159 Automattic staff take severance offer and walk out over WP Engine feud Matthew Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress biz Automattic and co-creator of the open source software, says he feels "much lighter" after 159 employees departed in the wake of his controversial attempt to pressure WP Engine to license trademarks the rival has used for years. As we reported earlier this week, Mullenweg contends WP …
There are always some tricky aspects to something that was formerly entirely charitable switching to a partially charitable and partially for-profit enterprise. In the case of the Raspberry Pi, not even this happened as the foundation set up a for-profit manufacturing company back in 2012. However, it is not the same as this case. The private company was majority owned by the foundation until it was taken public, and is still 49% owned by the foundation. If it was entirely owned by Eben Upton, this would be a different situation.
There are always some tricky aspects to something that was formerly entirely charitable switching to a partially charitable and partially for-profit enterprise. In the case of the Raspberry Pi, not even this happened as the foundation set up a for-profit manufacturing company back in 2012.
It can also be fairly normal. Charities often create trading companies because doing commercial/for profit stuff can get complicated to do purely as a charity. Rules are pretty strict. Where it can get tricky is when the trading company then charges the charity for services and fees, and becomes a way to siphon money from the charity into the trading arm. Especially when trustees of the charity also are directors of the for-profit. The Charities Commission can take a very dim view of those kinds of shenanigans.
I haven't poked around Raspberry Pi's filings but as a charitable venture, I'd have preferred it to be 51% owned by the foundation, and also expect to see it paying royalties or licensing fees at a 'fair' rate to the foundation for use of the IP. The US seems to take a more.. flexible view of charity vs for-profit and leaves it up to the courts to figure out stuff like WordPress.
If Wikipedia can be trusted, they had 1733 employees at some point in 2024, so this is about 9% of them who left. That doesn't explain how many of them were working in each area, though. It's still not a good look.
I'm also curious why he offered an exit package like this in the first place. There's something a little weird about the speed of that and the terms provided. The person who worked for two days and is getting six months of salary is a particularly odd example, because he certainly didn't have to do that by law.
"The person who worked for two days and is getting six months..."
Fair play to the guy on that, at least. He made an offer. When an odd corner case came up he stood buy the deal and didn't try amend it and back-peddle. It speaks to his character.
And he also seems quite happy for WP Engine not to give him a dime - as long as they invest in the platform. Which, again, points to his aims.
The package likely included some sort of NDA/don't-compete-with-me clause so that he can try to keep his customers from going along with the people who did the actual work for them, because there is an approximately 100% chance that all investors and customers are going to pull out in the coming months.
We should call him Matthew "Petarded" Mullenweg.
I'd challenge you to find anyone who managed to get a lick of work done in the first 2 days after onboarding to a new company, what with all the training material, brand indoctrination, health and safety courses, setting up of new IT equipment etc which has to be done.
Smart people. There'll be more to come, of course, as the legal battle plays out. I'm struggling to see how Matt/Automattic have a leg to stand on here. Sure, they'll get some of the complaints thrown out, but others have some very clear merits. At best, they'll be forced to pay some more minor damages, and probably lose what little control they had over the 'WP' initials. At worst, they're facing serious financial penalties for WP Engine's lost income, a severe weakening of trademark protections for the WordPress brand across the board, and forced breakup of the weird monopoly Matt's constructed that gives him control over both wordpress.com (Automattic) and wordpress.org (WordPress foundation).
Matt's problem here is that it doesn't matter if he's morally right or wrong, or whether community opinion is on his side (both of which are questionable right now). What matters is the law, and it's difficult to see how WordPress can win this on the legal merits, regardless of any other arguments. Whether you're a fan of WP Engine or not, they're almost certainly legally in the right here, and if Matt objected to them making a profit off his work product, he should've just joined the same club so many FOSS software makers have been flocking to of late and made WordPress a 'source-available' proprietary product instead. Of course, WP Engine would likely just fork it, but hey, at least then they might put more dev time in, right? I mean, that was the whole point of this thing, wasn't it? To encourage them to support the community a little more? It's not like Matt saw Silver Lake's oodles of cash and started salivating at the thought of getting a nice cut of it for himself, right?
