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The Courts

WordPress Parent Company Must Stop Blocking WP Engine, Judge Rules (theverge.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the escalating-tensions dept.
WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress.com parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins. From a report: The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of "multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm." It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine's access to WordPress.org.

Mullenweg waged a public campaign against WP Engine in September, accusing the service of misusing the WordPress trademark and not contributing enough to the WordPress community. After blocking WP Engine from WordPress.org's servers, Automattic took control of WP Engine's ACF Plugin.

WordPress Parent Company Must Stop Blocking WP Engine, Judge Rules More | Reply

WordPress Parent Company Must Stop Blocking WP Engine, Judge Rules

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  • As a long-time Wordpress user and admirer, this really feels like standing in the driveway, watching Mommy and Daddy setting the house on fire and fighting to the bitter end.

    • Re:Mystified (Score:4, Funny)

      by usedtobestine ( 7476084 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @03:17AM (#65004951)

      Yeah. But don't worry, it will get worse. Automattic will whitelist their addresses on one single t2.nano AWS instance in Sydney, Australia with a 64kb rate limiter.

      • Yeah. But don't worry, it will get worse. Automattic will whitelist their addresses on one single t2.nano AWS instance in Sydney, Australia with a 64kb rate limiter.

        That would actually be quite funny. You're probably not the only one to have that idea so it's quite likely that exactly that will happen. ... I'll be following the situation with rising amusement should it go that way. :-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          Not blocking is something different than not blocking completely.

          The injunction is quite specific, it requests a restitutio in integrum as of Sep 20th 2024. Automattic would have to prove that prior to Sep 20th 2024, there was only access to the t2.nano AWS instance in Sydney, Australia for WP Engine to be considered compliant.

        • Judges tend to frown on playing games with their lawful orders.

      • There's nothing judges love more than malicious compliance. They will definitely see in favour of Automatic and laugh it all off during the case.
        Sidenote can I employ you for some legal advice? You sound really cheap!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Automattic will whitelist their addresses on one single t2.nano AWS instance in Sydney, Australia with a 64kb rate limiter.

        Not unless Matt is prepared to pay fines and possibly serve jail time.

        Generally speaking "smart aleck tricks" in attempt to circumvent a court order can give rise to a criminal contempt charge

    • As a long-time Wordpress user and admirer

      Weird way to feel about the most infectious quagmire of garbage sites playing host to all manner of botnets and malware-laden plugins out there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      as a long time WordPress user and supporter, this feels like watching the parents put the kids to work in the fields while the parents are busy living it up, we provide the free content while they suck up all the advertising revenue generated

      wordpress.com and adsense are basically scams that grossly under pay people and with their $100 threshold for first payout, they are unfairly and deliberately sitting on billions of users income

    • Not so much, Automattic is WordPress' mommy and daddy while WPE is pretty much an outside leecher.

      • Wordpress was one of the founding investors in WPE, and later sold out.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        while WPE is pretty much an outside leecher.

        Only in the sense that all Wordpress users are leechers and web hosting providers are leechers because Wordpress users hired them to host their website.

        WPE is an agent of their customers. Their product is web hosting, and WPE helps their customers implement Wordpress because Wordpress is the tool their hosting customers want for managing their websites.

        If Wordpress didn't exist WPE could be hosting Ghost or Grav, Plone, etc.

        I would say they are not leechers but

    • Yea. Matt's being a real dick about this.

      He made open source software using the GNU license. Now, someone leverages WordPress to build a better hosting system than Automattic did, and he's pissed? This would be like Linus Torvolds going after Amazon or Microsoft for using Linux to power their cloud hosting ecosystem.

      Wordpress.org also added a checkbox to their login screen that says "I'm not affiliated with WPEngine in anyway" or something similar.

      • I don't know. If I had a popular open source project that someone else also made a successful business out of, I wouldn't begrudge them the success, but I also would feel like I needed to *help* them by donating my company's server resources and bandwidth to them.

        Why is it so hard for WPE to just alter the source to make these calls to their own servers instead of to WordPress.org's servers?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          Why is it so hard for WPE to just alter the source to make these calls to their own servers instead of to WordPress.org's servers?

          There's this:

          This is because the standard WordPress[General Public License] core software “hard codes” thewordpress.org update site into every WordPress website, rather than making the update site a configurable option for each user.

          Not that it matters. Blocking WPE wasn't about that, or trademark, or anything other other than some petty wannabe dictator is upset that they dropped the 'keep every edit by default' misfeature.

  • Give the control of Wordpress to a real non-profit organisation that will not try to blackmail it's partners because they are too successful, while faking a hypocrite "open" eco-system that welcome everyone, unless of course, again you are too successful.

