I wanted to share something I read about a few days ago and have been following closely. Since most of us are familiar with WordPress, I figured it’s worth talking about here.

 

There’s a major feud happening between WordPress and WP Engine. WP Engine is a big company with over 1,000 employees and a ton of clients, including businesses, schools, and charities. Recently, WordPress has banned WP Engine from using its resources, and this is causing serious problems for WP Engine and its customers. The ban stops them from getting updates to themes and plugins, leaving many sites vulnerable to security risks.

 

The tension goes back to some disagreements between WP Engine and Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress. He’s accused WP Engine of profiting from WordPress without giving back enough. WP Engine, in turn, says they’re being unfairly targeted, even sending a cease-and-desist letter to try to stop what they see as false claims. For now, WordPress has temporarily allowed WP Engine users access to resources again, but it’s unclear what will happen next.

 

It’s something to keep an eye on if you’re using WP Engine for your site or are just interested in how this all plays out.

 

Some interesting links:

 

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/

 

https://ma.tt/

 

https://journal.rmccue.io/431/wp-engine-must-win/

 

https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP-Engine-v-Automattic-et-al-with-Exhibit.pdf

 

https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com/

As a developer with an agency that does a fair amount of WP sites, I am of course paying attention to this.

 

It's been a few weeks since it kicked off and there's no sign of stopping yet. The injunction from WPE against Automattic has some very dark details about how this campaign has been going, and while it's trivially easy to feel all Chicken Little (The Sky Is Falling) about it, I think we're potentially seeing a volcano about to erupt.

 

I don't think that's even a bad thing for the ecosystem as a whole because it would goad WP into actually figuring out where their priorities are at, who their customers are, who their advocates are and who can really be trusted in this situation.

What do you think users of WP should prepare for?

 

What should we have in our backburners?

Paid Memberships dev says Matt threatened to take over their plugin "like we did to ACF" when they removed it from dotorg.

 

This is getting more surreal. Matt posted on the official Twitter account thanking WooCommerce for their sponsorship of Automattic.

 

Guess who owns WooCommerce? If you said Automattic, you'd be right! And if you think WPE are going to add this to the list of things, you'd also be right! (They've also pointed out the wonderful quotes from Matt's interview with TechCrunch where he admits to trying to cause WPE damage, the very thing the injunction is for)

This has been there since 2007. But it’s only now it’s being weaponised.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/cloudflare-blocks-automattics-wp-engine-tracker-for-phishing/532244/

 

Automattic, presumably under the direction of Matt Mullenweg, recently created a website called WP Engine Tracker on the WordPressEngineTracker.com domain name that lists how many WordPress sites have moved away from managed web host WP Engine. It also recommends web hosts that current customers can move to and offers a download of all domains that are hosted on WP Engine.

 

Interesting update!

This just got absolutely wild.

 

https://wordpress.org/plugins/secure-custom-fields/ - this is ACF Pro (remember, owned by WPE), rebranded and put on the plugin site by WordPress.org itself.

 

And it is the pro version - it has features only the pro version has, but without the licence key requirement, and with the most minimal rebranding possible being done. They didn't even bother find/replace on ACF to SCF, and by removing the official copyright they also violate the GPL in so doing.

 

Good going, Matt, good going. WPE's lawyers are going to love you for this, as is the rest of the ecosystem that builds premium plugins/themes.

[HEADING=2]WP Engine Vs Automattic: Judge Inclined To Grant Preliminary Injunction[/HEADING]

• WP Engine's attorney on Mullenweg's $32M demand: "That's not how you calculate a royalty. That's how you set a ransom."
  
• Judge indicates she's leaning toward granting "some sort of injunction."
  
• Attorneys have until Tuesday, December 3, to present "dueling submissions," which will determine how the judge will rule.
  

 

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-engine-vs-automattic-judge-inclined-to-grant-preliminary-injunction/533746/

 

WP Engine had their day in court, but it didn’t go entirely in their favor, as Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled the request for a preliminary injunction was too vague. However, the judge said they were “inclined to grant some sort of injunction.”

 

An attorney who live blogged the hearing on Bluesky noted that the judge wasn’t up on the technical but commended her for asking a lot of questions.

 

[HEADING=1]“That’s How You Set A Ransom”[/HEADING]

The attorney for plaintiff offered new details about what happened behind the scenes on the day that Matt Mullenweg went “nuclear” on WP Engine at WordCamp USA. She first explained that Mullenweg’s demand for trademark license was a sham. Then showed how Mullenweg failed to enforce his trademark claim for fifteen years.

 

Among the new details was that Mullenweg’s demand for $32 million dollars was communicated in a one-page letter and that the agreement was for a seven year period that automatically renews “essentially forever.” She then revealed new details of how Mullenweg decided on the $32 million dollars, explaining that it was just “a number” that Mullenweg felt WP Engine was able to pay.

