back to article The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

I am so sick of this. I've been a happy WordPress user since it rolled out the door in 2003, and I kissed Vignette (since acquired by OpenText) goodbye. WordPress was just so much easier to use than the alternatives; it was open source; and it was free. It was such a win! It is and remains such a no-brainer that today, …

  1. Lon24 Silver badge

    Bonkers

    IMHO the guy has gone bonkers. He is the Gregg Wallace of open source. Just read through his supposedly Christmas Holiday announcement and watch as his eyes begin to glaze and losing site of his keyboard fingers letting rip in a manner that his crisis managers and lawyers are covering their eyes in despair.

    This guy needs help. Not that he is going to listen to any. Great article by the way.

    https://wordpress.org/news/2024/12/holiday-break/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bonkers

      Talk about batshit crazy... or are certain drugs legal in their jurisdiction. I'd have thought "typing while under the influence" is pretty stupid.

      The guy needs a legal whipping for just being a jackass. And those companies jumping on the bandwagon and sucking his schlong to get on that list of "move away to us" list should be blacklisted for being opportunistic. The same thing Matt complains about, except when he is getting the oral pleasure...

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: Bonkers

        From his holiday break post: If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services

        After that rant I would be awfully tempted, if I didn't avoid WordPress as too much (security related) trouble.

    2. cipnt

      Re: Bonkers

      Man, that WP Engine hosting is ridiculously expensive!

      1. sabroni Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Man, that WP Engine hosting is ridiculously expensive!

        No wonder Mulletwang is trying to extort them.

  2. Spazturtle Silver badge

    "If Mullenweg keeps on his course, people could always fork the program."

    If WP Engine fork it then they would need to pay for development of that fork and the whole issue Mullenweg has was WP Engine is over WP Engine not wanting to pay for development costs.

    1. shah27

      It has been licensed as a free open source application. Th very definition of free means you don't pay. That is how WP became as popular. So why should one specific company pay for WP?

      1. Spazturtle Silver badge

        I'm not sure what that has to do with what I said. Automattic make WordPress, Automattic want WP Engine to pay for part of the development cost and are making life difficulty for WP Engine until they do. WP Engines only recourse is to fork WordPress into their own project, but that then means they would have to pay for the development of their fork.

        Automattic could decided to take their money and liquidate the business tomorrow, nobody can force them to continue developing WordPress. GPL does not entitle you to continued support from the developer.

        1. may_i Silver badge

          Grow up Matt. The free effort of thousands of developers is what helped to develop Wordpress in the first place.

        2. localzuk Silver badge

          No, Automattic don't make WordPress. They are licensed to use its trademarks, and provide development which is given to the WordPress Foundation, who make WordPress.

          This blurring of lines is part of the problem here.

        3. DaemonByte

          You're making the mistake of using logic on the Internet and the mob has decided Mullenweg must be hated on and any point he makes. And while his tantrums are making that rather easy the fact nobody has forked WordPress does indicate he has a point. The big community players clearly believes the project is more trouble than it's worth to take on themselves so clearly WordPress has a free loading problem. Mullenweg just handled it in the worst way possible.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            re: clearly OSS has a free loading problem

            I was working for a major uk bank a couple of years ago. They were all open source on their node.js stack and didn't want to pay for any software if they could avoid it.

            There is a load of OSS out there that is being used by major corporations to make millions of pounds with no give back at all to the community.

            This spat has just put it all into focus. Open source is free, monetising it involves providing services. Wordpress.org need to provide better hosting than their competitiors, not bitch about them.

            Do a Valve with the steam deck, make it easier to use wordpress.org than anyone else.

            But that would involve putting some effort in.

            1. bazza Silver badge

              Re: re: clearly OSS has a free loading problem

              Thing is, a lot of folk's interpretations of various OSS licenses have little in common with what the licenses actually say.

              For example, those banks and their use of OSS software, with no give back. The only valid expression of the software authors intentions is the license. If that license says "you can use that software for free", there is no other possible reading of it. And whilst many others may assume that the authors are looking for some sort of quid pro quo, some sort of give back, that's not actually what the license requests. It's not for third parties to say what the software authors meant to say instead of what they did actually say in the license they stuck on the front of their code.

