In this special interview by Website Planet, I looked for help in trying to make sense of the current conflict between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, and understand the potential implications for the WordPress and open-source communities.
As the founder Percona, an open-source database company with over 3,000 users, and a recognized leading expert in open-source strategy and database optimization, Peter Zaitsev is no stranger to navigating the balance between open-source ideals and business realities.
His insights will help us understand the real implications of this clash for the internet as a whole, and why a mindset shift is crucial for the survival of open source.
Quick recap: What’s going between WordPress and WP Engine?
Automattic, led by Matt Mullenweg, operates WordPress.com and some of the most popular services for WordPress, such as the Jetpack plugin, WordPress.com VIP, and WooCommerce.
WP Engine provides hosting services for WordPress sites, hence it’s a direct competitor of Automattic.
In mid-September, Mullenweg called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”, because they disabled the ability to see and track the revision history of each post, in his view just for the sake of saving money. He also complained WP Engine for not contributing enough to the open source project and for using the “WP” brand, which can make customers believe it’s part of WordPress.
WP Engine responded with a cease-and-desist letter to Mullenweg and Automattic, asking them to withdraw their comments, and saying that using the WordPress trademark falls under fair use. They also accused Mullenweg of requesting them to pay a significant percentage of its revenues to buy a license to the WordPress trademark. Since then, Over 150 employees left Automattic, mostly in disagreement with Mullenweg’s management of this dispute.
With these details in mind, let’s hear from a veteran contributor to the open-source world what this dispute means for the WordPress community, and how it is likely to impact it in the long run.
Automattic’s aggressive defense challenges open-source freedom and could impact innovation
My initial reaction was that this is a messy situation where both sides end up losing. Like the film WarGames, the only winning move is not to play.
First, this is not a battle between two companies. Matt is “BDFL” (Benevolent Dictator for Life) of WordPress. As he has so much control over the project, the community has very different, much higher expectations of how he will act compared to some large commercial company. With enterprise companies, it is kind of expected that they will use open source software as allowed by its license, without giving anything back. They might pay for support or for cloud services they need, but they don’t have to contribute.
The fact Automattic chose to invest a lot of developer time in WordPress is their choice. It is admirable. But it does not give them the right to force others to contribute, or to block them when they don’t want to contribute.
Open source software is defined by software licenses, where you provide your software for anyone to use without any restriction on how they use it, what they use it for, and be technology neutral. That means that others can take your project and use it for their own purposes, and that includes competing with you for customers. That is part of open source, it always has been.
One of the main ways that companies protect their operations is by putting trademarks and copyright in place. This copyright can protect branding, but you have to defend that copyright over time, or you lose it. The challenge here is whether WP Engine has misled customers through appropriating a trade mark, but the discussions about open source contributions have polarized the attention.
For those of us that have been involved in open source for years, WordPress has always been held up as a success story for the community and for the company behind the project. Matt and the team at Automattic have done a huge amount for the WordPress community.
But the way that he has taken action against WP Engine has seriously affected the community and caught a lot of others in the blast radius.
On the other side, you can see the argument that Matt makes – WP Engine competes with the WordPress community and with Automattic. WP Engine does potentially confuse prospects through its branding, but does this use fall into the Fair Use Doctrine?
WordPress has to defend its trademark, and prevent it being used by other companies. Mixing the two issues – open source and copyright – has not helped the situation. In open source, the choice to contribute or not is WP Engine’s prerogative – there is noth