    Just like a drug king pin, Matt is expecting business that use their eco-system and by the same time promote it, to pay him some sort of "success-tax"... if you're too big, at his convenance on his terms.

    What in the actual extremist and left socialism fuck

    • "actual extremist and left socialism fuck"? Are you aware of what those words mean? I can't see anything except pure capitalist greed *on either side* of this dispute

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Right. Because being a socialist and greedy are somehow mutually exclusive.

        • They kind of are mutually exclusive. At least in terms of Socialism's definition and origins. That doesn't mean there aren't people who use the word "socialist" to describe themselves, but don't meet the definition.

          Socialism is social ownership of the means of production. It literally means that no individual can own a business or product, but that they must share any and all ownership with those around them. i.e. There is no person at a company who gets to have all the power, and that social owners (whethe

    • Matt himself admitted that he screwed the PR-pooch when he snapped earlier this year. He apologized and he promised to

      a) call good friends and friendly industry experts before he does anything krass in the future

      b) clear up the confusion about pursuit of trademark violations and make good with the community

      c) stand back and have his/Automattics lawyers take care of the whole WP Engine problem/mess

      Here are some very in-depth long-form talks where the FOSS community asks some tough questions, puts him through

  • Don't use Wordpress, use Drupal instead... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by echo123 ( 1266692 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @08:25AM (#65005255)

    ...you'll never outgrow Drupal. That's why so many government websites are built using Drupal [drupal.org]. CNN, NYSE, Reuters, and a lot of Universities also use Drupal.

    Drupal is truly open-source, along with all the modules contributed to drupal.org which are easily installable and managed with a command line or scripts. Everything is hosted on gitlab.com and nothing is going away or will be denied to anyone.

    The open-source Drupal community is inclusive and supportive.

    The new Drupal CMS initiative [drupal.org] has been a year-long effort to make Drupal much more user-friendly to new users, (in competition to Wordpress). Drupal CMS was formerly known by its code name, Drupal Starshot. Drupal CMS has no direct impact on Drupal core development, while offering many different recipes that can be applied over an existing website [drupal.org].

    Drupal has an actual Security Team [drupal.org] that works well [drupal.org].

    • I tried many of these CMS tools and nothing came close to the ease of use and extensibility of Wordpress. This was a long time ago, so surely things could be different now

      • The current state is still as it was - WordPress is still easier for a brochure site. BUT... Drupal CMS (formerly known as Starshot) is Drupal's first bonified attempt to take a huge leap ahead of WordPress in terms of usability through a better UX and, more importantly, a built-in AI system to help build sites. As of this fall, the early models/examples were impressive enough for the smarter, lower-tier Drupal "developers" (aka site builders experienced with Drupal's current UI but don't touch code) to con

    • Re:Don't use Wordpress, use Drupal instead... (Score:5, Informative)

      by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @01:44PM (#65005929) Homepage

      Prelude: I was a Drupal maintainer [drupal.org]. My contributions include many contrib modules, as well as some core features (e.g. maintenance mode, watchdog API, syslog module, ...). Some of my contributed modules (Nagios) were in use at the White House during the Obama administration.

      I agree with what you say about Drupal, with some nuance.

      Drupal 8+ suitability for your web site depends on your particular case.
      If you are a large organization, with a budget for in-house staff or the equivalent contractors/agencies, then by all means: go for it.

      On the other hand, if you are a non-profit, or a small to medium business, then the current Drupal is overkill. Instead, use Backdrop CMS [backdropcms.org], which is a fork of the most popular version ever of Drupal, 7.x. It is faster, simpler, easier to maintain, while still being customizable, and having a wide range of contributed modules.

      • +1 on BackdropCMS. The Drupal community really should've been better about promoting their forking Drupal cousin as an alternative to those who didn't have Drupal expertise available, but that's old news.

  • Please, quietly, make a resale agreement with WPEngine. Resell their services under your name, branding it and taking a healthy skim off the top.

    Set up a seperate corporate entitry to do this. Use the profit to further enhance your core products and satisfy your desires as much as it can.

    Do not let us know this has happened until you've got it working right.

    Sincerely,

    All WP users who swear a pox on you for being such children.

  • Unblock access but rate limit it to 5kbps per connection with a total of 100 simultaneous connections....

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by garett_spencley ( 193892 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @11:10AM (#65005541) Journal

    I get that much of the time a preliminary injunction is not a final permanent ruling but just a "hold" on an issue while the court case addresses the conflict and decides what the permanent ruling will be.

    Still, the principle behind this is something I just can't reconcile with the facts of reality. From what I understand, WordPress.org is offering a service and that service is taking a massive thrashing from WP Engine to the point where WordPress (rightly or wrongly) considers it to be abusive.

    Now the courts have just issued an order compelling WordPress.org to continue offering this service to their abuser free of charge?

