Latest in WordPress war: Automattic says it wanted 8% cut of WP Engine revenue

WordPress developer Automattic on Wednesday published details of its efforts to pressure rival WP Engine to sign a trademark license agreement costing millions of dollars. As well as contributing to and steering the direction of the open source web publishing system WordPress – used by millions and millions of websites – …

[cornetman]

Bruce Perens has lost the plot and for love of $DEITY, can we please stop calling it "open source"? It is "free software" as in freedom. It has nothing to do directly with the ability to see the source code. Freedom is baked in. That was the *whole* point of the free software movement.

Whatever the truth about the trademark claims (honestly I don't care, it is for them to sort out in the courts), WP Engine are for the most part selling hosting, which is infrastructure. If I buy a hammer and use it to make furniture, I have no legal nor moral obligation to contribute to the development of hammer technology: I am selling my labours and the service that I am providing to my customers.

If my selling of furniture is immensely successful then that's great for me and nothing to do with hammer manufacturers. If the makers of hammers have a problem with that, then they can f*ck off.

[demon driver]

Not a good comparison. It's more like you would demand getting your hammers for free, without paying anything in return. Or an even better analogy would be you would demand someone to build, run and support a whole hammer factory just for you without your giving them something, anything back in return.

On the other hand we could correctly say if someone doesn't want exactly that to happen they shouldn't have gone free and open source to begin with.

But that's exactly the dilemma Perens is trying to address.

[Anonymous Coward]

"demand getting your hammers for free"

Not a good comparison either. It's more like someone saying "here, I've made a hammer, you're free to copy and use it" and then someone going and doing exactly that. Using the hammer, and modifying the hammer, are two different things.

[demon driver]

I see what you mean, but this isn't exactly about modifying vs. using, and the hammer analogy wasn't very fitting in the first place, which is why I thought up the hammer factory (yeah, nah, not a 100% fitting analogy, either, I know). The thing is that Wordpress isn't just a hammer that was manufactured and now there it is. What we're talking about here includes continued work being put into it in the background for eliminating bugs, fixing upcoming security issues, adding improvements, and churning out new, improved hammers every few weeks. Using Wordpress as a tool to provide services for profit means continuously profiting from that work, without reimbursing the producers for any of it.

Then again, it's absolutely correct to state that the Wordpress makers have said "here, we've made this software, you're free to use it".

And that's the dilemma, because if someone suddenly makes millions off of that ongoing work of others, the idea that those who actually do that work would deserve at least a small piece of that big cake is not completely misguided, either. It's just that I can't see them succeed in enforcing that, I don't think the free and/or open source licences used will facilitate that.

[FIA]

Then again, it's absolutely correct to state that the Wordpress makers have said "here, we've made this software, you're free to use it".

Exactly... it's a common problem with FOSS stuff. People don't think through the outcome of the licence choice they make.

And that's the dilemma, because if someone suddenly makes millions off of that ongoing work of others, the idea that those who actually do that work would deserve at least a small piece of that big cake is not completely misguided, either.

It is misguided... because you gave it away with a licence (i.e. guidance) that says that I can do exactly that. :) If that's not what you meant that's fine, but "I" didn't know that, and if I've built my business around what you said then why should I suffer? ;-)

There's nothing stopping Wordpress from offering their own hosting and competing with WP.

Or they could re-licence the code.

It's just that I can't see them succeed in enforcing that, I don't think the free and/or open source licences used will facilitate that.

That's only the case if others have contributed though. If it's 100% Wordpress owned code they can licence it as they see fit. If it's not to a significant extent then their 'reward us for our efforts' cry perhaps holds less weight.

[CowHorseFrog]

What are you talking about ?

Rules for thousands of years have been inventing gods and holy books to help brainwash and fool as many simple minded people who beleive...

Money is the only god... its also the reason why we those godless emperors, kings, caliphs and more gave us their holy books, they certainly didnt give it because they are good people.

[Jamie Jones]

I have a certain amount of sympathy - and I can fully understand and agree with them cutting off access to their servers - but the fact is, they chose a license that allows this, and now they are moaning because someone does so successfully?

