Whilst we don’t tend to regurgitate mudslinging or make a spectacle over ongoing legal disputes in our industry, this one has the potential to get a bit silly and impact hundreds of millions of WordPress sites. We’re not joking, there really are hundreds of millions of sites built on WordPress (Google it!), especially if you’re a WP Engine customer.
First of all, let’s introduce the parties here. First up, is WordPress. You’re more than likely already familiar with them if you’re reading this. WordPress is owned by a company called Automattic, Automattic is headed up by none other than the inventor of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg.
Next we have WP Engine, WP Engine is a dedicated WordPress hosting company. They aren’t your typical hosts; they offer managed services, plugins, themes – a whole ecosystem of addons for WordPress. Their entire business is based around WordPress.
Now introductions are out of the way, what’s going on?
Well, that’s an interesting story, hence why we’re writing about it. Trouble has been brewing between the two for a little while now., but things escalated in September of this year when Matt Mullenweg (Mr WordPress) criticised WP Engine for using WordPress in its branding. He claimed it misled users into thinking that WP Engine was officially affiliated with WordPress. He backed all this up with a bunch of legal stuff, citing policies, trademarks, and the like. However, he then referred to WP Engine as a “cancer to WordPress” …nice chap eh?!
WP Engine has been in the firing line for a while now, it’s all a bit contentious. Automattic (the WordPress guys) do have a point though: when making use of, or exploiting, an open-source platform it’s generally agreed that you give back in some way. An organisation with the resources of WP Engine would be in a great position to contribute to the future of WordPress. However it seems that WP Engine haven’t. Furthermore, allegedly, WP Engine actually removed features from WordPress, such as the revision history feature.
“Okay, so what’s the hoo ha about then?” we hear you cry. Well, here it comes…
Following all these disputes, Automattic actually banned WP Engine from the WordPress plugin repository. This prevents WP Engine-hosted sites from accessing the latest updates of themes and plugins – which is devastating to WP Engine’s customers. No security updates, no new plugins, nothing.
Automattic then went a step further and took control of a plugin that was previously maintained by WP Engine – Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) – we’ve actually written about these guys before. Now, for any of you with more than a passing interest in WordPress you’ll recognise that plugin – it’s huge, and used by boatloads of sites. Taking control of it was a bold move and, what’s more, WordPress then rebranded it to separate it from WP Engine!
You may read this and think to yourself that this doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Well, let’s think about the bigger picture shall we?
The interesting thing to take note of here is the precedent that WordPress has just set. Where before, we had a platform where the community could share plugins, themes, distribute updates and patches, confident in the fact that all was open and free from gatekeeping and profiteering, we now have the whispers of centralisation, revocation of access, commercialisation. Some would even argue that WordPress’ open-source nature has been undermined.
By banning WP Engine and assuming control of ACF, Automattic may have shown their hand and given our enormous community a big red flag and a glaring warning – i.e., they are more than willing to take action to enforce their own agenda to the detriment of end users. One could imagine a future where Automattic is more heavily influenced to focus on commercialisation and profit, where the WordPress plugin and theme repository is gatekept and walled off based on subscription models, and organisations viewed as competition are heavily restricted or outright banned from the platform entirely. It sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s not like we’ve not seen this kind of thing before.
So what’s Sox’s position on all this?
As a business, there’s not a lot here right now for us to be worried about – we don’t use anything WP Engine related, and we don’t tend to use ACF. So we’ve got no skin in this game. However, we always watch the landscape of our industry carefully and, if we spot something that we think might affect our customers, we let them know ASAP.
Graham has always been a huge supporter of open-source projects throughout his career. He will always turn to an open-source solution if one exists. He even recently ditched Windows and finally made the switch to Linux as his daily operating system (he’s been threatening that for years). He’s not a fan of what’s happening between WP Engine and Automattic – “While WP Engine have obviously been pushing their luck, Automattic aren’t really upholding the true spirit of what it means to be “open-source”. They’re playing a dangerous game. The open source community is a motivated bunch – if Automattic slight them the community will come up with an answer”.
Ultimately we expect to see more adoption of alternative content management systems next year as a result of what’s going on here. Especially if WP Engine and Automattic can’t bury the hatchet. In the grand scheme of things, adoption probably wont have a huge impact initially, but overtime we may start to see some hairline cracks in WordPress’s dominance of the web.