    It doesn't even matter to me whether WordPress is in the right or wrong here. Maybe they're unfairly discriminating against WP Engine who has done nothing wrong. But from what I understand, discrimination is only a crime in the USA if you are discriminating based on certain protected classes such as religion, race, gender etc.

    I mean, imagine you own a restaraunt and some rude asshole comes in and starts disrupting your customers, it's within your right to kick them out, ban them permanently from your property and refuse service in perpetuity. That's not unlawful discrimination. It is your right as a business and property owner.

    If I owned WordPress.org I would be seriously tempted to just close up shop and walk away out of principle. In the restaurant analogy, if a law were to compel me to accommodate disruptive customers I would quickly adopt the opinion that owning a restaurant is just not something I'm interested in any longer and I would liquidate and walk away.

    Beyond unlawful discrimination against protected classes, you have no duty to provide commercial services to others at your own expense or on their terms. There is no law in the USA that I am aware of that could compel a company to stay in business... such a notion would be absurd.

    Will be interesting to see how the court case concludes and what WordPress.org chooses to do regardless of the final ruling.

    • In general you need to learn a lot about the law, but for the point you brought up, see promissory estoppel [wikipedia.org].

      It would be better if your analogy of WP Engine being "some rude asshole comes in and starts disrupting your customers" matched any of the facts in the case, including from or claimed by Automattic and Matt Mullenweg. Especially when it does largely match his on the record behavior, a lot of which was cited in the preliminary injunction by the judge.

      • Obviously, you do know more about this than me, but it seems as though this is a step against freedom of association, as guaranteed in the bill of rights. Am I wrong about that?

        • The thing you're missing here is that Matt, as the representative of the Wordpress Foundation, made a promise. In 2010 he announced to the world that Wordpress trademark, among other things, would be free and open access to all, forever.
          He now wants to revoke that access, and instead charge people for the right to use it.
          This has a name in the law. Promissory Estoppel. If you make a promise, and other people rely on that promise and build a business around it, you don't get to break your promise later,

          • Absolutely fair - I didn't know about that promise component - I've only been vaguely following the story.

        • This preliminary injunction is a very small "step against freedom of association" compared to the many that started in the 1950s. Take your restaurant analogy and add that the "abusive" customer is black. It should be very clear the legitimacy of your removing him hinges on his genuinely being abusive, and saying it was because he accepted private equity would not fly, especially since you have from BlackRock. The judge and her clerks covered this [courtlistener.com] e.g. in the Balance of Equities section:

          Defendants argue

          • I'm not the person who provided that example, but I appreciate the response regardless. I was just asking how this applies to Freedom of Association - constitutionally, the right to choose how and with whom to associate. There are certainly exceptions in place having to do with not discriminating based on inalienable characteristics, but I can't imagine generally requiring association between two entities based on a "business need"; the promise element is valid and, as someone who has only vaguely been foll

            • From what I can see, the original promise, as stated below (thanks garrett_spencley) didn't include access to WP.Org resources, simply to the trademark and identity. How does that relate to accessing WP.Org resources?

      • because he promised to do so in a legally binding fashion.

        This is the part that I need clarification on.

        So I found the actual complaint: https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al.pdf

        In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the
        WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation
        (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open
        access for all: “Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress
        Foundation        , the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related
        open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity,
        its name, is now fully independent from any company.        ” Mullenweg and Automattic reiterated this
        promise later, in even more forceful terms: “What’s important is that [] longer than I’m alive,
        longer than Automattic is alive, longer than any of us are alive, there is something that holds the
        WordPress code and trademark for the free access for the world.”

        (bolded text is bold in the complaint)

        Furthermore, I found an following article that seeks to explain Promissory Estoppel. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp

        It states that the four following criteria need to be met:

        1. The promisor made a promise, with the intention that a reasonable person would act on it;
        2. The promisee believed the promisor, and acted on that promise in good faith;
        3. The promisor later reneged on that promise causing financial harm to the promisee; and
        4. The nature of the promise is such that the only way to avoid injustice is by enforcing the promise.

        1. What action here did WordPress believe that WP Engine would undertake as a result of this promise?

    • From what I understand, WordPress.org is offering a service and that service is taking a massive thrashing from WP Engine to the point where WordPress (rightly or wrongly) considers it to be abusive.

      That is NOT what is happening. Matt Mullenweg runs both Automattic and WordPress.org. Matt has been on a tear in the last few months complaining that WP Engine doesn't "pay their fair share." WordPress is set up to use WordPress.org as its directory for plugins, security updates, etc. When WP Engine refused to p

      • Why doesn't WP Engine just alter the source of WP to point to their own servers?

        It seems rather shitty practice to rely on a competitor for core functionality of your product without compensation.

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