Matt is in large part mischaracterizing, although not outright lying about, the court's ruling. If you follow the link he provided to the ruling itself, many of the dismissed claims were dismissed "with leave to amend" (basically WPEngine has to fix their allegations), and one was dismissed for the reason that it should instead be asserted "as an affirmative defense if appropriate later in this litigation." There were some claims dismissed in a way WPEngine can't fix, but not many, and others were upheld.
I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
Lawyer here-100% agree. Calling this a win is super super strange. The only claims that were dismissed were long shots anyway and will just be amended except for extortion.
The court didn’t even find that there wasn’t extortion, just that you can’t privately sue over the kind of extortion claimed here. Which means California could actually still sue over it, just not WPEngine.
Amusingly, the court also refused to take judicial notice of several documents Automattic submitted because WPEngine said they were not authentic copies of the documents.
Overall this is emphatically not a win. They knocked out roughly no interesting claims, knocked out zero claims permanently (the one claim that can’t be amended could still be sued over by California, and they actually might because it’s California), and will have just made themselves work arguing the same claims again once amended.
They will still end up in trial in 2027 or 2028.
The only usefulness of this would have been as a delaying tactic but I don’t see how that benefits Automattic given the PR disaster they made of this
Just the claims where dismissal was outright denied are also potentially (up to judge and jury at later stages) enough for some pretty devastating damages... I second that this was a loss for Matt. It wasn't even "a draw" where the plaintiffs have to try again with an amended complaint (not that they will necessarily not bother to amend).
> I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.
WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
They're doing what AWS and the other hyperscalers have done. Making bank on other people's hard work because "pure" open source allows for third party commercialization without compensation. (Or even giving back, as is with WP Engine's case. IIRC, they're not a top contributor to the open source code.)
Shouldn't we be angry at the appropriators that take everything and give nothing back?
AWS is 99.999% closed source. They're taxing the industry and contributing to increased centralization. Much of what made the early web so exciting has been hoovered up by these open source thieves.
Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
Again - I think the community is attacking the wrong person here. Matt acted immaturely, but he's the one that put in the work. Not WP Engine.
No amount of altruism or engineering work entitles you to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...
When you publish something under an open source license, you entitle the rest of the world to use it to get rich. That's what the license says on the tin, what the licenses have always been advertised, etc. I have absolutely no problem with AWS or WPEngine using that entitlement, nor do I have any problem with any software engineer (or software engineering organization like AWS) choosing not to publish source code they didn't promise to. Even if I wasn't of this opinion though - I don't see how someone violating this supposed prohibition could possibly entitle Matt to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...
Edit: I know it's off topic to talk about flagging, but can we consider not flagging the comment this is in reply to? I think it's generated valuable discussion for people learning about this case... even though I strongly disagree with the author.
This open source purism only benefits the leeches.
This is the same defense I see repeated for Amazon and Google, and they're two of the biggest destroyers.
Honestly OSI and their definition of "open" has been a scourge. Google and Amazon encourage this thinking because it benefits them.
You can have non-commercial "fair source" for customers that prevents vultures from stealing your hard work. That's ethical, yet it gets dunked on by OSI purists.
You can demand that profiteers be required to open source their entire stack. But these licenses are discouraged and underutilized.
But when this keeps keeps happening again and again and continues to be met with victims blaming -- I'm disgusted by the open source community's failure to be pragmatic and sustainable.
You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy. And so what did they take and take and never give themselves?
Open source, and Free Software especially, isn’t about pragmatism, or at least not only pragmatism. It’s about user freedom.
And I only hear people complaining about shared source and other proprietary software licenses when the people using them claim they’re open source so that they can piggyback on that goodwill without actually participating. It’s perfectly fine if someone wants to release stuff under a closed license. They just don’t get to do that and then brag about their open source contributions.
I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about
Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
There are things that are compact but build an interoperability ecosystem around them. Various compression algorithms, cryptography algorithms, communication protocols benefit from having a permissively-licensed implementation. Producing a closed-source fork won't make much sense, and where it does, won't damage the ecosystem. If I invented a new image compression format, I would like to see it supported everywhere, including all possible closed-source software.
There are things that are complex enough, and build an ecosystem on top of them. Producing a closed fork may split the ecosystem, and strangle the open branch if it. These things should use a copyleft license, or maybe dual strict copyleft + commercial license. Linux, Python, Postgres, Grafana, Nexcloud are good examples.
WordPress did it almost right, it uses GPL v2. But to force contributions from hosters, they should have used AGPL, which did not even exist at the time.
Your whole outlook is against the philosophy of Free Software. The whole point of free software is user freedom. If users can get better/cheaper services from WPEngine than they can from WordPress, and this is putting WordPress out of business: good. Companies should compete on services, not by enforcing a software monopoly.
This is better for users than the alternative. Since they're using open source software, they can always switch back if WordPress starts offering better services, or switch to some new company that can do it even better than either in the future.
People get mad about appropriating a term ("open source") that has had for 20 years a clear definition (among others "no discrimination against field of endeavor", "license must not restrict other software") for licenses that violate it.
Well, yes and no. You can change it, but only going forward. A change doesn’t mean that WPengine would have to stop using it. They would have what they have, but they wouldn’t be able to use anything new, developed under new license terms. And I think a lot of the community would walk away from Wordpress and side with WPengine. There would be a high profile fork.
I don't believe this is correct in this case; realistically, I don't think they can change it at all. As far as I can tell, the WordPress contribution process doesn't involve a CLA or CAA.
That means any license change for WordPress would require getting agreement from every single third-party contributor whose code is still present in the codebase; and/or, removing or rewriting code where the contributor (copyright holder) does not agree. In practical terms, that isn't going to be possible.
WordPress itself is also a fork, which further impacts the situation if any ancient b2/cafelog code is still present in the codebase.
The key point here is that without a CAA, third-party contributors still own the copyright to their code contributions; and without a CLA, the project owner has no legal authority to re-license that third-party code in ways which violate the contributors' license.
The "change it going forwards" thing generally only applies if a CLA or CAA was used; or if the previous license was a permissive one and the new license terms don't violate the old license terms in any way.
> You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy.
For source-availible software, you do. Someone "stealing" your code is table-stakes, if that turns your stomach then open source licenses aren't for you. You can sell your software and enjoy all the same protections of copyright that FOSS benefits from, instead. Microsoft built an empire doing that.
It's no use crying over spilled milk if the software is freely licensed. There just isn't. If a paid competitor can do a better job, it will inevitably replace the free alternative - that's competition. When you try to use fatalist framing devices like "open source has a problem" you ignore all the developers happily coexisting with FOSS. The ones who don't complain, many of whom spend their whole lives never asking for anything but the right to contribute.
If that's a problem and you dislike your neighbors, you're the one who needs to find a new neighborhood.
> I don't understand what open source purism even is.
I believe GP is referring to the behavior of users, not the developer. That is, an increasingly large segment of the industry refuses to touch software using non-OSI-approved licenses. Open source purists view non-OSI "source available" licenses with the same disdain as fully proprietary closed-source software.
In turn, this situation makes it extremely hard for independent-minded developers to form businesses for any software that doesn't lend itself well to SaaS. Massive companies can afford to release things as FOSS, but smaller/bootstrapped businesses effectively cannot.
Compare this to a few decades ago: the industry used to be less dogmatic regarding licenses, and there were a lot more smaller independent software vendors.
OSI was literally started by the leeching megacorps (look at their list of sponsors this is not some grand conspiracy) to shame people away from creating more fair licenses.
They are already angry enough that they had to consider AGPL as open source because it meets all their criteria.
The threat was to "go nuclear". Among other things
* Start a smear campaign
* block people from wordpress.org unless they ticked a loyalty checkbox stating they weren't affiliated with wpengine
* Take over and null Advanced Custom Fields, a WPengine plugin
* Block wpengine from wordpress.org, which is baked into wordpress, refuse to name a price for access, refuse to allow development of any alternate plugin hosting system
* Ban wordpress.org accounts of anyone who spoke up in favour of wpengine
* Start specific campaigns to poach wpengine clients
* start a website listing the staging urls of all wpengine customers and cite which ones left wpengine
I'm sure I've forgotten some things. The deal with extortion is you may have a legal ability to request money you are not legally entitled to. You may have a legal ability to take certain actions. But what is often not legal is threatening to take certain otherwise legal actions UNLESS you are paid money you are not legally entitled to.
