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Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions
- CMThF 2y agoOh no! Anyways...
- daenney 2y agoThere’s one useful paragraph of information in there, and the rest is Matt whining about the consequences of his own actions.
- phoe-krk 2y ago> As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers, so in order to avoid bothering the court I will say that none of the above applies to WP Engine, so if they need to bypass any of the above please just have your high-priced attorneys talk to my high-priced attorneys and we’ll arrange access, or just reach out directly to me on Slack and I’ll fix things for you. > I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages. > If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. If not, you can use literally any other web host in the world that isn’t suing me and is offering promotions and discounts for switching away from WP Engine. This post should be named "Holiday Breakdown" rather than "Holiday Break". In particular, one thing stood out to me: > I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. He can't prevent WP Engine from getting access to Automattic services, so he acts out his revenge on the rest of the world instead?
- drcongo 2y ago> If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services, they have great plans and pricing starting at $50/mo and scaling all the way up to $2,000/mo. Actually tempted.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars crying poverty while throwing a months-long temper tantrum. Hilarious if you don't have any stakes at play.
- MyFedora 2y ago> He can't prevent WP Engine from getting access to Automattic services, so he acts out his revenge on the rest of the world instead? Not a fan of Mullenweg either, but let's be realistic. For anyone who isn't completely detached from reality, dealing with lawsuits is draining, emotionally and mentally. It's easy to point fingers and assume motives, but unless you're in the trenches, it's hard to truly know what's going on in someone's head. Given the circumstances, his decision to take a break isn't exactly out of the ordinary. Most people would probably do the same if they were in his shoes.
- danaris 2y agoSure, but he brought 100% of this on himself with his previous petty-tyrant tantrums. There was absolutely no reason he needed to be on the business end of a lawsuit.
- acdha 2y agoThe lawsuit exists because he repeatedly chose to force it into existence. He will almost certainly lose it because he repeatedly made bad choices which had to have been against his lawyers’ counsel. He is likely going to lose the foundation’s non-profit status because he repeatedly made bad choices. I’m sorry for the other people affected and am amazed that he was willing to trash a reputation and business decades in the making, but it was his repeated choice to do so.
- solarkraft 2y agoMy brother in christ, he made this happen.
- phoe-krk 2y agoI'm not criticizing his personal decision of taking a break. I'm criticizing the fact that he pulled wordpress.org's functionality along with him, as if those functionalities depeneded on him personally, and the way in which that break was announced - namely, by spending most of his announcement criticizing WP Engine instead of talking about breaks.
- serial_dev 2y agoI wouldn't say it's revenge, but this meant to cause a stir, so that the few people who don't know about this unfortunate legal battle will hear about it. I wouldn't be surprised if he was so delusional that he thinks this will gain him and his web of companies more sympathy. He slaps the WordPress community in the face, out of nowhere, then he points at WP Engine, and says: "Isn't it a shame that these a*holes made me slap you... again?". I'm just speculating in this whole comment, but this is how I interpret this current chapter of the drama.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 2y ago"I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services" Can a court sue a person for lying/libel about the court itself? Now I'm imagining like how doctors and psychiatrists need to go to other doctors and psychiatrists for themselves. Normally if you lie about me we both go to a court, but if you lie about the court, where does the court go?
- Fluorescence 2y agoContempt of Court... literally. IANAL but if this is execution of a court order it would be CoC if it counts as failure to follow orders to include false claims. I don't know if a judge can charge CoC for disrespect of the court when not actually in it. If an ongoing case, might get a warning to remove contravening commentary and only a CoC on failure to do so.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jorams 2y agoI'm confused why this statement stood out to you. Isn't that exactly what the court ordered? WP Engine could no longer be denied access to wordpress.org services, and thus he is now legally compelled to provide them with the services of wordpress.org.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoBecause no the court did not order any such thing. I'm confused why you think it did. That was a lie. I'm not confused. It's just that the obvious explaination is not flattering.
- jorams 2y agoThe court order is at [1]. On page 41 and 42 it orders WP Engine's access to wordpress.org services to be reinstated to what it was on September 20, including all that entails. Thus he is now legally compelled to provide the wordpress.org services to WP Engine. He also provides those services to everyone else and used to provide them to WP Engine, but that doesn't make the statement false. [1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25451524-wp-engine-v-wordpress-injunction/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25451524-wp-engine-v...
- Zealotux 2y agoI wish for his sake he had a good friend to take that shovel away from his hands and take him on a long, contemplative, peaceful hike. Money truly can't buy everything.
- notfooled 2y agoDoes he really believe he can convince people that the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.com is a different Matt Mullenweg from the Matt Mullenweg who owns wordpress.org? They even look the same.
- nolok 2y agoAt this point I am pretty sure he convinced HIMSELF of that. Which would explain the whole ongoing fiasco.
- johannes1234321 2y agoHow are those two Matts related to the one running the Foundation?
- tanepiper 2y agoWhy has no one intervened on what is clearly a mental breakdown of one man?
