Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/comment/...

He posted this after receiving the C&D.

Extortion does not look like an easy case to make. Pull up some of the state statutes: they all seem to have intent and malice requirements, and/or, like California, require the threat to be of an unlawful injury. Threatening to ruthlessly exploit capabilities you lawfully have, like the bully pulpit of leading the WordPress project or the strictness with which you license your trademark, is unlikely to meet that standard.

(But see below for the 'DannyBee comment on how UCL unfair competition might work even if you can't make a case under the extortion statute itself).

I mean if a business if built on top of your business, is it actually illegal to say "Pay me if you want continued access?" Is it the wording that makes it illegal?

It's quite possible to host a "normal" WP installation with custom themes and plugins on WordPress.com (on the more expensive plan), I've done it a few times. But as much as I want to like it, I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. Some stuff that should be easy is just ridiculously difficult, like pulling logs programmatically. I think the main audience it caters to is people hosting a basic site with off the shelf themes.

There's a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his rant, making it show up everywhere.

Unfair competition is, particularly in California, which interprets it's UCL very broadly.

Let's set aside all other claims (there are others), and take a look at "Unlawful, Unfair, and Fraudulent Business Acts" under that.

We'll also throw out unlawful business acts (I don't see anything unlawful so far).

Unfair: "An “unfair” business act or practice, as defined by the UCL, is typically committed by either a company or a business competitor. ... In the context of a business competitor, it is considered an unfair business act when the company does something that broadly undermines competition in the marketplace."

Additionally, they consider " immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous" business acts to be unfair.

Banners on wp engine sites probably not a good thing under this. Threatening your competitors with bad keynotes unless they pay you, also probably not a great practice.

(I do think you'd be fine to say they suck. I just don't think you can get away with basically extorting them)

Fraudulent: "The UCL also prohibits “fraudulent” business acts or practices, which means any conduct that misleads or deceives consumers."

Note that it does not have to be defamation, or malice, or illegal. Just misleading or deceptive. More exactly, it does not have the elements of common law fraud - Intent is not a requirement, and negligence can be a violation.

So pure opinions without intent or with negligent intent that actually deceive consumers, while not defamation or common law fraud, are quite possibly a fraudulent business practice.

Overall, I think they have a stronger case than you might. Not on defamation, but on other things.

Regardless of the outcome, the approach i see taken by the Automattic CEO here seems remarkably stupid.

Don't mix your roles unless you want a court to mix your roles.

When he threatens to ban them from wordcamp[1] in what capacity is he doing it in?

1. Which, btw, the central website totally avoids mentioning who is in charge or paying overall anywhere i can find. I hope it's not the foundation (or him or automattic) and he's not mixing roles further while threatening his competitors.

Yes, but being the editor of the software used by your competitor is certainly funny.

just for monopolies right? And for hosting online and software that does it(two verticals of wordpress) there are hoardes of options.

Generally, but also especially when the position is "WordPress".

> Automattic put a banner in every WordPress dashboard on the subject, including WordPress instances hosted by WPE

> I put banners on my web

There's a large difference between putting up a banner on _your_ site and abusing your position to put a banner on _every_ site you can.

Nah. Putting disparaging claims directly on the dashboard of my customers seems pretty abusive, and if it happened to me I'd be looking at legal options too.

No, it would be like if Google started using Google Tag Manager to put banners on websites that use Plausible Analytics saying "this website uses analytics that might not be accurate!" Or if Cloudflare started putting banners on websites that use S3 saying "downloads might be slow because this website doesn't use Cloudflare R2"

I can see that, I'm saying it's superfluous

Automattic benefits greatly from their close relationship to Wordpress. Using the power they have to threaten a commercial competitor that has a good reputation in the community will push the Wordpress community to reevaluate that relationship. The contributions Automattic makes to Wordpress are valuable but valuable contributions do not excuse bad behaviour. Souring the relationship between Automattic and Wordpress is a major blunder, which Matt will be responsible for. If Automattic lose their preferential treatment and are forced to compete with WPE based only on service then they will be crushed because Automattic’s offerings are not as good — there’s a reason Matt is so sensitive about WPE. Automattic are just as dependent on venture capital as WPE, even more so because of how their business has been losing focus. Automattic’s value is based on its relationship with Wordpress, whereas WPE’s is entirely based on the service. Matt is threatening Automattic’s most valuable asset, removing him may be seen as the only option to rescue the relationship.

As an aside, people don’t usually act like this when things are going good. Perhaps Matt is lashing out because of pressure he is already under.

edit: and to close the loop, Matt is demanding benevolence from WPE that Automattic themselves don’t engage in. Automattic own the Wordpress.com domain and promote their hosting service through Wordpress.org (which causes the exact confusion Matt accuses WPE of benefiting from). The money Automattic spend on supporting Wordpress project is not a donation, it’s quid pro quo. Would WPE pay $10m a year to own all that? Of course, any rational company in the space would… but that’s not what Matt is offering.

