About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine…

I’ve been a happy WordPress user for almost 20 years. Before that, I wrote HTML by hand or used content management systems such as Drupal to run my websites. WordPress was so much better that I never looked back — and I’m far from alone. WordPress is used by 43% of all websites, including business giants such as eBay, Sony, GM, Samsung, and IBM. 

What’s not to like? 

Well, according to WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who spoke at the WordCamp WordPress conference in September, WP-Engine is squeezing out every last bit of money from the WordPress business, and “for open-source communities, it can be fatal.” Mullenweg went on in a blog post: WP-Engine is “a cancer to WordPress.” 

Wow. He went there. The most famous example of cancer and open source being mentioned together is when former Microsoft bigwig Steve Ballmer went off on Linux. Is this really where Mullenweg wanted to go? Yes, it is.

By his lights, “Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, the private equity firm with $102B assets that owns WP-Engine, is hollowing out the WordPress open source community by not including some WordPress features, such as its change revision system — and the company only contributes back 40 hours a week. Meanwhile, Automattic, Mullenweg’s for-profit WordPress company, “is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.” (He also accused WP-Engine of violating WordPress’s trademarks.)

WP-Engine was not amused and fired off a cease-and-desist letter to Mullenweg and Automattic demanding they withdraw their comments. The company also revealed in its words that Mullenweg would take a “scorched earth nuclear approach” against WP Engine unless it agreed to pay “a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.” Specifically, it claimed Mullenweg had demanded 8% of its gross revenues. That went over just as well as you’d think. 

Mullenweg briefly banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org resources, affecting updates for 1.5 million websites. This move prevented users from updating their plugins, which are an essential part of WordPress site management. That decision was swiftly reversed after community backlash.

Things continued downhill from there. On Oct. 2, WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg personally, alleging extortion, slander, and abuse of power.

People inside the WordPress community aren’t happy either. At Automattic, 159 employees (8.4% of the workforce) accepted Mullenweg’s offer to leave with a generous severance package if they disagreed with his handling of the situation.

In a controversial move, he also announced WordPress would be “forking” a WP Engine plugin, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), renaming it Secure Custom Fields. While forking open-source programs has long been a way for developers to protest against code policies, this seems to be generated mostly from Mullenweg wanting to strike at WP-Engine. In his own words, the move was “to remove commercial upsells.” The ACF developer team replied, “A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21-year history of WordPress.”

It’s also, as tech journalist Ian Betterridge observed on Threads, “Fascinating that Mullenweg, on the one hand, claims WP Engine has contributed nothing to WordPress, and on the other reckons its plugin code is so valuable to the community it needs to be taken over.”

Additionally, WordPress.org — the nonprofit arm of WordPress — implemented a mandatory checkbox on its login page requiring users to confirm they are not affiliated with WP Engine. How? Well, you see, it turns out WordPress.org doesn’t belong to the WordPress Foundation, where Mullenweg is one of its three leaders. No, as Mullenweg succinctly put it, “WordPress.org just belongs to me.“

Indeed, the more you look into this conflict, the clearer it becomes that this is no battle between a spunky old-school, open-source leader against a big bad commercial company and more a conflict between a capitalist who wants a bigger share of the WordPress pie and a company that had been doing quite well from the status quo.

If you spend a lot of time following open-source businesses like me, this might sound all too familiar. In the last few years, one successful open-source company after another, such as Hashicorp, Redis, and CockRoachDB, abandoned open source for “fauxpen source” licenses to try to make more money.  All these were already multi-hundred-million dollar businesses, but they wanted more. Much more. 

Greed is a powerful thing.

That appears to be the case here, too. WordPress can’t try the relicensing move. It’s licensed under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), This license is both irrevocable and requires any derived work to be licensed under the same license. What Mullenweg can and is doing, though, is trying to shake down WP Engine for more money.

As my fellow journalist Matthew Ingram pointed out in an excellent essay on the conflict, “Matt is not just the plucky founder of a nonprofit open-source project, he’s a wealthy CEO of a for-profit corporation that is attacking a competitor, and using his status as the founder of the nonprofit to extract money from that competitor.”

From where I sit, this is not a battle over open source. It’s a fight between someone worth hundreds of millions and a company worth billions. When you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in any conflict, whether it’s a family fight, a divorce, or a business fight, one of the best rules of thumb is to follow the money. What it’s telling me here is it’s about the cash. 

Unfortunately, this battle can potentially affect me and everyone who uses WordPress and WP Engine in particular. I didn’t need this. None of us do.