I want to share: https://t.co/CmCwbcxZfD has blocked @wpengine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin—disrupting essential work for #WordPress users, agencies, freelancers, and plugin developers.
— Brian Gardner (@bgardner) September 25, 2024
Please read: https://t.co/cE45rmvnqW
WordPress is kil
https://x.com/bgardner/status/1839070322617643212
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oh wow. What's the lawsuit about?
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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WP founder Matt (Automattic, who also now owns Tumblr) claims WPEngine hasn't contributed to WP open source development for many years even though they make $400M/yr in revenue selling a customized hosted version of WP, using WP trademark in marketing. They repeatedly tried to get WPEngine to invest more dev hours in open source WP, therefore benefiting the OSS dev community and Automattic's for profit company which also sells hosted versions of the mainline version of WP. But they basically blew them off.
Automattic asked for 8% of WPEngine profit to be reinvested in WP code via a foundation, or given directly to Automattic to do it themselves, they said no, Matt sperged out online, and WPEngine sent cease and desist to Automattic to make him shut up.
Matt owns commercial trademark rights to WordPress name and also controls widgets (JS embeds) that WPEngine uses on their customer sites and has influence over the WP code update pipeline. So he's putting the grips on. Maybe because a trademark suit by itself is not very winnable or something
Also Automattic raised hundreds of millions of $$ from investors in 2021 so they need money and need WP code modernized so it doesnt die off
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You're implying they're doing something that requires permission, but descriptive use of trademarks doesn't.
Do they use the trademarks in their marketing? Yes.
Do they use the trademarks in a way that requires licensing? Unlikely.
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Yeah let's modernize all this PHP
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oh wow interesting. Thanks for the explanation! I'm interested in seeing how this turns out.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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The dude what wrote it? is mad they're making so much money off it and not giving back to the community or whatever. Apparently he still owns the trademark for WordPress so he's asked for the following:
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"asking"
He's suddenly doing quite a few things to coerce WPE into paying. Some of his methods are probably legal, but puppeting the 501c3 to perform most of the coercion to pay the for-profit side is quite likely illegal. It's probably illegal to have the 501c3 act non-arm's-length in the for-profit's interests even before considering extortion claims.
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