Truth be told, this is the first post that has been published in years. Of all the things to talk about, the controversy between Automatic and WP Engine was the least expected.
Then again, it’s 2024.
How We Got Here
Enter the WordPress community. It started with Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and Automatic CEO, referring to WP Engine as a “cancer to WordPress.” He took exception to them disabling tracking of revisions of every post to save money.
He also accused Silver Lake, a majority owner of WP Engine, of not contributing enough to the WordPress project and confusing people into believing that it is officially part of WordPress.
Ironically, Automatic was a partial owner until 2018 according to David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of 37signals. Suffice it to say, Mullenweg did not take too kindly to Hansson’s take on the situation, though he did later edit his post in attempt to tone down the harshness.
Throughout the drama there have been lawsuits filed, and actions taken that have alarmed many.
The Drama
The official page for the Automatic Custom Fields plugin was taken over by Automatic and changed to Secure Custom Fields. WP Engine no longer has access to WordPress.org’s servers, where WordPress plugins are commonly available for installation and updates. Consequently, they have had to create an alternative method to updating the plugins they own.
This isn’t the first public conflict Mullenweg has had with those who used WordPress to make money.
In the end, Mullenweg is attempting to convince WP Engine of paying 8% of its gross revenue to Automatic in order to have a trademark license so they can continue to have WP in their name. Indeed, it did not go over well.
As Steven J Vaughn-Nichols put it,
From where I sit, this is not a battle over open source. It’s a fight between someone worth hundreds of millions and a company worth billions. When you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in any conflict, whether it’s a family fight, a divorce, or a business fight, one of the best rules of thumb is to follow the money. What it’s telling me here is it’s about the cash.
Unfortunately, this battle can potentially affect me and everyone who uses WordPress and WP Express in particular. I didn’t need this. None of us do.
What can we do?
This site uses WordPress and though none of the plugins used are affected as they don’t come from WP Engine, that doesn’t mean they won’t be as some of them come from third parties. Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner has a good answer to that question.
The TL;DR takeaway is don’t panic.
This site has been on hiatus for years as life changes were occurring and different priorities took hold. This type of conflict impacting media creation is nothing new. It’s concerning, but nothing that this site or most content creators have any control over.
The best path forward is to stay the course while looking into alternatives should the need to use a different content management system become necessary.
The good news is that efforts are underway to create another distribution method for WordPress plugins and themes. There is also ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress without the Gutenberg Editor. Alternatives are on the table.
So Don’t Panic
Corporate conflicts with other corporations are nothing new. When Oracle bought out Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org was eventually forked into LibreOffice by The Document Foundation. No project truly dies, especially when there are enough willing participants.
Beyond that the best we can hope for is a quick resolution to this conflict, lest Mullenweg digs himself a hole into the realm of major legal hot water.