<a href="https://www.world-today-news.com/wix-criticizes-wordpress-in-a-strange-marketing-campaign-ezanime-net/" title="Wix criticizes WordPress in a strange marketing campaign – EzAnime.net”>Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder and chief developer of WordPress, has been on the warpath for weeks. The opponent in its sights is the WordPress hoster WP Engine, which is controlled by the private equity company Silver Lake. In addition to hosting around 1.5 million WordPress installations, WP Engine also offers plugins and themes for WordPress.
Huge market share
You may or may not like the free content management system published by Matt Mullenweg since 2004, but it is free software and is constantly being developed by the WordPress Foundation. And it is the CMS we currently use at LinuxNews. This puts us at around 40% of all websites created with a CMS. In addition to the WordPress Foundation, whose chairman is Matt Mullenweg, he has been running the company Automattic, valued at around $7.5 billion, since 2005, which owns many other brands in addition to WordPress.com.
The cancerous tumor metaphor
The dispute is about Mullenweg’s accusation that WP-Engine has been benefiting from open-source WordPress for many years without contributing much to it. In one Blog entry A month ago, Mullenweg clarified his allegations and called WP Engine a “cancer for WordPress.” The last time this heavy artillery was brought out was the unforgettable appearance of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who called Linux a cancer and hippie GPL nonsense in an interview in 2001.
Mullenweg is also convinced that WP Engine has been violating trademark rights for years. WP Engine has refused a license agreement for years, says Mullenweg. He also believes that WP Engine needs its own trademark license because many people believed it was part of WordPress.
Self is the checkmate
While such disputes typically take place in court, Mullenweg seems determined to take matters into his own hands. After WP Engine served WordPress’ legal department with a cease-and-desist letter accusing Mullenweg of criminal statements and allegations, Mullenweg blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org. And that was the point where he was causing harm to the community and users of WordPress. From then on, WP Engine customers were cut off from updates to plugins and themes, posing a glaring security problem.
Locked out
After a brief unblocking and an ultimatum until October 1st, the ban came into force again. Mullenweg ultimately demanded a license fee of 8% of sales from WP Engine. WP Engine rejected this and filed a lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic.
As a result, Mullenweg realized that many of the employees at Automattic did not agree with his handling of the situation. He then offered anyone who wanted to leave the company a severance package of $30,000 or six months’ salary. 159 employees or 8.4 percent of the workforce accepted the offer and left the company.
Plug-in geforked
WP Engine is responding to the WordPress.org lockout by offloading the developer-loved Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin so that customers of the Pro version paid plugin will continue to receive updates. Mullenweg responded a week ago by announcing that WordPress, citing Point 18 of the Plug-ins Guidelines Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new, non-paid plugin called Secure Custom Fields. A security problem with AFC was also resolved.
Leadership style questioned
It is currently impossible to answer how the vendetta will continue. The community is divided and largely unenthusiastic. Scott Kingsley Clark, a WordPress core developer, resigned, saying he was tired of making excuses for Mullenweg’s behavior. His leadership of the project is increasingly being questioned by contributors, users and outside observers.
Increasing commercialization
The question of the increasing commercialization of open source projects as a result of companies that do little to support open source but take advantage of its benefits is of course legitimate and has been discussed frequently in recent years. Companies like MongoDB, Elastic, Confluent, Redis Labs and HashiCorp have tightened their licenses to make it more difficult for large cloud providers to rent open software as a service and to take little or no part in further development.
It is doubtful whether Mullenweg’s handling of the dispute with WP Engine will help to bring about a rethink in companies on this matter. One thing is clear: no matter who wins in this dispute, the WordPress community and WordPress users are definitely on the losing side.
