Tag: WP Engine

To WordPress

I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately switched back. Finally, Matt Mullenweg’s actions and words of late have really tested my sentiments. I’m not a software expert, just technologically curious and technically inclined. Since 2008, WordPress has hosted my blog; I’ve also brought many of my friends who wanted to blog online through WordPress; built or moved their startups’ websites here; and launched The Wire on a self-hosted setup in 2015. All platforms have their problems but WordPress has of late had more than most, thanks to Mullenweg.

After he banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org via their API, I high-tailed my site to Ghost.org, a good alternative for being not bloated and more blogging-friendly but on the flip side more expensive and less customisable. Sometime later I wondered if I should return but then Mullenweg published an acerbic post on his blog (that he later took down) directed at David Heinemeier Hansson. The incident left me quite unsure about how Mullenweg would react to a post criticising him in a blog hosted by his own company.

Ownership is at the heart of the ongoing dispute. Mullenweg has made a big deal of it. Since his campaign against WP Engine became public, it has become clear he believes WordPress.org is his personal fiefdom, where he is immune to the rules that apply to his colleagues, and that there is little in the form of reason in his decision to target WP Engine alone. His attempts to spin the dispute as one of trademark violation, presumably to take the focus away from his own mercurial actions and ad hoc imposition of sanctions, further deepen the place of ownership, the rules that do or don’t apply to owners, and their accountability.

On October 20, Mullenweg finally offered to stop commenting on the dispute in public while citing his own freedom of speech. I can’t say if this post inspired confidence in others to believe Mullenweg wouldn’t censor them by invoking trademark or some other similar instrument of convenience. (It didn’t in Bullenweg.) I just really wanted it to because WordPress is so valuable.

This whole fracas may have reinforced in a more technically capable person the importance of owning the infrastructure that hosts one’s digital assets. I’m not one of them; instead, I and frankly most of the world depend on solutions that are less fundamental, more pre-configured, and more accessible to keep and use our assets. WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two such solutions. Important places on the internet are hosted with/on either of them. W.org and W.com were once quite different (even with the confusion surrounding their domain names) but now, after Mullenweg’s unilateral attack against the most successful competitor to W.com, they’re evidently similarly vulnerable to the threat of his discretion.

Acquiring the technical chops to take full ownership and control of my sites, etc. would be a waste of my time, and rendering my presence on the internet contingent on the existence of an ideologically congruent and fully ethical CEO at the helm of a hosting company would be futile. I admit Mullenweg’s actions of late constitute a difference in kind rather than degree: no other hosting company CEO has behaved in a way that endangered the properties of their own customers and the wider community of people vested in their product. But leaving WordPress.com because Mullenweg crossed this particular line is to make my choice about where to host a site a matter of where I draw the line and where, when it moves, I’m going to draw it next. That’s exhausting.

It seems better to me to (completely rather than partially) decouple where I host my blog from how the hosting company’s owner behaves simply because I can’t afford it. My other alternatives at this time are Ghost, Drupal, minimalist alternatives like Bear or Mataroa (self-hosting WordPress may be too but I don’t want to leave for a host that, if it becomes successful, could become Mullenweg’s next target, at least not until the court’s verdict in the dispute restricts such behaviour). And each one of them has deal-breaking problems. I suppose I’m just too well-settled at WordPress. But it’s no longer unconditional love for WordPress either, and it won’t be the first platform on my mind when a friend asks me for suggestions for where they could start blogging or where a news site should be hosted.

In one of his posts Mullenweg had asked customers to vote with their wallet and quit using WP Engine. Voting with your wallet is expensive, requires a specific kind of web-hosting literacy, and, importantly, time and mental bandwidth. Yes, it’s important to make rational and informed choices about the things that are important to us, but we also need to pick our battles. The wisest courses of action (for someone in my position) here seems to be how we expect Mullenweg v. WP Engine is going to in court as well: to place one’s trust in only the laws and terms governing the provision of these services and the reasonably full and free expression of one’s own beliefs, ideas, and expectations. Everything else is going to be the price to be paid to keep a blog online, uncensored, and written.

Off the rails

Either Matt Mullenweg’s screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its employees who disagreed with his actions vis-à-vis WP Engine a buyout and that 8.4% of the company’s workforce took it. He wrote that he and Automattic (one and the same, really) wanted to make the buyout as enticing as possible, fixing the severance pay at $30,000 (Rs 25 lakh) or six months’ salary, whichever is higher. Excerpt:

159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! … It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit. However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.

I’m sure he knows no group of people turned down $126M to stay, each individual in this mass simply turned down “$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher” to stay. They decided that way because they agreed with him, didn’t disagree with him strongly enough, needed to have a job beyond six months or some other reason. Similarly the 159 that took the buyout decided to leave because they disagreed strongly enough with him, because they needed the money or some other reason.