              One cannot be both obligated and free of obligation at the same time. And, the established reality of the Western world's capitalist democracies is that if a company is not obligated to do something, the shareholders are allowed to get properly grumpy if the company then does burn shareholder money on something they don't have to do. Arguably, releasing software for free into such an environment in the hope that major corporations will shower your project foundation with funds or code donations is somewhat naive. And where it gets very complex is that the companies "free loading" may well be part owned by the pension scheme the software author is a member of...

              There are - amazingly - companies that'd rather pay for software (and get support) than use free software. The problem these days is that, in quite a few fields, there is no commercial option; it's OSS or nothing.

              There are other business cultures. In Japan companies exist as much to be socially useful as to be profitable. This is why Japanese company execs are on TV bowing deeply in apology when the company screws up; it's a personal social issue for themselves (and the share price crash is a mere secondary consideration).

      2. Greybearded old scrote
        Headmaster

        Actually, no. Did you miss all the explanations about Libre vs Gratis?

        There is nothing against selling Free Software, it's just difficult.

    2. iron

      WP Engine already contribute dev time on Wordpress, Mullenweg's problem is they don't contribute to his personal wealth.

      And nor should anyone else at this point. I cancelled my Pocket Casts (an Automattttic product) back in September when it became clear to me as an open source developer that Mullenweg is a blight on the industry.

    3. doublelayer Silver badge

      "If WP Engine fork it then they would need to pay for development of that fork"

      Yes, and they would have maintenance burdens just to keep in sync. Also, they should expect to have Automattic try to deliberately break compatibility whenever possible. All good reasons why they would want to avoid that if possible. If others in the community sided with them, they could have more success, but it's always somewhat difficult and risky.

      "and the whole issue Mullenweg has was WP Engine is over WP Engine not wanting to pay for development costs."

      No, that's what he said. Not even what he consistently says. It isn't consistent with reality. WP Engine does contribute code to Word Press itself in addition to the related open source components that add to its value, but that evidently isn't enough for him. Others contribute nothing, but they haven't gotten his attention yet. If this was his problem, he'd have acted differently. This suggests that, whatever his problem really is, it's something different.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "This suggests that, whatever his problem really is, it's something different."

        It sounds like a touch of CEO disease.

  3. Simon 66

    Good article.

    It's amazing how rich both these companies are. Obviously I'm naive about how much Open Source brings in, but $7.5 billion? For a few thousand lines of php?

    1. localzuk Silver badge

      Most of that revenue deep be site to simple hosting income really. Hosting millions of sites will bring in a lot of cash.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      It's like a lot of cloud providers. The money is in hosting and management of the software, but they wouldn't have that without the software. A lot of open source companies are in such a position, because people start with self-hosting, they eventually get so familiar with the software that they want to keep using it, and they're happy to pay for support and maintenance so they don't have to do that themselves and they also don't have to change the software they're using. Word Press hosts have two more advantages. They can attach that to paid web hosting, which is also lucrative, and the product they're hosting is understandable to nontechnical people who want a website and don't like the look of the introductory HTML tutorial that seems to be their other option.

      Unfortunately, some of those companies decide to try to take the software away from all those who continued to self-host it. I wonder if this is Automattic attempting to do the same while hiding that they're trying to do so. It has many of the same hallmarks, for instance the focus on one large provider first which is often intended to signal to all the developers who are providing free work that this isn't going to impact them. It does eventually come to hit those people, but only after the biggest money sources have either paid or left.

      1. TimMaher Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: HTML tutorial.

        If you have a hard time with that, look at the CSS one.

    3. David G from Visalia

      Another potential source of income is Gravatar

      Automattic bought Gravatar in 2007. Automattic does not say if they make any money from selling user profile connection data. So there is no evidence one way or the other whether this is a profit center. But _man_ having that Gravatar link on half the sites on the Internet probably makes a few people in the monetization-of-user-profile-data department salivating. I would be surprised if they _didn't_ sell this data, to help bolster that $7.5 billion number.

