanted money and was willing to let everything slide if they got it.
(1) The WPE C&D is, in my opinion, sloppily written, full of equivocation/fallacious reasoning. The situation is not "clear". (2) We haven't heard Matt's explanation of the text messages. (3) The WordPress name was registered in 2006 by Matt's company Automattic. In 2010 it was generously (no good deed is unpunished) transferred to a 501(c)3 and Automattic was given a license to the mark (at least in WordPress.com). According to WPE themselves: "the payment ostensibly would be for a 'license' to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license". That's a potentially disputed claim: they very well may need a license as they are (currently) possibly in violation of the (generous) trademark policy by advertising services they've titled "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It's unwise to malign Matt publicly – a court will be sorting out the necessity of the license.
Disclaimer WP Engine Customer -
I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece.
I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself.
I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.
I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.
Could you enlighten me as to what WP Engine does differently from Automattic that you can't buy from them? Looking at the WP Engine, it's the exact same thing, with the numbers filed off, as Automattic offers.
WP Engine offers headless WP CMS to static, for one, and it’s pretty slick. I don’t believe Automattic offers that, yet. But I bet Automattic builds it in, in the near future, and that’s probably what this WP Engine beef is really all about: money.
Which particular service of Automattic?
Like Wordpress.com in hindsight seems to offer it, but its not clear to me that I'm their customer target.
Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.
Wordpress.com is very limited and locked down relative to the .org variant hosts like WPE.
Related:
WP Engine is not WordPress
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41613628
> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web.
The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
> as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL
me neither but it pays; when we get called, bad things already happened, so it's always an emergency which means we can ask for 400-500$/hr to fix it. And there are so many bad wp sites that we can retire on that alone. But let me tell you about OpenCart, Drupal, etc which also are all lovely targets and more niche so higher hourlies!
As someone with a formal verification and static typing background, it is the most terrible crap there is, but it is very good business.
I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress.
For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish? PHP and Apache come up a lot too.
[delayed]
It's like any other system designed to be used by people that are not technically savvy. Lots of things have default values that are not sane. That's why the script kiddies hit every server they can with known defaults and vulns. Otherwise, it's like any other publicly facing internet server in that it takes maintenance with patches and updates and being informed on what you're running and changes being made.
So because the majority of users are not savvy, it's become a cesspool. Then you read about it on a tech forum like HN and it is derided as an inferior product rather than allowing improper use by the user/operator.
I've had an interview last week for a company doing WordPress stuff, and their tech lead, computer science guy, said their next project was a monitoring tool running unit tests in production to understand the health of the app
It's not only the non-tech-savvy, even CS guys become trash when they go too close to WP
Yeah I run wp2static on those, shut it down then stick the files on vercel/cloudflare pages/github pages.
This PHP version is old and let's anyone attack the site. If you upgrade it, that plugin breaks. If you manually upgrade the plugin, the pesky developer now requires a subscription. Just a nono. I build on Hugo.
Many (some very large) companies would not allow that route; their marketing team is trained on wp and they specifically implemented it (in the EU this is per country generally) to sidestep the head office enterprise cms that is unusable and takes days of workflow steps to get anything published; they want more dynamic, not less and they want less techy not more.
I personally don't like block themes.
Similar experience here. Poorly documented and inflexible.
We had that problem in barebones WP with no plugins at all.
Once we installed a few security plugins, it worked out just fine!
And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT.
Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer for WordPress cancer plugins… I don’t know. I wish someone would have the conversation. I don’t even care whether it’s Rust.
> Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins.
And a solution for which a typical non-tech business can ask around their family/friends/employees and find someone who's experienced enough to come in for a few hours out a few hours a week to to typical CMS admin/editorial stuff. And for which there are heaps of easy to find tutorials and youtube videos which can get someone up to speed enough to keep their own site running, while still spending 95+% of their time making widgets or selling trinkets or whatever their actual business is.
