Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry
wpenginestatus.comI have no dog in this fight, but from the outside this is ludicrous behaviour.
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of a for-profit WordPress hosting company, should not be using his position in the open-source WordPress project to attack another for-profit WordPress hosting company. Nothing could tank the reputation of the open-source WordPress project faster.
This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).
> This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company.
I am only looking at this from the outside but given that Wordpress.org (not the wordpress hosting company wordpress.com) is involved here, it's clear that this dispute involves the Wordpress project itself and not just the commercial Automattic entity/Matt Mullenweg.
Yeah, I'm afraid if WordPress.org doesn't have control over their own API's then they are compromised and reduces trust in them.
Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.
It's 40% of websites, but bear in mind that not all websites are of equal significance. Some websites are just spam and never receive any visits. If we measured how much time people spend on different websites, I would guess that WordPress wouldn't even reach 5% of time spent web surfing.
The question still stands though. Why does wp engine get to infringe on WordPress trademark AND get access to server resources for free?
WordPress's trademark policy[0] explicitly said:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
and
> Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
That makes this seem pretty cut and dry…
So Matt's mom confused WP Engine for official WordPress and Matt then decided that they are infringing on the WordPress trademark, by using "WP" and calling themselves "#1 platform for WordPress." Then, he threatened WP Engine to pay up or he will go to war against them, and now we are seeing what he meant by that.
Honestly, seems like pretty immature behavior, but it's entertaining at least.
His biggest beef with WP Engine is that their code is "bastardized" (???), because it doesn't enable revisions by default for their websites. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard. He's trying to convince us that only WP Engine is bad - and all other WP hosting companies are supposedly good.
Yep, it sounds like he is jealous/envious that they are making more off of WordPress hosting than Automattic. WordPress being open source makes this even more ridiculous, because he's complaining about modifications to open source software.
Yeah, I expected something more serious (like tracking usage analytics, scrapping data for some content generator or etc.) but it seems like the real problem is a minor function that {a lot} of users don't even know about?
The revisions history disabled feature is more of a scapegoat, imho.
Matt is being unreasonable and petty here. Posts once published, they are rarely edited.
Matt just bursted because of envy. He's used to be pampered with attention.
while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back, if Mullenweg were serious about gaining support from the community he would give a date for people to migrate their systems off of WPEngine before they blocked it.
this just feels petty as hell and honestly makes me annoyed at him than anything, no warning whatsoever. nobody has time to just "migrate to pressable" on a whim. just be glad it's something not more critical than updating some plugins.
you also can't deny the obvious conflict of interest here where it feels like he's trying take a "competitor" down. sucks all around.
> while i understand the sentiment of wpengine not contributing back
To my understanding this isn't even particularly true - WPEngine have contributed significantly to events/sponsorships and with their own open source contributions. Matt's demand was allegedly instead for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic".
Yeah this is my take as well. This feels like a mudsling fight and it’s messy. Whatever the .coms do is theirs, but the .org should not be in this one.
The statement at Wordpress.org reads like a very emotionally charged e-mail. While I am not in the know of the situation, it seems like a bit of terrible PR.
The statement isn't at wordpress.com
Need more coffee, edited!
God the hubris of the Wordpress camp..
https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine/
> WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.
Wordpress people have been rewriting content without asking for permission FOREVER, potentially breaking code embedded in content. They rewrite (or perhaps stopped by now, I've moved on) Wordpress to WordPress.
> Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia
If I was a hosting service I would have that noise off by default too.
I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago
https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/
and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.
Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.
All seems so sudden and disproportionate.
> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project?
WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?
Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.
I’d go with the most obvious explanation: Matt found out their biggest competitor makes more money than WP.com and does’t give back (money or development time), got rughtfully pissed, but started doing ridiculous things instead of just calling them out.
If WP Engine wanted to dedicate resources to build on the code they are using, they would've contributed more to the core itself.
Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
You might want to add a disclaimer that you work at Automattic.
Most of my other comments I was speaking in first person, in others I did not initially realize it wasn't as clear in some of them.
I also updated my bio here to reflect the product I am working for belongs to Automattic. Previously, it only mentioned the product which not everyone has to know belongs to Automattic.
Your employer has been served a cease and desist. Does your legal counsel know you are commenting on the legal matters on social media as an employee? This doesn’t seem like a wise position to put yourself or your employer in.
I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.
The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.
To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events.
Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.
I thought the trademarks were owned by the Wordpress Foundation?
They are, and the foundation's policy[0] already explicitly states:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell.
