this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Man, it's really hard to follow what's going on with that situation.
If anyone happens to have a TLDR I'd really appreciate it
TL;DR: Cofounder of open source project says super popular platform using their project needs to pay up for inane reasons. Chaos ensues.
In summary:
WP Engine is one of the most popular third party platforms built on top of WordPress.
They have a link and images on their webpage referencing that they are built on top of Wordpress (this is legal).
The former cofounder of Wordpress said that they are illegally using the Wordpress trademark.
WP Engine sends Cease and Desist.
WordPress Cofounder doubles down, blocks WP Engine and demanded WP Engine pay licensing fees for using their branding.
This pissed off a lot of people.
WP Engine sues. For a lot, including extortion, abuse of power, and asserts the cofounder of WordPress has criminally made false statements to the IRS.
The Executive Director for Wordpress resigns, presumably in solidarity with WP Engine and the community.
This is a very helpful summary, thank you!
WP engine are scummy AF & should lose a lot. Theyve given nothing back to the opensource community that wasnt advertising for themselves
Yea ok automattic employee
No he's right even while Matt M is being a massive piece of shit and ruining the WP community cohesion. DeliciousBrains iirc was the original ACF dev org that was bought out by WPE who do a lot of cornering dev using buyouts/investments and then go about with their internal commercialization of tooling built on GPL without contributing to the upstream platforms. WPEngine still aren't the good guys, they're just the victims in a case where the expected good guy WP founder and Automattic leader Matt Mullieswaggiesomethingrather turned out to be bad guy that is just as ethically and morally compromised with a little more salt for flavoring.
The problem is Matt Mullenweg, he’s the source of all the drama (and to quote someone else, he’s Musk, but coded in php lol).
There’s a good long form write up here: https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt (Sorry, not exactly a tldr, but I found this article this interesting)
Company runs a hosted Wordpress service that competes with wordpress.com. Wordpress (i.e. CEO Matt Mullenweg) wants a cut and is trying to strong-arm them. People are upset with this.
Totally out of the loop on this one.