At WordCamp U.S. this year, WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, sent shockwaves through the WordPress community when he called WP Engine, one of the largest managed WordPress hosting companies in the world, a “cancer to WordPress”. He specifically called out WP Engine’s parent company, private equity firm Silver Lake, for not contributing “enough” back to the WordPress community.
What followed was a tangled mess of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, expulsion of WP Engine employees from the WordPress community and plugin repository, and a mass exodus of Automattic employees who disagreed with some of the actions that Mullenweg was taking unilaterally. These actions included:
- Demanding that WP Engine and/or Silver Lake pay 8% of their revenues back to the project as part of WordPress’ “Five for the Future” initiative, a request that many viewed as extortionate.
- Prohibiting WP Engine employees from updating WP Engine-owned plugins on the WordPress plugin repository.
- Adding a checkbox to the WordPress.org login screen that made users declare that they were not “affiliated with WP Engine in any way”.
- Kicking WP Engine employees off WordCamp organizing teams and barring WP Engine from sponsoring WordCamps.
- Wresting control of WP Engine-owned plugins in the WordPress plugin repository (more on that below).
- Kicking WP Engine employees off of the WordPress community Slack team.
- Blocked any website hosted on WP Engine from the automatic and easily accessed core, them, and plugin update process that sites on any other hosting provider enjoy.
Many of these actions were viewed in the community as petty and vindictive, and served only to punish website owners who, largely, were ignorant of the drama and politics being played out in the WordPress ecosystem
Confusion Around the Name “WP Engine”
For full disclosure, I’ve never been a particular fan of WP Engine’s hosting service for reasons that have nothing to do with this latest controversy. There’s nothing inherently bad about their service; they’re still loads better than the $8/month alternatives. It’s just that when it comes to how I believe a website should be configured, I have differing opinions on the best way to do things than their technology allows.
Part of Mullenweg’s complaint is around the name “WP Engine”, and I will agree that I have seen this issue in our own experience. Because WordPress is so often referred to in print as “WP”, many people refer to WP Engine as “WordPress Engine” (I have the emails to prove it). Mullenweg states that he often gets support requests for issues on WP Engine, believing that WordPress and WP Engine are one in the same, when on the contrary, Automattic has its own hosting offerings that are unaffiliated with WP Engine, and are in fact competing products.
Coinciding with this public dispute, he changed the trademark policy around the terms “WordPress” and “WP”. While in the past, it had been fairly open to use the term “WP” (for instance, in URLs, where “wp” was allowed, but “wordpress” was not unless it was an officially-designated property of Automattic), Mullenweg changed it to be:
“The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”
Again, with the direct reference to WP Engine, and again with arbitrary moving the goalposts.
Advanced Custom Fields
For many WordPress developers like myself, there is no more indispensable plugin than Advanced Custom Fields. For a custom website that goes beyond the simple blog, ACF is the workhorse that allows your website to be anything you want it to be. The continued health and security of this particular plugin is a matter of great importance to many of us.
WP Engine owns the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, although they didn’t create it. From its inception and for many years, the plugin—both in its free and premium versions—was the brainchild of Australian developer Elliot Condon. It was then sold to a company called Delicious Brains which had a number of other top-quality plugins in its portfolio, including WP Migrate. But it was when Delicious Brains was sold to WP Engine that red flags started flying for me. Almost immediately, upsells for WP Engine’s hosting product started showing up in all of their plugins. While to date WP Engine has been a good steward of these ACF and their other Delicious Brains plugins, I am wary of how these plugins will be maintained in the future, especially in light of this dispute.
Among the actions Mullenweg took was commandeering the ACF and renaming it “Secure Custom Fields”. As Mullenweg had already banned WP Engine employees from logging into their WordPress.org accounts, they no longer had the means to update this plugin for features or security, and Mullenweg claimed it was within their rights to take this action. However, many in the WordPress community see it as an overreach of Mullenweg’s power. To top it off, Automattic recently released their own version of the pro version of ACF as a free download in the WordPress plugin repository, effectively nulling it, which is a universally condemned practice.
Once again, the independent developer, the agency, and the WordPress community are collateral damage in what is essentially a war of egos.
How Taupecat Studios Is Responding
Fortunately, this whole riff hasn’t significatly affected our operations. For one thing, most of our websites are not hosted on WP Engine. As for our use of Advanced Custom Fields, we have always been paid users of the premium version and will continue to be so. We are steadfastly against nulled software, no matter who is doing the nulling. We think Automattic’s (and specifically Mullenweg’s) actions in arbitrarily seizing control of a plugin and then releasing its key premium features is despicable.
But just from the 10,000 foot view, anything that causes such discord in a community we are so involved in causes grave concern. For one, how can any developer, especially one who contributes regularly to the plugin ecosystem, have any faith in the governance of WordPress as a whole? When your hard work can be capriciously snatched out from under you, what incentive is there to continue to develop for the platform? I fear that the strife will scare away new developers with great ideas and make them seek out other platforms that they deem more inviting and less risky. This would only hurt the community by creating a brain drain as talent leaves for other avenues.
There’s also the risk to business that have built themselves on top of the WordPress platform. Does the rancor in the community reach our prospective clients and cause them to move to other, less acrimonious communities? I would think that most of this drama has largely taken place out of sight of most website owners, but it could certainly be a marketing opportunity for agencies built on platforms other than WordPress to convince them to move to other platforms.
There is always a risk when a business relies on a single platform as its foundation; ask any Apple software developer whose application has been “Sherlocked”. But as business owners, we should not expect these risks to come from hissy fits between a leader with outsized influence and a major player several orders of magnitude larger than us. We end up being the poor buildings and cars crushed underneath Godzilla’s and Mothra’s footsteps.
Is Anybody Listening?
To this point, there have been few ways of voicing one’s concerns in a way that will reach the top echelons of the project’s governance. Matt Mullenweg seems to be listening to an audience of one—himself—in determining his next steps. But WordPress—which powers 40% of the world’s website—is too big to have one person making all of the major decisions. Additionally, while large actors like WP Engine should be encouraged to contribute more to the community, they should also not be shunned for perceived slights, nor should their employees—many of whom have been long-standing and active members of the WordPress community, be expelled for the acts (or lack thereof) of their employer and the hierarchy above them.
There are no winners in this situation, and no real “good guys” to root for, either. But in this clash of titans, the best the rest of us can do is try not to be more collateral damage.