WordPress saga escalates as WP Engine plugin forcibly forked and legal letters fly

The fight between WordPress co-creator Matthew Mullenweg and CMS hosting outfit WP Engine escalated over the weekend, with the latter seemingly made persona non grata in the WordPress community – or at least the parts of it run by Mullenweg . The weekend's action started on Saturday when Mullenweg – on behalf of the WordPress …

[Anonymous Coward]

Greed doesn't help

Automattic is actually doing pretty well with hundreds of employees. WP Engine is doing better - so what?

Once you have chosen your license, you live with the consequences. Automattic today probably would not exist but for using GPL. Part of the GPL is confidence that in future the software will continue to be shared, which Mullenweg is threatening to violate.

[katrinab]

Re: Greed doesn't help

Maybe that's the expectation, but legally, it just guarantees that you can share the version you already have. It does explicitly allow them to charge for future versions, just that you don't have to buy it from them, you could get a copy from someone else who bought it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Greed doesn't help

"you could get a copy from someone else who bought it."

Unless they change the licence of the new version which would be difficult unless htye can get agreement of all contributors whose code remains in that version.

[Natewrench]

Re: Greed doesn't help

https://cafelog.com/

[Natewrench]

Re: Greed doesn't help

WordPress is based on B2 Cafe blog

[Sora2566]

Yeah, nobody's coming out of this smelling like roses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Carry on

If the net outcome of all of this toy throwing and hissy fitting is a few less WordPress sites in existence, then I for one would view this very much as a positive.

[Irongut]

Mullenweg needs to go

I have never used WordPress but I have followed this story extensively and Mullenweg needs to go.

I've already cancelled my Pocket Casts subscription and will not give him or Automatic another penny.

[wolfetone]

Re: Mullenweg needs to go

"I've already cancelled my Pocket Casts subscription and will not give him or Automatic another penny."

I've been sat here reading all of these stories knowing in my head that I only have 1 WordPress website that I am bothered about. I spent far too long of my career working for sweatshops that delivered WordPress websites for clients, and I'm now in a different part of my career where I can be relatively free of the bullshit that goes with WordPress and Automatic.That 1 website is a personal project and wouldn't be too difficult to move away from WordPress, and I'll do that soon.

But then I also use SimpleNote alot. And it's only today as I am setting up a new laptop for myself do I realise SimpleNote is an Automatic product. That's gaulling, so I will be shifting that first thing when I get home.

Mullenwanker and his lot can get in the sea.

[Missing Semicolon]

And yet we let Red Hat get away with it.

They have done an even more blatant end-run around the GPL licence, to protect their assumed right to charge for all of Linux.

[adrianww]

Four Fox Ache

Mullenweg seems to be in need of a thorough and dedicated slap.

Although we do a fair bit of Wordpress stuff, we don’t host with WP Engine and I was hoping this whole ridiculous carry on would more or less pass us by. Or, at least, pass us by long enough for us to be out of the game anyway (working on that).

However, we do use ACF. We’ve been very happy with ACF (in those places where we’ve needed it and used it) and with the support for it - in our experience, it’s rare for there to be bugs or issues that aren’t fixed promptly. But now Mr Deranged Hissy-Fit Bloody Idiot Mullenweg has decided to remove ACF from the standard repository and replace it with his own forked version because of a supposed security issue. Yeah…riiight…nothing to do with you chucking your toys out of the pram and being a dick Matt, no, of course not.

OK, it’s not a massive issue. Just need to make sure the WP Engine versions of ACF remain on our sites and we pick up updates from WP Engine (or wherever). But it’s an unnecessary and annoying bit of hassle.

I’ll admit to having a bit of a love-hate relationship with Wordpress over the years - same as anyone who has spent any time using it or working with it I suspect. This ridiculous conduct by Mullenweg could well be the beginning of the end for Wordpress dominance in the blog/web content management space. No doubt many will be doing a little happy dance if that proves to be the case and I might well end up joining them for a bit of a boogie myself at this rate.

[wolfetone]

Re: Four Fox Ache

What gets forgotten is that people like you and the companies you work for - you make a lot of money out of WordPress.

What's to stop Mullenwanker coming after you? Or going after plugin makers who essentially bridge the gap between WordPress features and what it should do in the first place?

[adrianww]

Re: Four Fox Ache

Exactly. We’re way too small and insignificant ever to appear on his radar, but which hosting company is he going to take exception to next and will it be one of the ones that we use?

Even if we weren’t already planning on getting out of the web/content game, this ludicrous stramash would have made us start thinking about it. Or, at the very least, migrating away from Wordpress.

[katrinab]

Re: Four Fox Ache

I’m pretty sure the beginning of the end of Wordpress dominance was about 10 years ago?

Everyone has their own opinion on what is better, but most people do think something else is better.

Certainly when I think of Wordpress, I think security/ maintenance nightmare.

[adrianww]

Re: Four Fox Ache

If it was the beginning of the end 10 years ago, it’s been progressing very slowly. Most recent figures I can find show around 62 per cent of web sites that use some form of content management system use Wordpress. That equates to 40-odd per cent of all websites worldwide.

