The Matt Mullenweg and WordPress controversy | Explained Premium

Dispute between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine over WordPress trademark and open-source principles impacts global WordPress users.

The story so far: Since September 21, a dispute between Matt Mullenweg, the technologist at the centre of the WordPress community, and a company called WP Engine has snowballed rapidly into a crisis for lakhs of WordPress users around the world. WordPress reputedly powers more than 40% of all websites on the internet, which is several millions, so policies that affect users’ ability to access the software’s essential features could have a wide-ranging impact. The dispute is ostensibly over a trademark violation but also relates to the principles of open-source software development, trademark enforcement, and role clarity.

WordPress is the name of a piece of software people can use to build a website, blog or e-commerce portal on the internet. Its competitors include Ghost, Drupal, and Wix. WordPress is an oft-cited example of open-source software, built by volunteer developers who contribute/and or improve its code, test the software on new platforms and fix bugs, build themes and plug-ins that expand the functionality of WordPress beyond its core features, and routinely conduct camps, workshops, and conference to popularise its adoption for various businesses and use-cases. It is made available under a GPL licence.

WordPress is available to use in two ways. The self-hosted version refers to copies of WordPress that users can download for free from the website WordPress.org to use for websites hosted on their own servers. This is the open-source version. The hosted version refers to platforms or services where a third party manages your website’s WordPress setup and infrastructure in exchange for a fee. WP Engine is one such provider.

Matt Mullenweg is the founder and CEO of Automattic, a for-profit company that makes and distributes many digital products. One of them is WordPress.com, a hosted WordPress offering.

Automattic is also a major contributor to the development of open-source WordPress (3,988 hours/week). It isn’t directly affiliated with WordPress.org or the WordPress Foundation. This said, Mullenweg personally owns WordPress.org.

Along with WordPress.com, Automattic also owns WordPress VIP (targeted at developers maintaining large, high-traffic websites) and Pressable, all of which offer the same services to different segments of the market.

On September 21, Mullenweg published a post on WordPress.org accusing WP Engine of being a “cancer” to the WordPress community. His ire was directed at a core feature of WordPress: its ability to record all revisions a user has made to content created on WordPress. WP Engine has disabled this functionality stating that each change adds to the site’s database, and which over time becomes heavy and slows the website down. Instead, WP Engine has asked its users to contact its support staff if they need to enable revision control on a per-website basis. Mullenweg had charged that WP Engine is thus not WordPress.