The extortion claim was dismissed as the judge found there's no civil extortion tort under California law. California prosecutors haven't seen fit to file charges, so no formal proceeding.
But you're being rather blithe in your description.
If we're listing them in detail personally I think one of the most offensive (though least commercially relevant) offenses was to attempt to use public resources, the trademark owned by a 501c3 charity, fraudulently transferred back to Matt, to extort them. Both since that's obviously fucking wrong, and they were already only making nominative use of the trademark (i.e. using it to refer to WordPress's product) which they have a free speech right to do.
But WP Engine was equally shitty (even if it's "legal" - OSI purism has no sense of justice) to steal his company's lunch, from their decades of hard work, and contribute absolutely nothing back.
Again, it reeks of the same foul behavior we see from the hyperscalers.
Just to be clear, by “steal his company’s lunch” you mean “use software his company published in the manner specified by that software’s license,” right? It’s a funny definition of theft.
But them behaving badly (or not; I don’t know enough here to agree or disagree) isn’t the legal issue. Matt is in court for allegedly harming WPE’s business in violation of law and contracts, which has monetary damages WPE can seek to recover.
If you call me names, you’re misbehaving and should be called out for it. If I retaliate by knocking over your fence and spraypainting your cat, you get to sue me even though you were the one who behaved poorly, but legally, to start with.
TL;DR Matt claims WPE acted unethically, which is shameful. WPE claims Matt tried to ruin their business, in ways they say are illegal.
> But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
ACF was so important to the ecosystem that Automattic felt the need to grab it after they kicked out the maintainers. Doesn't that go against the story that WPEngine was contributing nothing?
> But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
> They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
> I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
Speak for yourself. Other people have different values and therefore interpretations of what's "moral" or "just".
If you want to make the argument that the only use of open source that's moral is one in which the user contributes back, that's fine. But I think you'll find yourself in a minority.
It's not equally shitty. Actively lying or smearing someone else is at least one level above freeloading on shittiness. WPE has explicit permission to freeload. No one gives explicit permission to drag their name through mud. Sorry, "both sides" won't cut it here.
I don't agree that WPE's behavior was shitty (as already discussed), let alone "equally" shitty. Even if I did though, so what? Two wrongs don't make a right. Shitty behavior doesn't justify someone else's lying/cheating/extorting/defaming/... Even criminals, real ones who have done far worse things than anything that happens in a business dispute, have the right to seek recourse via the legal system.
To say that 99% of what became WordPress was "done by him and his company" completely ignores the rich ecosystem of free and non-free plugins that have driven its value. A competitive landscape of hosting solutions like WP Engine drives increased demand for that plugin ecosystem; such demand, in turn, increases the value of WordPress and the company that shepherds its development.
My sympathies would lie, say, with a small development team, with minimal third-party contributors, for whom donations would make a massive difference in their ability to focus on their passion project, being stiffed by the AWS's of the world without as much as a corporate sponsorship of the project. Or even a small startup who sees a large behemoth supplant their ability to drive revenue via hosting.
My sympathies do not apply to $7.5B companies. At that scale, if your core product is open source and you're not continuing to innovate (including on business models beyond mere hosting) to stay ahead of competitors who are using your product the way the entire contributor community (not just you as the creator!) licensed it to them, there's no moral high ground.
This mentality drives me bonkers. If you don't want other people doing what they want with open source code, then don't open source it, at least not under a permissive license.
People are upset with Matt (though not necessarily the commenters you were replying to - TBH I thought it weird you posted your comment implying they were "attacking" Matt when they were simply pointing out the actual reality of the court ruling) because he wants to have his cake and eat it to: he wants to get all the benefits of open source (i.e. faster adoption and ecosystem creation) but then thinks he can be arbiter of some rules he made up in his head about "how much" someone who makes money off WordPress needs to give back.
So many times I've seen people complain about situations that would have been solved by choosing the license that actually matches how they intend others to use their work.
Some engineers seem stuck to the idea that if they choose a permissive license, people will still contribute back for some idea of "community" or "goodwill" - while really the license itself is the declaration of expected behavior.
By choosing a license, you're explicitly setting how you intend that code to be used - if you want don't /really/ want other people to monetize your work with no feedback, for example, that is what the license is for. If you don't want people to "leech" on your work, then choose one of the (many) licenses that disallows that.
This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.
I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."
My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.
> My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code.
Definitely. And not only companies; even Debian rejected some packages because the upstream owners added restrictive "desires" on top of the actual licenses.
Yep. And the reality is that 99.99% of open source is driven by a single contributor. I used to live in the open source world and talk with companies who were thinking about releasing something as open source and the biggest myth I had to disabuse them of was the idea that lots of contributors would show up to work on the code. In rare cases with high value projects that does happen, but mostly not. Honestly, GitHub was the best thing to happen to open source because it made it much easier to get the code and create PRs. In the old days, you had contributor agreements, emailed patches, etc. The bar was a lot higher for a contributor.
These days I honestly suspect tons of people do not think about the license they choose for their projects AT ALL and just reflexively put MIT. Like, if they were sleeping and you prodded them and said "license", they would mumble "MIT".
Yeah, and this is blatant when it is VC startup type stuff. But on the other hand you have say Redis, which seemed to be just some legitimate OSS cool but boring infrastructure for a long time, patches welcome. And then it becomes some VC 'cloud solution'. And everyone has to adapt (or pay).
Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.
For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?
WordPress is GPL - the GPL, like all "Open Source" (using OSI's definition) licenses enables commercial use, and that is a subset of one of the FSF's core principles (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).
By WPE - I don't think anyone has even claimed that informally - since they don't distribute software and WordPress is GPL not AGPL it would be hard to. Moreover they (according to themselves) use an unmodified version of WordPress which would make it next to impossible. Of course according to Matt they use “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress” but “is not WordPress.” And is a “cheap knock off” or a “bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code.” [1] but there's still no claim that they distribute that simulacra.
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
It was pretty different in a way that brought millions of people into WordPress, but it has evolved in a way that makes a lot of sense to people, clarifying what WordPress is, what the host is, and what the application layers on top of it are. And the new AI / Telex / Studio stuff is super cool.
> I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.
Wordpress became as successful as it did because of the open-source license.
If you were starting a website of your own using a tool just like this, and it wasn’t up on GitHub with a fully open source license, would you use it or look for an alternative that met those criteria?
Wordpress extracted significant value from the open-source license itself (and probably wouldn’t exist today without it). I’m not sure they realise that.
Exactly. It's very convenient to claim that somebody else benefits from the open license when there have always been dozens of competitors behind wordpress ready to take their place.
There are even commercial WP competitors with highly superior product like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. And you know what? They make fraction of what Automattic does. The strategy to offer free product and then make money on addons and hosting is clearly superior. But let's no mistake WP is for Automattic more like open-source freemium NOT some ideologically pure charity.
I really don't think it's fair to say the community is attacking Matt. Some people may be unfairly hounding Matt, but I think for the most part people are just pointing out that Matt is saying things that are misleading, without much prejudice to whether or not the situation was fair to begin with. It can be true that WP Engine is a leech and that Matt violated the law at the same time; the courts only care about the latter.
Unfortunately, though, people are really wont to loop the open source sustainability question into everything, even if it's only tangential (in that the WordPress situation is related to it in general, though it has little to do with the actual case here IMO.) Thus, like a broken MP3, I feel obliged to point out that not everyone universally agrees that we need to "defend" open source in this way.
Open source and free software are ultimately movements whose primary concerns are the rights of the users of the code with open/free licensing, not the developers; except of course by virtue of developers themselves being users. I think this is getting lost or perhaps intentionally ignored simply because people want the model of monetizing free/open source software by selling it as a service to work and be sustainable. Philosophically, open source doesn't care if it's fair what WP Engine did or how Matt can make a living, and this is definitely both for better or worse, but trying to alter these characteristics will result in something that is less universally applicable than open source, so I think it's moot. (Of course, the most philosophically suitable response to SaaS is AGPL, but again, AGPL is mostly concerned about the rights of users, not the rights of developers.)
