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They are only arguing "moments before our CEO Matt Mullenweg gave his keynote at WordCamp US."
And later, "Lee Wittlinger and Heather Brunner had ample time to resolve this conflict. "
It's like, "fuckers, we've been discussing this for ages. Wtf are you talking about 'moments before'?" response. This wasn't out of the blue.
To be clear, I really think WPEngine should contribute more, and if what’s being said about them changing out Automattic’s Stripe attribution tag from WooCommerce to their own, that’s also petty and honestly worthy of criticism.
However, Cloudflare really did call his bluff. If Cloudflare offers to help wp.org with the bandwidth required to host the plugins and themes, then that settles his whole whole ’infra is expensive’ argument.
It's happening WPEngine files suit https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/s/JsuCr7WBNJ
https://x.com/wpengine/status/1841633469685723292?s=19
>
bahahaha I love mxroutes response
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf
interesting read, the direct pdf of WP Engines case.
And now Matt has said his Automattic employees that don't agree with his actions can leave, and so the exodus has started https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/s/Q50Y3OiXCW
Looks like 37 Automattic employees have accepted the offer to leave so far https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841585100665872569
i agree they should contribute more.. but why pay from their revenue to Automattic? No other web host pays. Kinsta is also a major player, and so is Godaddy MWP with thousands of sites
lol
https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
Well seems more folks coming out with their stories of dealing with Matt https://medium.com/@kelliepeterson/nice-guy-matt-mullenweg-ceo-of-wordpress-com-cries-foul-and-threatens-me-with-legal-action-f116ac57d862
100%.
I could see them asking WPEngine to create a public repo (at WPEngine's expense) and that would seem like a reasonable request but other than that, it really just looks like someone punishing a specific company, arbitrarily, just because they happen to be successful.
Settling a personal score under the guise of helping is as disingenuous as it gets. When that Cloudflare guy offered up his help, Matt knew he had talked himself into a corner.
The guy obviously sucks but hopefully he was made aware his conversation was going to be made public before she posted it. If she would have held out on her personal feelings about him and just posted facts, it would have been a better article.
Given that Matt appears to be acting emotionally (which is fine by itself) and that he's blurring lines between the for profit and non profit entities so much, I can understand why employees are taking a paid exit while there's money to give.
Automattic's response https://automattic.com/2024/10/03/meritless/
Since we are on this topic, any CMS that's a viable Wordpress alternative? It's been awhile since I tried anything out but now's as good as a time as any to check something else out.
"Sir the cocaine is actually dripping from your nose"
"That claim is meritless"
"Someone say lawsuits?"
Looks like WPEngine got banned again
https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-banned-again-reports-deploying-a-solution
Matt is really messing with alot of folks livelihoods https://ma.tt/2024/10/alignment/
159 people left! I really want to know this guy's plan. It's really gotten under my skin. Like when you binge a TV show only to realize it was cancelled after the big cliffhanger.
Tehran. Not to derail this thread but if you lookup the reason for the delay, I guess it’s safe to say I’ll wait a long time for season 3
Seems like his plan is to get back to his comfortable state where everyone agrees with him alone and that he gets his own way.
This dont even load here, he getting ddos'd? LOL
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
Since WPEngine using lot of their BW, it is fairly reasonable to ask them for some cut from their profits, it also applies for other big players aswell.
just like gmail is free for end-users but for companies using their suite, need to pay.
or CF is free for normal users and then paid tiers.
when you (on behalf of your paying customers) are consuming hell lot of resources from WP.org then i don't find anything wrong in expecting money from you.
you want to use free resources and making money out of it but don't want to pay a cut from your profits from where you are getting free resources?
since they can't charge every end user, hobby sites etc...they are going after big companies.
i don't know whole saga but i support ma.tt if WPE is hell bent on sharing their profits with him (a small %)
asking payment for bandwidth is reasonable, however matt is asking from %revenue, not %profit. that's a big difference.
also, how about trying not to extort and blackmail beforehand?
