Automattic, Owner of WordPress, Feuds With WP Engine
Matt Mullenweg, writing on the Wordpress Foundation’s blog:
It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion. WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business…
This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
At this point, I was firmly on WordPress and Mullenweg’s side. “WP Engine,” a service that hosts WordPress cheaply and with other services, is not WordPress, but it sure sounds like it’s somehow affiliated with the WordPress Foundation. Rather, Automattic owns WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service for WordPress that is directly in competition with WP Engine. While the feud looks money-oriented at first, I’m sympathetic to Mullenweg’s initial argument that WP Engine is profiting off WordPress’ investments and work without licensing the trademark. Perhaps calling it a “cancer to WordPress” is a bit reactionary and boneheaded, but I understand — he is angry. I would be, too. Then it gets worse. Four days later:
Any WP Engine customers having trouble with their sites should contact WP Engine support and ask them to fix it.
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.
What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.
WP Engine was officially cut off from the WordPress service, throwing all its customers into the closest thing to hell possible for a website administrator. WordPress — up until September 25 — provided security updates to all WordPress users, including those who host WordPress on WP Engine, but now sites hosted with WP Engine will no longer receive critical updates or support from WordPress. From a business standpoint, again, it makes sense, but as a company that proudly proclaims it’s “committed to the open web” on its website, I think it should prefer to work out a diplomatic solution than pull WordPress from potentially thousands of websites. WordPress isn’t some small service — 43 percent of the web uses it. From there, WP Engine had enough. From Jess Weatherbed at The Verge on Thursday:
The WP Engine web hosting service is suing WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Automattic for alleged libel and attempted extortion, following a public spat over the WordPress trademark and open-source project. In the federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday, WP Engine accuses both Automattic and its CEO Mullenweg of “abuse of power, extortion, and greed,” and said it seeks to prevent them from inflicting further harm against WP Engine and the WordPress community.
Mullenweg immediately dismissed WP Engine’s allegations of “abuse of power, extortion, and greed,” but the struggle at the point went from a boring conflict about content management system software to lawsuits. Again, I think Automattic is entitled to 8 percent of WP Engine’s monthly revenue — as it wants — especially since WP Engine literally has “WP” in its name. It sounds like an official WordPress product, but it (a) isn’t, and (b) doesn’t pay the open-source project anything in return. It could be argued that that’s the nature of open source, but not all open source is created equal: if Samsung started calling One UI “Android UI,” for example, Google would sue it into oblivion. It’s obvious Google funds the Android open-source project, and without Google’s developers in Mountain View, Android wouldn’t flourish or exist entirely. It’s the same with WordPress; without Automattic, WordPress ceases to exist.
However, the extortioner-esque practices and language from Mullenweg reek of Elon Musk and Steve Huffman, the founder of Reddit. (Christian Selig, the developer of the Apollo Reddit client shut down by Reddit last year, said the same — and he knows a lot more about Huffman than I do.) Mullenweg clearly doesn’t just seem uninterested in compromising but is actively hostile in his little fight. I don’t know what WP Engine’s role in the fighting is — it could also be uncooperative — but Mullenweg’s bombastic language and hyper-inflated ego are ridiculous and unacceptable.
It’s not unreasonable to ask for compensation when another company is using your trademark. It is to cry like a petulant, spoiled child. And now from today, via Emma Roth at The Verge:
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg offered employees $30,000, or six months of salary (whichever is higher), to leave the company if they didn’t agree with his battle against WP Engine. In an update on Thursday night, Mullenweg said 159 people, making up 8.4 percent of the company, took the offer.
“Agree with me or go to hell.” What a pompous moron.