I totally can see how the sustainability issue is a huge problem, but if there's absolutely no way to make open source software more sustainable in the long term without changing it into essentially a different movement, then we're just going to need something else (i.e. Fair Source.) However, even if open source proves unsustainable for some models of software, it clearly can do great for other software, so it's probably here to stay, plus we still have many avenues we can go down to improve matters (I think that government funding for open source is brilliant, and it has shown some promising results already IMO.)
I say all of this as someone who would definitely love to be able to just work on open source full time... but I want it to really be open source.
> WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
To me, its not right that if you follow this open source license legal contract that there's then an additional, arbitrary set of restrictions that you must also follow.
If you don't want companies from making money from your own source project, don't license it in a way that lets them. It's really not that hard.
> Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
IIRC Manifest v2 was never a part of WebKit. Chrome introduced it in it's browser after they 'took webkit'. Google has continued to contribute to Webkit (and Blink), and is a good example of open source development.
If AWS or WPEngine release their sources, then they are upholding their end of the bargain. Why shouldn't they make money, if they can?
If they are not releasing their sources, because of inappropriate licences, then that's what licenses like AGPL are there for.
I've got much less of a problem with AWS making money than I do with Canonical replacing GPL code with knock offs designed to cut the community out of code sharing.
It’s not AGPL though, and AGPL would have solved the underlying problem. GPL existed to force companies to release changes so “I can have it also”; and that’s a political view, the whole “free as in freedom”. Cloud wasn’t accounted for in this pre-centralised internet. 2001 (B2), is long before AGPLv3, but if you have the same ideology, that’s what you want. You built a thing using GPL based code, I want it also.
Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
WPE says they use WordPress unmodified from the upstream source (which they contriubte(d)) to. The AGPL would not have changed anything in this dispute.
It's way more nuanced. Wordpress became popular thanks to convergence of many things including work done by PHP and shared hosting providers (and of course linux). WP itself is not that special CMS but it was main platform people knew about where you can easily self-host and thus be in control/independent. I can't understate how much this is THE main feature. And this is mainly thanks to the PHP/hosting not WP itself.
In that ecosystem everybody depends on everybody. It is also shared open competitive market. But importantly more people use WP the better for everyone.
When you start to throw your weight around thinking you should be getting more because it's all your doing... you will upset the balance. People will call you out. Because they want and need the ecosystem to stay open.
For example think about PHP itself... should they be upset and also want more? The creators of PHP didn't become millionares quite the oposite. Why aren't they entitled to some of the pie? Or Linux? Or what about the guy that cofounded Wordpress but never was invited to be part of Automattic?
>I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.
There are two different group of engineers on two different end of political belief and spectrum ( political here might not be the right word ). Unfortunately there hasn't been a healthy debate on HN about this since 2013 / 2014.
We ends up with big tech getting the hate, it doesn't matter what they do anymore. And no one is even willing to defend them going against the vocal HN comment's majority. Since WP Engine isn't big, the leaching hurt doesn't count. And of course Matt acted immaturely, which doesn't buy him much vote. It is forever more like a popularity contest.
We have seen the pendulum swinging back in the past 2 - 3 years. Where HN give credit to big tech even if they dont agree with them. ( I was surprised when someone on HN wrote something good about Meta ).
If there is anything we have learned or should have learned over the past 10 - 20 years. It is better to have a healthy disagreement written or spoken out, rather than being one sided on the topic and silent on another.
I don't think it makes sense to bring Big Tech into this, nor would I say opinion runs along a spectrum/binary. Neither WPE nor Automattic are Big Tech.
The main problem with Big Tech is that they're all criminals, they increasingly break the law at vast scale and the legal system seems incapable of doing anything about it. The issue of primary concern with them is a matter of law and society, namely are we a society of laws? Or one where the powerful merely purchase the justice system they want to have?
With WPE vs Matt, WPE has broken no laws as far as I know, and if Matt has, he probably isn't powerful enough to subvert the justice system to his will.
There is more to giving back than just source code. They can and do offer a service to host instances of WordPress for others to provide value to the WordPress community.
WP Engine literally paid for the conference at which Matt said WP Engine never paid for anything.
Also, Matt gave them permission to do what they're doing.
Also, Matt did to someone before him (that nobody remembers including me), what WP Engine did to Matt. So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on here - if WP Engine is bad, Matt is bad.
Matt cites three claims that are dismissed (antitrust, monopolization, and extortion), which based on my skim are really two claims. The first, as you say, is dismissed with leave to amend. The second is dismissed without leave to amend. The first is given the opportunity to be amended, but the dismissal demonstrates serious flaws in the legal argument that they will have difficulty recovering from. I think it's fair for him to celebrate this as a win.
I'd add that some of the WPEngine claims which have been dismissed were reaching quite a bit, e.g. that blocking WPEngine's access to wordpress.org constituted "computer hacking" under the CFAA.
Right. The surviving CFAA claim involves Automattic's takeover of WPEngine's plugin listing. I think this is a stronger claim, since it actually involves unauthorized access (rather than blocking access), and the judge seems to agree.
As one of the people being highly critical of Matt in this thread, I actually mildly agree with this. The CFAA interpreted broadly is a terrifyingly overbroad law, and while I don't approve of the conduct of seizing the plugin (and could see, for instance, a unfair business practices claim based on it) I think I'd prefer it if the courts interpreted the CFAA narrowly enough to not include an app store updating an app with something other than what the developer put in it.
From a strategic standpoint, this is exactly what you’d want: the judge cut through the noise, dismissed the flimsiest claims (many with leave to amend), and signaled that only well-substantiated allegations have a path forward. That’s a strong opening for Matt and Automattic.
The effort at https://fair.pm is well underway to cut out Matt and wordpress.org as a single point of failure and control in the community. It's a Linux Foundation project, being run by former WordPress community leaders (people who provided years of volunteer labor that directly benefited Automattic), and there's been interest from several large hosting providers, including some that are even larger than WPE. Matt is likely to find that by the time the trial actually starts, that he's already lost.
Looks interesting, but I don't see any mention of a reputation system - what's their plan for warning people about packages that should not be installed, such as hacked, covert adware/spyware, etc?
Package advisories are seen as a content moderation issue: repositories and clients will be able to subscribe to one or more streams of digitally signed "labels" that can be interpreted by a policy mechanism that can render a verdict anywhere from "show this warning" to "do not install" to "remove immediately". The architecture is based on the system used by BlueSky: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture.
It's also not implemented yet: the initial release of the FAIR package manager is aimed at the package distribution parts, both mirroring the themes/plugins on wordpress.org and using W3C DIDs on BlueSky's PLC server as an indirection in front of raw URLs for hand-curated packages not hosted on .org, such as the FAIR client and server plugins themselves.
My own role in FAIR is a lot simpler, and it's maintaining AspireCloud, the project from AspirePress (now a working group of FAIR) that implements enough of api.wordpress.org to enable a searchable mirror of all its downloadable assets. AC is usable on its own without the FAIR ecosystem, but also makes up a good chunk of it while things are getting bootstrapped. So while I have a pretty good grasp of the planned architecture, I'm still not the best person to give the details. There's a public Slack server on https://chat.fair.pm which is still the best place to go for answers, and discussion boards on Github for less synchronous discussion (though the problem with GH is there's so many repos it's hard to find the right one).
> Since each package has a fully unique ID, services can be "layered on top" to provide additional functionality. A moderation service can block users from installing known-dangerous packages, or highlight recommended packages - or even integrate with commercial services like vulnerability scanners.
Maybe he might be winning in courts, but I will never depend on any WordPress.com service again. Don't play with your users and developers that have supported you for more than a decade this childishly. Your public image will not recover from this.
Don't worry, he's not winning in the courts as much as he seems to be trying to claim (I'm reading the legal doc, not his blog post, but going off of the context of his headline and the comments here).
I wouldn't touch Wordpress.com, ever, although I still use wordpress the software and am happy to see movement in decentralizing the plugin and core repos.
Thanks to Matt's shenanigans I discovered ClassicPress a few months ago https://www.classicpress.net/ - I had such a good experience that I ended up migrating all of my self hosted blogs to it, as a form of insurance against further madness with the WP Foundation. Note that depending on what plugins or themes you are using, ClassicPress might not work as well for you. You can consider setting up a monthly donation to support development.
I wonder sometimes what is going on over there. WordPress had a great community , nice people, seemingly successful open source with a business attached. Maybe it wasn't enough? I know talking to some of the shops that use it that their clients were asking about this turn of events.