If they didn't want this to happen, why choose this license?

Perhaps because many contributors, and third party plugin writers wouldn't have done so if the software was under a different licence? In fact, the very part of the license they are moaning about may be a good reason why WP has grown as it has, in which case, it seems like they want to have their cake and eat it. (or "eat their cake, yet still have a cake left in reserve", as the saying actually means)

[Donn Bly]

I wonder if those servers are being run for and by Automattic, or if they are run for and by the WordPress Foundation. If they are Automattic's then there is no issue with them blocking access, but if those servers are being run for the foundation, even if Automattic donates the hosting, then I see huge red flags with Automattic cutting off access to the customers of their competitors. Because that is what they did, they didn't just cut off WP Engine, they cut off every company that uses WP Engine for hosting even if those companies don't use WP Engine's management services.

[maffski]

Re: I wonder if those servers are being run for and by Automattic...

...or if they are run for and by the WordPress Foundation

Neither, turns out Wordpress.org is completely controlled by Matt in person. Which means every single Wordpress site in the world updates solely on his whim. Which came a surprise to me as I thought that wordpress.org was the foundation.

He claimed that this is because the foundation is non profit and as .org provides updates to commercial organisations it wasn't allowed to control the site, however he also explained the foundation owns a for profit (WordPress Community Support) so there's no reason it couldn't run the .org in a similar way.

[doublelayer]

Re: I wonder if those servers are being run for and by Automattic...

That may be the case for the domain name, but the relevant question is who is paying for whichever servers are used to distribute updates, or if it's cloud, who gets the bandwidth bill? Is that him personally? Somehow, I doubt he's personally operating them, which makes me think it's likely that the same organization is probably doing the admin and paying the bill.

[ChoHag]

> If they didn't want this to happen, why choose this license?

Free labour.

I can't work out which one is the pot and which one is the kettle.

[unimaginative]

They did not choose the license. Wordpress was a fork of an existing blog CMS.

Of course they could have forked something BSD licensed or written their own software from scratch and licensed it the way they linked so this does not undermine your point.

[Donn Bly]

Automattic is trying to frame this as some sort of trademark dispute, but we should note that the WordPress foundation owns the rights to the WordPress trademark, not Automattic. The WordPress Foundation has licensed the trademark to Automattic, but the trademark does not extend to the letters "WP". Neither the foundation nor Automattic have exclusive rights to "WP". That is why "WP Engine" or any other business name that contains those letters is not a trademark violation, whether related to WordPress or not.

But 8% of the GROSS TURNOVER? That is more than the net profit of many hosting companies. WP Engine is a hosting company, and they have built their business around hosting open-source applications, particularly WordPress, but Apache and Linux certainly make a bigger contribution to their bottom line in terms of dollars per line of code. Yet while WP Engine makes money from hosting WordPress websites, Automattic somehow feels that they are entitled to all of their profit from all lines of business?

This is nothing more than Automattic trying to weaponize open source to take out a competitor.

Will they try to take 8% of GoDaddy's profit next? Are they going to start demanding a percentage of all sales from WooCommerce sites like the credit card companies do?

And that term sheet -- they want to prevent someone from forking open source software? They want someone to agree to terms and conditions for branding for seven years when they haven't even defined what those future conditions would be? Nobody in their right mind would sign any sort of contract like that, and Automattic knows it. Mullenweg could be a poster child for "negotiating in bad faith".

[Lon24]

If this is truly a trademark dispute then presumably the lawyers see 'WP' as a possible infringement in implying it is Wordpress. Should that be proven in US jurisdictions then surely rather than suffer an 8% reduction on margin the company could rename to PW Engine and be rid of the lawsuit.

I really have problems getting my head round this or having sympathy for anyone but Wordpress users.

[heyrick]

To those of a certain age, "WP" means Word Processing.

[katrinab]

Or more specifically WordPerfect.

[unimaginative]

The problem here is that Automattic does not own the trademark, the Wordpress Foundation, does, and it is a non-profit.

It looks like Matt is using his position as the director or a non-profit to turn rights that non-profit holds into revenue for his business.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Yep, it's the ugly side of open source

'They're making more money than us because they're better at business, and it isn't fair!'