  4. heyrick Silver badge

    Oddly enough...

    I'm listening to an 80s radio station and as I read this, Depeche Mode were singing "the grabbing hands grab all they can, everything counts in large amounts".

    We've seen this enough times in the past. Seemingly normal people end up running a company that does something and makes loads of money (a valuation they always seems a little high to my mind, but whatever...) and then the person running it gets paranoid about their baby and restrictive in ways that would have sunk the company before it started if they were like that in the beginning; and often in ways that are contrary to the ethos that made them what they are.

  5. abend0c4 Silver badge

    I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure I don't understand the merits of the respective legal arguments which will ultimately be decided in court.

    However, if it were the case that one could (a) trademark the identity of an open source project in such a way that commercial organisations offering hosting solutions would need a licence even to mention the name of the project they hosted and/or (b) there were no requirement to issue such licences on a FRAND basis then I think it's reasonable to suggest we would have to reconsider our notions of "open source".

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      You can call it something else. See for example Iceweasel [Firefox] or Rocky Linux [Red Hat]

      1. druck Silver badge

        Text Squeeze?

        1. SuperGeek

          WordSquish?

          1. keithpeter Silver badge
            Trollface

            BrinkMatt?

      2. abend0c4 Silver badge

        Of course you can - and you'd almost certainly want to in order to distinguish your offering from the alternative.

        However, we are potentially faced with the situation in which you're not allowed to make any allusion to the contents of the brackets - in effect not be permitted to mention the project from which yours derives. Though there may be specific cases in which it's obvious, in general that would be a barrier to alternative development paths. Or, indeed, hosting providers if there are, as claimed, outstanding trademark applications for "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress".

        It's entirely possible this is not the intent of the specific legal processes now in train, but it does seem to raise that future possibility.

      3. sabroni Silver badge
        Facepalm

        re: You can call it something else.

        But then people looking for a host for product A see that you host something called product B and don't consider you.

        Are you sure this isn't a stupid suggestion?

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      It is the Wordpress Foundation that holds the Wordpress trademark, not Automattic...

      Aside: If Matt or any of his supporters wishes to disagree, they are welcome to modify the claims made on the Wordpress Foundation website...

      My understanding is that WP Engine comply with the stipulations of the Wordpress Foundation on the use of their trademark...

  6. JoeCool Silver badge

    nice diatribe, but not much insight

    If venting helps you deal, then here's to your health.

    If you doubt mullenweg's stated reason, then make the case. But making (large) commercial concerns suppport Foss, why not ?

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: nice diatribe, but not much insight

      "If you doubt mullenweg's stated reason, then make the case."

      They have. I have. His stated reason makes little sense and, even if that's what he actually believes, he is not implementing it in a sane way.

      "But making (large) commercial concerns suppport Foss, why not ?"

      When it's a large commercial concern "supporting" by paying a larger commercial concern, it somehow loses a lot of the "it's humble FOSS and deserves their support" argument. When the concern being targeted actually does contribute, that doesn't help with the argument. When the concern that would receive the "support" is one that took over an open source project, ACF, to the detriment of the users of that project, with no notice at all, it also doesn't make the case that they do things worthy of the support. I am all in favor of companies supporting open source. I am less in favor of them being forced to do it in a way that makes it non-FOSS from the perspective of the small user or contributor. I'm very much against it when they're being beaten with dubious legal threats that mostly don't work unless they changed the license to be explicit about it*, while someone like Mullenweg makes spurious arguments for why this is helping which look like lies or delusions.

      * I have a feeling they don't want to change the license because they've seen what happens when others do it. If they did change the license, it would unify people who intend to fork it, while if they retain the GPL, they can hope that a lot of people just stand back because they don't use the services of either host.

      1. graemep
        Happy

        Re: nice diatribe, but not much insight

        They cannot change the license because they do hold the copyright on all the code. It started as a fork and I think they accept outside contributions.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: nice diatribe, but not much insight

          But doesn’t the Wordpress Foundation hold the copyright on ALL the Wordpress code?