If you have an infrastructure, stability is a good selling point.
My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.
The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
If you could hypothetically turn back time to prior to what is now called the 'WordPress drama', would you personally choose this same path again, or would you do things differently?
Have you thought about licensing future additions to WordPress under AGPL? I believe it can be done [1]. This will disallow private forks and require companies to publish any changes they make.
It would disallow private forks of WordPress (require them to share the modifications) but I don't know whether WPEngine and other hosts have any private modifications or they all use stock WordPress.
It's been almost a year, I'm curious if there's been any serious discussions about settling this case (e.g. a proposal both sides were actually actively considering/negotiating)?
Hi, Matt. Why, in late 2025, should I opt to use PHP and WP for a blog or a web site instead of just using Rust and Tokio?
If I use Rust, my web site will be blazingly fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, and it can power performance-critical services that run on embedded devices and easily integrate with other languages. Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. And that's on top of how Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling. I can even use Rust to supercharge my JavaScript, one module at a time.
It depends on your goals, your customer needs. All technology is just a means to an end. Languages and frameworks are easy to switch between once you understand programming fundamentals. We run production Erlang code at Automattic. Use the right tool for the job. Don't start with a language; start with a problem to be solved.
I recently worked on a few client projects that used WP/Gutternberg.
I was pleasenetly surprised by how good the dev/editing experience has been compared to when I tried using Gutternberg a few years ago, some amazing work has gone into it.
Sadly I still have a lot of uneasiness around what has happened over the past year.
For most greenfield projects we have been using Statamic CMS
For those who still need word press, I recommend checking out the roots.io open source collective, they have done great work bringing modern PHP development practices into WP projects. Bedrock and Sage are a great starting point to any project.
As a wordpress dev, yeah. I've got a small file that's almost entirely devoted to reversing stupid things he unilaterally shoved into core. Off the top of my head, full screen editing by default, the stupid 'howdy' that crops up in several places, and the silent user content edit that he added to translate Wordpress into WordPress in the content of every single wp install (no, really, go try it. And then listen to the guy talk about how user content is sacred, lol.)
And I say this as somebody who thinks that the block editor is... fine. I use it in a hybrid style, using ACF to create blocks that behave and perform natively but don't require directly using all the stupid build tool cruft.
>I've got a small file that's almost entirely devoted to reversing stupid things he unilaterally shoved into core
That's actually very cool. In most runtimes the "core" built-ins and standard libraries are immutable. You'd have to recompile them with your changes to get the same effect. Not so with PHP. A footgun, but in this case a useful one.
Matt’s behavior was atrocious. I’m with WP Engine on this, and I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic. I don’t pretend to know the law better than they do, but still.
The court opinion doesn't mean what he is implying, although he isn't outright lying. See my explanation in this top-level comment I just made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927
Agreed about Matt, completely. It should be remembered that although it's framed as a legal win, it's not THE legal win. I am not a lawyer, but I think the practice is generally to make as many arguments as the law will support up front– but not all of them were ever going to stick. And WP Engine can still remedy any deficiencies in their pleading to try to make them stick (I'll wait for legal minds to finish reading this and explain it to me, though).
> I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic
There are 11 claims in WPE's complaint, three were dismissed, and as I understand it, only one of them decisively. Matt wants to spin it as good news, good for him. He's still potentially getting taken to the cleaners if he doesn't settle.
IIRC: guy made a CMS, built a successful company and organization and trademarks around it, decided last year that another company was using it unfairly, created lots of drama, lost his marbles
matt relies on the passage of time and the fact that nobody really cares too much about wordpress drama. it's best that people do not forget what type of person he actually is behind the public facade when he inevitably pulls this kind of shit again later.
from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:
you didnt even link to the right version of the DHH post! The original had this gem of a paragraph:
> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
And he continues to churn out popular open source projects - m9st recently related to moving off-cloud, using Linux etc... And ruby on rails continues to evolve immensely whereas WordPress is stuck in 2005
It's not clear to you that trying to use trademark law to prevent a company selling WordPress software from saying they offer WordPress software is "being in the wrong"?
He didn't win. He won in the way Apple won over Epic. (Apple lost.) People seem not to understand that in a lawsuit like this the lawyers throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. WPEngine surely didn't expect all of this to fly... but some of it did.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter who or what it's about. Please take care to observe the guidelines if you want to participate here:
Matt is in large part mischaracterizing, although not outright lying about, the court's ruling. If you follow the link he provided to the ruling itself, many of the dismissed claims were dismissed "with leave to amend" (basically WPEngine has to fix their allegations), and one was dismissed for the reason that it should instead be asserted "as an affirmative defense if appropriate later in this litigation." There were some claims dismissed in a way WPEngine can't fix, but not many, and others were upheld.
I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
In case Matt removes the link to the actual ruling from his post, and also simply for HN readers' convenience, here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/169/wpengine-i...
Lawyer here-100% agree. Calling this a win is super super strange. The only claims that were dismissed were long shots anyway and will just be amended except for extortion.
The court didn’t even find that there wasn’t extortion, just that you can’t privately sue over the kind of extortion claimed here. Which means California could actually still sue over it, just not WPEngine.
Amusingly, the court also refused to take judicial notice of several documents Automattic submitted because WPEngine said they were not authentic copies of the documents.
Overall this is emphatically not a win. They knocked out roughly no interesting claims, knocked out zero claims permanently (the one claim that can’t be amended could still be sued over by California, and they actually might because it’s California), and will have just made themselves work arguing the same claims again once amended.
They will still end up in trial in 2027 or 2028.
The only usefulness of this would have been as a delaying tactic but I don’t see how that benefits Automattic given the PR disaster they made of this
It's only super strange if you have no knowledge of who Matt is. Poor attempts at misdirection is his status quo.
Thanks for that informative analysis and extra details!
Just the claims where dismissal was outright denied are also potentially (up to judge and jury at later stages) enough for some pretty devastating damages... I second that this was a loss for Matt. It wasn't even "a draw" where the plaintiffs have to try again with an amended complaint (not that they will necessarily not bother to amend).
> I have no connection to either side here, nor am I a lawyer, but I do know how to read a legal opinion.
Describes me as well.
I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.
I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.
WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
They're doing what AWS and the other hyperscalers have done. Making bank on other people's hard work because "pure" open source allows for third party commercialization without compensation. (Or even giving back, as is with WP Engine's case. IIRC, they're not a top contributor to the open source code.)
Shouldn't we be angry at the appropriators that take everything and give nothing back?
AWS is 99.999% closed source. They're taxing the industry and contributing to increased centralization. Much of what made the early web so exciting has been hoovered up by these open source thieves.
Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
Again - I think the community is attacking the wrong person here. Matt acted immaturely, but he's the one that put in the work. Not WP Engine.
No amount of altruism or engineering work entitles you to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...
When you publish something under an open source license, you entitle the rest of the world to use it to get rich. That's what the license says on the tin, what the licenses have always been advertised, etc. I have absolutely no problem with AWS or WPEngine using that entitlement, nor do I have any problem with any software engineer (or software engineering organization like AWS) choosing not to publish source code they didn't promise to. Even if I wasn't of this opinion though - I don't see how someone violating this supposed prohibition could possibly entitle Matt to lie/cheat/extort/defame/...
Edit: I know it's off topic to talk about flagging, but can we consider not flagging the comment this is in reply to? I think it's generated valuable discussion for people learning about this case... even though I strongly disagree with the author.
This open source purism only benefits the leeches.
This is the same defense I see repeated for Amazon and Google, and they're two of the biggest destroyers.
Honestly OSI and their definition of "open" has been a scourge. Google and Amazon encourage this thinking because it benefits them.
You can have non-commercial "fair source" for customers that prevents vultures from stealing your hard work. That's ethical, yet it gets dunked on by OSI purists.
You can demand that profiteers be required to open source their entire stack. But these licenses are discouraged and underutilized.
But when this keeps keeps happening again and again and continues to be met with victims blaming -- I'm disgusted by the open source community's failure to be pragmatic and sustainable.
You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy. And so what did they take and take and never give themselves?
Open source has a problem.
Open source, and Free Software especially, isn’t about pragmatism, or at least not only pragmatism. It’s about user freedom.