According to WP Engine:
> Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine 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. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
There are two paths:
1. Fork and cherry-pick from upstream, don't accept contributions from outside. They need minimal changes.
2. Fork and maintain their fork independently, try to get community contributors too.
If WP Engine is not capable to contribute to WP development, how do you imagine they will ne able to support a fork?
Has WP Engine actually done anything wrong? Wordpress is released under GPLv2 which allows modification and commercial use. I don't see the justification for Automattic demanding royalties.
They are intending on enforcing this via trademarks and not code license. So the dispute is about "WP" and how "Wordpress" is used on the WP Engine website as a trademark.
Using WordPress the software is totally free, in both senses of the word.
Using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks outside of fair use is not.
Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.
The WordPress Foundation's trademark policy[0] seemed fairly clear that:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
and
> a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
To me it looks like a conflict of interests that Matt's using his role as the director of the non-profit to try to make a competitor pay his for-profit business (which it's worth disclosing that you are an employee of, edit: now disclosed) tens of millions of dollars.
Particuarly since WP Engine do already seem to contribute to the WordPress project/community/non-profit side, through events/sponsorships/open-source contributions. Even WordPress.org states "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" under their "Five for the Future" program[1].
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...
I am an employee of Automattic, that's correct and public.
The problem is not the "WP" in their name but their specific usage of "WordPress" and "WooCommerce" on their website and marketing. You don't have to literally use the trademarked in your brand name for infringement. Legal threshold, AFAIK, is around 15% of the people thinking you are officially related to the owner or the licensees of the trademark.
https://automattic.com/2024/09/25/open-source-trademarks-wp-...
The supposedly infringing quotes from WP Engine in Automattic's "Exhibit B" ("Increase website speed with the fastest WordPress hosting", etc.) are extraordinarily similar to what the Wordpress Foundation's trademark policy explicitly permits ("the world’s best WordPress themes") - and would be nominative use even if that were not the case.
I'm hoping that contributors balk and are willing to walk since the ramifications are way beyond just WP Engine within the FOSS community.
They've realized it's an untapped source of revenue and they want their share, somehow
Lets try to take the discussion into something technically more interesting.
WordPress is calling the database for most things which make things slow. I don't know how things improved over the years but is there any trial for a hard or soft fork that tries to address this performance bottleneck?
The last time I worked with WordPress was 5-6 years ago so I am not aware of the scene now.
If there would be a fork resulting from this fiasco I hope it will focus on addressing that. Although WordPress registry and community is too big to change over a short or medium range.
The current best practice for solving that is to flatten your WordPress installation in HTML files, or to use a WP cache plugin. Caches like CloudFlare also help a lot.
I don't know the exact details about it, but that solves the bottleneck. Once pages are flattened they do not have to call the database again.
There's also a flat-file CMS called FlatPress, but I was not able to reliably determine if it's a fork or not.
This behavior seems incredibly hostile, especially considering both companies have been around for over a decade. So, what changed? WP Engine got big? They've been that way for quite some time. My guess is that developments over the past eight years—such as the rise of static sites, JavaScript, and Node.js have likely led to a decline in market share and revenue for both WordPress and WP Engine (though I don’t have specific data to back this up). This is just bad business. Focusing on competitors is a distraction, and at this point, it feels like a personal feud for Matt. What are the motives? Money (unlikely Matt already is wealthy), seems like hubris.
Matt needs to calm down, talk to their lawyers and keep the ego in check
Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine.
Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store
Wordpress is a fork of a GPL licensed blog CMS so they had no choice but for it to be GPL.
> Matt needs to calm down ...
... means, "this seems more important to Matt than it does to me" and "he should just accept it shouldn't matter to him any more than it does to me".
Which, when paraphrased, explains why the comment tends to further provoke those who are passionate about something dear to them.
Often it's dear, and they are uncalm, because it came from them or is part of them in some way. That's the anti-calm appealed to by "think of the children", an inciting phrase. We're to recognize that our creations are worth our care.
Put another way: not all indignation is unrighteous.
Related announcement from Wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
Regardless of the claims made, that is a startlingly immature piece of communication.
Yep.
Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place!
----
[0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues.
> [...] and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues
I'm occasionally forced to work with Wordpress, so I'm not an expert or anything, but that's my impression as well. Wordpress was designed for publishing articles but people want to use it as a foundation for building highly dynamic websites.
