The Pettiest Drama in the Tech World Is Taking Place at … WordPress?
Reading Time: 8 minutesIn a public beef with a major client, co-founder Matt Mullenweg is showing the world that he’s one of the pettiest CEOs out there., WordPress: How Matt Mullenweg’s public spat with WP Engine is threatening the open-source internet.
You may not typically think of WordPress, the blogging platform turned ubiquitous content management system, as a workplace rife with corporate drama, or as an instigator of petty public beefs. Then again, you may not know much about co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who, as CEO of parent company Automattic, controls an empire’s worth of popular web software and infrastructure—and is unshy about ensuring that everyone knows this.
Over the past couple weeks, Mullenweg has been waging war on one of WordPress’ longest and most successful clients: WP Engine, a hosting service launched in 2010 by a tech writer who wanted to figure out a way to keep his personal blog from crashing. The tool he built, which relies heavily on WordPress’ open-source code, provides a gateway for budding website builders to not only buy and manage a domain of their own, but to also gain access to premium features for custom designs, cloud storage, and tracking analytics. This made it a popular option for users who like the WordPress template but also desired a more full-fledged system in exchange for their money.
But on Sept. 17, for the first day of WordPress’ annual WordCamp U.S. summit (touted as ‘the premiere North American event for web professionals’), Mullenweg published a blog post on his personal site that celebrated the ideals of open-source software and criticized companies that ‘treat Open Source simply as a resource to extract from its natural surroundings, like oil from the ground.’ It didn’t take long for him to get into specifics—and take a shot at WP Engine directly.
‘WP Engine has good people … but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management,’ he wrote. ‘Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital.’ He encouraged the ‘WordPress community to vote with your wallet,’ and not give it to a company that’s ‘going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?’
The beef was that, even though WP Engine amply built off WordPress’ open-source programming to further its own successful business, it wasn’t devoting enough time or resources in turn to helping the WordPress ecosystem maintain and develop itself for posterity. (He cited other companies, like GoDaddy and Google, that also utilize WordPress’ code but do far more to assist the sitemaker in turn.)
For the last day of WordCamp U.S., Sept. 20, Mullenweg hosted a session that he previewed as being ‘one of my spiciest WordCamp presentations ever.’ Indeed, in this talk, he kept up his critiques of WP Engine and Silver Lake—which had further manifested in a shady tweet in support of ‘any employee [who] faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company’s participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress.’
For the live talk, he cited ‘information’ from ‘WP Engine employees who’ve reached out to me,’ including alleged instances in which Silver Lake bought two different pro-open-source tech companies (Talent and Unity) and made profits off of them at the expense of their communities’ approval. This was all to, again, tee up a direct shot at WP Engine:
If the initial blog post had set off some ripples within the web-developer world, Mullenweg’s talk was the tectonic shift. Audience members who participated in the post-presentation Q&A questioned why Mullenweg had made such an aggressive speech (he mostly doubled down in his live responses). Many of the coders, digital marketers, and Big Tech employees in attendance later shared their thoughts on this declaration of war, with one observer who is also ‘not a fan of’ WP Engine still calling the oratory ‘irresponsible, unkind, and malicious at worst.’
Another WordPress customer stated that ‘Matt is completely correct about WP Engine’ but thought that ‘the speech missed the mark.’ Yet another said that this infighting ‘does nothing for the community,’ and one blogger also pointed out that Mullenweg has a history of airing out ‘personal vendettas rather publicly, wrapped up in some kind of ‘I’m looking out for what’s best for everyone’ sentiment.’
The main takeaways: Mullenweg may have had a point, but he raised it in a rather impolitic manner—at an event that WP Engine itself sponsored with cash, no less. One WordPress fan even stated that ‘Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP,’ a sentiment that the CEO was forced to address after it was shared on the official WordPress subreddit.
Yet Mullenweg kept doubling down in the days following the conference, with tweets and blogs that extended the dispute to WP Engine’s alleged misuse of WordPress’ trademarks (i.e., ‘their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not’) and ripped into the company for not offering its users a logged history of site-update revisions like the standard WordPress system does.
On Sept. 23, WP Engine got fed up. Its lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic that alleged Mullenweg had ‘threatened’ that WP Engine had to pay Automattic a ‘very large sum of money’ before his WordCamp keynote—or he would embark on a ‘scorched earth nuclear approach’ to WP Engine.
The counsel cited conversations—which took place throughout the course of the summit, up until Mullenweg’s closing speech—between Automattic’s CFO and a WP Engine board member, as well as screenshots of texts from Mullenweg, in which the executives had threatened to stage public attacks on WP Engine if it ‘did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues—tens of millions of dollars in fact—on an ongoing basis.’ (Mullenweg later confirmed in an interview with a Twitch streamer that he had indeed sent those texts.)
Automattic’s lawyers sent their own cease-and-desist to WP Engine on the very same day, asking that it stop supposedly infringing on WordPress’ branding and intellectual property. But WP Engine’s letter was enough to throw a major wrinkle into Mullenweg’s narrative.
On Sept. 25, Mullenweg declared that WordPress was banning WP Engine from WordPress’ nonprofit network (which houses the open-source coding), thus cutting off any updates or fixes to the 1.5 million websites that use WP Engine as the host for their WordPress infrastructure. Just two days later, after an outcry from the user base, he announced a temporary ‘reprieve’ from the block and shifted the blame back to Silver Lake, granting his nemeses a new deadline to make things right.
