A war has been raging in the WordPress ecosystem for the past two weeks. In a latest development, employees are leaving the feisty WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, who is dividing the WordPress community. An eighth of his own staff do not seem to share his position. It’s about demands in the millions, blackmail, “nuclear options” and, in a very big way, defending the future of open source against profit-oriented corporate giants.
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At least that’s how Mullenweg, one of the co-founders and chief developers of the widely used CMS and web publishing system WordPress, which currently underpins around two thirds of all known websites as an open source project, sees it. Mullenweg himself is also the founder and CEO of Automattic Inc, a for-profit company that owns Tumblr and the freemium platform WordPress.com, among others. For clarity: WordPress itself is under the umbrella of the WordPress Foundation, also founded by Mullenweg. As the project is under the GPL license, the codebase is free to use, modify and may be used to create commercial content.
Fall out
Since mid-September, Matt Mullenweg’s declared opponent has been the hosting provider WP Engine, which has been selling products based on the free WordPress platform for a decade. The platform serves over 150 million customers, including large companies. WP stands for WordPress and in the past, WP Engine has also been a welcome guest at community events and part of the Five for the Future initiative, which encourages major WordPress reusers and hosters to volunteer for WordPress. WP Engine is therefore clearly associated with WordPress – and competes with Automattic with its offering.
The stumbling block appears to be the takeover of WP Engine by the American technology investor Silver Lake, which is backed by the billion-euro holding company Mosel Bidco SE. In a blog entry in mid-September, Matt Mullenweg criticized the influence that such profit-driven companies have on an open source-based project: Here, people take without giving back, hollowing out the entire system until there is nothing left of it.
Silver Lake is no stranger to the damaging influence of venture capital on software companies: Software AG, which was acquired by Silver Lake, is currently selling off its assets; the development of Talend, which is also largely owned by Silver Lake, has fallen asleep in recent years. Mullenweg’s critical view of Silver Lake in particular therefore seems justified –, although he seems to be attacking WP Engine more than Silver Lake.
Among other things, he criticized WP Engine’s practice of removing the “undo” function from its offering, which is very important for the end product, and pointed to the small number of working hours that WP Engine invests in the codebase. This time shows Five for Future – his company Automattic is at the top with around 3500 hours per week, WP Engine has only 45 hours left for development. But even WP Engine is still in the top fifth of all contributors. Another point of criticism: the lack of donations to the WordPress Foundation. If you donated just one dollar yourself, you would donate more than WP Engine, which is worth millions.
Nuclear options
Mullenweg therefore demanded compensation from WP Engine. The hoster is using the WordPress brand, which actually belongs to the WordPress Foundation, without permission for advertising purposes –, which even confuses his own mother –, and should therefore cede a portion of its income every month to pay for its use. A lot of money is at stake here: Mullenweg demanded 8 percent of the income, around 35 million US dollars. This could optionally be paid for by WP Engine employees, who would devote their paid time entirely to working on WordPress. The time Mullenweg gave WP Engine to comply with his demand was short: Less than a week later, Mullenweg already wanted the expensive signature. If WP Engine did not comply, Mullenweg threatened a “nuclear option”, which meant giving an accusatory keynote at the annual WordCamp community meeting on September 20.
WP Engine cited communication with Matt Mullenweg (not yet checked for authenticity) in their statement of claim…
(Image: WP Engine)
WP Engine speaks of “blackmail” in this regard and in a statement of claim from WP Engine listed on October 2, screenshots of the communication with Mullenweg can be found – a classification as blackmail is, assuming correctness, not out of thin air. The signature did not materialize, Mullenweg gave the nuclear keynote, which consisted of two slides: an explanation of the fertile open source system and a portrait picture of Silver Lake’s Managing Director, Lee Wittlinger, along with a public email address.
… which can certainly be understood as blackmail.
(Image: WP Engine)
Law and ideal
This is where the dispute, which has become a full-blown drama, splits into a legal dispute over the WordPress brand and Mullenweg’s activism. In addition to the documented communication, the statement of claim also contains another juicy detail, namely that the rights to the WordPress trademark do not belong to the WordPress Foundation, but to Mullenweg himself, or rather Automattic. When WordPress transferred the trademark to the Foundation, the Foundation immediately and exclusively transferred it to Mullenweg’s company, which is why Automattic is also the party issuing the warning regarding its use. WP Engine also cites years of use of the trademark without a warning and asks the central question: “Why now, all of a sudden?” Beneath this lies the clear licensing of WordPress as GPLv2, which should legally allow WP Engine to conduct its business.
Mullenweg recently dismissed the statement of claim as irrelevant, which means that he will probably end up in litigation. However, instead of writing letters to lawyers, he is relying on the power of the community and his own influence. With his keynote speech and his blog posts, in which he invokes the necessary protection of open source software, accuses WP Engine of intimidating its supporters and assures that he “certainly won’t commit suicide”, he is pulling out the really big tools from the drawer and has so far been effective in turning the community against Silver Lake and WP Engine. Something more tangible: the shutdown of WordPress services for WP Engine until October 1. WP Engine documented the significant impact in its incident blog, but still refused to pay.
While WP Engine chooses the legal form, Mullenweg goes its own way.
(Image: cku)
Split
However, actions like this are now also affecting the community itself, whose sympathy Mullenweg was actually sure of. However, the idea of a fork is already circulating and Mullenweg’s actions are causing uncertainty: why does he refer so strongly to WP Engine when numerous other providers also use WordPress, use the brand and contribute less to the project?
The fact that his own company Automattic is the primary beneficiary of the compensation also does not cast the best light on the open source campaigner and, in response to the impending split in the community, he announced on October 5 that he would make a compensation payment to employees of his company if they wanted to leave Automattic due to the controversy. This offer has now been accepted by 156 employees – an eighth of his workforce. The mud-slinging will continue on two fronts: Mullenweg will deal further public blows and WP Engine will mount a legal defense.
(kki)
