[slouch]

Matt admitted on reddit that he asked for 8% of annual revenue or ~40 million. https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fnz0h6/comment/...

He posted this after receiving the C&D.

[mthoms]

Notably, Matt demanded that would need to be paid to Automattic instead of the WordPress Foundation. (that's according to WPEngine).

Automattic is Matt's private, for-profit company and a direct competitor to WPE.

[arp242]

Matt's message reads:

> 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.

So they could have "paid" by just hiring a few WordPress devs to work on it. That is: not necessarily by transferring dollars to Automattic.

IMHO this is an important bit of nuance missing in this thread.

[slouch]

That's because Matt's Foundation gave Matt's Automattic the exclusive commercial trademark license. https://x.com/photomatt/status/1838671002529665394

[tptacek]

There are things in that WPE C&D that make me question how candid they're being; for instance, the trademark dispute seems an awful lot more complicated than the letters "W" and "P".

[deepfriedchokes]

I think this guy is having some sort of legit mental health crisis.

[mintplant]

I've been wondering this since his Tumblr dust-up earlier in the year.

[3np]

The "next week means 'no'" really stands out.

[chuckadams]

Cool, thanks for the link. I wonder how much of Automattic's board is made up of Matt's personal friends. He'd best hope it's a majority.

[duskwuff]

Out of five board members, one is Matt, one was the CEO of Automattic before Matt took over the role, and a third was an early investor. The other two are harder to pin down.

https://automattic.com/board/

[gibrown]

No need to wonder: https://automattic.com/board/