          Although looking at the Wordpress Foundation statement ( https://wordpressfoundation.org/news/2022/what-is-the-wordpress-foundation-and-why-does-it-exist/ ), it does seem they are more into education and lobbying than actually project ownership. It is notable in the About statement they include this statement “ As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks.”, but no statement about continued development of Wordpress itself. Which would suggest the Foundation may have quietly handed the project etc. over to Automattic..

    2. ChoHag Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: nice diatribe, but not much insight

      If you want to make a commercial concern support the Foss [sic] that you provide to them, you need to license it to them under an agreement that specifies the support that is required and not one which explicitly requires nothing.

      If you say "here's some stuff, take it, it's free" what do you think people are going to do?

    3. sabroni Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: why not ?

      Umm, it's called extortion and it's illegal?

  7. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

    "You can always get it enabled, or if it bugs you that much, you can move to another WordPress hosting company that does have it on by default."

    I think the choice argument is a red herring. e.g. "If you don't like Chrome, use another browser." "If you don't like gmail.com, use another email provider." etc... These are true at the most pedantic level. But once a product becomes ginormous it gets to shape the market and set the terms of engagement. The number of people who are prepared to go to the effort of using a different product/host and put up with a degraded experience are a rounding error. (Admittedly, most of them are rounded up on El Reg.) I bet many of us carry the IE6 scars because it couldn't be ignored.

    So if you are willing to say the law matters to open source (and I think it does) then you also have to concede that market forces and the network effect matter, too. So this is a battle about who gets to shape that market and be the driving force behind Wordpress. WP Engine is large enough to be a threat to Automattic. However altruistic (or otherwise) you think the participants' motives are, I think we can all acknowledge this is a dick swinging contest for the future of Wordpress.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Considering that seven months before the first salvo of the WordPress and WPEngine scuffle Mullenweg embroiled himself in some really... deranged behaviour related to the other website Automattic owns, and I think... yeah, maybe this pattern of not respecting boundaries and taking that propertarian view a little bit too far might be a pattern for the guy.

    It's almost like feeling entitled and not respecting community norms can be a pattern of behaviour, and not just isolated moments of derangement.

    (I'm not saying that Mullenweg is a sexual harasser. I am saying he's a pain old harasser, though.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I'm not mincing words at all: he's a transphobe, and a bit of a creepy one at that. (I mean, stalking users he perma-banned for the 'crime' of being trans over to other sites?! that's harassment right there.)

      He also doesn't take criticism well, either, that much is evidenced by both this debacle and the tumblr issues from February.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        No disagreement there — man's at best got transphobia to unlearn, and also needs to back the fuck off from people. Sadly I think he's too rich for social norms and consequences to affect him, so he's out there, causing harm.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Looks like he banned the person for posting violent and sexually explicit content.

        And followed she/them/her/thee/who to Twitter because he/she/them/they/Zippity-Doo-Dad made a misleading post about the whole sorry business on said Twitter.

        Sounds to me like some people are trying to call anyone who calls them out on their/thems/his/hers toxic behaviour 'transphobe' and thereby get away with doing anything they like.

        And that is not good. No, it is not good at all.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          she/them/her/thee/who

          When you're not sure of someone's gender simply use "they". This is common usage when the gender is unknown, eg:

          "I went to see the doctor about my knee yesterday."

          "Cool, what did they say?"

          We don't know the gender of the doctor so we use "they" to cover all the bases.

          Or could it be that you too have a problem with anyone who isn't cis-gender?

        2. withQuietEyes

          My brother in Christ she joked about turning him off and on again. Like a computer. Because he wasn't working right.

          You know, the joke that this entire site has affectionately beaten into the ground.

          How violent.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    WP Engine is not WP Express

    > In my mind, WordPress is the software WP Engine uses, and everyone knows WP Express is not WordPress.

    Everyone also knows WP Engine is not WP Express ...

  10. Donn Bly
    Devil

    Where have we seen this before?