And I only hear people complaining about shared source and other proprietary software licenses when the people using them claim they’re open source so that they can piggyback on that goodwill without actually participating. It’s perfectly fine if someone wants to release stuff under a closed license. They just don’t get to do that and then brag about their open source contributions.
> It’s about user freedom.
I think it's worth asking "who is the user?" in this type of scenario. Because to my mind, AWS or WP Engine aren't really "users" per se - they are resellers that provide services to end-users, and the end-users are the only ones whose rights we should be particularly concerned about
Of course, most of these licenses were written before reselling open-source software was a hugely valuable endeavour, so they make no distinction between resellers and end-users...
They're using the software to achieve a useful aim (build a business that offers a service).
Difficult to get a purer example of a "user" than this.
There are things that are compact but build an interoperability ecosystem around them. Various compression algorithms, cryptography algorithms, communication protocols benefit from having a permissively-licensed implementation. Producing a closed-source fork won't make much sense, and where it does, won't damage the ecosystem. If I invented a new image compression format, I would like to see it supported everywhere, including all possible closed-source software.
There are things that are complex enough, and build an ecosystem on top of them. Producing a closed fork may split the ecosystem, and strangle the open branch if it. These things should use a copyleft license, or maybe dual strict copyleft + commercial license. Linux, Python, Postgres, Grafana, Nexcloud are good examples.
WordPress did it almost right, it uses GPL v2. But to force contributions from hosters, they should have used AGPL, which did not even exist at the time.
Your whole outlook is against the philosophy of Free Software. The whole point of free software is user freedom. If users can get better/cheaper services from WPEngine than they can from WordPress, and this is putting WordPress out of business: good. Companies should compete on services, not by enforcing a software monopoly.
This is better for users than the alternative. Since they're using open source software, they can always switch back if WordPress starts offering better services, or switch to some new company that can do it even better than either in the future.
Free software has nothing to do with making services cheaper.
If you're mad about what someone can legally do under your license, get a better license
Bingo. This is the crux of the whole thing.
Thing is, whenever they use, or switch to, a "better" license, people get mad about that too.
People get mad about appropriating a term ("open source") that has had for 20 years a clear definition (among others "no discrimination against field of endeavor", "license must not restrict other software") for licenses that violate it.
Not the developer's problem. Don't like the license? Don't use the software.
(Note, I'm not defending anything that MM has done, but you're allowed to change your license, even if users dont like it.)
Well, yes and no. You can change it, but only going forward. A change doesn’t mean that WPengine would have to stop using it. They would have what they have, but they wouldn’t be able to use anything new, developed under new license terms. And I think a lot of the community would walk away from Wordpress and side with WPengine. There would be a high profile fork.
> You can change it, but only going forward.
I don't believe this is correct in this case; realistically, I don't think they can change it at all. As far as I can tell, the WordPress contribution process doesn't involve a CLA or CAA.
That means any license change for WordPress would require getting agreement from every single third-party contributor whose code is still present in the codebase; and/or, removing or rewriting code where the contributor (copyright holder) does not agree. In practical terms, that isn't going to be possible.
WordPress itself is also a fork, which further impacts the situation if any ancient b2/cafelog code is still present in the codebase.
The key point here is that without a CAA, third-party contributors still own the copyright to their code contributions; and without a CLA, the project owner has no legal authority to re-license that third-party code in ways which violate the contributors' license.
The "change it going forwards" thing generally only applies if a CLA or CAA was used; or if the previous license was a permissive one and the new license terms don't violate the old license terms in any way.
Let the chips fall as they may, no?
If there was a way to make changes entirely free of consequence, everybody would be doing it.
Yep, agreed. IMO, Matt just has sour grapes that someone was able to build a superior business.
The developer getting mad about their own choice is fundamentally different from other people getting mad about their choice.
Sadly, I can testify to that.
If you don't like that, just use AGPL that force SAAS to publish the modifications.
Seriously. I don't even understand what the argument is about.
> You have to give away everything or you're the bad guy.
For source-availible software, you do. Someone "stealing" your code is table-stakes, if that turns your stomach then open source licenses aren't for you. You can sell your software and enjoy all the same protections of copyright that FOSS benefits from, instead. Microsoft built an empire doing that.
It's no use crying over spilled milk if the software is freely licensed. There just isn't. If a paid competitor can do a better job, it will inevitably replace the free alternative - that's competition. When you try to use fatalist framing devices like "open source has a problem" you ignore all the developers happily coexisting with FOSS. The ones who don't complain, many of whom spend their whole lives never asking for anything but the right to contribute.
If that's a problem and you dislike your neighbors, you're the one who needs to find a new neighborhood.
>This open source purism only benefits the leeches.
I don't understand what open source purism even is.
You pick a license for your software, and now you're mad because people are making money off of it. Then why even go with an open source license?
Do what Bill Gates did tell people to pay up for using Microsoft software, because Microsoft software isn't open source.
What are you crying about?
> I don't understand what open source purism even is.
I believe GP is referring to the behavior of users, not the developer. That is, an increasingly large segment of the industry refuses to touch software using non-OSI-approved licenses. Open source purists view non-OSI "source available" licenses with the same disdain as fully proprietary closed-source software.
In turn, this situation makes it extremely hard for independent-minded developers to form businesses for any software that doesn't lend itself well to SaaS. Massive companies can afford to release things as FOSS, but smaller/bootstrapped businesses effectively cannot.
Compare this to a few decades ago: the industry used to be less dogmatic regarding licenses, and there were a lot more smaller independent software vendors.
This is not "open source purism," dude, what are you even talking about? This is just choosing a proper open source license.
OSI was literally started by the leeching megacorps (look at their list of sponsors this is not some grand conspiracy) to shame people away from creating more fair licenses.
They are already angry enough that they had to consider AGPL as open source because it meets all their criteria.
The extortion was to get them to contribute or pay somebody to contribute. And the threat was to withdraw his own resources.
The threat was to "go nuclear". Among other things
* Start a smear campaign
* block people from wordpress.org unless they ticked a loyalty checkbox stating they weren't affiliated with wpengine
* Take over and null Advanced Custom Fields, a WPengine plugin
* Block wpengine from wordpress.org, which is baked into wordpress, refuse to name a price for access, refuse to allow development of any alternate plugin hosting system
* Ban wordpress.org accounts of anyone who spoke up in favour of wpengine
* Start specific campaigns to poach wpengine clients
* start a website listing the staging urls of all wpengine customers and cite which ones left wpengine
I'm sure I've forgotten some things. The deal with extortion is you may have a legal ability to request money you are not legally entitled to. You may have a legal ability to take certain actions. But what is often not legal is threatening to take certain otherwise legal actions UNLESS you are paid money you are not legally entitled to.
The extortion claim was dismissed as the judge found there's no civil extortion tort under California law. California prosecutors haven't seen fit to file charges, so no formal proceeding.
But you're being rather blithe in your description.
If we're listing them in detail personally I think one of the most offensive (though least commercially relevant) offenses was to attempt to use public resources, the trademark owned by a 501c3 charity, fraudulently transferred back to Matt, to extort them. Both since that's obviously fucking wrong, and they were already only making nominative use of the trademark (i.e. using it to refer to WordPress's product) which they have a free speech right to do.
This was all shitty behavior.
But WP Engine was equally shitty (even if it's "legal" - OSI purism has no sense of justice) to steal his company's lunch, from their decades of hard work, and contribute absolutely nothing back.
Again, it reeks of the same foul behavior we see from the hyperscalers.
Just to be clear, by “steal his company’s lunch” you mean “use software his company published in the manner specified by that software’s license,” right? It’s a funny definition of theft.
Exactly. “You complied with our license. How dare you!”
But them behaving badly (or not; I don’t know enough here to agree or disagree) isn’t the legal issue. Matt is in court for allegedly harming WPE’s business in violation of law and contracts, which has monetary damages WPE can seek to recover.
If you call me names, you’re misbehaving and should be called out for it. If I retaliate by knocking over your fence and spraypainting your cat, you get to sue me even though you were the one who behaved poorly, but legally, to start with.
TL;DR Matt claims WPE acted unethically, which is shameful. WPE claims Matt tried to ruin their business, in ways they say are illegal.
I agree with everything you've said.
