Things have accelerated since my post about Automattic and WP Engine a couple weeks ago. I’m writing this follow-up post not to pick sides, but because it feels right to blog about something this significant happening in the website hosting world.
Banning WP Engine from WordPress.org sort of cascaded to other problems. The popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin maintained by WP Engine was forked to Secure Custom Fields. David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about open source licensing.
Matt Mullenweg responded to DHH with personal attacks, but he has since removed the post and apologized, recognizing that he had crossed a line:
I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.
I also noticed DHH’s reply on Twitter X to the original post:
I don’t think people are irredeemable, and I know how stressful it can be to be under siege. But you have to stop digging to get out of a hole.
I’ve never run a company the size of 37signals or Automattic. I can relate a little, though, to feeling you’re being attacked unfairly from multiple sides. When it’s your company, your name, and you’ve invested more or less everything in making it work.
Years ago someone left Micro.blog and at the time I genuinely thought it was going to hurt our business. I was losing sleep, worried that what I had created was too fragile. Even a single person can have a big impact on a tiny company if what that person says resonates with others. Every subscription is precious. In that case years ago, I chose to stay quiet in public but I sent a few private emails that in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have.
(It wasn’t really that bad. I try to avoid sending anything in email that I would regret if it was made public.)
Back to Matt, he has provided such steady leadership in the community for years that it makes the current chaos seem even more dramatic. Because Matt is putting out fires, I’m not sure he’s had time to take a step away, look at the situation with fresh eyes, and plan a long-term strategy to resolve this.
I liked Brandon Kraft’s blog post about how easily conflated all the terms and trademarks have become:
It pains me that the last few weeks have conflated everything. Automattic has the exclusive trademark license for commercial usage of “WordPress.” The license is a fact, whether you think it is good, bad, or neutral. Automattic allowing in-kind donations (e.g., sponsored time) as consideration for a sublicense seems fine.
Automattic vs. WP Engine is such a newsworthy event that many people are chiming in without understanding how all the pieces fit together. It’s the social media outrage machine, amplifying whatever the accepted narrative is.
I’ve heard a couple people say — including this post today from Ben Werdmuller — that WP Engine should fork WordPress so they have something they can control. Probably so, but that also gets to the root of the problem: WordPress is literally in WP Engine’s name! It’s not exactly like if my platform was named Hugo.blog instead of Micro.blog, because we use Hugo behind the scenes, but it’s not far from that either.
Names are powerful. Matt effectively owns WordPress because he owns the name. The community is more intangible, owned by no one. It’s hard to grasp even what the community is because it’s not a single thing, it’s thousands of people with different backgrounds and goals. There’s no question that this saga has hurt the community, but like Matt’s apology post, I don’t think it is hurt beyond repair.
