wpinsider's comments

Given Mullenweg and Automattic hired a full time ‘Executive Director of WordPress.org, does that mean that Automattic will contribute 5 hours to Wordpress beyond that?

Also fascinating that Mullenweg is willing to back away from the WordPress people love, but won’t let others engage to take up the slack. Has he been blocking WPE and others contributions if they don’t line up with his/Automattic’s commercial interests all along? Is there another shoe to drop?

If community members submit code to improve core by removing the dependency on .org and allowing users to choose will Mullenweg allow it in?

He also said that he was using the situation to downsize his business. “we can serve our customers better, just more efficiently… I can see a point where Automattic reaches $1bn of revenue with fewer people than we have today.”

Mullenweg’s for profit company @automattic now appears to be acting to further exert control the open source community he helped found. Felipe Santos an Automattic employee has demanded that @wordcampsyd delete tweets related to @wpengine being removed as a sponsor and threatened to remove the organizing team. Then a follow up demanding local WordCamp organizers turn off MFA and turn over credentials for their social media accounts.

Photomatt’s argument is flawed in its interpretation of the First Amendment. Key points of concern include:

1. Misapplication of the First Amendment: The First Amendment restricts the U.S. government from infringing on freedom of speech. However, private entities are not bound by this provision. The First Amendment does not protect individuals from actions taken by private companies enforcing contractual or legal obligations. WP Engine, as a private entity, has the right to seek legal remedies, including an injunction, if they believe rights, promises, or contractual terms have been violated. The issue is not about freedom of speech but about the misuse of his power and position, conflicts of interest and multiple harms caused by Mullenweg’s actions.

2. Speech Rights vs. Legal Injunctions: The Mullenweg is framing legal claims as a restriction of free speech. However, a legal injunction does not curtail First Amendment rights unless it unjustly censors speech in a manner recognized by courts. Injunctions often aim to prevent specific harms, such as defamation, breach of promise or contract, or other legal wrongs, and are about addressing legal violations.

3. Legal Context: The Mullenweg overlooks that WP Engine’s claims are not about restricting free speech but about other legal concerns, amongst other things : intellectual property, contract disputes, breaches of promise, and reputational harm. The framing of the argument as about free speech is specious and distracts from the core legal issues at play in the injunction.

4. Contradictory Position: Photomattic says he will stop commenting on the case but simultaneously encourages others to speak on his behalf. While this tactic may not directly violate any rights, it seems disingenuous to claim adherence to one’s First Amendment rights while actively seeking to influence public discourse through surrogates and shrills, something he appears to have done throughout the dispute.

The argument seeks to manipulatively capture sympathy and naively misunderstands and misrepresents the First Amendment, conflates legal actions taken by a private company with government suppression of speech. It fails to engage with the legal basis of the injunction and attempts to encourage others to speak for him.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more commentary on this.

Mullenweg’s prior comments that there weren’t any plans to pursue any other hosts or plugin developers seem to be null in the face of a bigger plan.

When you couple this with the additional (egregious) trademark registrations for terms commonly used across the community, it seems clear that there was a co-ordinated and deliberate plan.

I wonder if any other hosts or plugin developers caved in to pressure before Mullenweg turned his sights on WP Engine, or whether his enforced ‘samattical’/Tumblr tirade delayed things.

Fair. Have fixed.

Seems like it will change a lot of people's perspective on his battle. Initially there might have been something in it worth listening to, but then he cut users off from updates and stole a plugin with hundreds of thousands of hours of code contributed to the community. Now he's basically admitting that it's all about how much money he makes off the project he runs and deriding DHH for not exploiting his projects enough!

It looks like it was all about the money all along.

Despite his claims that he was looking for contributions to the project, or that he was concerned about trademark use, Mullenweg's latest tirade against DHH is 'all about the money', not about Open Source, not about the community. All about MM's personal profit motive.

Strongly recommend installing the genuine ACF from www.advancedcustomfields.com - the WP Engine and ACF teams have provided timely updates (even fixed Automattic’s spurious security issue in less than a day) and have uploaded a permanent fix to MM’s malicious hack of ACF to create SCF.