- kotaKat 2y ago[flagged]
- anon7000 2y agoBeen surrounding himself with yes men for years. I mean he literally said “commit to my ideas or leave with a half year of severance” and a lot of people took him up on the offer
- OJFord 2y agoIt would take a very awesome job or a very bad market for me not to accept that I think.
- nolok 2y agoHe was here saying his lawyer validated everything he was saying when anyone with any little amount of experience with lawyers and B2B legal case could immediately tell no actual decent lawyer would have validated any of that. And what he said here on HN ended up being used against him in the injuction ... So either he stopped listening to the people around him (including lawyer in a legal case), or the people around him are chosen based on their ability to say yes rather than be useful. I don't know about the ownership of Automattic to know if there is a board not doing its job either or if they can't do anything anyway. And ultimately the legal cases "doesn't matter" grand scale, but the damage he is doing to public perception is immense. There are a bazillion marketing agencies out there being affected by his emotionnal breakdown, so if WP Engine were to put themselves in the middle as a separate, "safe" provider they might even benefit even more from the situation. People don't like it when you touch their wallet.
- grvdrm 2y agoYou said it best: sounds like he surrounds himself with people (and lawyers) that tell him what he wants to hear. Have worked for someone like that before - it is not fun.
- varun_chopra 2y agoDamn, reading all this makes me feel terrible. I wonder what goes on in somebody’s mind to make them self-sabotage their lives like Matt has over the past couple of weeks.
- altairprime 2y agoMy working theory is that investors are pulling up ladders now that interest rates are VC-unprofitable, and so either he finds a way to increase growth in profit y-o-y or they bail and let him crash like TypePad did years ago. (Except TypePad had paying customers, so their bandwidth bills weren’t anywhere near the looming threat WP is presumably facing.)
- nextworddev 2y agoWhat he’s doing is basically what every cloud provider does but for some reason he is demonized even more
- philistine 2y agoCould you point me to the post from AWS complaining that they have to provide free labour?
- nextworddev 2y agoGCP and AWS are obviously more tactful and call that open source and partner ecosystem strategy
- altairprime 2y agoHe's openly hostile, though, which is definitely a key difference! (Not an admirable one, but still.)
- bookofjoe 2y agoI've been with Typepad for my blog since 2004 and though it's clunky and glitchy, it still works!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pluc 2y agoThis is just a play to pretend that WordPress.org is run by volunteers when in truth it's entirely run by Automattic. If it was actually ran by volunteers, he couldn't make any of it stop... because people volunteer their time without being told what to do. I can't wait for him to lose millions of dollars for a hissy fit. It's going to be delicious.
- nolok 2y agoExcept the injunction was against .com, not the .org Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities is fake, and actions like this may backfire in a big way (and I'm not even talking about the taxes aspect of it at the end). Again, I doubt any lawyer with any once of competency validated this move, let alone write it publicly like this that it's because of the legal case and WP Engine. That's very dumb. What are the lawyers supposed to say when the case will be reviewed ? Nothing to do with the case ? Reasons unrelated to WP Engine ? Their client put it in writing without even being asked to.
- arielcostas 2y ago> Except the injunction was against .com, not the .org Against .com (Automattic) and .org (Mullenweg as an individual) > Part of the case is that he is muddying the water on purpose and the separation in two entities Three, actually: WordPress Foundation, Automattic Inc., and Matt Mullenweg (as an individual)
- nolok 2y agoAh yes, you're right, I meant "was against the .com not the foundation" but even I got confused ...
- arielcostas 2y agoWhich is the whole point: there is no actual, clear, separation between Mullenweg's person, Automattic and the WP Foundation
- ochronus 2y agoJesus, what an absolute sh..show :/ it's really a pity.
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago[dead]
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, if anything this sort of thing surely has to be pushing people towards WPEngine, rather than the service run by the guy who is visibly losing it?
- gustavorg 2y agoAfter reading all these comments, I started to worry and even panic because it seemed to me that I was on the wrong side. HN, which side are we on?
- Sebb767 2y agoThis is a faceted issue where both sides have valid points. Also, HN is not a single entity.
- thanksgiving 2y agoPersonally, I am now clear that both sides, matt and wp engine are wrong. Matt is more wrong than wp engine but that doesn't mean wp engine is right. This is just my personal opinion.
- kemayo 2y agoI think it's that WP Engine might arguably have been being a jerk, albeit in a way completely allowed by WordPress' licensing and directed entirely at extracting some benefit specifically from Automattic's work. ...whereas Matt's being a jerk in a way that involves collateral for the general community of people who use WordPress. So everyone is more concerned about him, because he's threatening a lot more people.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoIt's possible to agree with both stances that WPEngine gets a free ride on a bunch of volunteers and that Matt's behaviour is disgusting
- conartist6 2y agoIt couldn't matter less whose "side" you are on is kind of the point. You could like Matt and think he's basically right about freeloaders, yet you would still be horrified and absolutely powerless as you watch him shred his once-whole community into halves, then quarters, then eighths as he doubles down and doubles down some more...
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- dools 2y ago[flagged]
- itsdrewmiller 2y agoI know it isn't necessarily hacker news standard, but I greatly appreciate when submitters summarize the actual content rather than post vague titles like "What's Next" or "The Real Story" or whatever.
