Recap of the WordPress drama between Automattic and WP Engine
By Aatu Väisänen
October 15th, 2024
Recently the hottest topic in the realm of open source and content management systems (CMS) has been the WordPress drama between WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and WP Engine. This post will recap the most important events of the situation (this far). We will keep updating the post as the situation unfolds further.
What is the drama about, again?
You might not have a solid understanding of the topic yet, so here's an introduction.
WordPress is the most popular open-source traditional CMS in the world: over 43.5% of all websites uses WordPress to power their website [1]. So it’s fair to say, that a lot of organizations and individuals rely on WordPress and its stability in order to manage their website.
Matt Mullenweg, a co-founder of WordPress, is the leader of the WordPress foundation, which is a charitable organization supporting WordPress as an open source software project. Mullenweg is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, which is a private company behind the WordPress.com hosting platform.
WP Engine is a company that offers a popular WordPress hosting platform (also called WP Engine). WP Engine is controlled by a private equity firm, called Silver Lake. Remember this for later: Mullenweg’s company Automattic, and more specifically its hosting platform WordPress.com is a direct competitor to WP Engine.
The open-source WordPress software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2 or later) [2]. This means, that anyone is free to use (and modify) WordPress commercially: however, any derivative work must use the same license. The license does not cover the use of the WordPress name, logo or other associated trademarks, which are owned and overseen by the WordPress Foundation.
Side note: the WordPress license encourages, but does not require contributing to the open-source project.
Until recently, on the WordPress Foundation’s trademark policy page [3], it said that the abbreviation “WP” “is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit”. [4] It had been like that for nearly two decades. However, currently it says this:
“The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”’ [3]
Clearly someone at the WordPress Foundation is not happy with WP Engine, so what happened?
Recap of the events (this far)
At the moment of writing this, the drama has been unfolding for several weeks now, so in this section I will run you through the most important events around the whole mess.
September 17
September 17 was the first day of the WordCamp U.S. summit, which is a big annual event focusing around the WordPress ecosystem. During the same day, Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post [5] on his personal website, where he heavily criticized companies that make a profit out of WordPress, but do not contribute to the open-source project as heavily as his own company, Automattic, does. In the post, he clearly states that the company that he’s pointing his finger at is WP Engine, which according to Mullenweg, “doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital”.
September 20
On the last day of WordCamp U.S. Mullenweg hosted a controversial presentation where he continued to criticize WP Engine, and Silver Lake behind it. In the following days Mullenweg continued to escalate his censure on WP Engine by posting on X and on his personal blog site.
Also on September 20, Automattic sent a trademark license agreement to WP Engine, where they demanded 8% of WP Engine’s monthly gross revenue. So a company asks for its direct competitor to hand out some of their profits for them—sounds crazy, right?
September 23
On September 23, the legal department of WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic [4], accusing the company and Mullenweg of unlawfully demanding money from WP Engine, and of “threatening to embark on a ‘scorched earth nuclear approach’ toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond.” [6]
On that very day, Automattic issued their own cease-and-desist notice to WP Engine, alleging misuse of WordPress trademarks. Automattic asserted that they hold exclusive commercial rights granted by the WordPress Foundation. [7]
Side note to make this very clear: Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, suddenly claims that his private multi-billion dollar company has the exclusive commercial rights granted by the WordPress Foundation, which he also is the director of. Does this not sound like an abuse of conflicting roles?
September 25
The drama escalated to a new level on September 25, when WordPress.org, the home of the open-source WordPress software (managed by the WordPress Foundation), banned WP Engine from accessing updates and plugins hosted on the WordPress.org repository. This is a huge deal, because hundreds of thousands of websites use WP Engine to host their WordPress website. The ban means that these websites may become vulnerable to security threats, and lose access to some plugin functionalities altogether. There are tens of thousands of plugins hosted on WordPress.org, so the impact is significant.
September 27
Mullenweg temporarily lifted the WP Engine ban for accessing the WordPress.org servers until October 1 [8]. So, at the moment of writing (October 15) WP Engine is still banned.
Mullenweg discussed live with a tech-related Twitch streamer Primeagen about the situation around Automattic, WordPress and WP Engine. The appearance proved to be important later on, but more on that later.
September 29
Mullenweg discussed live with another tech streamer, Theo about the whole mess that he had created with WP Engine. Mullenweg’s appearance in this stream would also prove important later on.
October 2
On October 2 WP Engine filed an official lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. The lawsuit includes 11 distinct allegations, including defamation in both written and spoken forms, attempted extortion, and infringement of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (an US cybersecurity bill). Furthermore, WP Engine alleges that the WordPress Foundation neglected to properly disclose its trademark ownership to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The company also claims that Mullenweg provided false information to the IRS. The lawsuit cited many clips from the Twitch streams that Mullenweg appeared on September 27 and 29.
October 3
Automattic and Mullenweg responded to the lawsuit: “Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine” [8]
October 9
Mullenweg continued to burn bridges with WP Engine by adding a checkbox asking to confirm that the user is "not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise" to all login pages on WordPress.org [4].
October 12
The story continued on October 12, when Mullenweg announced in a WordPress.org news release [9] that they would be forking a very popular plugin called Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin called Secure Custom Fields (SCF). ACF is used by over 2 million websites, and it is owned by WP Engine. So essentially this means that ACF is no longer accessible via WordPress.org to anyone. This has been stated on ACF’s website (see the screenshot below).
October 17
In the news section of WordPress.org, a post listing WP Engine migration offers was published for WP Engine customers thinking of switching to another platform. The post states the following [10]:
"Given the egregious legal attacks by WP Engine against WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, a number of their customers have been looking for alternative hosting, and in return a number of hosts have created specials and promotions for WP Engine customers looking to migrate to a host that has great relations with WordPress.org."