Icon for the likely end result of all this on the WordPress ecosystem and community. Well played, Matt.
I agree that Matt would eventually lose this in court, but long before that happens he will lose the community. He has ramped up the pressure with the checkbox on the login page, trying to pressure WP Engine users and developers. There's too much at stake here to put up with this nonsense threatening everyone's livelihood. Yes, we all benefit from the resources devoted to WP security - but others are making a nice living in that space as well (e.g. Wordfence). From what I can tell, Matt's developers have mostly been hard at work creating the block-based Gutenburg system, which is muscling in on Elementor's space. Automattic is also doing well on Woocommerce revenue. But now Matt is putting all of his success on the line by declaring war on WP Engine. I expect that to backfire spectacularly - a fork will happen, as folks lose confidence in his leadership.
Mullenweg's lawyers need to get Mullenweg off the postcast circuit.
I see where Mullenweg is coming from, but in recent interviews he has come over as more than a little rash, impetuous and ignorant of the law (I'm no lawyer, but it is like watching Sidney Powell in clown shoes running across a legal minefield). To steal a turn of phase on behalf of the departing staff "and for that reason alone, I'm out". Sometimes as I watched I was literally covering my eyes and saying "don't say that", "oh, you didn't, did you?" and "could even an expensive lawyer get you out of this".
Could anyone look the departing staff at "Automattic" in the eye say that things will turn around for the better? It may seem disloyal to leave but people have many confllicting loyalties in their lives.
I am sure many of the departing staff see themselves as the first in the lifeboats, by which I mean the first to throw their CVs in the ring. There are undoutedly opportunities in the world for Wordpress people, but a limited number of jobs for top people.
"WP Engine" seem pretty mercenary, but if they meet the GPL they meet the GPL, and they are ultimately a business.
Using trademark law to act a some sort of IP proxy for code contribution will not work, for the simple reason that Trademark law and Copyright law are in no way proxies. Trademarks must be defended and WP was explicitly not defended (i.e. permission was given in the license to use it willy-nilly) for many years. This is therefore incredibly unlikely to stand. Retrospecively modifying the license conditions on the website won't fix that. In fact it almost undoubtedly makes matters worse; much much worse. If the argument that WP is synonymous with "Wordpress" is won, then that trademark might (unlikely, but might) fall too.
Trademark law, extortion accusations, defamation, IP - wow! that is an impressive set of specialist (i.e. unintuitive and expensive) legal fields (why not add family, international trade and human rights to complete the set?). I do hope they manage to sort something out, but it seems to have gone way beyond private, informal chats - and into "my lawyers will be in touch with your lawyers".
+1 for explaining the many legal issues Matt's facing so clearly and succinctly. These are the legal merits I was referring to in my comment above, but my buzzy head at 1am couldn't pin down into words. One of Matt's lawyers needs to gag him, fast. Or one of his PR people. But then, every time he opens his mouth, they get a nice fat pay bump, so what incentive do they really have to try and stop him?
Anyway, have a beer!
The issue isn't solely over "WP" being used, but that WP Engine was actually using the "WordPress" and "WooCommerce" trademarks commercially and without license throughout their site, in video ads, Google Ads, etc.
These trademarks are something that have been enforced for years, not just in domain names, but also when submitting any plugin or theme to the .org repo during the review process. The folks currently backing WP Engine are apparently ignorant to this process.
They literally had a plan called "Core WordPress" and changed everything after the cease and desist. If they truly believe all of their violations were fair use, why change anything to reduce any risk? Contributing to core WordPress was simply one option WP Engine had instead of paying a trademark license alone. They didn't want to do either.
I don't know how they were using them, but to some extent, this is normal and expected. If you're hosting Word Press, then saying that is stating a fact rather than advertising on a trademark. The "Core WordPress" name could easily be permitted on that basis. They could have used the name in other ways that would be more difficult to justify, and it wouldn't surprise me if they had, but that name doesn't sound like one of those. WooCommerce is another story and could be more a clearer violation.
