Automattic vs. WP Engine

Paul Sawers:

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”

Mullenweg criticized the company — which has been commercializing the open source WordPress project since 2010 — for profiteering without giving much back, while also disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform in the first place.

[…]

It’s worth noting that Automattic has a history in backing WordPress-hosting companies, having invested in WP Engine itself way back in 2011, while Mullenweg also spoke at WP Engine’s conference just last year. Moreover, Automattic also bought a majority stake in WordPress-hosting company Pressable back in 2016, and later invested in GridPane too.

[…]

In response to the brouhaha that followed the talk, Mullenweg published a follow-up blog post, where he calls WP Engine a “cancer” to WordPress. “It’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread,” he wrote.

WP Engine has responded with a cease and desist letter (via Hacker News, Slashdot):

During calls on September 17th and 19th, for instance, Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis.

[…]

Mr. Mullenweg further stated that he had already created slides for his keynote speech, taking aim at WP Engine and its investor, and would present them to WordCamp attendees – and to millions of others via livestream on YouTube – if his financial demands were not met.

Rodrigo Ghedin (via Hacker News):

Notably, WP Engine was a sponsor of the event.

[…]

What I find deeply ironic in this situation is his accusation that WP Engine “confused even his own mother,” while he’s the owner of Automattic, which has a hosting service literally called WordPress.com, distinct from the FOSS project WordPress.org — an intentional yet obvious confusion that everyone who interacts with WordPress struggles to understand and has benefited Automattic immensely since ever.

Last year, Matt leveraged the FOSS project and his for-profit endeavor resemblance (and his position in both) to redirect web searches pointed at WordPress.org plugin directory to a mirror hosted in WordPress.com.

pluc:

There’s a widget on the default WordPress dashboard that displays a RSS feed of WordPress.org, where Matt posted his rant, making it show up everywhere.

Daniel Jalkut:

I respect @photomatt’s opinion that consumers of open source should “give back”, but to my mind that’s antithetical to the notion of it being free. Free things do not come with conditions. Giving back is an option, and always welcome. That’s open source.

Matt @photomatt has SO MUCH goodwill in the WordPress community and I fear he’s squandering it in this WPEngine fight. Whatever the details it’s not coming off well in public. I hope they resolve things soon.

Previously:

• Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools
• WordPress at 20
• Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Update (2024-09-25): Automattic (PDF, tweet, Hacker News):

On September 23, Automattic sent the following cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, outlining WP Engine’s pattern of unauthorized usage of the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks and demanding that WP Engine stop such behavior.

Derek J:

When you change the trademark policy mid fight to make your case stronger...

Jonathan Jernigan:

The largest applause came from a very brave person who states that Mullenweg punching down feels like vendettas and are demotivating. This person continues by saying that if he had spent the time on stage promoting meetups and talking about bringing new people into the fold, that the positivity would be far more effective than this targeted attack.

[…]

As clearly stated, there is no strict requirement or obligation whereby using WordPress commits you to investing 5% back into WordPress, so how can we just single out WPEngine?

[…]

Are any of these companies after #1 giving back “enough”? It doesn’t appear so if we’re using those pledge numbers vs revenue as the metric. So why are they not getting equal shit live on stage? If that isn’t the metric Mullenweg is judging them by, then tell me what is?

Google’ers even got a shoutout from Mullenweg on stage during the keynote, despite their relatively tiny pledge and Mullenweg acknowledging they have revenue the size of some entire countries GDPs.

See also: Mike Rockwell and astawhiz.

Update (2024-09-26): Thomas Claburn:

WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter’s servers from accessing WordPress.org resources – and therefore from potentially vital software updates.

[…]

Among WordPress users posting to Reddit, not everyone is on board with Mullenweg’s war against WP Engine. There’s discussion of a WordPress fork, and pushbackagainstthe WP Engine block.

WP Engine (via Hacker News):

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.

Matt Mullenweg:

WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.

WP Engine was trying to block Mullenweg’s attacks on their product from being injected into the dashboard of all their customers. That seems entirely reasonable. I host my own WordPress, and I didn’t like seeing his rants there, either.

The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own.

Suddenly pulling the rug on security updates puts users at risk. In response, Patchstack has halted publishing new vulnerabilities, so the end result is that WordPress’s own users will be less secure, too.

Why should WordPress.org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

That makes some sense, but it sure seems like WordPress is the one who started the fight and who intentionally broke functionality for users caught in the middle. Even if WP Engine is in the wrong, which I don’t think is clear, this is terrible for the WordPress community. Contributor or not, an open source project should not be sabotaging its users. Mullenweg comes off looking like a maniac.