But no: Mullenweg is convinced he’s still in the right and that all those people who left Automattic did so because the messaging from WP Engine and its principal investor got to them, not because Mullenweg is toying with them.

Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

We also know Mullenweg has been moderating his blog’s comments section to allow only those comments that are favourable to him and his worldview. All bloggers whose blogs have comments sections do this. But the public response to the ongoing Mullenweg v. WP Engine saga has been strongly polarising whereas the comments Mullenweg has been letting through are are strictly and overwhelmingly in his favour. Mullenweg also said during a recent talk-show the criticism has been getting to him — but evidently not in a way that makes him reconsider his words or actions.

The comments that he’s been approving on his blog open windows into his internal narrative. This one under the post about the buyout caught my eye:

I see that twitter is treating this story as some sort of apocalypse for A8C and and don’t get it why. You shouldn’t collaborate with those who aren’t interested in working with you. Instead, you definitely want to team up with those who chose not to hit the piñata and decided to focus on the band at the candy factory.

Mullenweg wrote he called the buyout an “Alignment Offer”. At least one Automattic employee who decided to stay has spun the buyout as “financial freedom” for dissenters to “stand by their choice”. The irony of an echo chamber in this place, at this time, is too much to bear: WordPress was started and existed for a long time as a tool that people could use to publish themselves online, to converse with people around the planet, discover new perspectives, and ultimately change others’ minds or their own. Mullenweg’s September 21 post on WordPress.org was concerned with the hosting provider’s decision to disable users’ ability to track post revisions. He wrote there:

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.

Content is sacred because of its potency (although “sacred” isn’t the word I’d use). The ideas in the heads of the people who will soon leave Automattic are ‘content’ in this way too. When in 2022 WordPress.com (which Automattic owns) consolidated its multiple subscription plans to a single “Pro” plan, I wrote a post critiquing the move and it stayed at the front page of Hacker News for almost a day. It drew so much attention — agreement as well as disagreement — that then WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin responded to say, among other things, “Your content isn’t going anywhere.” This was laudable because it’s important for content to be able to hang around.

Let’s assume a bunch of people at Automattic disagreed with Mullenweg. His response was to entice them to leave with a supposedly lucrative offer on their way out rather than engage with their disagreement, attempt to change their minds and/or his own, and from here take Automattic to a new position of strength. All good organisations contend with disagreement; those that are able to do so to the company’s benefit and without altogether sundering employer-employee relations emerge the better for it. Those that can’t or won’t are signalling they can only work if an important human degree of freedom is sliced off.

Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine escalates

Update, September 26, 2024: WordPress.org has banned websites hosted on WP Engine from accessing its resources. As someone put it on X, this is Matt Mullenweg dropping a giant turd into the laps of millions of WordPress users.

The Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine dispute seems to be escalating, which is a bit of a surprise because it was so ill-founded to begin with. Yet the escalation has also been exponential.

Mullenweg published his post disparaging WP Engine on the WordPress.org site (from where you can download the open source WordPress CMS) on September 21.

On September 23, WP Engine said it had sent WordPress.com parent company and WordPress lead developer Automattic, whose CEO is Mullenweg, a cease and desist letter. Excerpt:

Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers,and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the WordPress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses.

💥

Later on the same day, Automattic sent a cease and desist letter of its own to WP Engine. Excerpt:

As you know, our Client owns all intellectual property rights globally in and to the world-famous WOOCOMMERCE and WOO trademarks; and the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation to use, enforce, and sublicense the world-famous WORDPRESS trademark, among others, and all other associated intellectual property rights.We are writing about WP Engine’s web hosting and related services that improperly use our Client’s WORDPRESS and WOOCOMMERCE trademarks in their marketing.We understand that our Client has contacted you about securing a proper license to use its trademarks, yet no such agreement has been reached. As such, your blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our Client’s trademarks has infringed our Client’s rights and confused consumers into believing, falsely, that WP Engine is authorized, endorsed, or sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated or associated with, our Client. WP Engine’s unauthorized use of our Client’s trademarks also dilutes their rights, tarnishes their reputation, and otherwise harms the goodwill they have established in their famous and well-known trademarks, and has enabled WP Engine to unfairly compete with our Client, leading to WP Engine’s unjust enrichment.

Now it’s a trademark dispute. Automattic is alleging people at large are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself and that that’s leading to loss of revenue for Automattic. Hang on to this thought while we move on to the next detail. At 10.34 pm IST on September 4, Mullenweg shared this tidbit in a Reddit comment:

[WP Engine] had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.