8% of revenue in perpetuity seems like a licensing deal, not payment for services. WP is arguing that they don't need a license deal to deliver their service which seems to be true? Therefore, the 8% just seems like a shakedown to get money - good old blackmail.

Take a look at the votes on Matt's reddit comments https://www.reddit.com/user/photomatt/

It wasn't just the blog post. Did you miss the keynote, numerous posts on Reddit and other outlets, as well as the threatening calls and text messages? I'm using his own definition of "scorched earth nuclear". This goes far beyond a single tweet.

> What's defamatory about it?

Oh, I don't know. Calling your competitors "cancer", their product a "cheap knock-off", and urging people to stop using them?

If my competitors are selling an inferior product, I would let that speak for itself, which should make my alternative shine in comparison. Going on a mudslinging crusade just reeks of desperation and immaturity, and the defamation and blackmailing could be illegal. If he really had a case against them, it would be resolved in court.

I'm not the target audience of either, but if I had to choose which one to use today, I would go with WP Engine based on this alone.

Did you not read the post? He wanted them to stop calling their fork of wordpress "Wordpress".

They either continue to use their fork and call it something other than wordpress, or they use an unmodified version of wordpress and are permitted to call it "wordpress", or they pay for rights to use the mark for their modified version.

No doubt this has all stemmed from the issue of them taking and not giving back. If they aren't going to play nicely and pay proportionally for development as per the pledges, then they can pay for the right to use the mark for their fork. Why should automattic and dozens of others pledge thousands of hours of dev time per week when one of the biggest users pledges 40 hours? It may be permitted as per the GPL, but use of the mark is subject to fair use - and fair use doesn't cover them passing off a fork of wordpress as wordpress. Clearly that technicality is being used to force them to pay their share through licensing of the mark.

Wait what about the middle ground? Give me access to a VPS and I can make your dreams come true, as cheap as possible, using modern CI tools and a lot of.. automation.

Sure, maintaining it has a cost, but to me the alternative feels like trying to build a business by reselling expensive chocolates you bought from the hotel mini bar.

Jason Cohen has done a number of talks on the origin of WP engine as being reliable/fast/secure in terms of preferences at the time of launch;

But I think you are right, the features you listed naturally contributed and strengthened those needs.

Wordpress.com would be the equivalent. That said, they don't exactly offer an unmodified WP experience either at least not without upgrading to the higher tier plans. The base plan has plugins disabled for example. Not even sure how it's different from what Matt is accusing WP Engine of.

WordPress has the same problem as PHP: it's too easy to do what you want the wrong way. The right way is great, but the wrong way is easier, cheaper, more common, more documented, etc.

Supply and demand.

These businesses exist and operate the way they do because of customer desires. The customers could hire better agencies but for a number of reasons don't.

That’s pretty unfair. Most of the work I do can be considered “marketing” since it’s corporate sites and portfolios. Businesses need to have an online presence of some sort and someone has to create one for them. Not everything is SEO spam.

Not spam at all. I just don't want to be so obvious about what the business was, even though I've mentioned it in the past.

Think top 10 keywords space and spanning about 4-5 of them.

It's the largest business in its space and a major national advertiser both digitally and traditionally. You have seen their ads on the street, on TV, on websites and on Youtube.

Even internationally, you have seen their ads on TV. Big hint.

No we had an army of call center folks, case managers, etc. But given the nature of the business there is no sales, only marketing generating revenue.

Basically, no our marketing team didn't turn the coal into diamonds, but obtaining the coal was our team's primary function and 100% our output. We spent several hundred million annually on advertising (roughly the GDP of Tonga!).

I've had an interview last week for a company doing WordPress stuff, and their tech lead, computer science guy, said their next project was a monitoring tool running unit tests in production to understand the health of the app

It's not only the non-tech-savvy, even CS guys become trash when they go too close to WP

I think your response can be said of any application made before now.

Thanks. It seems really good. PHP, files and folders instead of db, easy templating, plugins, admin interface built on Vue.js, open source at GitHub and a commercial license as well. Since 2012.

The only issue is to have more themes available, at getkirby-themes_com there are 22 only.

They are not dead. The reason why WP took web by storm and Joomla and Drupal became less visible is that WP did a lot of work in instant usability - their 2 minutes’ installation changed the game imho.

Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great.

However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically.

Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…

> Response from IT

This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.

Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.

WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.

We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.

> The problem is that marketing wants a website that

... they can publish and update content without having to get IT involved - just like they did at their last job where the website was WordPress.

Oh, and IT who thinks their company has a marketing department that adds zero revenue to the bottom line needs to go back to they mom's basement or academia. That's just not how the world works.

Hahaha, I've been in this exact situation. Marketing set up an entire WordPress website unbeknownst to IT. Over a year's worth of effort and they never even mentioned to us they work working on it.

