> I think it's also useful to note that Mullenweg wasn't demanding 8% of WPE's revenue, but rather an allocation of WPE revenue to WordPress ecosystem development (by staff members on WPE's own team), with the revenue to Automattic (or whoever, I forget) as an in-kind payment option.† That is a much more reasonable-sounding ask than simply forking over cash to Mullenweg's own business.

I think the question is, in exchange for what?

I think the reason that all this is controversial, is it feels a bit like a shake-down. Give us some resources, otherwise, while, that is a nice wordpress business you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.

I think at this point three things are true. The first is that Mullenweg sincerely believes that WPE should be contributing more than it is to the development of WordPress. The second is that they have no legal obligation to do so, which gives Mullenweg very little leverage to force them to do anything. The final thing is that the setup of WordPress and Automattic and Mullenweg's role in both makes any attempts to apply social pressure to achieve his aims at best a case of bad optics and at worst a saunter through a legal minefield with some hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane strapped to his back.

"Negotiation" invokes visions of term sheets and boardrooms but what Matt actually meant by "negotiation" (as revealed in the interview) was emails in which he expressed displeasure at the lack of contribution from WP Engine, and only in the days before WordCamp did any sort of terms arrive at the table (the 8% demand). Matt has acknowledged he escalated things in the space of days, not years. The emails read out are birthday party invites, not term sheets.

I agree that WP Engine cannot be characterised as "good guys" given it's a bottom-line driven machine that will chew up and spit out all in its path, and Matt has earned credibility through decades of community-minded WordPress stewardship, but let's not pretend this is some business deal that went sour, it's Matt using every inch of leverage he has to cause WP Engine pain because of his moral objections to the private-equity machine taking money away from his community-minded company.

Obviously WP Engine were never going to pay Automattic tens of millions of dollars per year, Matt knows that, we know that, it's a side show. He was just saying things to ruin their day. Just like the millions of dollars per year in costs incurred running WordPress.org that Matt has wheeled out to justify causing WP Engine pain by cutting them off from plugin updates (Cloudflare have offered to host WordPress.org for free; Matt has not accepted the offer).

He demanded either 8% of their gross revenue, the equivalent in development time for employees who would be directed by WordPress.org, or some combination thereof.

He also demanded auditing of WP Engine by their direct competitor, Automattic.

0. https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet...

WP Engine could legally do this, but if they had the development resources to do so, Matt Mullenweg probably wouldn't be doing legally questionable and morally reprehensible things to try and coerce WP Engine into funding WordPress itself. Maintaining a fork of WordPress with its own independent development priorities would involve a lot of work.

What WP Engine will most likely do is run their own plugin repository mirror, strip off whatever trademarks they don't feel legally empowered in using, and move on. WordPress cannot legally exclude WP Engine from using WordPress code.

I think the bigger problem would be, would they be willing to invest the engineering resources to do all that.

If the crux of the argument is that WP Engine doesn’t give back, I wonder how likely it would be that they’d be willing to do that.

Of course, if they were willing, they’d be allowed to do that and might even find success. I’ve often wondered why a host hasn’t tried to do a more focused WP-fork and the main conclusion I’ve come to is that they just aren’t willing to invest the significant resources that that would require.

It wasn’t a host, but CraftCMS was born out of ExpressionEngine (not the code; the Craft code all unique) and the makers of the most popular EE plugins being frustrated with the core EE direction.

Craft has a thriving business and EE has been sold several times and is much smaller than it was, so it ultimately worked.

But that was in some ways the opposite of this scenario; you had some of the largest ecosystem members who were unable to contribute meaningfully to core (because of the license/structure of EE at that time), opting to do their own thing.

I don’t anticipate any of the major hosts willing to invest what it would take to build/maintain their own WP fork.

They would need to, as Matt is in full on WAR mode shooting rockets a civilians too (he disabled WPEngines sites access to the plugin repository). Basically starving out anyone who needs to do anything. This is dangerous as plugins all need to be updated constantly less you get hacked as soon as an exploit is found. It's like they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Matt pretty much has an iron grip on Wordpress which had humble beginnings but turned into the google/facebook of websites.

You could make the fork five times faster, a tenth of the code, have every paid feature like Jetpack and Akismet built in for free, and include coupons for unlimited handjobs and ice cream, and it would still go nowhere without the WordPress brand. It's not the same audience as Terraform. Every time I get the itch to start cleaning out WP's Augean Stables with some kind of compatibility layer on top of modern tech (same idea as Drupal 8+) I have to remind myself of that depressing fact: no one will care that it's better.

I am just hoping that someone more connected to and respected within the WP community takes up the mantle; the fact that I can't even name such a person makes me pretty unqualified to lead a fork. But this is not the first iteration of #wpdrama, won't be the last, and my mental health is probably better served by putting WP in the rear view once and for all.

Honestly, I'd be all for a fork. Wordpress is dying a slow death. The only way forward I see is to break with the history that's holding it back and make radical changes to its architecture. Matt will never do that. Perhaps WP Engine can.

It would be an utter failure. WP Engine is just a hosting provider. Their entire business model is based on the name recognition of Wordpress. And Wordpress itself is built on ancient technology. So you are saying leave the brand and take the ancient technology then try to make it successful under a completely new brand? It’s a nonsense.

WP Engine can't afford to get even a single developer to work on Wordpress. How do you imagine them handling a fork?

These were my thoughts exactly, regardless of the outcome. If I had something deployed and could move it, I would be migrating off of WordPress right now.

I have some domains with wordpress.com as their registrar (they had a good deal when Google Domains was getting sold off), and I'm definitely side-eyeing that relationship now...

I’m currently building a site on Wordpress and beginning. Wonder of if I should be using it. Are there good alternatives that allow page editing and have good ecosystem?

I can say that zero sites were broken by the disabling of a news widget. On the other hand, disabling updates sure was a breaking change I had to respond to immediately!

There's been no dispute around if WP Engine removed the news widget or not from their managed installs. Matt claims that removing that widget fundamentally breaks Wordpress and thus broke all of WP Engine's sites.

If they broke thousands of sites, customer would be pretty pissed and moved to another host. Why does Matt care when these are not his customers and he only gains from WP Engine's loss.

I think he’s threatening to sue or extort them for 51% of the company, or something like that? If I were him I would spend less time talking to his terrible lawyer and more time talking to a mental health professional.

I mean, yeah, he's been pretty clear that about that and the trademark complaint was awfully light on evidence of actual trademark issues. He doesn't like their business model, doesn't think they contribute enough upstream, etc.

But that's just not something you get to control when you license your software as GPLv2. Some people are gonna use it in ways you don't like.

He should have just done an marketing campaign about why you should host with Wordpress.com instead of WP Engine. Instead he's torched an insane amount of goodwill for seemingly no return.

Lawyers don’t advise you on what is right or what is wrong. That’s what priests do.

Lawyers advise you on what is legal and what isn’t, and what opens you up to liability.

He seems quite confused.

Sounds like he's a bit delusional

And they do chuck a bit back. Matt just thinks it is not enough.

The Trademark is for WordPress, not WP. The name "WP Engine" isn't the alleged problem, it's their usage in their hosting packages like "WordPress Core".

“WP” is not at dispute here.

Even better: just proxy the requests up to WP.org through GCP/AWS.