The post was published under the WordPress.org author name, but it sounds a lot like something that Matt Mullenweg would write.
October 18
WP Engine's lawyers filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, requesting the court to order Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to stop their alleged harmful actions against WP Engine [11]. So, essentially WP Engine believes that they have to ask court to intervene in order to stop Automattic and Mullenweg from causing further harm to their business. The request was later updated with a follow-up, which asked for the court to shorten the timeline for the preliminary injunction.
October 21
Mullenweg continued to make bold claims on October 21 in a blog post [12], where he claimed that WP Engine is trying to restrict his First Amendment rights—referring to his freedom of speech being somehow threatened by WP Engine, and their lawsuit. In the post he also states that he will not give any additional public comments on the situation with WP Engine, until until the court of law reaches a decision on the matter.
My take: So, in the post Mullenweg tries to frame his controversial statements about WP Engine as an exercise in free expression: seems like bit of a reach, doesn't it? Time will tell whether the promise to avoid further public comments will hold.
October 25
WP Engine released a blog post [13] that summarizes the timeline of events from their perspective. The purpose of the post is to emphasize WP Engine's "ensured stability and security" for their customers.
October 30
Mullenweg was interviewed in the TechCrunch Distrupt event [14], where he mostly continued to repeat his claims about WP Engine, and remarks about the situation as a whole. This speech also had a part where Mullenweg rambled about WP Engine having lost "tens of thousands of customers", and how Automattic is going to "take every single one of their customers".
Again, Mullenweg having spoken without thinking, his words would later be used against him in the legal documents filed against him and Automattic.
The legal battle continued, as Automattic filed several documents to court during the day, including a response to WP Engine's motion for preliminary injunction.
October 31
The official WordPress X account was hostile towards a WordPress project called AspirePress, questioning why they have created the project in the first place [15].
The language in the post(s) sounds a lot like Mullenweg is back posting his remarks, just under the WordPress account and not his personal.
November 4
Automattic shares a blog post [16] about the whole mess with WP Engine. The post is (obviously) very biased towards Automattic and their stance on the matter.
November 5
The exchange of legal documents proceeded, as WP Engine's lawyers filed their response to the response of Automattic's lawyers to WP Engine's motion for preliminary injunction.
November 6
Automattic created https://wordpressenginetracker.com/, a website that lists how many websites still use WP Engine as their hosting service. There was a downloadable CSV that listed every domain that still used WP Engine, including staging domains, which heavily undermined the privacy of a lot of businesses using WordPress. The CSV has been taken down later on, however the creation of the website was a very unprofessional action done by Automattic.
November 14
WP Engine filed their revised complaint to the court. It listed a total of 20 claims about the misconducts done by Automattic / Mullenweg against WP Engine, 9 of which were new. The updated complaint included the mention of WP Engine Tracker, which Automattic published on November 6, stating that the website monitors domains leaving WP Engine and even provides a downloadable list of their customer sites, seemingly encouraging competitors to poach these clients. [17]
November 26
The preliminary injunction hearing about the lawsuit was held in court. The judge stated that the parties will have to maintain the status quo until December 2, by which the they had to submit revised versions of their proposals due to the lack of specificity in them.
December 2
Both Automattic and WP Engine submitted their own revised proposals to the court as they were unable to come to terms on what the preliminary injunction should include [18].
December 10
The court ordered Automattic/Mullenweg to stop the following actions while the lawsuit proceeds [19]:
Stop blocking WP Engine and its customers from accessing wordpress.org
Restore WP Engine's access to its plugins and tools on wordpress.org as they existed before September 20, 2024
Stop interfering with WP Engine's WordPress installations and plugins
Remove their public list of WP Engine's customers from wordpressenginetracker.com
Remove the checkbox they added that made users confirm they weren't affiliated with WP Engine
Restore all of WP Engine's employee login credentials and access to various WordPress.org resources
This was a huge win in itself for WP Engine, as it suggests that they seem have the stronger case in the legal fight. However, as stated before, the lawsuit continues so we will continue to monitor the situation.
December 11
As expected, Matt Mullenweg was not happy about the court's order against him and his company, Automattic. According to 404 Media [20], he wrote the following hypocritical comment on a popular WordPress community Slack, Post Status:
"I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted"
Mullenweg's username on the Post Status Slack has been changed to “gone 💀”.
It seems that Mullenweg's vision of "nuclear war" against WP Engine has really backfired on him and his company, as expected.
Key takeaways
WordPress has maintained its position as the world's leading CMS due to its stability and open-source philosophy. However, the ongoing dispute between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, has significantly undermined confidence in WordPress's reputation as a reliable CMS.
Many businesses using WordPress now face the unsettling possibility that their websites—often their primary digital presence—could suddenly become susceptible to serious security vulnerabilities, or cease functioning completely. This all stems from the questionable actions taken by a single, very influential person within the WordPress ecosystem.
These businesses may have the question: can we no longer trust on the stability of our content management system, and what are the alternatives?
I would like to give credit to this gist by Adrienne L. Travis, as they have done an amazing job sharing continuous updates on the whole situation. Take a look if you're interested in additional details about the drama between Automattic and WP Engine.
References:
The WordPress ecosystem has lost its mind... (YouTube video)
Ensuring Stability and Security: Recent Timeline (WP Engine blog post)
Matt Mullenweg talks about Automattic’s staffing issues and financials at TechCrunch Disrupt
Defending Open Source: Protecting the Future of WordPress (Automattic blog post)
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