Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

Mullenweg just keeps digging. He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim. If Trademark was the issue, why did it take him over a decade ? Why is he not going after all the other gazillion WP providers that use similar phrase on their website ? We all know the answer. The only company (WP Engine) that beat his for profit company (wordpress.com). He is just salty.

Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark.

For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress. I can imagine a world where you are inundated with complaints that your software doesn't do X basic thing (because the top provider has disabled it) but ITS BEEN THERE THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME TIME STOP COMPLAINING (put a smile on and explain calmly). You get my point. And then you snap.

No idea if that's what is in his mind but I have some sympathy for Matt. In principle. (This is me steelmanning Matt)

Disabling/limiting revisions is built in to WordPress.

All WP Engine did is add:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

to their configs.

Even if they had literally disabled 80% of the functionality of wordpress, would that still be the concern of anyone other than WP Engine and their customers?

Why would anyone using open source software be required to use 100% of the functionality that the software is capable of providing?

Which is also something done by his own hosting companies (unsure if it's in all cases, but at least some).

> He is the only person I have ever seen interacting in such a petty manner that he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim

Right. At the very start of this I was automatically on wordPress' side because yeah, kick back if you make a mint off free code. It's the morally correct thing to do.

The rest is just.. wtf. I hope I never mullenweg a project this badly.

What you've said is completely true, but I still can't detect any bad behavior here. He stopped supporting a company that was threatening (not unfairly) his company with his software. Why would he be obligated to justify that?

If you built your business next to mine, and I shared e.g. my water infrastructure with you for free or for a nominal fee, then one day your business got large enough to threaten my business, am I obligated to let you keep using my water, or should you have figured something else out long ago?

Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated.

This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dump

If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.

That analogy doesn't fit. What actually happened is that someone shared with you how they do mining contingent on the fact that if you use that knowledge or add to it, that you have to share it as well (WordPress was a fork off of b2/cafelog)

You did so, but turns out that other people are way better at utilizing that knowledge than you are. You throw a hissy fit on the internet. Everybody turns against you, even people who think that in essence you're right.

Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.

I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.

I don't know about you but I would be more frustrated not being able to revise posts? It's bad enough on twitter I can't update my posts, I have to delete and repost

But until the last few weeks the Wordpress site enthusiastically endorsed its use by third parties.

It wasn’t “we really wish you wouldn’t”.

Every WordPress installation I have seen has had plugins. And likely used revisions too. So I would say about the same, both are mandatory features for most users.

Revisions in this discussion is a copy of revisions you've made so you can reference or revert to one. You can still update posts all you want.

I can't speak for blogging usecases, but for agency websites we would disable revisions and a bunch of other things for every single wordpress installation(even the blog posts that show up on the main admin area)

Heck even Jetpack, Automattics official plugin, recommends limiting revisions: https://jetpack.com/blog/wordpress-revisions/

Lastly, Wpengine never fully disabled post revisions, they just limited it to 2-3.

Congratulations!

"I hope I never mullenweg a project this badly."

That is the only good thing I've seen come out of this whole debacle. This needs to become standard tech/OSS lexicon, and Matt's enduring legacy.

> he made a company backed by Private Equity look like a victim

Jason Cohen understood the tradeoffs of using private equity versus bootstrapping. He goes into the decision in more depth elsewhere, but at 44s into this video about avoiding private equity he alludes to his decision:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=0m44s

I'd love to see the receipts where Automattic is paying 8% of their revenue to Rasmus Lerdorf or a company he's in control of?

Seems totally fair, right? WordPress is 100% reliant on PHP and getting updates, new features, and security fixes for free, none of which the PHP project is obligated to provide?

Surely Automattic, a company valued at over 7 billion with annual revenues of over 700mil is happily paying Rasmus 50 odd million a year?

No? Why not? Are the rules different for WPEngine and Silver Lake compared to Automattic and Blackrock/Alta Park?

And, you know what? You can't run Wordpress without Linux, Windows, macOS, and maybe a few *BSD operating systems to run it on. I guess Matt's owes Linus and Bill and Tim, and a bunch of BSD project leads another $50mil.

Yep. This is what it said on September 19, the day before Matt launched his nuclear war:

> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

It was changed to its current spiteful text on September 25.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240919043912/https://wordpressf...

Well isn't that the deal when you're building a company around an open-source project? It's a bit childish to go after people that are better at making money of your open-source project. Maybe you should then just not go into open source, if you cannot handle these kinds of situations.

Well isn't that the thing about open-source software, that you can change the code and redistribute it? What is wrong about that? The WP Engine customers can ask WP Engine about that, it has nothing to do with Automattic.

Or WP Engine customers don't understand and are coming to Automattic for this? Well you can answer to refer to the WP Engine docs? You don't have to give them support if they're not your customer.

Doesn't this serve as evidence that my speculation that Matt is frustrated with the behavior of WP engine? Please and spiteful language is not legally binding.

I do think it's worth noting Automattic has raised ~$984M (via PE/other investors), whereas WP Engine has raised far less & is somehow doing far better with less headcount.

What's really telling is ~9 of Automattic's 46 own investments were inside the WordPress ecosystem, vs. 100% of WP Engine's. Things like Beeper for $124M in April of 2024 just seem awkward in light of the recent complaints about WP Engine not doing enough.

I don't think "Matt is frustrated with WP Engine" is speculation. That much is abundantly clear.

What's not clear is if they did anything wrong to deserve it.

Tinfoil theory: Matt is actually paid by or invested in Silver Lake/WPE and using his position to tank the foundation on their behalf. Then WPE is actually king WP, and a new OSS foundation must rise from the ashes and they'll be there as trusted, responsible party to select the leaders

I admit, this is pretty far-fetched, and I don't even believe it, but I'd say the same thing about the whole affair

> Lastly, Wpengine never fully disabled post revisions, they just limited it to 2-3.

Not quite. https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/#Post_Revisio...

"Every WP Engine site has WordPress revisions disabled by default... Revisions can only be enabled by contacting Support... Support can help you enable 3 revisions for your posts to start. Revisions should not exceed 5."