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.
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.
echelon · 28m ago
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.
acoustics · 3s ago
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?
gpm · 19m ago
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/...
pessimizer · 9m ago
The extortion was to get them to contribute or pay somebody to contribute. And the threat was to withdraw his own resources.
nofriend · 1h ago
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.
duskwuff · 57m ago
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.
gpm · 51m ago
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.
3np · 1h ago
Considering how obviously in the wrong he is, it might not be too off calling that a win for him.
meibo · 1h ago
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.
kbarmettler · 1h ago
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.
chatmasta · 44m ago
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.
yepitwas · 40m ago
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.
mastazi · 1h ago
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.
eclipticplane · 1h ago
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.
zipzapzip · 4m ago
Converted to what if you don't mind me asking?
acomjean · 52m ago
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.
chrisvenum · 1h ago
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.
edm0nd · 1h ago
This dude has to be one of the biggest losers in the modern tech space.
velcrovan · 1h ago
Just ditched my last WordPress installation in July. Good for you Matt.
popalchemist · 1h ago
This guy is unbearable.
kbarmettler · 1h ago
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.
simpaticoder · 1h ago
>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.
Sophistifunk · 13m ago
Hans… are we the baddies!?
iambateman · 1h ago
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.
sgammon · 1h ago
thats great matt. i still wont ever use wordpress because of your choices
raincole · 1h ago
The controversial topics around wordpress are surreal.
stephenlf · 1h ago
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.
jkaplowitz · 1h ago
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
kbarmettler · 1h ago
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).
larsiusprime · 46m ago
Can someone provide some context for those of us who are utterly out of the loop?
ValentineC · 45m ago
I remember this to be a pretty good recap of the whole fiasco:
matt relies on 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?
Pretty obvious outcome thus far (although this isn't much detail and Mullenweg is an unreliable narator.) It's comical that WPE thought they had a right to Wordpress's labor. It's so weird that they thought they did, and everybody else thought they did too.
I can't imagine that there won't be some punishment somewhere for Mullenweg's mouth, but cutting them off is obviously his right. He doesn't owe them anything, not bandwidth, not hosting, not trademarks, nothing.
I understand that this comment will be downvoted into oblivion, but I have no idea why people think that they're entitled to get more free shit from somebody who is already giving them free shit, even if they're private equity.
edit: and the "he screwed himself, I left" stuff is so much Bluesky. Go away and be happy. I can't stand the backend of Wordpress, I was employed to keep about 20 high traffic WP blogs up for a couple years and hated every second I had to deal with it. Well, at least it was better than the Drupal site that I had to deal with too.
nchmy · 11m ago
you could just read the legal document, as others in this thread have, rather than rely on an "unreliable narrator"...
Surely no sane person is on WPE's side. They're just vehemently against Matt, who has proven to be a complete psychopath
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...
> 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 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.
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?
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/...
Only the extortion (1030(a)(7)) CFAA claim was dismissed, and it was dismissed with leave to amend.
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.
I removed/converted my last Wordpress site (commercial and otherwise) last month.
If you have an infrastructure, stability is a good selling point.
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.
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.
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.
As our company thinks about a new website vendor, WordPress is off the table because of the nonsense.
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
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
> 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 can't imagine that there won't be some punishment somewhere for Mullenweg's mouth, but cutting them off is obviously his right. He doesn't owe them anything, not bandwidth, not hosting, not trademarks, nothing.
I understand that this comment will be downvoted into oblivion, but I have no idea why people think that they're entitled to get more free shit from somebody who is already giving them free shit, even if they're private equity.
edit: and the "he screwed himself, I left" stuff is so much Bluesky. Go away and be happy. I can't stand the backend of Wordpress, I was employed to keep about 20 high traffic WP blogs up for a couple years and hated every second I had to deal with it. Well, at least it was better than the Drupal site that I had to deal with too.
Surely no sane person is on WPE's side. They're just vehemently against Matt, who has proven to be a complete psychopath
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.