By the letter of the law, WPE is squeaky clean. But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
> But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
ACF was so important to the ecosystem that Automattic felt the need to grab it after they kicked out the maintainers. Doesn't that go against the story that WPEngine was contributing nothing?
> But by kumbaya ethics or community spirit or whatever you want to call it, they're scummy vultures.
> They're dipping into the "take a penny" jar and not replenishing it.
> I can't square this with any sense of justice or morality.
Speak for yourself. Other people have different values and therefore interpretations of what's "moral" or "just".
If you want to make the argument that the only use of open source that's moral is one in which the user contributes back, that's fine. But I think you'll find yourself in a minority.
It's not equally shitty. Actively lying or smearing someone else is at least one level above freeloading on shittiness. WPE has explicit permission to freeload. No one gives explicit permission to drag their name through mud. Sorry, "both sides" won't cut it here.
I don't agree that WPE's behavior was shitty (as already discussed), let alone "equally" shitty. Even if I did though, so what? Two wrongs don't make a right. Shitty behavior doesn't justify someone else's lying/cheating/extorting/defaming/... Even criminals, real ones who have done far worse things than anything that happens in a business dispute, have the right to seek recourse via the legal system.
Would you care to disclose your identity?
The last time I encountered someone making these points, they had a financial bias. Is that true for you?
I wrote a blog post about this: https://ma.tt/2025/09/externalities/
To say that 99% of what became WordPress was "done by him and his company" completely ignores the rich ecosystem of free and non-free plugins that have driven its value. A competitive landscape of hosting solutions like WP Engine drives increased demand for that plugin ecosystem; such demand, in turn, increases the value of WordPress and the company that shepherds its development.
My sympathies would lie, say, with a small development team, with minimal third-party contributors, for whom donations would make a massive difference in their ability to focus on their passion project, being stiffed by the AWS's of the world without as much as a corporate sponsorship of the project. Or even a small startup who sees a large behemoth supplant their ability to drive revenue via hosting.
My sympathies do not apply to $7.5B companies. At that scale, if your core product is open source and you're not continuing to innovate (including on business models beyond mere hosting) to stay ahead of competitors who are using your product the way the entire contributor community (not just you as the creator!) licensed it to them, there's no moral high ground.
> They're just leaches on an open source license.
This mentality drives me bonkers. If you don't want other people doing what they want with open source code, then don't open source it, at least not under a permissive license.
People are upset with Matt (though not necessarily the commenters you were replying to - TBH I thought it weird you posted your comment implying they were "attacking" Matt when they were simply pointing out the actual reality of the court ruling) because he wants to have his cake and eat it to: he wants to get all the benefits of open source (i.e. faster adoption and ecosystem creation) but then thinks he can be arbiter of some rules he made up in his head about "how much" someone who makes money off WordPress needs to give back.
So many times I've seen people complain about situations that would have been solved by choosing the license that actually matches how they intend others to use their work.
Some engineers seem stuck to the idea that if they choose a permissive license, people will still contribute back for some idea of "community" or "goodwill" - while really the license itself is the declaration of expected behavior.
By choosing a license, you're explicitly setting how you intend that code to be used - if you want don't /really/ want other people to monetize your work with no feedback, for example, that is what the license is for. If you don't want people to "leech" on your work, then choose one of the (many) licenses that disallows that.
This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.
I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."
My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.
> My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code.
Definitely. And not only companies; even Debian rejected some packages because the upstream owners added restrictive "desires" on top of the actual licenses.
Yep. And the reality is that 99.99% of open source is driven by a single contributor. I used to live in the open source world and talk with companies who were thinking about releasing something as open source and the biggest myth I had to disabuse them of was the idea that lots of contributors would show up to work on the code. In rare cases with high value projects that does happen, but mostly not. Honestly, GitHub was the best thing to happen to open source because it made it much easier to get the code and create PRs. In the old days, you had contributor agreements, emailed patches, etc. The bar was a lot higher for a contributor.
These days I honestly suspect tons of people do not think about the license they choose for their projects AT ALL and just reflexively put MIT. Like, if they were sleeping and you prodded them and said "license", they would mumble "MIT".
Yeah, and this is blatant when it is VC startup type stuff. But on the other hand you have say Redis, which seemed to be just some legitimate OSS cool but boring infrastructure for a long time, patches welcome. And then it becomes some VC 'cloud solution'. And everyone has to adapt (or pay).
Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.
For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?
WordPress is GPL - the GPL, like all "Open Source" (using OSI's definition) licenses enables commercial use, and that is a subset of one of the FSF's core principles (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).
I haven't been following this conflict: have the terms of the GPL been broken?
By WPE - I don't think anyone has even claimed that informally - since they don't distribute software and WordPress is GPL not AGPL it would be hard to. Moreover they (according to themselves) use an unmodified version of WordPress which would make it next to impossible. Of course according to Matt they use “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress” but “is not WordPress.” And is a “cheap knock off” or a “bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code.” [1] but there's still no claim that they distribute that simulacra.
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
[1] Taken from the complaint https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
ps wordpress dot com is the most bastardized simulacra of wordpress in existence
It was pretty different in a way that brought millions of people into WordPress, but it has evolved in a way that makes a lot of sense to people, clarifying what WordPress is, what the host is, and what the application layers on top of it are. And the new AI / Telex / Studio stuff is super cool.
Why do you have to pay for using plugins on wp dot com, which are free everywhere else in wordpress, Matt?
> I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.
Wordpress became as successful as it did because of the open-source license.
If you were starting a website of your own using a tool just like this, and it wasn’t up on GitHub with a fully open source license, would you use it or look for an alternative that met those criteria?
Wordpress extracted significant value from the open-source license itself (and probably wouldn’t exist today without it). I’m not sure they realise that.
Exactly. It's very convenient to claim that somebody else benefits from the open license when there have always been dozens of competitors behind wordpress ready to take their place.
There are even commercial WP competitors with highly superior product like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. And you know what? They make fraction of what Automattic does. The strategy to offer free product and then make money on addons and hosting is clearly superior. But let's no mistake WP is for Automattic more like open-source freemium NOT some ideologically pure charity.
I really don't think it's fair to say the community is attacking Matt. Some people may be unfairly hounding Matt, but I think for the most part people are just pointing out that Matt is saying things that are misleading, without much prejudice to whether or not the situation was fair to begin with. It can be true that WP Engine is a leech and that Matt violated the law at the same time; the courts only care about the latter.
Unfortunately, though, people are really wont to loop the open source sustainability question into everything, even if it's only tangential (in that the WordPress situation is related to it in general, though it has little to do with the actual case here IMO.) Thus, like a broken MP3, I feel obliged to point out that not everyone universally agrees that we need to "defend" open source in this way.
Open source and free software are ultimately movements whose primary concerns are the rights of the users of the code with open/free licensing, not the developers; except of course by virtue of developers themselves being users. I think this is getting lost or perhaps intentionally ignored simply because people want the model of monetizing free/open source software by selling it as a service to work and be sustainable. Philosophically, open source doesn't care if it's fair what WP Engine did or how Matt can make a living, and this is definitely both for better or worse, but trying to alter these characteristics will result in something that is less universally applicable than open source, so I think it's moot. (Of course, the most philosophically suitable response to SaaS is AGPL, but again, AGPL is mostly concerned about the rights of users, not the rights of developers.)
I totally can see how the sustainability issue is a huge problem, but if there's absolutely no way to make open source software more sustainable in the long term without changing it into essentially a different movement, then we're just going to need something else (i.e. Fair Source.) However, even if open source proves unsustainable for some models of software, it clearly can do great for other software, so it's probably here to stay, plus we still have many avenues we can go down to improve matters (I think that government funding for open source is brilliant, and it has shown some promising results already IMO.)
I say all of this as someone who would definitely love to be able to just work on open source full time... but I want it to really be open source.
> WP Engine contributes nothing back. They're just leaches on an open source license.
To me, its not right that if you follow this open source license legal contract that there's then an additional, arbitrary set of restrictions that you must also follow.
If you don't want companies from making money from your own source project, don't license it in a way that lets them. It's really not that hard.
> Google for taking WebKit, snatching the web, and then removing Manifest v2 amongst other crimes.
IIRC Manifest v2 was never a part of WebKit. Chrome introduced it in it's browser after they 'took webkit'. Google has continued to contribute to Webkit (and Blink), and is a good example of open source development.
