Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly clear: he’s in charge of WordPress’ future.
Mullenweg heads up WordPress.com and its parent company, Automattic. He owns the WordPress.org project, and he even leads the nonprofit foundation that controls the WordPress trademark. To the outside observer, these might appear to be independent organizations, all separately designed around the WordPress open-source project. But as he wages a battle against WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, Mullenweg has muddied the boundaries between three essential entities that lead a sprawling ecosystem powering almost half of the web.
To Mullenweg, that’s all fine — as long as it supports the health of WordPress long-term.
“WordPress.org just belongs to me personally,” Mullenweg said during an interview with The Verge. WordPress.org exists outside the commercial realm of Automattic, as a standalone publishing platform that offers free access to its open-source code that people can use to create their own websites. But it’s not a neutral, independent arbiter of the ecosystem. “In my role as owning WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark. That’s part of why we cut off access from the servers.”
“That’s true: we are pressuring them”
Mullenweg’s feud with WP Engine fans out in a few different directions. He’s criticized WP Engine for not putting enough time and money into developing the open-source WordPress ecosystem, saying that if you gave $1 to the WordPress Foundation, “you’d be a bigger donor than WP Engine.” And Mullenweg has brought up the possibility that WP Engine “hacked” the Automatic-owned WooCommerce plug-in to collect commissions meant for Automattic, which WP Engine has denied. From those arguments, the fight appears to be one over what is and isn’t appropriate in the open-source software world.
But Mullenweg has since sidelined those arguments to make the case that WP Engine — and its “hacked up, bastardized simulacra” of the WordPress open-source code, as he describes it — is infringing on Automattic’s trademark: WordPress.
“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.” WP Engine competes directly with the hosting services offered by Automattic and WordPress.com, and Mullenweg argues one of the reasons for its success is the use of “WordPress” across its site. “That’s why we’re using that legal avenue to really, yeah, pressure them. That’s true: we are pressuring them.”
Mullenweg began his public pressure campaign during a WordPress conference last month, telling people to “vote with your wallet” and stop supporting WP Engine. He later called the service a “cancer” to the WordPress ecosystem. Mullenweg eventually blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org’s servers, leaving WP Engine’s customers unable to install themes, plug-ins, and updates.
The decision to cut off WP Engine also put other WordPress projects in a precarious position. WordPress is open-source and free to use, with no mandate to give back. But Mullenweg has made it clear that there is some bar that successful projects must meet to stay off Automattic’s radar.
“I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host,” Mullenweg says. There is “no requirement to give back. WordPress will be open-source forever and ever, and so there will never be any legal requirement to give back.” But WordPress does still “request” that companies contribute something. “It’s better for WordPress if they give back.”
For WP Engine, what it comes down to is this: Mullenweg wants the company to contribute to WordPress, whether it’s by paying to license the WordPress trademark or by pitching into the open-source WordPress project.
Even though the WordPress Foundation controls the platform’s trademark, the commercial rights for that trademark are licensed to Automattic. That means Automattic can charge other companies for using the WordPress trademark for commercial purposes — and that’s where Mullenweg has been able to exert pressure on WP Engine.
“What they’re doing is not okay. It’s not that they’re calling it WP; it’s that they’re using the WordPress trademark in confusing ways,” Mullenweg said. He cited the “frantic changes” he claims WP Engine made to its site to remove mentions of “WordPress” after the dispute began. Under the WordPress Foundation’s trademark policies, companies can use the WordPress name and logo to “refer to and explain their services.”
The foundation says the “WP” abbreviation isn’t covered by its trademarks, but the guidelines were recently tweaked to say that companies should stop using the abbreviation in “a way that confuses people.” During The Verge’s interview, Mullenweg confirmed he changed the foundation’s trademark policies to include a “dig at WP Engine.” The policy now says WP Engine “never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”
This week, Automattic published its proposed solution to the dispute: a seven-year deal that would require WP Engine to pay an 8 percent fee on all revenue to either use the WordPress and Automattic’s WooCommerce trademarks or to compensate employees who would contribute to the WordPress open-source project. The deal was offered in late September, but Mullenweg says it’s off the table due to “WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence.”
The dispute culminated in a lawsuit, in which WP Engine accuses Automattic and Mullenweg of extortion. WP Engine alleges that Mullenweg said he would proceed with a “scorched earth nuclear approach” after the two failed to come to an agreement. “When WPE refused to capitulate to Automattic’s astronomical and extortionate monetary demands, Mullenweg made good on his threats,” WP Engine claims. “The threat of ‘war’ turned into a multi-front attack, part of an overarching scheme to extract payouts from WPE.”
In the lawsuit, WP Engine claims Mullenweg is attempting to “capitalize on the chaos he caused” by advertising a deal to switch to Pressable — another WordPress host owned by Automattic. The filing also includes a purported job offer from Mullenweg to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner saying that if she declines to join Automattic, he’d tell the CEO of Silver Lake — the private equity firm that owns WP Engine. WP Engine referred us to the lawsuit when asked for comment.
WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy has since left Automattic, along with more than 150 other employees who accepted Mullenweg’s offer to leave for $30,000 or six months of pay, whichever is higher, if they didn’t support his fight against WP Engine.
More importantly, WP Engine’s lawsuit raises concerns about corporate overreach, alleging Mullenweg’s actions reflect “a clear abuse of his conflicting roles” at the WordPress Foundation, Automattic, and the open-source WordPress project. In a statement on Thursday, Automattic called the lawsuit “baseless,” adding that it denies WP Engine’s allegations, “which are gross mischaracterizations of reality.”
However the legal case may pan out, it’s become clear that Mullenweg does control WordPress.org. But his fight with WP Engine has only made the border between WordPress and Automattic murkier, casting a shadow of uncertainty over the open source community that’s long backed him. That seems to be a risk Automattic is willing to take as long as WordPress comes out on top.