 

The point of this part of the plaintiff’s argument was to show that the royalty rate that Mullenweg was asking for was not based on any value of the mark but rather the rate was a figure that Mullenweg felt he was able to squeeze out of WP Engine, saying that the rate was “set in an extortionate manner.”

 

[HEADING=2]WordPress must stop blocking WP Engine, judge rules[/HEADING]

/

[HEADING=2]Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg also have to quit interfering with WP Engine’s ACF plugin[/HEADING]

WP Engine just won a preliminary injunction against WordPress parent company Automattic. On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins.

The preliminary injunction comes after WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, filed a lawsuit that accused Automattic and its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, of “multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm.” It later asked the court to stop Mullenweg from restricting WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org.

Mullenweg waged a public campaign againstWP Engine in September, accusing the service of misusing the WordPress trademark and not contributing enough to the WordPress community. After blocking WP Engine from WordPress.org’s servers, Automattic took control of WP Engine’s ACF Plugin.

 

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found merit in WP Engine’s claims that Automattic’s actions harmed business relationships, saying Mullenweg’s “conduct is designed to induce breach or disruption.” As for Automattic’s argument that blamed WP Enginefor relying on WordPress.org to power its business, Judge Martínez-Olguín didn’t find it very compelling.

“While Defendants characterize WPEngine’s harm as self-imposed because it built its business around a website ‘that it had no contractual right to use...’ Defendants’ role in helping that harm materialize through their recent targeted actions toward WPEngine, and no other competitor, cannot be ignored,” the ruling states.

The Verge reached out to Automattic and WP Engine with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

The ruling found the WP Engine showed it will suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief, while also impacting members of the WordPress community. Under the preliminary injunction, Automattic will have to take down the list of companies it displayed on a site it created to track outgoing WP Engine customers, as well as remove the checkbox that asks WordPress users to verify they’re not affiliated with WP Engine when logging in.

 

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318350/automattic-restore-wp-engine-access-wordpress

I bet Matt is just sitting there, arms crossed, fuming mad.

The injunction is a pretty comprehensive smackdown of everything Matt has done to this point.

The world used WordPress. Are they too big to fail? But it sure sounds like some cracks are showing.

Very few things are genuinely too big to fail, as 2008 proved very conclusively. (Much of what 2008 proved is that there are things that are too big to be allowed to fail, which is a different thing entirely)

 

WordPress's main issues here stem from single points of failure which were fine all the time Matt followed the "benevolent dictator for life" approach as is common in open source. In fact if you look most of the most successful open source projects operate under the BDFL approach because it's the only way to keep things sane.

 

What we have here is a BDFL who isn't so benevolent after all - we've seen examples in the past of him being petty and a nuisance but never anything on this scale.

 

Right now as it stands, WordPress is not, in itself, too big to fail: Matt is a single source of failure in the ecosystem because he, and he alone, controls the primary keys to wordpress.org itself where plugins et al live, and no-one would dispute that WordPress's strength as a platform comes from its add-on ecosystem. You start actively gatekeeping that in a way the community has significant issues with, and that's a problem.

 

The ultimate check and balance for open source has always been the fork - the final 'we do not agree with where you are taking the project' step - but most forks never thrive because most forks fizzle and die and the primary project picks up the slack. ClassicPress is a good example - it's never been able to keep the pace with WP even though it's just WP minus Gutenberg.

 

But in WP's case it isn't just the codebase you'd need to fork - it's the ecosystem, and then bring the ecosystem along for the ride, or try like hell to maintain compatibility otherwise you immediately put yourself on the back foot with it all.

 

Time will tell what happens but when this finally gets to court proper, I hope it ends up that Matt has to hand over the keys to w.org to the Foundation, and that he is forcibly removed from its board for defrauding the government over the state of the Foundation's assets. (Because, yeah, if you weren't paying attention, that's actually part of the drama: Matt is using trademarks as leverage, which he's entitled to do, I guess. The Foundation owns the trademarks, Automattic is the licensee and enforcer, but either way that implies the value of the trademarks is held by the Foundation, which is certainly not declared on the balance sheet as an asset, while he's claiming these trademarks are so valuable they need a multi-million dollar licence.)

I can't quite believe that I've not heard about this issue until reading through this thread this morning. I work for a charity and we use WordPress for our whole website, which has millions of visitors each year. If something happens to WordPress, it would have the potential to severely affect our operations - we wouldn't have the funding in place to be able to pay £100,000+ to a professional website development company to rebuild what we've got now, and our website and functionality is so extensive that it would undoubtedly cost at least this, if not more, for a professional job.

