WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties (techcrunch.com) 23
WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark.
The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts.
The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.
The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts.
The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.
Rent seeking is getting crazy (Score:4, Interesting)
You keep seeing this where some suit sees a whole shitload of users and they get dollar signs in their eyes and get excited about how much revenue they can suck out of them in exchange for basically nothing.
WordPress isn't magic it's quick and dirty code and that's what made it popular if you add cost to it it's just going to get replaced by something else.
But you never know what you can get away with until you try and everything's a grift now so here we go with another round of it.
I wonder if there are any actual successes of this particular type of rent seeking that I just haven't heard about. The two I mentioned above were complete disasters, unity in particular has never fully recovered and basically created a viable competitor that was way behind previously with Godot. Their little snafu brought literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra funding to the Godot project and has allowed it to catch up. D&d just barely managed to recognize their fuck up and back off before losing everything.
Re:Rent seeking is getting crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
Redhat (CentOS), Cpanel, now wordpress pulling out the "pay for a licence now" after years of not having to.
All the free hosters use cpanel, and a lot of them offer "wordpress hosting" packages.
And if you have ever used cpanel recently, there is an entire "wordpress management" toolkit added to it.
Boy would it ever suck to be a host that has to pay all this license bullshit for 100 people to make a business card site (basically a 1 page website with the business name, hours, location.) Cpanel restricts how many sites you can run per machine, so now you have to minmax those licences. If you had to pay more on top, the business model doesn't work. So you're now stuck paying $90/mo for one stupid wordpress site.
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Pretty much all those same sites also have Drupal, which does all the same jobs, only better. It's far from perfect itself, but it's still worlds ahead of Wordpress. If they had to pay a fee to do Wordpress installs, I promise they would just drop it, or they would make users pay for them. My hosting costs approximately nothing, there's no room for licensing fees there.
And Automattic continues to circle the drain (Score:4, Informative)
Matt's actions make Oracle's actions towards Java look nurturing and altruistic. This is suicidal, and I don't see anything coming out of it except moves to other blogging/easy-website-creator platforms.
you're missing the important part (Score:1)
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Nope.
Vibe coding doesn't mean you can easily write a Wordpress clone in half a day. It just makes it easier for less skilled people to create applications that a real programmer would have used Wordpress as a framework for.
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https://arstechnica.com/ai/202... [arstechnica.com]
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Nope. It really isn't.
A team of experts in C were able to, over an unspecified period, able to get Claude to generate a C compiler of unknown quality, by having it work with the code of several existing C compilers. That's not proof generative AI is anywhere near being able to spit out a feature complete Wordpress|C compiler|etc thing that's been vibe coded in half a day. It's also quite useless: it relies upon C compilers already existing. It might have been impressive if it took the ANSI C spec and wrote
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No body wants that. 50% of wordpress is never touched and the top plugin of the last six months is 'classic editor'. Also a good chunk of it could be replaced with open source apis (rest, etc)
You might want to take another look at AI coding. I've churned out 20 commercial plugins the last year, and I consider myself a entry level at php (my main jam is c, vb, ml, perl coding).
I had AI clone the entire wp classic editor system with all DB access into Perl for a site that only allowed
Tumblr? (Score:3)
I'm still trying to figure out. (Score:2)
Re: I'm still trying to figure out. (Score:3)
WordPress is more of an ecosystem than a product. A new WordPress can never reasonably compete with WordPress because of the giant market of service providers and plugin developers that has spring up around it.
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Most WP plugins are garbage, adding functionality that should have been core functionality.
People forget that wordpress offers no core functionality at all other than writing text blogs, and commenting on the text blogs. Everything else, is a plugin.
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The thing with Word press plugins, is that if Posix taught us anything its that APIs can be copied;. It'd take a team of 2-3 guys to implement most of that API in drupal or whatever.
But lets do one better. I'd like to see this as an opportunity to finally rid the world of computers of fucking PHP.
Do some statistical analysis and figure out what are the plugins everyone uses, write a new *better* CMS in python or javascript, add those popular funcrtions in for free and let wordpress finally die.
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A new WordPress can never reasonably compete with WordPress because of the giant market of service providers and plugin developers that has spring up around it.
Allow me to introduce you to Drupal, which you have apparently never heard of. It's the second-most popular CMS after Wordpress, it has a large community and they actually care about things like security. There are modules which do what all of the popular Wordpress plugins do. It's clear which modules are supported and which aren't. You can manage it from the CLI or from the web. Wordpress can go away and Drupal can do exactly the same job, only with less suck.
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Fork it. Not that it hasn't [b2evolution.net] been [classicpress.net]done already...
No kidding.. (Score:2)
Why wouldn't they?
You honestly think after one shake-down for more money, they'd stop there?
That would satisfy their 'goal', and also make their bank account happy?
And after the Top 10, they'd keep going too.
It was obvious from the get-go. Matt's 'excuse' for extorting Automattic applies just as much to most others down the line.
How do you steal WP Engine's customers? (Score:2)
Good Bye WordPress (Score:1)