Put all these details together and we understand Mullenweg is alleging via Automattic that people are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself to Automattic’s detriment, that WP Engine has wrongfully used the WordPress trademark, that what WP Engine is selling isn’t WordPress but something it has reportedly “butchered”, and that WP Engine’s enrichment is unjust.

I think it’s starting to stink for Mullenweg. As detailed in the previous post, WP Engine didn’t “butcher” WordPress. In fact they didn’t change anything about WordPress’s core composition. They turned off a setting, didn’t hide it, and offered a way to get around it by other means. WordPress is open source software provided under a GPL license, which means others are allowed to modify it (and subsequently avail it under the same license). So even if WP Engine modified WordPress — which it didn’t — it would’ve been operating within its rights.

Second, WP Engine was founded in 2010. Why is Automattic alleging a trademark violation after 14 years of being okay with it? Even if consumers are currently confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself — which I doubt — that Automattic didn’t pursue a legal dispute in all this time is very fishy. It also creates new uncertainty for all the many other WordPress hosting companies that have “WP” in their names. On a related note, WP Engine is selling WordPress hosting and not WordPress itself as well as claims to have emails from Automattic staff saying using the “WP” short form is okay.

Another point of note here is whether ‘WP’ is covered by trademark. At some point in the recent past, the wordpressfoundation.org website updated its ‘Trademark Policy’ page to include an answer as well as some gratuitous remarks:

The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Third, Mullenweg’s demand that WP Engine cough up 8% of their revenue amounts to a demand for $40 million (Rs 334.5 crore). Considering Automattic has now pinned this demand to the wobbly allegation of wrongful trademark use, WP Engine seems increasingly in the right to dispute and not entertain his demands. Moreover, WP Engine’s lawyers’ letter suggests Mullenweg gave WP Engine a very small window within which to comply with this demand and, for added measure, allegedly threw in a threat. But then at 10.38 pm on September 24, Mullenweg said this on Reddit:

I would have happily negotiated from there, but they refused to even take a call. Their entire strategy has been to obscure and delay, which they tried to do on Friday. “Can we get the right folks together early next week?” They’ve been stringing us along for years, I’m the dummy for believing that they actually wanted to do anything. But making it right, now.

The reply to this comment by Reddit user u/ChallengeEuphoric237 is perfect:

If they don’t believe they needed to pay, then why would they?

1/ If the fees were for the trademark, why weren’t they going to the WordPress Foundation instead of Automattic?

2/ Why do they need to license the WordPress trademark? Stating they allow hosting as a product isn’t a violation of trademark law, neither is using WP. You guys used to be an investor in the company for crying out loud.

WordPress and Automattic seem incredibly petty in all of this. Why did you *need* to do it during the keynote? Why did you *need* to make a huge stink at the booth? If this was a legal issue, let the lawyers sort it out instead of dragging the community through the mud. Everyone expected much more from you. I don’t use WP Engine’s products, but if someone came to me trying to extort 8% of my revenue on some flimsy trademark issue, I wouldn’t be very responsive either.

“Can we get the right folks together early next week?”

Did you honestly expect them to agree to a nearly 40 million dollar annual charge via text message when you literally gave them what seems like an hour notice right before your keynote? Would you agree to that? I’m no lawyer, but that whole exchange seems like an exercise in extortion – threatening to destroy someones reputation unless they agree to something monetarily, which is a felony.

Let’s see what the courts say, but you’ve lost a ton of clout in the community over this.

The subtext of Mullenweg’s September 21 post seemed to be that private equity is cutting costs in a way that’s eating into the aspirations and dues of open source software development. Then again, as many observers in the sector have said, this couldn’t be the real issue because private equity is almost everywhere in the WordPress hosting space and singling out WP Engine made little sense. So the sub-subtext seemed to be that Mullenweg was unhappy about WP Engine eating into the revenue streams of WordPress.com and WordPress VIP (Automattic’s elite hosting service). But after the events of the three days that followed, that sub-subtext seems likelier to be the whole issue.

On a final note, many people are kicking back with 🍿 and speculating about how this dispute could escalate further. But it’s difficult for me personally to be entertained by this. While Mullenweg’s September 21 post didn’t in hindsight do a good job of communicating what his real argument was, he did suggest there was a problem with a model in which for-profit entities could springboard off the efforts of open-source communities that have volunteered their time and skills without the entities giving back. But dovetailing to u/ChallengeEuphoria237’s concluding remark, conversations about that issue vis-à-vis WP Engine are now more unlikely to happen than they were before Mullenweg launched into this “making it right” campaign.

Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. This isn’t just really far removed from “butchering” (much less in public), it’s also dishonest: WP Engine didn’t modify WordPress’s core, it simply turned off a setting that was available to turn off.

WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

(I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

(It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps WP Engine beating WordPress.com in the market?