I'm not _that_ much of a fan of WordPress, but WordPress on WPEngine is 100% my initial recommendation for anyone asking about how to run their business website.
(I'd be curious to see a Rust backend API replacement for the WP + top 100 plugins that uses the standard html/frontend, to have the type safety and security Rust is famed for, while being identical in use to WordPress so all the people currently admin-ing WP site wouldn't have to even know it's different. But not curious enough to expend any effort to make it. )
Drupal is trying for basically this with its Starshot project. It might just work, if they can get enough people to build third-party themes.
Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does.
I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up.
There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.
Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great.
However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically.
Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…
> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need
Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.
The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."
Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!"
Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."
> The problem is that marketing wants a website that
... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress.
Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.
No they can't. You don't roll out technical solutions without IT involvement for obvious security and stability reasons from hosting, bandwidth charges, auth, security maintenance, cert renewals, https, etc, unless you don't care about any of those things. That's literally ITs job and why the dept exists.
Those concerns are kinda the raison d'être for WPEngine.
For anywhere small enough to not have an IT department, or so large and where the IT department has effectively become obstructionist to other department's jobs, just buy marketing their own WPEngine subscription and let them do their thing.
I think people who work in an "IT Department" sometimes have a too narrow view of the rest of the world. Both ignoring that almost all small and most medium sized businesses do not have an IT department, and also that there are people and departments in their own organisations who's IT needs are real but are not considered a priority by the IT Department.
(Often understandably not the IT departments priority, the people in a bank IT department who're securing financial systems from continuous attacks almost certainly don't consider the HR departments need to set up a quick website for the company bbq or RUOK day to be a prioroty. But someone in HR is getting _super_ frustrated at not being able to do the "simple things" they know they could do if IT didn't keep pushing back.)
> Response from IT
This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.
Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.
WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.
We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.
Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.
I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."
I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.
The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.
I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.
The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.
I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."
He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."
I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.
This really doesn't sound believable, on your part. You can't run pngquant on the images directory to shrink down the images? Should take 2 seconds of shell script. Honestly a lot of things you mention seem like pretty trivial to do... Wordpress is so well understood and there are so many utilities and integrations for it, it's one of the simplest things to integrate with something else. This comment sounds like you were mad they made something that the rest of the company wanted and got mad and didn't want to play ball.... could just be misinterpretation over text, who knows.
Kinda leaning towards this too. Changing the domain in WordPress is 1 command "wp search-replace marketingtempdomain.ext blog.officialcorp.ext" (2 if you sensibly --dry-run it first) and I've yet to have any trouble setting up SSO and MFA with the sites I maintain that need it.
Like I get it, it's a pain in the arse situation to have some random new site dumped on you for sure, but hardly the end of the world.
Then again I make my bread and butter by building and maintaining sites in WordPress for BD and marketing depts where it'd take a corp's internal IT 3 years just to come up with the spec, so I'm a little biased :P
I love an IT dept that says something is impossible - they keep my bills paid haha
I'd love to get your feedback on https://hub.scroll.pub/. Create new sites in 0.1 seconds. No signup required.
It's a new stack, but it's pretty revolutionary foundation, and as we get some good templates and imrpove the UX, I think it should bring a lot of joy to people who currently suffer with wordpress. It's all open source/public domain. Having started my programming career in Wordpress ~17 years ago, I have been able to take my favorite parts from it and get rid of all the annoying parts (like requiring a database, php/javascript hybrid, etc).
This seems like it will be relevant...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Sad to see Matt M behaving in such a childish manner. The initial wordpress.org blogpost looked pretty bad, but the quoted text messages are so much worse.
It's not uncommon for a license being required to use a registered trademark. WPE denies they need one. Matt apparently disagrees.
This is funny considering WP Engine has been the only thing that kept me developing wordpress sites for years.
I know it's not considered "contribution" in the sense that Matt was talking about, but WPEngine owns and maintains some of the most popular and powerful Wordpress plugins on the planet. I'm not sure why he chose to pick a fight with them. My best guess is that he wants Wordpress.com (hosting) to be what WPEngine became.