    The new conspiracy theory is that Matt Mullenweg may have become possessed by the ghost of Roger McAfee.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Where have we seen this before?

      Personally, he see what is going on with Musk and him running the USA and Mr Mulleweg has decided that he wants some of that.

      A plague on all their shoulders (Esp Musk)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Where have we seen this before?

      In truth, the cause might be far more mundane.

      Concentrations of money and power end up isolating people from the consequences of their actions, and that manifests as significant cognitive damage, especially related to impulse control and decision-making.

      Basically, he's not getting enough “No” in his life, which turns out to be a vital social nutrient. In short, he, like many other rich and affluent people, has Vitamin N deficiency.

      1. TimMaher Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Vitamin N deficiency

        Like that. I have noted it in my little black book. I keep it in my coat pocket.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Problemattic

    The problem is that I knew my new content management system wouldn't get ahead in a crowded field without being open source but obviously it was my baby. I used trademarks and board-level control of the owning foundation but still a few people were not playing by my rules. This is like when I was young and people beat me at football when it was my ball we were playing with. The solution worked then and it will work now. My ball!

  12. Pomgolian
    WTF?

    An honest question

    I'm really bemused about how much the alleged development costs are when I review what they actually produce. It doesn't look to me like WordPress has done very much at all of any significance and it's still the same poor featured blogging tool it always was. Yes there's a new block editor that lots of people hated, but to do anything useful with WordPress you have to install a ton of plugins and page builders etc. So, what exactly are they spending the development time on because it's not readily apparent in terms of functionality.

    1. IGotOut Silver badge

      Re: An honest question

      To be fair, it does take effort to take someone else's plugin and then absorb it into the main code.

  13. Stephen Wilkinson

    Thank you for reminding me of OpenText, and therefor Livelink ECM!

    I thought I'd buried those thoughts a long time ago :(

  14. BOFH_fan

    broken, not broken

    After reading the story, I checked on our broken website. Huh, it's not broken today.

    Whatever.

  15. Test Man

    Mullenweg is weird. In short, he complained that WP Engine forked their WordPress.org open source software, so then goes and forks their plugin.

    Is he on something?

  16. Jeffrey B. Layton

    I've used WordPress in the past and liked it. I was getting ready to launch a new blog/site when knucklehead Fred started sh*t-posting. Then it got worse. At that point I have chosen not to use WordPress every again.

    I'm hoping that Linux apps and tools that are needed ask Mullenweg to start contributing more. I know you can switch out tools underneath WP, but the open-source ones should just start blackmailing him as he is blackmailing others.

    Great opinion piece Steven! This topic needed something like this and you write so well. Thanks very much!

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      "should just start blackmailing"

      Better to consider the guy an obnoxious twat that to open that can of worms...

  17. ecofeco Silver badge
    FAIL

    A pox on both thier houses

    There are no good guys in this brouhaha.

  18. GNU Enjoyer
    FAIL

    >WordPress was just so much easier to use than the alternatives; it was open source; and it was free.

    Wordpress is not merely gratis, source-available software, it is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (or at your option), any later version; https://wordpress.org/about/license/

    >It's like someone telling me that Red Hat Linux is Linux. No, no, it's not. It's a Linux distro.

    Red Hat systemd/Linux doesn't simply distribute Linux (what a distribution of Linux could only possibly be grammatically), it distributes far more software.

  19. Ech

    It was annoying when Matt opened his mouth at Word Amp that day. Some of us walked out.

  20. withQuietEyes

    Well that's proven me wrong.

    I thought, when his transphobic nonsense went down on Tumblr (and I found out he was the CEO of fucking WORDPRESS), that it was a Musk-like situation: some intelligent subordinate had redirected his more loony instincts towards Tumblr, the useless moneysink (/affectionate) that they'd somehow ended up with, in order to keep him from making trouble in the actual important shit in the company. Sure, he'd piss off Tumblr instantly, but that's a bit like pissing off the three specific sparrows who live in your favorite park bench. Pissing off the entire WP Engine userbase seems a very different affair.

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