Update (2024-09-27): Daniel Jalkut:

I was interested to discover that the WordPress Foundation just registered for the trademarks “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress” earlier this year.

Christina Warren:

So many thoughts on the WordPress drama but I think my main takeaway is that it makes me sad. We should absolutely be having conversations about how commercial users of OSS contribute back, especially groups like webhosts. But the people being hurt the most right now are users.

Tia Wood:

I feel thousands of innocent people in our community were harmed in the process just to stick it to a competitor. This is honestly disappointing.

Matt Ronge:

• Automattic blocking WP Engine customers from updating their plugins is deeply hostile. Fine, sue each other into oblivion, but don’t interfere with customers
• Automattic shouldn’t have spent the past couple years overpaying for dumb companies, they’ve spent 10’s of millions on it
• Also Automattic’s tagline “Making the web a better place” Please… follow the money that’s what’s happening here
• Does this mean that there will be a fork in WordPress? I think a non-insignificant chance

Laurie Voss:

You can’t power 40% of the web and act this way, people will fork your shit.

Matt Mullenweg:

I would love if they forked it! They can run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase.

Matt Birchler:

I mean I used WordPress for this very blog for many years and I knew WordPress kept revision history, but I don’t think I ever used it. For what it’s worth, Ghost doesn’t have any revision history, and I’ve never thought to hope they add it. That’s not to say no one would want or need it, just that it’s very reasonable for someone not to need that feature, so to be told by the head of WordPress that I’m not even using WordPress if I’m not using (or able to use) revisions is insane to me.

If Matt Mullenweg thinks WP Engine is illegally using WordPress’s trademark, then I’ll let the courts handle that because I don’t have an opinion either way, but what an odd thing to hang your argument on.

I knew about the revision history but have probably only used it a handful of times, and I don’t think of it has core to WordPress because it wasn’t added until after I switched. Does WP Engine really turn it off to save database space? I kind of find that hard to believe because images use so much more space than text, and I wonder whether most blogs have lots of long posts that are frequently edited. I make lots of updates to posts on this blog, so I do have lots of revisions, and even then the whole WordPress database is only about 300 MB for 22 years of posts and comments.

Eric Mann (via Hacker News):

WP Engine never calls itself “WordPress Engine” in marketing. However, searches for “WordPress Engine” do yield sponsored advertisements for WP Engine. Until this week, they even had partner agencies listed on their own website as “WordPress Engine Preferred Partner Agenc[ies].”

Even if WP Engine isn’t actively trying to brand itself as “WordPress Engine,” they aren’t doing anything to avoid others doing so. A talk at their recent DE{CODE} conference even referred to them as such. It’s clear they are directly benefiting from the name confusion but they do not have the same rights to the trademark as Automattic and WordPress.com.

[…]

Any system pulling remote data from a third party source should have protections against that source becoming unavailable, whether that’s a pull-through cache or even just a circuit-breaker in their system.

One might also ask why the open-source project has hardcoded the URLs for these services to what looks like a domain for the project itself, but it’s actually controlled by Automattic?

Ernie Smith:

Pinning the blame on WP Engine for Matt’s actions is a cop-out. When is the last time a host got removed from access to the WordPress community?

I’m sorry, disconnecting thousands of customers from an essential service with no warning is not normal behavior, and the fact that Mullenweg is promoting this take only highlights that he doesn’t understand how toxic this behavior is.

You are not punishing WP Engine. You are punishing people who bought into this ecosystem.

codegeek:

I have worked with WP for 10+ years now and in my opinion like many others, this is nothing but jealously from Matt whose for profit competitor (wordpress.com and VIP) got beaten by WPEngine.

In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com.

Indeed, that does confuse people, and having WP Engine pay to use the trademark would do nothing to reduce the confusion.

FireBeyond:

1. WP.org is supposedly NOT part of the foundation, but something of Matt/Automattic’s generosity.

2. Despite this, solicits donations that seemingly go to the foundation.

3. Despite this, is hosted on the foundation’s AS number.

4. WP.org may not be under obligation to provide services, but when it chooses to discontinue services to one independent for profit user of the open source software, but not to another ostensibly independent for profit user of the open source software that just so happens to be owned by the person donating the services, then there is a conflict.

5. When the open source software, which has a hard coded news feed source that is mostly written by said owner, and this is used to post articles disparaging that other company, directly to their customers, this is also a conflict.

See also: Matt Mullenweg.