The paradox of these highly dynamic WP websites is that people usually try to build that way because they don't have the development expertise to make a custom solution, so they need lots of plugins to achieve what they want, but those plugins are often built to such poor quality and security standards that they really need to be reviewed before use, but to review them you need developer expertise.
>The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer
I wonder what it means.
I guess many webhosters run a WAF that blocks known WordPress exploits, protecting sites that don't update wordpress (quickly). And presumably wordpress.org somehow helps with configuring WAF rules for this.
I’ve been using WordPress since b2/cafelog, and hilariously it’s this hubbub that’s made me aware of WPEngine.
WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin.
Something I wonder, is it possible to have 3rd party plugin registries, so unconnected to .org ?
As far as I know, you can still download a plugin, install it in the plugin folder, and possibly restart WordPress, but it's a bit more risky. Installing a plugin via the admin interface is much more comfortable.
That said, as a WP admin of a tiny commercial website, I find it distressing that someone else can influence the functionalities of my Website. I already didn't install Jetpack because I dislike the intrusiveness and, frankly, the spying by Autommatic which is enabled by this plugin on our revenues and commercial transactions. All this points toward a direction that is not pleasant.
Yes. It's all just PHP. You can write your own plugin that does all this.
Not out of the box really. It's incredibly frustrating where everyone "rolls their own solution" for commercial plugins
I thought this didn't affect me until tonight I had a call from a freelance client maybe 5 years ago call me.
Just spent the better part of 3 hours after work trying to help him out, what WordPress have done here is ridiculous. It feels like something more petty than a child. Mullenweg needs to grow up and realise that open source is open source. I've read through the cease and desist claims. It's Mullenweg's petty ego destroying an ecosystem of WPE users. So much for his high and mighty 'wordpress is the pinicle of user's experience'
Whatever his angle is, I just replaced Wordpress with a home rolled cms for my client. WordPress can die for all I care. The web would be safer for it.
This whole thing seems petty and vindictive and will surely only damage Wordpress as a whole.
[dupe] Discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41652760
Ugh! I manage a large number of sites on WPE for clients, and keeping them updated and secure via manual method is going to be a pain. I might as well spin up my servers and migrate away instead of waiting for things to settle.
This spat is embarrassing for both companies.
What do you mean by both? What should have WPEngine done differently?
Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.)
Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.
I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1]
I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute.
> I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1]
To at least partially back up my claim linked for the latter, WP Engine is part of WordPress.org's "Five for the Future" program, stating "This organization contributes 5% of their resources to the WordPress project" and listing developers they sponsor: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524210250/https://wordpress...
Their own open-source projects can be found on GitHub, like FaustJS: https://github.com/wpengine/faustjs
The primary events they sponsor are, to my understanding, WordCamps and DE{CODE}.
Thanks! This is the first time I’ve seen a fleshed-out counter-claim like this. Yeah, if this is (still) correct I think I’m with WPE on this one.
(I also do not really have a stake in this, but as an open source developer trying to launch a product it’s really easy for me to sympathize with WP.org/.com)
Thanks. Another counter-claim I've seen to this is that WPEngine used to provide developers and sponsor events, but no longer do.
Any insights there?
Not trying to come across as interrogating or particularly concerned with the answer, but the whole thing is a curiosity.
The "Five for the Future" page is still up. Wayback machine shows that the contributor/hours numbers seem to have been revised downwards last week, possibly suggesting that WP Engine contributes less than it used to (or that Matt noticed and decided to give it a more conservative estimate), but also meaning the figures there now should be up-to-date and that WP Engine does still currently sponsor at least 11 contributors.
WP Engine was listed as sponsor for WordCamp Europe 2024[0], which was in June, and ran DE{CODE} back in March. So they seem at least relatively recent on events.
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond
WPEngine has been a supreme disappointment in the last year. Agency Partner Program is a bogus seduction tactic. The development instance you can have now is embarrassing when displaying progress to clients as they swear no caching exists when the instance is password-protected. I'm tired of WPEngine and love that this is happening. Been much happier with Kinsta.
This needs to be higher up really. Big news with impact to those working with Wordpress.
Why though?
> "I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.
> What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.
If you read the full (pretty short) statement, it comes of as something written at the end of a bad day with a lot of petty and vindictive emotion behind it all. Regardless of the actual issues, which I know no more of than the statement on the website.
Is anyone still using WordPress?
40+% of the websites online?
Just 478 million websites representing 43% of the web.
How many of those get more than 1 human visitor per day?
Oh no, marketing teams everywhere are in disarray and might need to talk to their organization’s full stack developer teams