Mullenweg, WP Engine and Collateral Damage

Last week, Matt Mullenweg, head honcho at Automattic and creator of WordPress, publicly called out WP Engine (one of the bigger dedicated WordPress hosts) for questionable behaviour, labelling them a “cancer to WordPress” and urging users to switch hosting providers.

He also complained (among other things) about WP Engine’s lack of return commitment to the WordPress community, noting they only contribute back around 40 hours per week while Automattic contributes time approaching 4,000 hours. Given the companies are roughly the same size and of similar revenue at around half a billion dollars (according to Mullenweg), it would be hard to argue this is anything but morally disproportionate.

Not happy about this, Mullenweg has filed legal action, decreeing that WP Engine needs to pay up. According to WP Engine, this would be an “astronomical and extortionate monetary demand” amounting to tens of millions of dollars annually for use of the WordPress trademark. WP Engine disputes the trademark infringement accusation and has filed suit back, while also claiming that Mullenweg personally threatened a ‘scorched earth nuclear approach’ on WP Engine if they fail to comply.

There’s more nuance to this, but these points should paint a broad enough picture for you.

Shots Fired

Today Mullenweg escalated the situation by banning WP Engine access to wordpress.org, which means all 1.5 million WP Engine customers (including Rocket Apps) are prevented from receiving plugin and theme updates. From a security standpoint, this puts said customers in a compromising position.

Make no mistake, Mullenweg is fully aware of this fact. But he argues that if WP Engine won’t pay, they (and WP Engine customers by extension) should not benefit from free access to WordPress.org resources.

The WP Engine status page at time of writing reflects the current situation, and also curiously states “We will update you as soon as we have a fix”. I can’t imagine what a “fix” would entail, short of agreeing to Mullenweg’s terms. Maybe they have an ace up their sleeve.

Update: A few hours later and apparently WP Engine did have that ace:

Things Are Getting Serious

As if to prove his point, Mullenweg also made an unexpected offer to all Automattic staff: accept a $30,000 (6 months salary) payment and leave the company if you don’t agree with his battle against WP Engine. Perhaps not surprisingly, many have taken him up on this offer, 159 at the time of this post which accounts for 8.4% of the company.

From the outside looking in, it doesn’t look good for Automattic. From the original outset community opinion was divided, but WP Engine seem to be making a clearer case against Mullenweg’s shenanigans pointing out his baseless accusations, alleged lies and ambiguous statements.

Case in point, Mullenweg made an impromptu appearance on ThePrimeTime, where he attempted to convince viewers that he already had several in-person discussions with key WP Engine personal regarding trademark licensing. His source of ‘proof’: his calendar, which Prime rightly pointed out isn’t proof as those meeting could have been about anything.

Highlighting just how bad things have become, and even his biggest supporters are beginning do doubt.

Collateral Damage

Has Mullenweg gone to far? It depends who you ask. Like it or not, as the person who writes the checks he doesn’t have to justify his position or answer to anyone, and that’s a problem.

This isn’t the first time Mullenweg has been known to make questionable decisions in the past, seemingly because it suited him at the time and often without soliciting prior feedback from the WordPress community as is customary. I recall one particular incident on a last minute whim he enabled distraction-free editing by default for WordPress 5.4 onwards, only casually mentioning it in the discussion thread and not responding to any valid criticism of the decision. We’ve all been stuck with it since.

Obviously those are low stakes compared to the current situation, but sadly this time he’s demonstrated a willingness to allow innocent parties to get caught in the crossfire. I can only surmise that in Mullenweg’s eyes, WP Engine customers are justifiable collateral damage in his righteous war.

What It Means For Rocket Apps Products

There’s good news. Because Rocket Apps products are not hosted on wordpress.org, they will not be prevented from receiving updates. The Rocket Apps website itself, however, is in the same boat as all other WP Engine customers, for now.