 

I have read through the thread and looked at some of the drama on X, but still struggling to find out exactly where we are with this situation right now - can anybody provide a TL;DR, or current update on the WP situation?

tl:dr; WP want WPE to give them a ton of cash, and did a variety of things that were hurting WPE. The court has now told WP to pack it in and return the access etc to WPE back to how it was before it kicked off.

 

The back and forth has included WP hijacking the popular ACF plug-in (including the paid version) which they’ve always been able to do but tacitly agreed not to. This is unprecedented and has lead to a lot of plug-in devs having second thoughts.

 

Assuming they comply, little now will change until the proper court date unless Matt has another tantrum.

tl:dr; WP want WPE to give them a ton of cash, and did a variety of things that were hurting WPE. The court has now told WP to pack it in and return the access etc to WPE back to how it was before it kicked off.

 

The back and forth has included WP hijacking the popular ACF plug-in (including the paid version) which they’ve always been able to do but tacitly agreed not to. This is unprecedented and has lead to a lot of plug-in devs having second thoughts.

 

Assuming they comply, little now will change until the proper court date unless Matt has another tantrum.

 

Great summary, thanks for that!

 

I've always been amazed at the functionality offered by WordPress, and in no doubt that is mainly thanks to the developers of plug-ins. Without them, everything our charity does for example would be absolutely impossible. We use a lot of the free plug-ins and a fair few ones that we've had custom-made, but as it is not my area generally to deal with the website maintenance I don't have full details. Nevertheless, the work we do would be so much more complicated and ultimately would mean we were able to help a lot less people.

 

I'm glad to hear that access has been, or should be, restored to the previous state imminently. Hopefully the upcoming legal action will cause all parties to reflect and decide that an amicable resolution is best for all parties, both in terms of reputation and also financially.

We shall see what comes next but it’s fair to say that Matt (head of WP) has history for being a petulant man child. Trouble is, he’s a petulant man child with access to a significant amount of money.

 

I expect him to comply with the court’s ruling (he has 72 hours) but give it till just after Christmas and I think he’ll find a whole new way to be petulant.

 

He is still peeved that he was pushed out of owing a stake in WPE by their current investors.

Think of the millions of legit companies and organizations that base their website on wp.

 

In 2008? GM was kept afloat because they employed tens of thousands of workers.

 

Too big to fail means if wp implodes, so does millions of legit websites.

Too big to fail means if wp implodes, so does millions of legit websites.

Yes and no.

 

The reality is that in the event of Automattic collapsing, someone will pick up the pieces. Probably someone like WPEngine, maybe a coalition of WPEngine, Kinsta and a few other of the more specialised WP hosts.

 

It's also not like there aren't other CMS options out there. Drupal, Joomla, CraftCMS, Statemic and others.

I can 100% assure you there are others being built as I type this. The thing that absolutely amazes me is that WP has remained as popular as it has. Maybe the drama that is ongoing will really get some folks looking at viable alternatives. There is a lot of room for improvement with today's stack compared to the core WP codebase.

 

From a dev point of view, let's face it. "The Loop" sucks and it sucks badly.

The thing is, ClassicPress has admirably demonstrated why forking doesn't work in practical terms, so then you start looking at 'other CMSes' which by definition has to include the full weight of the ecosystem. And that's something a lot of the projects currently going at this haven't understood: WP's strength is not WP, its strength is the sheer scale of its ecosystem which started life 20 years ago when WP started.

 

If you were to actually look at WP today, aside from Gutenberg you'd have to go digging to understand what had changed between 10 years ago and now, because much of where it changed was in subtle ways (e.g. full site editing) - but the size and scale of the ecosystem is why it keeps going. It happened to be in the right place at the right time to make a seismic shift and its ecosystem has propped it up ever since.

 

It's also why Matt going after individual leaders in the ecosystem is such the bad move that it is because it tells other premium plugin authors 'hey, maybe you should think about finding another plugin ecosystem to live in if you want to keep having income'.

 

Yes, you can absolutely replace a WP blog with CraftCMS or Drupal in a small scale of time, but the more plugins you have to replicate, the harder that task is and the more upfront effort that will be required to get there - and for almost anyone, that equates to a cost that has to be borne by someone.

In other news, Matt is so upset by this court injunction that the community Slack instance for community discussions... he's ragequit it.

 

I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.

 

It was all fine when other people were giving you free labour and you were parasitically exploiting it, of course.

lol. I'm surprised he hasn't launched into the air yet with his arrogant attitude. There must be a rocket up his ass sometime soon.

There's been a level of 'but he controls WordPress' and no-one ever wanted to push him that far out of fear what he might do because he is a firmly entitled individual.

 

This time, though, he picked on someone who can fight back and whose capacity to fight back actually has teeth. The rocket is firmly lodged at this point, we're just waiting to see how high it's going to go when it actually launches.