All is not well in the WordPress community. For the last several weeks, Matt Mullenweg, an entrepreneur who developed the hugely popular free and open source content management system and founded Automattic – which sells premium WordPress.com services – has seemingly been waging a war against WP Engine, a hosting platform for WordPress websites.

The dispute initially hinged on allegations Mullenweg made that WP Engine leeched off WordPress by raising significant amounts in funding thanks to the work done for free by open-source contributors to WordPress. To compensate, Automattic has asked for 8% of WP Engine’s monthly revenue in perpetuity.

Legal filings by WP Engine in response say it is “a case about abuse of power, extortion, and greed.” In the weeks since that initial flurry of legal letters, the temperature has risen. Dissenting voices have reported being kicked out of the WordPress Slack, and users logging into WordPress have been asked to tick a disclaimer saying they are not connected with WP Engine.

Hostile takeover?

The latest development is that a WordPress plugin, Advanced Custom Fields, was taken over on the weekend of October 12-13 by WordPress without the permission of the original makers.

The plugin is used by more than two million websites worldwide, according to the original developers, and was acquired by WP Engine in June 2022. “A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress,” the Advanced Custom Fields X account wrote.

Mullenweg and the official WordPress social media accounts called it a forking of the plugin. “This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins,” Mullenweg said.  

The action was described by Hashim Warren, a product marketer, on social media as “engineering violence”. He explained: “You distribute software on a marketplace, then one day your access gets cut off, and the platform takes over your project and takes your users.” 

As part of the takeover, WordPress has allowed users to automatically update to their version of the plugin, which they call Secure Custom Fields. Some critics say that those who are automatically updating may not know they are changing their systems to switch provider.

Shattered trust

“WordPress has shattered the implicit trust between developers and package repositories,” Derrick Reimer, the founder of SavvyCal, posted on X. “These are some dark times for open source.” Reimer appears to worry that Mullenweg has taken an open source project and is rapidly making it less open, and more under a single person’s control.

Chris Wallace, a two-time Emmy-nominated product design leader, shared similar sentiments. He spent more than a decade developing apps, websites, and a WordPress theme and plugin company. “The one word I can use to describe [Matt Mullenweg’s] destruction of WordPress is heartbreaking,” he wrote.

Why it matters

The issue continues to escalate on a near-daily basis. I’ve personally received messages from many within the WordPress community each morning with phrases like “Well, everything just got worse” as Mullenweg’s latest shift in tone trickles through the community. That not only has an impact on the business run by Mullenweg, but on the livelihoods of the developers who make their living from the WordPress ecosystem.

The situation also raises concerns about the reliability of WordPress, which powers 43% of websites. Ongoing development of WordPress could feasibly slow as the community is riven in two, and which may not be able to be put back together, all while the idea of an open source license is rapidly rewritten.

“The integrity of open source licenses […] is under direct assault by Automattic's grotesque claim for WP Engine's revenues,” wrote David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, in a recent blog post. Mullenweg couldn’t resist but to clap back six days later.

The problem is that at present, there are few alternatives, and little sign of an entirely new fork emerging from scratch. That means there are few if any reliable exit strategies at present for those unhappy about the current direction of travel – or fearful about where the shift is taking them.