As for why they might change these, it could easily be that they hoped that making those cosmetic changes would make this lawsuit go away. Not fighting this means less trouble for them even if they think they are guaranteed to win, not to mention that they do benefit from Automattic's work and don't really want to see them destroyed. They don't have to think that their actions were illegal to justify stopping them.
"If you're hosting Word Press, then saying that is stating a fact rather than advertising on a trademark."
That is not automatically true, which is why in the Linux world many distros re-brand Firefox to something else. If the binary does not come strait from Mozilla then you can't call it Firefox.
That is not entirely correct. Mozilla's guidelines are on modifications rather than binary source. If I take the source code for Firefox and compile it unmodified, it is Firefox. Mozilla is fine with this, and so would a court. To some extent, they're also fine with some modifications, though their preferences aren't entirely clear. Rebranding seems to happen when changes have been made to the binary, for example removing some advertising. Even in that case, they could easily say that they are using Firefox with some changes by the distribution and be fine from a trademark situation because they are. They choose not to because Mozilla would prefer they didn't, but they don't have a legal requirement to. Different rules might apply to trademarked logos, I'd have to check the license, but the name wouldn't be affected.
Is this whole company to company slagging match as simple as. Wp are losing money (for that market). Let's get some money from wp engine. We can then blame wp engine for the job losses.
The 30k to leave seems very generous for the usa.
Couldn't they see what wp engine are doing better and mimic that.
What am I missing?
I'm not sure. At the start, this seemed like the old classic "I made something open source [with lots of others' help] and I want to be paid by the people who make money off it. Why can't I force them to do that?". To add a bit of extra spice, there was something a little legally dubious about trademarks thrown in. However, the way it's played out isn't following the normal pattern. There are lots of people who host Word Press for profit. They all say "Word Press" on their websites. Some of them use it in advertising that I'd rather not see anymore. None of those have been sued or had their access to update servers cut. Either this is really about the name of the company, in which case it's not going to go well for Automattic because "WP" is not the same thing as "Word Press", or it's about something else but I'm not sure what it is.
If there's an actual legal thing in here, I don't get it. I'm currently operating on the theory that it's really just a personal whim that's going to go badly, mostly because that's the only explanation that gets even close to explaining most of the events. Maybe Mullenweg hates someone who works at WP Engine. It would make more sense than most of the rest of this.
Mullenweg has form on this. He has regular tantrums regarding other companies making a profit off his products - take his feud with James Farmer's biz 'WPMU Dev' a few years back. This is just the first case of one of them actually fighting back with lawyers, and it's quickly escalated out of control.
In my past BOFH life there was a time when every clown and his circus wanted an all singing and dancing web site.
Too few hours in the day for this nonsense so "you can have a read-only document tree and IncludesNoExec or you can go to buggery an externally hosted Wordpess site."
(Any requests for PHP* might invite an ex fenestrā introduction to the car park.)
After a few months these clowns' sites were unmaintained and basically abandoned, the owner having moved on to a newer glittering toy.
In any case I was never troubled by web server issues. Those hosted internally were mostly static and a couple owned by fairly cluey people pushed all the cleverness out to the client. (This before web2 was really a thing.) ECMAscript/Javascript, CSS and DOM also seem pretty horrible but again not my problem.
* in the early '00s it was rare for a month to pass without one or more CERT or AUSCert bulletins about a serious flaw in php[4?] - really best avoided. :)
So Mullenweg using Automattic committed tax fraud in basically HUNDREDS of jurisdictions worldwide, and across every state in the US.
Then lied about it. Then tried to illegally cover it up. Then tried to bribe politicians to turn a blind eye
THEN 159 employees jumped ship, because they were about to be made scapegoats for mullenweg's ACTUAL financial crimes.
This guy needs to get such a massive prison sentence, it'll send waves of fear to every company that was given a not-for-profit product or license and tries to take it over and basically copyright/trademark/patent troll the CEO to riches.
And whilst it SEEMS a small percentage of staff left, those were nearly 100% of their technical staff with the actual talent and skills (and the ability to fix security problems). The ones they have left are spreadsheet-creating secretaries and financial "make some work so we look busy" types. The talent has left the building.
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