It’s worth providing an explanation of WordPress’ unique corporate-and-nonprofit structure, and how that further complicates an already somewhat knotty issue.
The conglomerate Automattic (which is spelled that way because of its CEO’s first name) owns the commercial business WordPress.com, which customers use every day to access, construct, or edit their websites. But this for-profit business is nominally and structurally distinct from the WordPress Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that does not fall under Automattic’s ownership and exists as a charitable organization dedicated to furthering the WordPress open-source project—including partnerships with WordPress-powered companies that encourage (but do not require) them to offer time and resources in turn so as to keep the open-source project sustainable.
Matt Mullenweg is head of both WordPress.com and the WordPress Foundation, which naturally entails potential conflicts of interest for a foundation that’s not supposed to be so involved with WordPress.com’s commercial activity. Yet we see just that playing out in the battle with WP Engine/Silver Lake, as Mullenweg weaponized WordPress.com to cut off WP Engine’s functionality because he didn’t like how WP Engine interacts with the open-source project and the trademarks.
The thrust of the legal claims in the cease-and-desist from Automattic revolves around WP Engine’s alleged misuse of trademarks, not its lack of volunteerism. Still, even these may be legally dubious. On Sept. 20, just a few days before WP Engine sent its cease-and-desist, Automattic published its proposed trademark-terms sheet with WP Engine, spelling out its offered (but by no means implemented) seven-year deal: If WP Engine wanted to employ WordPress branding, it would have to either pay Automattic 10 percent of its gross revenues on a monthly basis or dip into the salaries of all WP Engine employees assigned to WordPress-related tasks and give Automattic 8 percent of those earnings.
WP Engine’s future participation in any WordCamp summits was also made contingent on this compensation. As WP Engine noted in its letter, that would amount to a $32 million yearly check paid to Automattic, out of the hosting company’s $400 million annual revenue.
But, as Emma Roth noted in the Verge, the WordPress Foundation’s trademark policy originally noted that ‘the abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.’ Not only was this changed after Sept. 19 (you can read the archived version here), but the foundation’s new terms were suddenly reworded in a targeted, catty manner:
Not the most typical disclaimer for any copyright terms of service. And Mullenweg’s story curried even more skepticism on Oct. 2, when WP Engine filed an 11-count lawsuit against him and Automattic, accusing the parties of attempted extortion, libel, and slander, among other serious claims. One of the most eye-popping charges in WP Engine’s nearly 100-page filing contends that when Automattic made its big show of transferring WordPress trademark rights to the WordPress Foundation in 2010, it ‘in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day.’ This meant that the WordPress trademarks ‘effectively never left Automattic’s hands.’
Automattic fired back the next day with a short response to the ‘meritless lawsuit,’ announcing it had retained famed attorney Neal Katyal to defend the company and Mullenweg.
But the CEO had other problems to deal with—most immediately, dissent from Automattic and foundation employees who either disapproved of his public conduct or fully disagreed with his ideological stance. Mullenweg then offered what he characterized as ‘the most generous buy-out package possible‘: If any Automattic employees chose to resign before nighttime on Oct. 3, they ‘would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.’
Some took the package yet praised Mullenweg in public; others kept mum about their departures. Mullenweg referred to the ordeal as ‘an emotional roller coaster,’ noting that the large majority of the resignees were people who worked expressly on the WordPress ecosystem networks at play in this whole battle.
By then, even Mullenweg appeared to tone down a little of the righteousness in his anti–WP Engine crusade. In an Oct. 4 interview with the Verge’s Roth, he claimed that it was just fine to weaponize both his commercial and nonprofit operations here, because the foundation ‘just belongs to me personally.’
‘I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark,’ he explained. He also added that ‘there will never be any legal requirement to give back’ to the foundation, and admitted that ‘we are pressuring’ WP Engine to accept its preferred arrangement.
It seems Mullenweg and his supporters will never stop posting as the lawsuit drags on. The manager of WordPress’ official X account is sniping at WP Engine affiliates whose services have been disrupted thanks to the conflict, telling one plug-in developer that everything would be fixed ‘if you dropped your lawsuits, apologized, and didn’t abuse trademarks.’ The Automattic blog published a timeline on Tuesday of ‘some of the meetings we’ve had with WP Engine over the past 20 months,’ as a means of positioning Automattic in contrast to ‘WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th.’ One especially silly new development: 404 Media found on Wednesday that WordPress users logging on to their accounts were forced to tick off a new checkbox that read, ‘I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.’ This has had the effect of locking out some of WordPress’ most high-profile users.
As for the broader internet ecosystem—well, this really comes down to an existential moment for the already endangered open-source ideals of the early internet, and whether they’re sustainable in a modern age where once-free or -cheap services have had to adjust to the realities of capitalism. Today, artificial intelligence mooches off so much open data for its multibillion-dollar systems, platforms that once appeared to dedicate themselves to the public good (like Reddit and OpenAI) now enter into increasingly exclusive and oblique deals with Big Tech giants, and people desire any measure of transparency in an increasingly paywalled, gatekept information superhighway.
Mullenweg, who’s long been notorious for publicly fighting with his own companies’ users and clients, may not be wrong to criticize WP Engine for not doing enough to keep his open-source dream alive—but his hypervisible insults, his incoherent and ever-shifting reasons for these fisticuffs, and his own contradictory stance on his open-source advocacy aren’t winning him much support or favor. If this is how a professed advocate for an open-source world is behaving, is there really any future left for the open-source dream of the World Wide Web?
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