Uh oh, if these allegations by WP Engine are true, then Matt may have been falsely claiming the non profit and for profit arms of wordpress were two separate entities when he actually controlled both, and charging the for profit company licensing fees for trademarks in order to funnel money to himself. This is all alleged, but if true it could constitute some pretty severe legal violations
I just need everyone to see the kind of day Matthew Charles Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and tumblr user @photomatt had on the Orange Website which is basically diametrically opposed to tumblr:
For context, famously well-adjusted non-harassment non-hypocrite and tumblr owner Matt is being sued for a whole litany of things (I’ll let their lawsuit explain it in full). in summary:
wordpress (the technology) is open source and nonprofit and used by 40% of websites,
matty boy owns automattic which owns tumblr and wordpress.com (a wordpress host)
the trademark for WordPress was falsely “transferred” to the nonprofit foundation wordpress.org – by the way, matt explicitly says “WordPress.org just belongs to me” – and in fact sneakily and tax fraudily licensed it back exclusively anyway. the foundation is a very very thin front.
for context, WP Engine are another wordpress host; they’re contributed to wordpress for a while now,
automattic has decided after some twenty years to extort WPE for a trademark (that they don’t own), explicitly described by matt as “a scorched earth nuclear approach”. guess why? they wanted profit
in addition to a boatload of libel (corporate beef, eh) the guy has explicitly cut off access so now fucking tens of millions of sites for a kajillion different things can’t update their plugins or issue support tickets. conveniently, automattic has found a security flaw in a wpe plugin. wanna update it to protect your site? uhhhh…
but it’s ok! wordpress.com (and a different company matt owns) explicitly offers a way to buy out the contract. see isn’t that easy?
guy’s now being a reply guy everywhere, including dick measuring about his charitable tax returns and for some inane reason contacting the ceo of reddit to change r/Wordpress to r/WordPress (no, really)
Hey guys… maybe I know why tumblr is so hellbent on accusing fundraisers for 3 Muslim-majority nationalities (Palestinian, Lebanese, and Sudanese) of being scams…
Updated some of the wording on my paragraph because after looking into it more the wording may have been misleading / misinformed!
Just for further clarity, because I realize most people reading this post won’t open the links, for the part about the fraudulent business plans and behaviour, it’s discussed very shortly in paragraphs 10-15. Fraudulent business practices were not the primary reason for the lawsuit and they were not primary aspects of the allegations, but they were present and it was worth mentioning due to the irony of the present treatment tumblr has of Muslim majority nationalities currently.
Regardless of how in-depth or vague these specific allegations are, do not let that take away from the fact that a Muslim nurse accused Matt Mullenweg and his mother Kathleen Mullenweg of scamming her out of free labour. And this wasn’t the first time they scammed a worker out of her money.
matt photomatt mullenweg, ceo of wordpress and tumblr: “that guy” as in me? “fuck off” as in off this mortal coil? as per our zero tolerance policy, he, i mean they, i mean you, are banned for life.