- dools 2y agoYeah I don't really give a shit but I find the selectiveness with which this guideline is enforced annoying. Either get rid of the guideline or enforce it all the time. The removal of "why" and "how" from the start of titles automatically is also fucking stupid.
- kemayo 2y agoIt's not really editorializing, since that means adding opinions. The HN title is currently a factual summary of the situation, without any particular flavoring. It's not "Matt throws a tantrum, takes toys and goes home" or anything like that. In cases like this where the original post title is pretty useless, I'm in favor of expanding it a bit.
- dools 2y agoSure, so the guideline should be changed and should not be selectively enforced. It's HN's stupidest guideline.
- utopicwork 2y ago[flagged]
- e40 2y agoStalking? WTF
- utopicwork 2y agoI guess this isnt well known here but Matt (or his mods) kicked a trans woman off tumblr and then followed her across platforms to try and shut her up
- vinchley 2y agoMatt's actual tweet, for context: https://i.redd.it/asjc0wtjarkc1.png https://i.redd.it/asjc0wtjarkc1.png Those usernames say it all really.
- utopicwork 2y ago[dead]
- Kye 2y agoThey don't, really. Trans shitposting is an art form, and it often involves silly names. This is why it's a problem when platforms get too big. Context collapses because they can't have enough moderators to understand and appropriately handle every little niche goof. It looks a certain way from a naive analysis, but is obviously not (necessarily) what it looks like to that analysis with the tiniest bit of extra information.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoUh that's a pretty far leap from the practically libelous claim that he stalked somebody. From reading this source it sounds more like the drama spilled over from Tumblr to Twitter, that's hardly stalking in my book. Also they were banned for wishing death on Matt, “a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.” https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...
- frereubu 2y agoI run a WordPress agency and I'm absolutely horrified by all of this. It's not cutting through to our clients yet, but building on WordPress suddenly feels incredibly risky when one person can throw their toys out of the pram - the pineapple checkbox is just fucking ridiculous - and derail an entire ecosystem. I really wish there was some kind of mechanism to cut Matt entirely out of WordPress because he deserves to be completely ostracised.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoPlanning to set up a new customer-facing website next year, and there is 0.0% chance that it will be based on WordPress, even though several of our existing websites are WP.
- therealdrag0 2y agoWhat will you use instead?
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoProbably Wagtail.
- QuantumGood 2y agoWagtail = Open-source CMS developed in Python to work with Django
- _zagj 2y ago[flagged]
- frereubu 2y agoOh stop it. That kind of snark is pointless. WordPress with the correct hosting setup and good coding practices is absolutely fine. It's the cheap hosting and throwing insecure plugins that causes issues with WordPress sites.
- xnx 2y agoThrough all of this, has there been discussion about how WordPress is "freeloading" off of PHP, MySQL, etc.?
- josefresco 2y agoYes, and as a result of that public shaming effort Automattic increased their contributions to the PHP Foundation by 2.5x: https://x.com/ThePHPF/status/1853390265429508427 https://x.com/ThePHPF/status/1853390265429508427
- hulitu 2y ago> Matt Mullenweg temporarily shuts down some Wordpress.org functions If sanctions work so well for other countries, why wouldn't they for WP Engine ? /s
- Gud 2y agoI’m so happy this drama came now and not later. I was in the process of setting up a simple Wordpress site for my wife’s business, to replace the Adobe portfolio she is currently using… so thanks, I guess?
- kemayo 2y agoHe timed the initial meltdown perfectly, because it was just before the domains I'd transferred to WordPress.com's registrar when Google Domains got sold were up for renewal. So the net effect there was that Matt bought me a free year of domain hosting, and drove me away just in time for me to not start paying him.
- exsomet 2y ago> As you may have heard, I’m legally compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers Didn’t the court order have a whole section about WP Engine covering the cost of providing the required services?
- Scion9066 2y agoMatt's side wanted WP Engine to cover what seems to be the costs of running the entire wordpress.org site but the judge didn't go for that: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-inc-v-automattic-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in... > Defendants [Matt's side] counter that a bond of $1.6 million is appropriate. Opp. at 32. They assert that “the continued maintenance and operation of the Website incurs an estimated $800,000.00 in administrative, server and developer costs per year[,]” and that allowing WPEngine to access the developer resources of the Website permits WPEngine to benefit from the distribution of its products on the Website[,] which “carries with it a separate value.” > [...] >In reply, WPEngine argues that if the court is inclined to require a bond, “it should be a de minimus amount, not wordpress.org’s entire budget for two years.” > [...] > Under these circumstances, the Court finds that any harm to Defendants resulting from the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief is unlikely, as it merely requires them to revert to business as usual as of September 20, 2024. Accordingly, the Court declines to require WPEngine to post a bond.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eonmist 2y agoWhy is it a conflict at all? Does modifying the software go against the license? They don't have to follow Matt's philosophy. If Matt want to control the use he should have encoded it in the license. Isn't this a classical case of wrongly chosen license and assuming others agree with you on unstated things.