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf
... about 80% of which were related to WP ...
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-automattic-as-ceos-fight-with-wp-engine-escalates/
HAHAHAHA! I just love it - and of bloody course the idiot tries to spin the loss as a kind of show of loyalty (along the lines of "so, the large majority want to be and stay with us").
WPengine, go!
the only guy who profited from this court-case is the one who jointed Automattic/WP on 1st October, 2024, and left the company on 3rd October, 2024 within 2 days with $30,000 in cash.. (like a lottery!!)
Calin from LET drops to 2nd position.
It is very reasonable!
The problem is Matt said the problem isn't bandwidth money for nonprofit org, but that WP Engine commits not enough and "WP Engine is cancer", because they do not have enabled revisions. Ah, and that WP Engine is a threat to opensource because of one investor, while Automattic has tons of them like Blackrock and Salesforce. Hypocrisy all over place.
It was misleading, it was done in bad faith and same bad faith remained to this day, by making additional claims just like bandwidth costs.
The truth is that Automattic (for profit company that has wordpress.com, NOT wordpress.org) wants to get a piece of cake of WP Engine, likely because some of Automattic investors were unhappy that WP Engine grown so big. If Matt would tell the trith at least once instead of gaslighting and prosucing bullshit, I think he would win this battle.
Instead of all drama if he would release a plan where he would point out where WP Engine cut would go (for example implementing better admin page with dark mode, maybe integrating secondary, SQLite database on disk for revisions so they wouldnt clutter WP to the point where providers turn revision off) - would we protest? Would we not agree, that we want better opensource product? It would be easy win from Matt. WP Engine would look bad im everyone eyes if they wouldnt want to help improve what they are basing whole business on.
The big part you missed is where Cloudflare offered up their infrastructure to host Wordpress in its entirety, free of charge. Dude straight faced called his bluff and Matt knew at the moment, he messed up.
As you said though, they use a significant amount of resources and given their business relies 100% on Wordpress, having them pay for bandwidth or a separate repo would have been a reasonable request. I say request because, I'm not a lawyer, but if there's only one place to get your updates/plugins and you're a free, open-source project, what differentiates a WPEngine user vs a person who uses wordpress elsewhere?
They're both utilizing wordpress as a CMS
They're both using the same public repos
They're not contributing to any additional bandwidth usage
WPEngine is just a Wordpress user by proxy, 1 to 1, they just happen to be using WPEngine as a provider. Singling out a company when there's so many others doesn't make sense.
"WPEngine doesn't have revisions" was some other thing he got his panties in a twist over. Who cares? They're a PRIVATE company that specializes in optimized wordpress installs. They don't do it the way you envisioned it - get over it, your project open source and they're a private business. Want revisions? Go to one of the other million wordpress hosts; They're a managed provider who just happens to specialize in Wordpress hosting and if anything, WPEngine is helping Wordpress by being a huge provider who exclusively uses Wordpress.
Think about it. Your product was so good that a group of individuals formed a private company that exclusively deals with your project and they're cranking in $400,000,000 a year with ~1200 employees. What better way to show how great your project is than to have 1200 people trust their livelihoods to it? He's just mad he didn't get a piece of that pie.
Matt's gone mask off mode and whether or not he realizes it yet, he's really screwed the pooch. Now's not the time to be messing around with people's financials/livelihoods. Maybe Matt and the CUPS exploit guy can go on a retreat together and talk about bad decisions in life.
I can relate to this but at this point (after investors invested in his company)....he is more interested in getting a pie than feeling great about it.
Yeah kind of bummed he didn't take up Cloudflare CEO's offer. Would save so a lot of $$$$ and improve download speed/latency. From my benchmarks for WP Plugin mirror, Cloudflare served mirror showed 43 times faster download speeds and 82% lower latency compared to those served from WordPress.org