ChallengeEup237

Yah I agree, he'll pull the temple down on his head before he lets others control it, which is likely what he's going to end up doing.

Automattic has exclusive commercial rights to the WordPress trademark. That was the self-dealing deal he made when he "gave" the trademark to the WordPress Foundation. He can start a new commercial WP company, but it won't have that trademark so would be limited in the same ways he was trying to force on WP Engine etc.

I think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.

There is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.

Yah that's horrible. You're like a dead man walking on death row at that point.

The Foundation's public filings are online, and I think they only had $22k in donations last year. Doesn't mean his contributions were all charitable, but they don't appear to have gone to the Foundation at least.

Matt has unfortunately been very unresponsive to any feedback about what should or should not go into core. Despite claiming WordPress core is open-source and open to almost everyone, the team leaders responsible for what goes into each release have been all Automattic employees since 2019.

So you guys don't get sued any further for essentially hijacking a distribution channel and pushing an unauthorized version?

If I were an employee of A8C I wouldn't be touching this code with a ten foot pole - employees can still be found guilty of criminal wrongdoing even if their employer told them to do something.

And continue to update it. Automattic bought WooCommerce.

There are so many legal entities here that appear completely intertwined: The WordPress Foundation, Automattic, Audrey Capital, WordPress Community Support PBC, etc. Conflicts of interest are a problem even if they aren't acted upon. It's going to get ugly.

What does her position have to do with the lawsuit? It could have been a developer position, it doesn't materially change anything.