Welcome to capitalism. If you make mistakes that cost you money, your customers will not be nice, they will usually take everything they can without killing the goose. Extracting more value than you paid is what business *is*. Your business model is built on other people being able to take as much as they can get? Sounds like you won't be in business long.

Should WP Engine morally pay a reasonable amount to WordPress if they're carrying out most of the development? Absolutely. They don't have to, however, and 8% of gross income is a ridiculously large figure to request, you'd be better forking all the WordPress code, renaming it PressWord, and employing a team of developers. It would be substantially cheaper than 8% of gross income, and carry less business and investor risk.

[TheMaskedMan]

"It also includes a ban on forking software from Automattic, its WooCommerce subsidiary, or its affiliate's software (eg, plugins and extensions)"

Fork off seems like the correct response. Automatic are looking worse and worse by the day. At this rate they'll be demanding a cut of any profits made by sites running wordpress by the end of the week. If I still used wordpress I'd be thinking about alternatives right now.

[Anonymous Coward]

WooCommerce WAS being considered

for a project that I'm involved with. No longer.

I expect that many other WP projects will be looking at the products that Automatic develops and going 'Nah, we have other options'.

There is an anti-Trump ad put out by 'The Lincoln Project' where we see Trump telling his disciples that he is so greedy. 'I want it all'. The same can be said for Automatic.

[ChoHag]

> I think people will understand that being able to demand a fair return on their work is essential

That's the kind of understanding that costs £100s/hr.

No part of "take this for free and do what you like with it, no questions asked" can demand, expect or even hope for a return, fair or unfair. Even a thanks is too much to expect. If you don't like that, don't release your work to the public under a license which amounts to "take this for free and do what you like with it, no questions asked".

Even a lawyer could tell you that.

Except Perens.

[demon driver]

Perens says exactly that. Which is why he's been working on a new contractual concept that doesn't actually say "take this for free and do what you like", but rather "take this for free and do what you like, except if you make more than $5M revenue (or so), or if you want to modify it without giving the modifications back to the public, then you need to pay a small fraction of your revenue (not more than 1%)", with the goal of enabling the developers to be fairly paid. To me, that sounds quite sensible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perens has forgotten what the freedom was he was fighting for, namely:

No discrimination between users

No discrimination between uses, including commercial use

So he, too, can fuck right off as he is now part of the problem he wanted to solve.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe he realised that the 'problem' has changed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Disheartening

Having worked in WP Engine 3 years ago, this whole escapade is something of a surprise. I was aware of some branding friction but it was the business equivilant of more on a level of two people refusing to make eye contact.

While I was there, I believe there were 2 developers dedicated to working on Wordpress full time to give back to the community. I mean, it wasn't a *lot* based on their staffing level but it wasn't nothing either. I'm kind of glad they've come up with a legal response though but it wouldn't have been an easy call. They're very aware their infrastructure is primarily based on FOSS, and they encourage their engineers to work on open source project in their own time (though frankly, some of this happens during office hours too on the sly).

Should they do more? Probably. But they haven't been sitting still all this time either.

[sten2012]

Re: Disheartening

No horse in this race generally but:

"They encourage their engineers to work on open source project in their own time"

How generous of them!

[Donn Bly]

"The software should be freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, and without permission."

Those aren't my words, those are the words of the WordPress Foundation, one of their stated goals when Matt Mullenweg helped create it in 2009. The idea behind the foundation was that no one person or company should be able to control the direction or future of WordPress or any other project supported by the foundation. A year later he transferred the WordPress trademarks to the foundation. Now over a decade later and after receiving hundreds of thousands of hours of donated labor from community members that were integral to making the project a success, he apparently wants to walk that back.

There are a LOT of companies that have based their business model on producing products and services that run on top, under, or alongside WordPress. Good or bad, it is the most popular website framework with more than 40% of all websites on the Internet using it. Quite a few of those companies have "WP" in their company or product names, as it is not a trademarked term.

I'm wondering if "WP Beginner" is going to be the next company in Automattic's crosshairs -- or is he only going to go after the companies that compete with his hosting company?