Update (2024-09-30): Cory Birdsong:

I’m not super deep into this side of WP, but supposedly it’s less about space and more about performance. Revisions are stored as another post in the wp_posts table, and they are also created each time you hit “save draft” on a post that hasn’t been published yet. This can add up.

Josh Collinsworth (Hacker News):

Companies have been describing themselves as one or both of those terms for around 15 years at this point. (We freely called Flywheel a “managed WordPress hosting company” the entire time I worked there, and we were far from the first. We were also at one point one of WordPress.org’s recommended hosts. So…obviously, not a big deal.)

Anyway, this filing of spurious trademarks makes it appear very much like Matt’s endgame was to extract money from WP Engine, but he just needed more of a foundation to do it (pun intended?). So, following that initial rejection, Matt set the Foundation arm of WordPress working on securing highly dubious trademarks, which, again, I and most reasonable observers think and hope will fail.

[…]

As an additional point here: if the problem was confusion around WP Engine’s name, why not just ask them for a name change? Why all the contribution stuff, too? Conversely, if Matt’s beef was with WP Engine’s lack of contribution, why is he going after their name and marketing? It feels very much like Matt’s just trying to cobble together all the reasons he can think of to justify his assault, in my opinion.

[…]

Matt also claims WP Engine is selling “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress.” His reason for this wild claim? Because WP Engine disables revisions (a default feature of WordPress, albeit a pretty small one).

[…]

WordPress.org is ostensibly the website for the nonprofit foundation; it’s supposed to exist to prevent any one for-profit company from having too much power over the WordPress ecosystem. It’s supposed to be agnostic.

[…]

One of the biggest revelations here is: Matt wanted the money he was trying to get from WP Engine to go to Automattic, which, again, is Matt’s for-profit company.

Emma Roth:

WP Engine operates a bit differently. It says it focuses on investing in the community through sponsorships and encouraging the adoption of the platform. The hosting platform was acquired by the private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018, and Mullenweg views it as a business that profits off of open-source code without giving anything back.

[…]

Mullenweg doesn’t appear to be wrong about WP Engine’s contributions. But WP Engine is ultimately abiding by the rules of WordPress’ open-source license: it’s generally free to use, and WP Engine doesn’t have to give back to the WordPress community just because it’s banking off the open-source code.

[…]

The fight has garnered a mix of reactions. On one side, people think WP Engine is in the wrong, with some saying the company should contribute more to the open source project and that its use of “WP” is misleading. On the other, some WordPress community members are calling on Mullenweg to step down and accuse of him abusing his power over WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Others believe the situation could result in a fork of WordPress and brought up concerns about whether WordPress will take action against other companies using the “WP” abbreviation or trademark.

Matt Mullenweg (tweet, Hacker News):

We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00.

keyladelslay:

Wait you’re really announcing on a Friday that you’re giving devs till Tuesday to support our clients?? I would happily move the wp engine people to literally any other host but customers like it & have whole processes built on it

Steven Mizrahie:

Matt, please stop this nonsense. If you cared about those users as you claim, giving them (@WPengine) essentially less than 1 business day to spin up new infra, test it, QA/QC it and more, then add it to production is woefully short. If you’re so concerned about WPE’s access to your servers for free, what is the estimated cost for those charges? It’s nominal, so let’s not make it about that, right?

Matthew Keys:

I’ve used WordPress for years, for my own websites and for clients. I’ve never used WP Engine. But this whole situation has really soured my view on WordPress, knowing one person can cause so much turbulence for so many who rely on it.

Update (2024-10-01): Core Intuition:

Daniel and Manton talk about the community drama and impending fiasco of WordPress and Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine. They weigh the arguments of either side. Then they consider the larger issue of dependencies we have on the platforms we develop for, and how we strive for independence from platforms that can make or break our business.

Update (2024-10-02): Rae Morey (via Hacker News):

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has rescinded an 8% licensing deal offered to WP Engine in September, suggesting that escalating tensions between the two companies could lead to a corporate acquisition by Automattic.

In an interview with The Repository, Mullenweg said Automattic now wanted more than 8% of WP Engine’s annual revenue, or an equivalent of resources invested into the WordPress project—or a combination of both—in exchange for the use of its “WordPress” and “WooCommerce” trademarks.

[…]

“I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide to do this,” he said. “I was taken advantage of for so many years. The only way to deal with a bully is to fight,” he said.

