Lenny Rachitsky: disagreement

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think this is until this gets resolved... which by the way I hope it is soon. I think there's no business reason for this to continue. I really hope that they come to a settlement or something. We're ready. They could end this tomorrow if they wanted to. WP Engine could. We can't. We're just defending right now. So it's really incumbent on them. All of our competitors, by the way, are like, "Great. WordPress, the king on the hill, all of a sudden we can use this." And so there's also not just from WP Engine, but also from all the competitors to WordPress, and all the people who would love to capture some market share, they're really leaning into this. So I've seen white papers, I've seen all sorts of things where people talk about this. We're actually in the next couple of days going to publish something really cool on the WordPress.org blog though that shows if you actually look at the numbers, like the activity, number of commits, plugin updates, downloads, installs of WordPress since September 20th when this all started, it's quite healthy. And so I'm not saying that there isn't examples of where someone lost a project or something like that. I'm sure it's happened. It's the internet's big. WordPress has so many millions of users and developers and everything that you're going to get some example. But by the numbers things are actually quite healthy, and in some ways it's not that there's no press is bad press, it's raised the awareness of WordPress quite a bit. So people who haven't talked about WordPress in years are now like, "Oh, Let's talk about it." And so a little bit of drama I think, I wouldn't do this all the time, but a little bit can be a good thing. Okay, so one of the most common frustrations I've seen on the internet, people complaining is around the trademark. I don't know all the details, but my understanding is there's kind of a... you moved the trademark to be owned by the foundation and Automattic is exclusive rights to use the trademark. And I think people are like, "Oh, I thought it was the foundation owned it, but maybe Matt still owns it and then you're trying to monetize it through this agreement with WP Engine. " Is there anything you can share there that'll make people feel and see your side of the story? Yeah, this is totally fair because it's complicated, but people are saying this has been private. This has all been very public and documented on the internet from the beginning. So WordPress.org has always been me personally, and I think because it's... part of the reason we started there is . com was not available when we started. So that's why we started on the .org and things like that. But I think people also assume .org means nonprofit or something, and that's sometimes true but it's not always. It's not a requirement of the .org domain. Then when I founded Automattic and when we did register the trademark that actually was registered under Automattic. So it used to be, for the first five years of the project or whatever, that Automattic just owned everything outright. And again, I had investors and the board and that was under the control of that. Now, as Automattic became more successful I was able to consolidate some voting rights and other things and at least later advocate. Also remember, I was like 21 when all this was happening, so I was not maybe the most savvy about legal stuff or didn't always have the best advice. So later as I learned more, I was like, "Oh, I want to actually take this out of the company and create a nonprofit." And so we ended up creating a nonprofit. Now the rules around 501(3)(C) nonprofits run the IRS are actually very strict. So that's also something as people assume, it's like, oh, doesn't the nonprofit run the software, and we applied for that originally and it was denied by the IRS. So we actually weren't able to put WordPress.org or the software itself under the nonprofit, but we were able to have sort of an educational purview. So what was eventually approved was sort of running the meetups and other things for WordPress, doing educational stuff. We sponsor a lot of learn to code or running workshops in other countries. We have this cool thing called do_action where we'll do a weekend where we take a bunch of nonprofits and build websites for them and stuff like that. So the nonprofit does a lot of exciting things there and then also negotiated with the investors and everyone at Automattic to actually put the trademark under the foundation. Now the compromise there was that Automattic at this point is running WordPress.com. So to continue running that, which at the time had already tens of millions of users and everything, it needed a commercial license. And so the compromise is that the foundation would kind of own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org because obviously I need that. And then Automattic would retain the commercial license and the ability to sub-license that, so to sell that to others. So this was kind of the grand compromise and create this tripartite structure. I was very inspired by the three branches of government.…

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