As for security/maintenance issues, I can’t say that Wordpress is any more of a nightmare than any other solution in my experience. But it does have a very large attack service with all the themes and plugins and is obviously a big and tempting target owing to its prevalence. You can’t just use it and add plugins and other cruft willy-nilly with zero risk. You need to keep your wits about you, same as with anything else.

I think that has been one of the sources of Wordpress’ bad rep when it comes to security really. It is perceived (by some management and bean-counting types) as being an easy way to do content management and get stuff online without having to get the serious techies involved. Next thing you know, Dave from marketing has built the new customer info portal and all hell breaks loose because no one has ensured that his lashed-up Wordpress monstrosity has had a proper audit and a decent set of security and maintenance tools deployed with it.

[adrianww]

Re: Four Fox Ache

…aaand just spotted “attack service” in that comment. Which should have read “attack surface” of course. D’oh!

(Of course, detractors might say that “a very large attack service” is a pretty good way to describe any Wordpress installation. And they’d be right too in lots of cases…)

[JoeCool]

Re: Four Fox Ache

i don't use wordpress, so i have a basic question: what is the barrier to using scf in place of acf ? seems like that is the intent of the foek and restriction on acf

[adrianww]

Re: Four Fox Ache

There isn’t a barrier as such but it’s one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” scenarios.

Right now, I have more faith in WP Engine and its management than I do in Matt Mullenweg and Automattic. This fork looks purely like Mullenweg trying to make life slightly more awkward for anyone using WP Engine or its products. And seemingly all because he’s having a meltdown because WP Engine are making a bigger success of running a Wordpress hosting business than his own for-profit baby. So he appears to be using the open-source/Foundation side of Wordpress to further his personal or business vendetta against WP Engine.

If he’s going to do this kind of thing, what kind of small-minded dickery is he going to indulge in next? All he’s ultimately going to achieve is a splintering of the Wordpress environment to the detriment of all.

Of course, as others have said, anything that effectively buggers up Wordpress (even if only in slightly irritating or fairly minor ways so far) and makes it less attractive as a platform is possibly no bad thing.

[doublelayer]

Re: Four Fox Ache

Probably the same barriers there always are with a new fork. If a problem is detected in it, who do I think is going to fix it first? Who is going to fix it better? And do I worry that one of them is going to try to screw over the other, for example by making a fix and licensing it in such a way that the other fork can't adopt that fix and therefore delaying their fix?

This happens all the time. When Amazon forked ElasticSearch, Elastic quickly enough introduced a change intended to prevent libraries from working with Amazon's version. They're still fighting that one out, but as I don't use the products much anymore, I'm not up to date with developments there. If I was using these, I'd be worried about SCF's reliability because they might be more interested in making things harder for WP Engine than delivering the thing that the plugin was intended to do. I could use it easily, but I'd prefer not to and I'd be worried if I had to.

[remainer_01]

Talented

Mullenweg Is a talented guy! He actually managed to make a private equity outfit look like the underdog, and got me to side with WPE.

Impressive work, keep it up!!

[Blackjack]

I really don't like private-equity firms, they only care about money and fck the user. But I also don't like companies whose whole business depends on open source not contributing at all.

[Donn Bly]

Yes, but just because Mullenweg says that WP Engine doesn't contribute doesn't make it true. If WP Engine didn't contribute to the community, then we wouldn't be talking about how WP Engine isn't going to be allowed to continue to sponsor community events such as WordCamp, how their employees and developers are no longer going to be allowed to participate in events or contribute code, or how a WordPress plugin developed and maintained by WP Engine is being forked by Automattic and renamed. Those are all contributions to the WordPress community, they just aren't direct contributions to Mullenweg's bank account.

[Matthew "The Worst Writer on the Internet" Saroff]

A Legal Question

The donate page for Wordpress.org says, "The WordPress Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization (Federal tax ID 20-5498932)."

I'm not a programmer, my coding is so ugly that it kills tardigraves, but I did incorporate a 501(C)3 back in the day,

It appears to me that Mullenweg, by using the not-for-profit to enrich his for-profit company is engaging in inurement, which is a violation of IRS regulations on the subject.

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/inurement-private-benefit-charitable-organizations

"A section 501(c)(3) organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests, such as the creator or the creator's family, shareholders of the organization, other designated individuals, or persons controlled directly or indirectly by such private interests. No part of the net earnings of a section 501(c)(3) organization may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual. A private shareholder or individual is a person having a personal and private interest in the activities of the organization."

This sounds to me like a violation of black letter charity law, though I am a mechanical engineer, not a lawyer, dammit. (Yes I just went Dr. McCoy)

[Donn Bly]

Forked?

When it comes to the ACF plugin, I don't think that "forked" is the right word to describe what they are doing. They made a copy, renamed it, and are apparently pushing the renamed version out to existing websites without the website owner's explicit consent under the guise of a "security fix" on an issue that has already been patched. To me it looks more like a Hijacking.