It sure seems like it’s Mullenweg who’s the bully here and that the selectively applied trademark dispute is a red herring, only introduced as leverage to get revenue or resources, which it’s not clear that the project even needs. He seems to be abusing his position as controller of the .org domain and putting the interests of Automattic ahead of those of the open-source project and community. See also: graeme.

Automattic (Hacker News):

One of the many lies in Silver Lake and WP Engine’s C&D was their claim that Automattic demanded money from them moments before our CEO Matt Mullenweg gave his keynote at WordCamp US.

That is not true. Automattic asked for a verbal agreement that WP Engine would give some percentage of their revenue back into WordPress, either in the form of a trademark agreement or employee hours spent on core WordPress.

For transparency, Automattic is publishing the full term sheet WP Engine was offered on September 20^th.

This is deceptive. They don’t seem to be disputing the screenshots, which show Mullenweg extorting WP Engine. And if you read the term sheet, it doesn’t say that the money is requested to go “back into WordPress.” It says that they want 8% of WP Engine’s revenue to be paid to Automattic. The alternative, providing labor instead of money, is to have the employees’ work “directed by WordPress.org,” which sounds like it’s the WordPress foundation but is actually Mullenweg himself. So for all the talk about giving back to open source, this seems to actually be about having WP Engine pay or do work for its competitor.

It has long seemed like there were some conflicts of interest between WordPress.com and the open source project, with the latter being steered to provide holes for the paid product to fill. I think there needs to be more separation from Automattic, either with WordPress.org under community control or with the open source project rehomed to somewhere independent.

Update (2024-10-03): WP Engine v. Automattic (via Hacker News):

This is a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed. The misconduct at issue here is all the more shocking because it occurred in an unexpected place—the WordPress open source software community built on promises of the freedom to build, run, change, and redistribute without barriers or constraints, for all. Those promises were not kept, and that community was betrayed, by the wrongful acts of a few—Defendants—to the detriment of the many, including WPE.

See also: Matt Mullenweg and safety1st.

Colin Devroe (Mastodon):

The confusion and unrest in the community have been palpable ever since.

People want the leaders of their communities to be reliable, stalwart, reasoned individuals. No matter what is happening, they do not want to see community leaders lash out, react quickly, and make sweeping changes. That is, until they have had the time to fully understand why those changes are being made. The reason we all feel this way is that we immediately get worried that we could be the next target of that leader’s ire next.

Update (2024-10-04): Automattic (Hacker News):

Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights.

Hazel Q:

“So, how’d you get this job at Automattic, Heather?”

“Oh, the CEO threatened to ruin my career and life if I didn’t take it. I love it here my feedback is welcome all the time. Such a good boss. 😬”

Like, what the fuck did this man expect sending shit like that?

I thought this must be fake, but it’s in the WP Engine complaint referenced above.

Matthew Mullenweg:

They lied that it was to run WordPress.com, though, she wanted to be the Executive Director of WordPress.org for Automattic, a position that was held by Josepha.

aimazon:

But you own and run and finance WordPress.org personally, as you’ve revealed and talked about numerous times in the last few weeks. I don’t follow, how can Heather apply for a job with Automattic to be the Executive Director of a website you personally own?

The ways that Automattic, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, the WordPress Foundation, and Mullenweg personally are intertwined are way more confusing than the confusion between WordPress and WP Engine that is the casus belli for this extortion.

Ivan Mehta (Matt Mullenweg, Hacker News, Daniel Jalkut):

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said on Thursday that 159 employees (roughly 8.4% of staff) accepted a severance package that the company had offered to those who disagreed with his direction of WordPress and his handling of the tussle with web hosting provider WP Engine.

[…]

Some employees who left the company include the head of WordPress.com (Automattic’s commercial WordPress hosting arm), Daniel Bachhuber, head of programs and contributor experience Naoko Takano, the Principal architect for AI, Daniel Walmsley.

[…]

Over the last few days, several people on X have hinted about a severance offer being circulated among Automattic employees. Mullenweg also allegedly DM’d a former employee who posted about the offer and accused her of attacking the company and him.

Kellie Peterson:

Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, co-founder of WordPress, and single point of failure for WordPress.org is trying to bully me with legal threats over my commentary regarding his recent behavior.

[…]

I am not a WP Engine (or PE in general) apologist. I believe they should contribute more to core, etc. However, what Matt has done, is doing, continues to do is antithetical to opensource, to his own stated goals to democratize publishing and to grow the use of WordPress. He has demonstrated time and again that when he does not get his way or has no leg to stand on he will default to subterfuge to achieve his goals.

See also: Jeff Chandler, regarding a trademark dispute from 2015.

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