If AWS or WPEngine release their sources, then they are upholding their end of the bargain. Why shouldn't they make money, if they can?
If they are not releasing their sources, because of inappropriate licences, then that's what licenses like AGPL are there for.
I've got much less of a problem with AWS making money than I do with Canonical replacing GPL code with knock offs designed to cut the community out of code sharing.
It’s not AGPL though, and AGPL would have solved the underlying problem. GPL existed to force companies to release changes so “I can have it also”; and that’s a political view, the whole “free as in freedom”. Cloud wasn’t accounted for in this pre-centralised internet. 2001 (B2), is long before AGPLv3, but if you have the same ideology, that’s what you want. You built a thing using GPL based code, I want it also.
Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
WPE says they use WordPress unmodified from the upstream source (which they contriubte(d)) to. The AGPL would not have changed anything in this dispute.
It's way more nuanced. Wordpress became popular thanks to convergence of many things including work done by PHP and shared hosting providers (and of course linux). WP itself is not that special CMS but it was main platform people knew about where you can easily self-host and thus be in control/independent. I can't understate how much this is THE main feature. And this is mainly thanks to the PHP/hosting not WP itself.
In that ecosystem everybody depends on everybody. It is also shared open competitive market. But importantly more people use WP the better for everyone.
When you start to throw your weight around thinking you should be getting more because it's all your doing... you will upset the balance. People will call you out. Because they want and need the ecosystem to stay open.
For example think about PHP itself... should they be upset and also want more? The creators of PHP didn't become millionares quite the oposite. Why aren't they entitled to some of the pie? Or Linux? Or what about the guy that cofounded Wordpress but never was invited to be part of Automattic?
>I really don't get the engineers on HN sometimes.
There are two different group of engineers on two different end of political belief and spectrum ( political here might not be the right word ). Unfortunately there hasn't been a healthy debate on HN about this since 2013 / 2014.
We ends up with big tech getting the hate, it doesn't matter what they do anymore. And no one is even willing to defend them going against the vocal HN comment's majority. Since WP Engine isn't big, the leaching hurt doesn't count. And of course Matt acted immaturely, which doesn't buy him much vote. It is forever more like a popularity contest.
We have seen the pendulum swinging back in the past 2 - 3 years. Where HN give credit to big tech even if they dont agree with them. ( I was surprised when someone on HN wrote something good about Meta ).
If there is anything we have learned or should have learned over the past 10 - 20 years. It is better to have a healthy disagreement written or spoken out, rather than being one sided on the topic and silent on another.
I don't think it makes sense to bring Big Tech into this, nor would I say opinion runs along a spectrum/binary. Neither WPE nor Automattic are Big Tech.
The main problem with Big Tech is that they're all criminals, they increasingly break the law at vast scale and the legal system seems incapable of doing anything about it. The issue of primary concern with them is a matter of law and society, namely are we a society of laws? Or one where the powerful merely purchase the justice system they want to have?
With WPE vs Matt, WPE has broken no laws as far as I know, and if Matt has, he probably isn't powerful enough to subvert the justice system to his will.
No matter what my personal opinion one may have, it should not change the way one interprets a legal document, should it?
There is no obligation to contribute back. That's the whole point of open source. It's irrelevant how much WP Engine contributes.
Also, uh, they did contribute back, and to the ecosystem.
That they didn’t is pure lies and FUD from Matt who retreats back to the position that it “Wasn’t enough”…
There is more to giving back than just source code. They can and do offer a service to host instances of WordPress for others to provide value to the WordPress community.
WP Engine literally paid for the conference at which Matt said WP Engine never paid for anything.
Also, Matt gave them permission to do what they're doing.
Also, Matt did to someone before him (that nobody remembers including me), what WP Engine did to Matt. So he doesn't really have a leg to stand on here - if WP Engine is bad, Matt is bad.
Matt cites three claims that are dismissed (antitrust, monopolization, and extortion), which based on my skim are really two claims. The first, as you say, is dismissed with leave to amend. The second is dismissed without leave to amend. The first is given the opportunity to be amended, but the dismissal demonstrates serious flaws in the legal argument that they will have difficulty recovering from. I think it's fair for him to celebrate this as a win.
I'd add that some of the WPEngine claims which have been dismissed were reaching quite a bit, e.g. that blocking WPEngine's access to wordpress.org constituted "computer hacking" under the CFAA.
I agree, but note that the "computer hacking" (1030(a)(5)) CFAA claim survived, outright.
Only the extortion (1030(a)(7)) CFAA claim was dismissed, and it was dismissed with leave to amend.
Right. The surviving CFAA claim involves Automattic's takeover of WPEngine's plugin listing. I think this is a stronger claim, since it actually involves unauthorized access (rather than blocking access), and the judge seems to agree.
This could set a very dangerous precedent if it goes through.
As one of the people being highly critical of Matt in this thread, I actually mildly agree with this. The CFAA interpreted broadly is a terrifyingly overbroad law, and while I don't approve of the conduct of seizing the plugin (and could see, for instance, a unfair business practices claim based on it) I think I'd prefer it if the courts interpreted the CFAA narrowly enough to not include an app store updating an app with something other than what the developer put in it.
Thank you!
Considering how obviously in the wrong he is, it might not be too off calling that a win for him.
From a strategic standpoint, this is exactly what you’d want: the judge cut through the noise, dismissed the flimsiest claims (many with leave to amend), and signaled that only well-substantiated allegations have a path forward. That’s a strong opening for Matt and Automattic.
This isn't uncommon in proceedings like this.
>In case Matt removes the link
It is sad how his reputation is.
The effort at https://fair.pm is well underway to cut out Matt and wordpress.org as a single point of failure and control in the community. It's a Linux Foundation project, being run by former WordPress community leaders (people who provided years of volunteer labor that directly benefited Automattic), and there's been interest from several large hosting providers, including some that are even larger than WPE. Matt is likely to find that by the time the trial actually starts, that he's already lost.
Looks interesting, but I don't see any mention of a reputation system - what's their plan for warning people about packages that should not be installed, such as hacked, covert adware/spyware, etc?
Package advisories are seen as a content moderation issue: repositories and clients will be able to subscribe to one or more streams of digitally signed "labels" that can be interpreted by a policy mechanism that can render a verdict anywhere from "show this warning" to "do not install" to "remove immediately". The architecture is based on the system used by BlueSky: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/blueskys-moderation-architecture.
It's also not implemented yet: the initial release of the FAIR package manager is aimed at the package distribution parts, both mirroring the themes/plugins on wordpress.org and using W3C DIDs on BlueSky's PLC server as an indirection in front of raw URLs for hand-curated packages not hosted on .org, such as the FAIR client and server plugins themselves.
My own role in FAIR is a lot simpler, and it's maintaining AspireCloud, the project from AspirePress (now a working group of FAIR) that implements enough of api.wordpress.org to enable a searchable mirror of all its downloadable assets. AC is usable on its own without the FAIR ecosystem, but also makes up a good chunk of it while things are getting bootstrapped. So while I have a pretty good grasp of the planned architecture, I'm still not the best person to give the details. There's a public Slack server on https://chat.fair.pm which is still the best place to go for answers, and discussion boards on Github for less synchronous discussion (though the problem with GH is there's so many repos it's hard to find the right one).
> Since each package has a fully unique ID, services can be "layered on top" to provide additional functionality. A moderation service can block users from installing known-dangerous packages, or highlight recommended packages - or even integrate with commercial services like vulnerability scanners.
Maybe he might be winning in courts, but I will never depend on any WordPress.com service again. Don't play with your users and developers that have supported you for more than a decade this childishly. Your public image will not recover from this.
Don't worry, he's not winning in the courts as much as he seems to be trying to claim (I'm reading the legal doc, not his blog post, but going off of the context of his headline and the comments here).
I wouldn't touch Wordpress.com, ever, although I still use wordpress the software and am happy to see movement in decentralizing the plugin and core repos.
100% agree. I don't see how I could forget what happened.
Thanks to Matt's shenanigans I discovered ClassicPress a few months ago https://www.classicpress.net/ - I had such a good experience that I ended up migrating all of my self hosted blogs to it, as a form of insurance against further madness with the WP Foundation. Note that depending on what plugins or themes you are using, ClassicPress might not work as well for you. You can consider setting up a monthly donation to support development.
