In yet another show that money doesn’t equal intelligence, today we have another 40 year old millionaire acting in a “mature and well thought of” manner, and not abusing their wealth and power.
September last year, Matt Mullenweg, founder and current owner of automattic, which runs wordpress, made an OFFICIAL BLOG POST, on wordpress.org itself, called “WP Engine is not WordPress”, where all this started. A few months and a loss in court later however and… nah things are still as bad as they were, and getting worse.
In this post, I’ll go out of my way to list the entire timeline so far(with updates in the future as new things come out) so you can see how bad of a situation about 40% of the entire web is right now as majority of websites, this one included(for now), unfortunately depend on wordpress to exist.
WP Engine is Not WordPress
Months ago, Matt The Great made a post with tittled “WP Engine is Not WordPress”. Leveraging the range of the (supposed to be) news page that gets shown in every wordpress website’s dashboard, he created a post claiming that WP Engine is something that’s “chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it”. calling it a “cancer for wordpress”…for some reason?
All in all, if the drama had ended there? Fair enough. That is your opinion and, despite it holding a lot of power due to you being a millionaire in control of a massive blog platform so maybe you should be more careful, you are still entitle to having one. Sadly for half the web, it didn’t end there.
Matt decided to sue WP Engine(and change their trademark policy) for copyright infringement, and they in return sued Automattic. Then, in all his wisdom and genius, he changed the login page on wordpress to the following:
Yes, he added that checkbox to it. And said he’d pay employees who disagree with him to leave(which at least 159 of them took the offer).
Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’
Not satisfied with the show so far, Matt rolled a d20 and got another nat 20 in bad choices: In the middle of sueing WP Engine, he thought it was a good idea to ban the company from accessing wordpress.org’ resources. This means that all their clients could no longer update plugins, themes or wordpress itself.
And to add insult to injury, in a 5d chess move, Matt himself, not through Automattic this time, launched his very own “WP Engine tracker” page, listing every single website to leave the service due to his attacks. Showing how proud he was in causing problems to the non-involved users.
Like anyone with a functioning frontal lobe could imagine, this didn’t look good to the judge, who quickly ruled Matt can’t throw a tantrum that affects thousands of unrelated people over some petty situation like that.
Matt was not happy.
“I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted”
After taking the news very well, our CEO rage quit the Community Slack. According to 404 media, he said:
“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.”
He then took a short christmas break and is now back in black, announcing that his company will spend just 45 weekly hours developing wordpress, instead of the previous almost 4000, allegedly to incentivize companies to join his “Five for the Future” program where companies would donate 5% of their resources to wordpress.org.
I said allegedly above because, immediately after, Matt lashed out at contributors. He wrote a full blog post talking about how he deactivated several accounts, in special two who were planning on creating a fork of wordpress. One of the accounts had not been used since 2020 and had no connection to anything mentioned here.
This would have been a massive impact to them, since they can’t contribute to neither the core wordpress nor plugins due to not having an account anymore, thus being unable to continue the fork project…. if not for the fact anyone can still fork it on github.
“Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out,[…] The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation.”
-Matt Mullenweg
This is as far as the drama has gone so far. I might have missed some stuff here and there, so feel free to comment or message me however you like and I’ll add to the post(don’t worry, I won’t ban your neopets account for correcting me).
Let us all hope that Matt gets tired of wordpress and decides to retire and invest in crypto or something, allowing every other website to not fear for its future.
Sources: TechCrunch, The Verge