My slightly earlier submission with a direct PDF link for people who aren't able to view Twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631920
Well, there's that context we were all asking for.
I'm no fan of WP Engine and their outrageous prices for very average performance, but this is a terrible look for Matt M if true. reply
I'm not a lawyer, as you will soon realize. This is just water cooler talk, which is what HN is for.
I sort of directionally think that if WPE had a strong case here, their opening bid wouldn't be a C&D (I've noticed C&Ds frequently include a "preserve documents" section, presumably as punctuation, but for what it's worth that's an implicit threat they might sue).
The meat of this C&D seems to be a section towards the middle where they describe Mullenweg's keynote speech. It makes, according to WPE, these claims (numbers mine):
1. Claiming that WP Engine is a company that just wants to “feed off” of the WordPress ecosystem without giving anything back.
2. Suggesting that WP Engine employees may be fired for speaking up, supporting Mr. Mullenweg, or supporting WordPress, and offering to provide support in finding them new jobs if that were to occur.
3. Stating that every WP Engine customer should watch his speech and then not renew their contracts with WP Engine when those contracts are up for renewal.
4. Claiming that if current WP Engine customers switch to a different host they “might get faster performance.”
5. Alleging that WP Engine is “misus[ing] the trademark” including by using “WP” in its name.
6. Claiming that WP Engine’s investor doesn’t “give a dang” about Open Source ideals.
Under a US defamation analysis, claims (1), (3), and (6) appear to be statements of opinion. Statements of opinion, even when persuasively worded and authoritative, are generally not actionable as defamation. It might depend on the wording; in corner cases, an opinion can be actionable if it directly implies a conclusion made from facts known to the speaker and not disclosed to the audience --- but the facts involved have to be specific, you can't just imagine that I've implied I have secret facts (or my audience expects me to) because I'm Matt Mullenweg.
Claim (4) seems like it's probably just a fact? Is WPE assuredly the fastest possible provider at any given price point? The "might" also seems pretty important there.
That leaves (5) the allegation about the trademark dispute, which doesn't sound like an especially promising avenue for a lawsuit, but who knows? and (2) the bit about employee and former employee reprisals. The thing about (2) is if there's a single example of a disgruntled WPE employee who thinks they missed a promotion because they stuck up for the WordPress Foundation or whatever, WPE might have a hard time using that claim.
You'd think that before WordPress/Automattic started directly demanding funds from the board of WPE, they probably had some kind of counsel review this stuff and figure out what they could and couldn't safely say?
Maybe there's tortious interference stuff here that gives these claims more teeth than a typical defamation suit (I've come to roll my eyes at tortious interference, too; unless you're alleging really specific fact patterns I've come to assume these interference claims are also a sort of C&D "punctuation").
This is one of those times where I'm saying a lot of stuff in the hopes that someone much more knowledgeable will set me straight. :)
The most damning claim, I think, is that Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE. Automattic is a direct competitor to WPE (by way of WordPress.com). I'm no lawyer but I expect there's at least some argument to be made that there's some abuse of Automattic's position in doing so (though I don't know enough about the law to know whether they have a chance of winning such an argument). If Automattic was purely producing open source software with no vested interest in profit, that would be a different story perhaps.
I assume the real goal here is to have the letter exist and be public, as a counterpoint in customer conversations.
Matt is predictable. WPE wrote this letter for the community. They knew Matt would throw a fit and they would be able to take the high ground while also releasing an assassination of Matt’s character. The Wordpress community doesn’t care about Wordpress.com, Matt just blew what little credibility he had left. Worthless as a legal letter, brilliant as a response for the Wordpress community. Matt will inevitably step down within a few weeks, and a few years from now, this will be seen as a pivotal moment enabling WPE to dominate Wordpress.com. Matt could not have played this worse.
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