It’s hard to overstate the importance of WordPress to the World Wide Web. The publishing platform plays a massive role in website publishing and has since its release 21 years ago — acting as a management system for the images, files, and text of around four in 10 of all the websites and blogs online. In the digital publishing world, WordPress is one of the very best-known brands, so its role in a pitched, very complex spat over its trademark is unusual and noteworthy — not least because it has seriously impacted many websites owned by people who have nothing to do with the two companies at fault.
The battle between Automattic, an American-based, globally distributed digital company that owns WordPress.org, and WP Engine, a WordPress site hosting service that provides paid server access to publishers, has simmered quietly for some time. But on Wednesday, things hit a crisis point. WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic asking that its CEO, Matt Mullenweg, stop publicly trashing WP Engine, tech news site TechCrunch reports. This was a retaliatory act after Mullenweg published a blog post that called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”
Shortly after that, Automattic sent its own cease and desist letter to WP Engine, accusing the hosting service of infringing on several of its trademarks.
If that’s not confusing enough, then read on: Mullenweg is CEO and president of Automattic, and its service WordPress.org is a web-based solution for publishing third-party blogs. But Mullenweg was also, with a partner, one of the original developers of the WordPress software suite — the actual code that makes blog publishing possible.
The suite itself is technically owned by the WordPress Foundation, a nonprofit, and is effectively an open-source product. His beef with WP Engine is very personal and centers around the fact that WP Engine has been “commercializing” the WordPress project since 2010. His newly released letter accuses the provider of profiteering and also disabling important parts of WordPress in its solutions. There is more than a little similarity between this tale of corporate, profit-seeking intrigue versus the original nonprofit ethos and the factors that make up the complex battle raging inside AI company OpenAI.
Though the trademark spat has not yet reached suing-each-other-in-court levels, it has escalated to the point that Mullenweg has now banned WP Engine from accessing the resources of WordPress.org. What this means, TechCrunch reports, is that it effectively cut off WP Engine from accessing key “extra” bits of software, like plugins, that help make published websites actually work. That act has now broken “a lot of websites,” TechCrunch explains, and has prevented others from updating the plugins that they have already installed. The decision is also exposing some websites to potential cyberattacks.
The community of WordPress users is displeased, to say the least. And it’s easy to see why: WordPress software powers a massive share of the websites and blogs published — possibly as much as 40 percent. It’s reliable, it has countless customers, and now many of its clients find that key parts of their business just aren’t working as they should.
Several takeaways from this spat offer other businesses useful lessons, starting with the need for a clear and simple corporate structure and direct lines of ownership of the products your company makes. It’s also a sharp reminder that keeping control of your trademark and associated intellectual property is critical, lest your business encounter complicated legal issues many years down the road.
Lastly, it’s a reminder that if your small business relies on someone else’s product — perhaps particularly if that product is open source — your revenues and profits could be at the whim of their decision making. Having a contingency plan in place is probably wise.