It seems that Automattic is now offering WP Engine customers free migration services to migrate their websites to Mullenweg's hosting company. This entire dispute couldn't be about Automattic just trying to increase market share, could it? Sure is looking that way.

[Rich 2]

“open source is broken”

It seems to be lauded more and more these days that the open source model is broken, at least when commerce and making money enters the picture.

I question weather open source and making money can cooperate at all without making the people that write it for free feeling hard done by.

At the start of open source being a “thing” NOBODY expected to be paid for the code they wrote and published. If they did, they wouldn’t publish it and make it freely available. It was a simple binary choice and it was up to the individual what they wanted to do.

And then business got involved and eyed an opportunity to make money from someone else’s work. And as time has gone on, and more and more businesses are making money from other peoples’ work, those people are getting increasingly annoyed, generally in proportion to how much money is being made.

I don’t have an answer to this but my point is (eventually!) that I cannot see how the two things can ever work harmoniously together, and if you are publishing some OS code and think you might get pissed off by the situation in the future then you have a choice - either don’t publish your code for free or apply some licensing terms that will stop you being pissed off, or go full commercial closed source.

Open source isn’t broken - it’s just fundamentally incompatible with (other people’s) businesses making money from it.

[ChoHag]

Re: “open source is broken”

> Open source isn’t broken - it’s just fundamentally incompatible with (other people’s) businesses making money from it.

No.

Other peoples' businesses making money from it IS THE POINT. Free software was doing just fine except no business would touch the GPL with a barge pole and so open source was born. People WANTED business to get in on it and so licenses were designed which would appeal to the sort of people who want to take stuff without giving back.

"Open source" was coined specifically to provide the unfettered freedom that the GPL provides and then tries to enforce, but without the viral enforcement. Open source exists SOLELY to be ATTRACTIVE TO BUSINESS by giving them free shit with no hooks attached and no obligations.

The source is open for all comers. For anyone to do with as you please.

If you don't like that don't play the game.

The only thing that's broken here is people expecting to be able to give something away and then claw it back.

[J. Cook]

While I don't have a problem with the trademark issue (which is probably stupid and frivolous), I do have an issue with how Matt handled it- slagging another company in public over something that should have just been a "lawyers at twenty paces" issue is IMAO, unprofessional, childish, and uncalled for.

(Bias: I have a problem with the person and how he's been behaving towards the users of one of Automattic's other properties.)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry for sounding like an idiot, but…

…can't WP Engine just rebrand itself to anything, literally anything, and avoid infringing on Wordpress' trademark?

Like:

photomatt: You gotta stop using “WP Engine” or else we'll sue you for infringing our trademarks.

WP Engine Management: Sure. We're MILB Hosting now.

photomatt:

photomatt:

photomatt: ok I'll bite. what's MILB stand for.

WP Engine MILB Hosting Management: Mullenweng Is A Litigious Butthead.

photomatt:

photomatt:

WP Engine MILB Hosting Management: Please note that the use of “butthead” and not “bastard”, which, we want to make it clear, is an opinion of Matt Mullenweg's conduct, and is in no way indicative of Matt Mullenweg's parentage.

[doublelayer]

Re: I'm sorry for sounding like an idiot, but…

Probably not, in that WP isn't Word Press's trademark and the trademarks they do have are owned by the foundation rather than the company doing the suing. If they sue about the letters WP, they're going to lose. So they're probably trying to make a case on use of a trademark somewhere else.

Maybe it's their current headline: "Most Trusted WordPress Platform 2024 | WP Engine®" and similar things. I still think the trademark wouldn't apply because they are hosting Word Press, but that line actually includes a trademarked phrase while their company name doesn't. Either way, it seems clear that trademarks are not the actual issue here and is just the way that the fight is currently described.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

While I've run Wordpress self hosted, Automattic has always made me twitchy. Seems I was right on that score.

Anyway, time to look for an alternative and migrate my sites. Not that I post much these days, but it feels nice to keep them around.

[CowHorseFrog]

Trademarks, posting established some year, all actions of those who innovation.

Labels, names, mottos all bullshit.