If you’re a bit active in the WordPress community, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the war that’s going on between WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg and hosting / software company WP Engine. So what is that all about?

WP Engine doesn’t give back (enough) to WordPress, according to Matt

WP Engine, a large hosting company specialized in hosting WordPress websites, makes a LOT of money because of WordPress. In an interview with WP Engine founder Jason Cohen, he said they’re expecting to hit $400 million in revenue in 2024. That’s more than half of Automattic’s revenue, which is expected around $710 million according to Latka. Automattic is Matt Mullenweg’s for profit company, that owns WordPress.com… a WordPress hosting company.

But Automattic contributes almost 4000 hours per week – which is about 100 employees – to WordPress development. WP Engine contributes only 40 hours per week – 1 employee. Only 1 employee dedicated to the software on which you’ve built a 400 million dollar business on, which employs over 1000 employees nowadays… that seems a bit to little. I can understand Matt getting mad about that.

But that’s not the only thing WP Engine contributes to WordPress. They also produce educational content and organize events like DE{CODE}, sponsor WordCamp events, and they’ve acquired – and since then developed and maintained – some very popular WordPress plugins like Local, Genesis Blocks and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF).

Matt wants 8% of WP Engine’s Gross Revenue

But all of that is not nearly enough, according to Mad Matt. Even his own Five for the Future project – which encourages – encourages, not obligates – companies to allocate 5% of their resources to the development of WordPress – isn’t even enough for WP Engine.

Matt wants WP Engine to pay 8% of their gross revenue to Automattic, or commit 8% of its revenue in the form of salaries of WP Engine employees working on WordPress core features and functionality.

Yes, 8% of the Gross Revenue. You’ve read that right. Not 8% of their profits, which would already be a crazy amount, but 8% of their Gross Revenue, so all revenue generated by WP Engine from the sale of its services, calculated without deductions for taxes, refunds, or other costs, as stated in the concept license agreement that Automattic drafted.

But WordPress is open source

On WordPress.org’s own about page, they say “WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms:

  1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
  2. The freedom to study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish.
  3. The freedom to redistribute.
  4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

So, this license basically allows you to do whatever you want with the WordPress software.

WordPress is a trademark

So Matt couldn’t take any legal action against WP Engine for making money with the WordPress software, or for modifying the software. So he decided to start a lawsuit over their use of the name WordPress, which is a registered trademark.

However, the abbreviation WP – that WP Engine uses – isn’t part of that trademark. Even more so, the WordPress foundation Trademark Policy used to say “The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

We know that thanks to the Internet Archive, because Matt has changed that to “The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

So, he can’t take any legal action against WP Engine for using WP either. However, they are using terms like WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting on their website… but so is every other hosting company, or (Bob the) webbuilder.

What has happened so far

Matt called out WP Engine in his keynote speech at WordCamp 2024

It all started when Matt ended his keynote speech at WordCamp 2024 (a large event for the WordPress community) on September 20 with sharp criticism towards WP Engine, accusing the hosting company of things like disabling content revisions to save on storage costs, giving users a degraded experience.

That may be true, but the license clearly stated they can do that.

He also mentioned WP Engine’s branding, which he feels misleads customers into thinking it is an official part of WordPress.

But since WP isn’t part of the WordPress trademark, and the trademark policy used to say “you are free to use it in any way you see fit“, there’s nothing he can do about that either.

He also pointed out that WP Engine contributes minimally to the development of WordPress despite profiting heavily from it. Even if that is true, they have no obligation to contribute anything to WordPress.

WP Engine is not WordPress blog post

On September 21, Matt publishes a blog post titles “WP Engine is not WordPress“, in which he repeats his concerns about WP Engine’s branding and how little they give back to WordPress, and that they turn off revisions. He even calls WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress”.

Matt tried to get WP Engine to sign a license agreement

Matt’s attacks towards WP Engine didn’t just come out of the blue though. In the weeks before, he tried to pressure WP Engine in signing the previously mentioned license agreement to pay 8% of their revenue to Automattic.

WP Engine issues a Cease and Desist letter to Automattic

That is evident from the Cease and Desist letter that WP Engine sent to Automattic on September 23, demanding Matt stops his campaign against WP Engine. In that letter, there are several messages from Matt to WP Engine’s management team, threatening to go on a nuclear war against WP Engine if they don’t pay up, starting with the keynote speech.

Automattic issues a Cease and Desist letter to WP Engine

On the same day, Automattic responses with it’s own Cease and Desist letter to WP Engine, demanding they stop using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.

Matt blocks WP Engine servers access to WordPress.org

On September 25, Matt blocks WP Engine servers access to WordPress.org, which means customers who host their website on WP Engine (and Flywheel, another hosting brand that’s owned by the same company) can’t update plugins and themes anymore via the WP dashboard like they used to. They also can’t install any new plugins or themes from WordPress.org.

Matt hoped that would convince WP Engine customers to move to another hosting company. He probably didn’t expect the huge blowback it caused from the WordPress community though, which moved him to restore WP Engine’s access for a few days, allowing them to copy everything on to their own servers.

On October 8, he even added a mandatory checkbox that says “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise” on the WordPress.org login page.

Automattic offers $30000 for employees who don’t agree with him to leave

There’s not only a lot of criticism on Matt’s actions from the WordPress community, but also from within his own company. Therefor he made all Automattic employees an offer: if you don’t agree with me, you can leave and get $30000 or months of salary, whichever is the most.

159 people took the offer, which is 8.4% of all employees. Well, at least he got his 8%! Amongst them were both the director of WordPress.org and the director of WordPress.com.

Hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields plugin

On October 12, Matt took over control of Advanced Custom Fields, a WordPress plugin owned by WP Engine with over 2 million active installs. He just forked the plugin – meaning he copied it – renamed it to Secure Custom Fields and hijacked Advanced Custom Fields’ spot on WordPress.org.

What does all of this mean for WordPress?

The fact that Matt publicly attacked WP Engine during WordCamp – a community event which WP Engine sponsors with $75000 sponsorship package – didn’t go too well with the WordPress community, but a lot of people could see where he was coming from.

However, that goodwill went down the drain quickly when he blocked access to the WordPress.org servers for WP Engine. That didn’t just hurt WP Engine, but mainly their hundreds of thousands of customers – most of them just normal WordPress users like you and me who have absolutely nothing to do with all the drama.

And then he took over the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, a plugin that as been a key factor in the growth of WordPress, enraging plugin developers all over the world. After all, why would a developer spent thousands of hours on coding a plugin, putting even more hours in supporting it and making it more popular, only to be at risk the platform you’re developing it for can just take it away from you whenever they want.

Mad Matt has got to go

Just like the American Congres can remove a president from office, the WordPress community should be able to remove Matt as the WordPress.org CEO. Or maybe it’s more like Child Protection Services; Matt is the father of WordPress, but he’s killing his own child. Mad Matt has got to go.

UPDATE: Judge rules Matt has to stop

On December 10, a judge finally told Matt what everyone else already knew; he has to stop everything that’s harming WP Engine. He has to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, give back control over the ACF plugin (he still offers a fork of ACF Pro under the name Secure Custom Fields though), and remove the checkbox that said “I’m not affiliated with WP Engine” (well, it’s still there, but now says “Pineapple is delicious on pizza” so I guess he now wants to exclude all Italians). Read all the details here.

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