Oh man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone lose an internet drama, only to revive it a few months later when everyone had forgotten about it.
If we’re lucky he’s still not paying attention to either expert advice or common sense, and will show up to post in this very thread.
Howdy!
https://giphy.com/explore/oh-boy-here-we-go
Dude! Don’t do this, for real! Scram and pretend you’ve never heard of HN if asked. No courtroom good can come of you commenting here.
Matt had a golden goose and he decided it wasn't golden enough.
I removed/converted my last Wordpress site (commercial and otherwise) last month.
I wonder sometimes what is going on over there. WordPress had a great community , nice people, seemingly successful open source with a business attached. Maybe it wasn't enough? I know talking to some of the shops that use it that their clients were asking about this turn of events.
If you have an infrastructure, stability is a good selling point.
Converted to what if you don't mind me asking?
Im still using wp org, is that risky. I do like the platform.
Happy to answer any questions from HN folks, to the extent I can. I love this community and have been here since 2007.
> to the extent I can
Taking legal advice now? Rhetorical question, more a statement: last time you were here, you didn't.
edit: For the uninitiated, page 24 is neat. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
It's interesting to me that all the screenshots besides the HN one appear to be from mobile devices?
Do you have a response to the top comment (among others) which assert that you are mischaracterizing the ruling? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927
My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.
The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
If you could hypothetically turn back time to prior to what is now called the 'WordPress drama', would you personally choose this same path again, or would you do things differently?
Differently.
How so?
Have you thought about licensing future additions to WordPress under AGPL? I believe it can be done [1]. This will disallow private forks and require companies to publish any changes they make.
[1]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12276/how-to-...
I suspect WordPress will be GPL forever; it's a lovely license, and I enjoy publishing work under it.
How would this help? This isn’t at issue.
It would disallow private forks of WordPress (require them to share the modifications) but I don't know whether WPEngine and other hosts have any private modifications or they all use stock WordPress.
It's been almost a year, I'm curious if there's been any serious discussions about settling this case (e.g. a proposal both sides were actually actively considering/negotiating)?
There was an excellent magistrate judge and a settlement proceeding, which I showed up to in good faith, but the other CEO did not.
Are you considering or have you ever considered moving to or developing some other CMS?
I'm maintaining and developing two other CMS systems, in Tumblr and Day One, and I hope one day there can just be one.
Hi, Matt. Why, in late 2025, should I opt to use PHP and WP for a blog or a web site instead of just using Rust and Tokio?
If I use Rust, my web site will be blazingly fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, and it can power performance-critical services that run on embedded devices and easily integrate with other languages. Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. And that's on top of how Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling. I can even use Rust to supercharge my JavaScript, one module at a time.
It depends on your goals, your customer needs. All technology is just a means to an end. Languages and frameworks are easy to switch between once you understand programming fundamentals. We run production Erlang code at Automattic. Use the right tool for the job. Don't start with a language; start with a problem to be solved.
> Rust's rich type system and ownership model will guarantee me memory-safety and thread-safety, which eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.
With PHP, you don't have to worry about compile-time bugs, because there is no compile time.
…and instead you get runtime bugs which is somehow better?
If I may ask, what's your take on SSGs?
Static site generators? Not sure what you mean. A static site is appropriate in some situations. I love sites that are alive, dynamic, reactive.
I recently worked on a few client projects that used WP/Gutternberg. I was pleasenetly surprised by how good the dev/editing experience has been compared to when I tried using Gutternberg a few years ago, some amazing work has gone into it. Sadly I still have a lot of uneasiness around what has happened over the past year. For most greenfield projects we have been using Statamic CMS
For those who still need word press, I recommend checking out the roots.io open source collective, they have done great work bringing modern PHP development practices into WP projects. Bedrock and Sage are a great starting point to any project.
Just ditched my last WordPress installation in July. Good for you Matt.
Perhaps it’s a legal win but the PR disaster remains.
As our company thinks about a new website vendor, WordPress is off the table because of the nonsense.
I can't imagine the professional reputational damage I'd incur if I were to recommended wordpress, or worse, wordpress.com after all of this.
Genuinely, why? What kind of visions of reputational damage does having your marketing website on wordpress.com conjure up to you?
How would anyone even know where it’s hosted?
I get the guy pissed off some php devs but I’m sure as hell not hosting that shit myself, marketing team content can be their problem.
This guy is unbearable.
As a wordpress dev, yeah. I've got a small file that's almost entirely devoted to reversing stupid things he unilaterally shoved into core. Off the top of my head, full screen editing by default, the stupid 'howdy' that crops up in several places, and the silent user content edit that he added to translate Wordpress into WordPress in the content of every single wp install (no, really, go try it. And then listen to the guy talk about how user content is sacred, lol.)
And I say this as somebody who thinks that the block editor is... fine. I use it in a hybrid style, using ACF to create blocks that behave and perform natively but don't require directly using all the stupid build tool cruft.
>I've got a small file that's almost entirely devoted to reversing stupid things he unilaterally shoved into core
That's actually very cool. In most runtimes the "core" built-ins and standard libraries are immutable. You'd have to recompile them with your changes to get the same effect. Not so with PHP. A footgun, but in this case a useful one.
Why not share the diff so anyone can apply it :)
thats great matt. i still wont ever use wordpress because of your choices
The controversial topics around wordpress are surreal.
Matt’s behavior was atrocious. I’m with WP Engine on this, and I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic. I don’t pretend to know the law better than they do, but still.
The court opinion doesn't mean what he is implying, although he isn't outright lying. See my explanation in this top-level comment I just made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927
Agreed about Matt, completely. It should be remembered that although it's framed as a legal win, it's not THE legal win. I am not a lawyer, but I think the practice is generally to make as many arguments as the law will support up front– but not all of them were ever going to stick. And WP Engine can still remedy any deficiencies in their pleading to try to make them stick (I'll wait for legal minds to finish reading this and explain it to me, though).
> I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic
There are 11 claims in WPE's complaint, three were dismissed, and as I understand it, only one of them decisively. Matt wants to spin it as good news, good for him. He's still potentially getting taken to the cleaners if he doesn't settle.
WordPress is dying as ungraciously as free-to-air TV is.
Can someone provide some context for those of us who are utterly out of the loop?
IIRC: guy made a CMS, built a successful company and organization and trademarks around it, decided last year that another company was using it unfairly, created lots of drama, lost his marbles
One of his first posts on the topic: https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/
A collection of crazy quotes and events, biased towards the other perspective: https://mullenweg.wtf/
Edit: and HN commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
I remember this to be a pretty good recap of the whole fiasco:
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
matt relies on the passage of time and the fact that nobody really cares too much about wordpress drama. it's best that people do not forget what type of person he actually is behind the public facade when he inevitably pulls this kind of shit again later.
from literally back in 2011 when someone predicted exactly what would happen and got crucified for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117190122/http://wpblogger....
https://web.archive.org/web/20110117192124/http://wpblogger....
one of his responses to DHH when the WPE thing went down:
https://archive.md/UZZit
you didnt even link to the right version of the DHH post! The original had this gem of a paragraph:
> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?
https://archive.md/4yLNR
I wrote to DHH at the time hoping the Hey World part could be open sourced or ONCE as a blogging platform. But he wasn't interested in the idea.
The guy already created immense value by his open source work. It's fine for him not to open source everything.
And he continues to churn out popular open source projects - m9st recently related to moving off-cloud, using Linux etc... And ruby on rails continues to evolve immensely whereas WordPress is stuck in 2005
http://archive.today/wfrKj
Not for a paywall, of course: personal blog he hosts. Due to editing in the past.
"Win" or, said another way, "The bullshit I started is seeing an end". Whatever works for you, buddy.
It ain't working for him, but it's all he's got.
It ain't much and it's neither honest or work!
It's not clear to me that he's in the wrong.
https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/
It's not clear to you that trying to use trademark law to prevent a company selling WordPress software from saying they offer WordPress software is "being in the wrong"?
The mad lad won his case, but lost his reputation.
He didn't win. He won in the way Apple won over Epic. (Apple lost.) People seem not to understand that in a lawsuit like this the lawyers throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. WPEngine surely didn't expect all of this to fly... but some of it did.
he hasnt come even slightly close to winning his case
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Outside of cryptocurrency yeah