Last week I had the opportunity to attend and reflect on WordCamp US 2024 in Portland. It was a great event that left me more than a little conflicted about the state of WordPress today – specifically the stagnant level of innovation I see with popular WordPress hosts.
For those who missed the news, the event capped off with an address from Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project. It was a polarizing talk that called out a specific host (WP Engine) and their private equity investors (Silver Lake) for purported harm to the community.
Since then, WP Engine has openly published a cease and desist letter against Matt and his company Automattic. Then Matt and his legal team published a counter to them alleging trademark infringement and intentional market confusion on the part of WP Engine. He doubled down this week by blocking WP Engine from free access to the APIs provided by WordPress.org for installing and updating WordPress software.
It’s a messy situation that has many people conflicted on where they stand and how to respond.
Why Open Source Matters
WordPress is free and open source software. It’s built by a community around the world, many of whom write the software on their own time with their own resources and give it freely to the world. I’ve personally written a lot of code for WordPress, both in the form of free plugins and code for the core system. My work – for which I was not paid – literally powers millions of websites.
I give back because WordPress is one of the things that made me who I am today. It introduced me to blogging.1I had a blog before WordPress, built manually using Microsoft FrontPage and published to my university servers over FTP. But … it was inconsistent and, except for a cached copy on a thumb drive, no longer exists. It exposed me to the GPL, copyleft licensing, and the idea of free software. WordPress introduced me to the broader PHP community, where I’ve been an active speaker, writer, and core contributor for nearly 20 years.
Blogging directly led to one of my first jobs. Contributing code back to the WordPress community led to another. Speaking about PHP led to being asked to write multiple books on the language and my eventual inclusion into the project as a release manager.
I also know, from first-hand conversations, of the impact my own work has had on the lives of individuals. From the engineer in Kenya who used my blog to start coding and eventually provide for his family through a job in the WordPress space. To the inmate learning to code because of my books. There are a lot of other stories – but the point is that WordPress made me a better developer and helped me put my work into the world. And my work has had a direct, positive impact in the lives of many.
It’s personally rewarding for me, but reinforces the fact that WordPress (and the people who build and fight for it) is a major force of good in the world.
Who is Right?
Disclaimer
I am not a lawyer and this stance is my personal opinion. It does not reflect deep legal advice or an detailed understanding of any relevant legal precedents. This is merely my read on the situation based on my own background in the community and events / situations to which I’ve been privy.
Trademarks
There has been a lot of confusion in the past between WordPress the open source project and wordpress.com, the paid hosting service provided by Automattic. Given the legacy of the “WordPress” trademark, and Automattic being granted explicit rights to use the trademark commercially, this confusion is understood and has been argued to death in the path.
WP Engine never calls itself “WordPress Engine” in marketing. However, searches for “WordPress Engine” do yield sponsored advertisements for WP Engine. Until this week, they even had partner agencies listed on their own website as “WordPress Engine Preferred Partner Agenc[ies].”2An archive.org search shows that this particular agency listing was changed from “WordPress Engine Preferred Partner Agency” to “WP Engine Preferred Partner Agency” on September 24, 2024. At the time of this writing, at least one other partner still references “WordPress Engine” on pages with case studies.
Even if WP Engine isn’t actively trying to brand itself as “WordPress Engine,” they aren’t doing anything to avoid others doing so. A talk at their recent DE{CODE} conference even referred to them as such. It’s clear they are directly benefiting from the name confusion but they do not have the same rights to the trademark as Automattic and WordPress.com.
The initial arguments made by Matt were related to WP Engine’s failure to contribute back to the open source community. These are arguments that have yet to be addressed and are incredibly valid. Especially when, amidst all of these conversations, WP Engine advertises their contributions to WordPress on their homepage!
It’s true that WP Engine has published tutorials and their own plugins to enhance their product offering. But are those contributions to WordPress itself? The first argument from Matt is that WP Engine as a company only contributes 40 people-hours per week to the project, which does not reflect a culture focused on “ensuring an open future with […] contributions to WordPress.”
End-user Impact
The biggest unfortunate side effect of this battle is the impact on end users. When Matt blocked WP Engine servers from communicating with WordPress.org’s APIs, many people (rightfully?) flagged concern about how this would be seen by stakeholders. Most of those stakeholders won’t know, understand, or even care about the issues above – all they will see is instability and an overall concern about the safety and security of the project.
That’s a valid concern.
But it’s also a misplaced one.
Actions have consequences. Inaction also has consequences. The inaction on WP Engine’s part to address very valid concerns raised directly by Matt and his team led consequentially to the removal of API access – an issue that any web host should have had a reasonable protection against. Any system pulling remote data from a third party source should have protections against that source becoming unavailable, whether that’s a pull-through cache or even just a circuit-breaker in their system.
WP Engine, a very large and successful host, did not have protections in their system for an unexpected outage of WordPress.org API services. As a result, end users could not fetch updates and instead saw errors.3WP Engine has since stood up a proxy for the services provided by WordPress.org and various reports suggest the outage is, at least for now, resolved.
I feel for impacted end users. But that they were impacted at all is WP Engine’s fault and responsibility to fix. They’ve been providing access to free services hosted on WordPress.org and, due to a major disagreement on community contributions and trademark licensing, permission to use those services has been revoked. It sucks, but to pin the blame on anyone other than WP Engine is disingenuous.
Earlier in my career, I built a virtual machine image for running Ubuntu on top of Hyper-V for running a vvv developer environment. It worked for me, and I published the image to allow colleagues to use it as well. Down the road, another developer leveraged the image as a base for building a completely unrelated product. I only found out when my cloud service provider sent me the bill for serving that image to the developer’s thousands of users. I contacted the developer and asked them to pitch in to cover the cost – they refused. So I deleted the image.
My removal of that image hurt Hyper-V users of vvv. It hurt users of Laravel Homestead, who were also using my image for free. While I regret hurting those users, it was because another member of the community chose to build a paid service atop my free services – costing me thousands of dollars in infrastructure – while refusing to contribute in any way (i.e. paying me a fee or hosting their own image) to aid in the delivery of those services.
WP Engine has done the same thing. They’ve built a powerful, profitable platform leveraging free services provided by a third party. That third party asked them to give back to the community and, when they refused, revoked their access to those free services. This revocation hurts end users, yes, but it’s WP Engine who is responsible for that harm. Do not misplace that blame.
Where To From Here?
I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know what the lasting impact will be to WordPress or even the broader open source community from this battle.
What I do know is that I’ll still continue to use WordPress. I’ll still contribute to open source. I’ll still advocate for a free, open web and the tools and technologies that keep it that way.
The whole dispute could easily have been circumvented if only WP Engine would live up to their stated culture of being “passionate for giving back and WordPress.” Fixing the damage that’s been done will be hard, but is possible. There’s a path forward if only the decision makers involved are willing to tread.
At the end of the day, I’m on the sidelines here, waiting to see how the entire situation evolves and resolves. It’s painful to watch, but will hopefully answer a lot of questions about the health of this particular part of the open source community. Will the conflict resolve amicably? Will the legal battle result in further litigation that sets the precedent for these disagreements in the future? Who will still meet up with me at WordCamp US 2025?
I hope to see answers to all of these questions soon …