We are litigation counsel for WP Engine and write to address the serious and repeated misconduct Automattic has directed toward WP Engine over the past several days.
Stunningly, Automattic's CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described "scorched earth nuclear approach" toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses.
Mr. Mullenweg's covert demand that WP Engine hand over tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic, while publicly masquerading as an altruistic protector of the WordPress community, is disgraceful. WP Engine will not accede to these unconscionable demands which not only harm WP Engine and its employees, but also threaten the entire WordPress community. WP Engine has sought to do the right thing at each stage of Mr. Mullenweg's wrongful campaign and will continue to do so, with the integrity and candor that are hallmarks of its own culture and that of many other participants in the WordPress ecosystem. Mr. Mullenweg's words and conduct constitute actionable wrongdoing and must cease immediately.
He went to defend himself on Reddit:
They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.
I would have happily negotiated from there, but they refused to even take a call. Their entire strategy has been to obscure and delay, which they tried to do on Friday. "Can we get the right folks together early next week?" They've been stringing us along for years, I'm the dummy for believing that they actually wanted to do anything. But making it right, now.
And also went in for a fight on orange site:
WP Engine calls itself the worlds #1 wordpress hosting (with over 1.5m clients), but they aren't even in the top 10 material contributors to wordpress. Although they have pledged to support wordpress development, is is only to the tune of 40 hours a week. Their pledge is miniscule given their usage of wordpress and isn't even in the top 25 pledges made. It seems they were called out on this, and told to resolve it or it would get highlighted, and highlighted it was.
Sure, the license allows them to do whatever they want, but there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much in return. With over $400M ARR, thats something they could easily resolve.
Take note, this is how to do business negotiations:
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Isn't Wordpress completely destroyed by Shopify & Substack?
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I just looked up substack and this was the first google result:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/theres-another-abusive-male-at-reddit
I fricking kneel to the recommendation engine at google holy shit.
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Here are the Kagi results for comparison (#1 Kagi shill reporting)
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That looks exactly the same as the google results. They even have a stylized "g" as a logo. Probably just charging you for scraped google results.
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Kagi is somehow charging techies who should know better $10/month for https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist and https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
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I like it ;]
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I wanna use Kagi but I can't bring myself to pay for a search engine monthly.
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Then pay for it anually?
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Kagi is good. Ppl just cope and use censored bing (ddg).
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I hate how we have to pay monies to google now.
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How is Kagi? I like the idea in general, but every time I try another search engine I end up back on Google because of all of the nice little features they've added.
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I can't imagine ever going back to G or DDG
my year subscription just renewed like a week ago and I was happy to see it
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What you get is based on what you have been detected to like by google, so if you get that it just says that you're into
content.
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Bardfinn
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BARD BOT ALERT!Current streak was: 0 days 01 hours 02 minutes and 21 seconds
Record is 1 days 13 hours 09 minutes and 59 seconds by TheDunceonFlorist
Average time between mentions: 0 days 00 hours 49 minutes and 27 seconds
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Yeah there's a long tail of wordpress monkeys slinging subpar sites but nobody switched in is using it except maybe for an SEO blog
!codecels how do you host your dropshipping emporium?
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