I'm in a monthly directors meeting of all depts and marketing unveils their wonderful website to much applause and oohs and ahhs. They then say, looking at me, "Yes we should be ready to launch in a couple weeks after IT sets up authentication and integrates it with our CRM and mail blast system."

I was so lost for words I just kind of nodded my head, wide-eyed.

The way they had it set up did not allow us to use the same SSO/auth we used for everything else. So users would need a separate account. Their auth system didn't support any kind of MFA. Their plugins were not compatible with our CRM. External accounts would need to be set up manually. They used a different domain thinking they could just change it later but it got so baked into everything that changing it everywhere would be extremely difficult. Their hosting solution was going to cost us a shit ton of money because none of the graphics were optimized for web. Every image was like a 50MB PNG. It did look nice, but nothing was set up in a way that made it compatible with anything we already had in place.

I told marketing there was no way I could make this work and they'd wasted a year's worth of effort by not pulling me in from the get go to at least help them find some sane compatible solutions. "Well, if we can't use SSO, couldn't we just build a spreadsheet with everyone's logins so you could plug that in?" Jfc no.

The CEO/owner sends me a meeting invite and asks me why I'm refusing to work with marketing on their website. I explain that they had decided not mention any of this to me from the get go and explained the reasons why I couldn't make it work.

I said, "well, technically we could make anything work, but you're going to have to hire a small dev team to integrate this with our CRM. We're going to have to pay a lot more monthly for our CRM because now we need API access (we'd need that either way even if the plugins were compatible) and if you want a team to write some custom integrations for this, you'll need some kind of retainer to make sure they can support it when the plugins change and break everything in unpredictable intervals or the plugins are no longer maintained."

He refused to believe me and basically said "Well I'm not sure why I'm paying you if you can't even get a website to work."

I quiet quit and resigned about a month later. You can imagine the other kind of shenanigans that went on if that was considered acceptable.

Why? Hugo is Markdown, child's play. You can use GitHub as a CMS.

Must clarify: not wp2static, but a random plugin breaking on php upgrade, sometimes requiring a subscription in new versions.

If they are "The most trusted WordPress platform", that implies there is more than one platform. That implies that none of them are first party WordPress. So I don't buy that. (Regarding their plans, I think they would be safer to put the word 'Plan' at the end of their plan names.)

Do you want to explain how it does work? And what exactly that I said is wrong?

Here’s the Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

Yes it is. Go ahead and Google "nominative fair use".

It doesn't matter what the policy says if there is no legal basis for it. WordPress can't prevent Nominative Use, everyone can call the thing they are doing "WordPress hosting" if it is WordPress hosting. If the policy doesn't allow that, the policy can be ignored.

>>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services

I think the policy is somewhat vague on this; does 'Wordpress Hosting' refer to and explain the offered service? Clearly. Is 'Wordpress Hosting' a "product" WP Engine is selling? Kind of, yah?

My understanding of trademark is also that "we've been doing this for ages and you didn't say anything" is a pretty solid defense, and "Wordpress Hosting" is about the most generic hosting service offered on the internet at this point, everyone and their dog offers it.

WordPress’s own trademark policy states:

> For example, a consulting company can describe its business as “123 Web Services, offering WordPress consulting for small businesses,” but cannot call its business “The WordPress Consulting Company.” Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”

If WordPress specifically says that using the tagline “the world’s best WordPress themes” is okay, it’s hard to show anything WP Engine has done as being unacceptable.

https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/

Edit, because I’m responding too fast or some nonsense: That’s an interesting point; but if that were true, Matt should have used that as his argument, after sending a polite letter first explaining that was going too far. This did not happen; and considering Matt was on their podcast and didn’t give a darn until lately, it appears to not be a real problem.

(1) The WPE C&D is, in my opinion, sloppily written, full of equivocation/fallacious reasoning. The situation is not "clear". (2) We haven't heard Matt's explanation of the text messages. (3) The WordPress name was registered in 2006 by Matt's company Automattic. In 2010 it was generously (no good deed is unpunished) transferred to a 501(c)3 and Automattic was given a license to the mark (at least in WordPress.com). According to WPE themselves: "the payment ostensibly would be for a 'license' to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license". That's a potentially disputed claim: they very well may need a license as they are (currently) possibly in violation of the (generous) trademark policy by advertising services they've titled "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", and "Enterprise WordPress". It's unwise to malign Matt publicly – a court will be sorting out the necessity of the license.

Meanwhile, right now over on Reddit there are WordPress Core developers posting about this anonymously for fear of retaliation from Matt.

He has... a bit of reputation.

He is throwing things around like: "it's tragedy of the commons", "they are evil capitalists" etc. etc. In another words he wants to "hijack" their market share as they supposedly "hijacked" WordPress' brand, logo or whatever.