Half a life’s effort was contributed to open source. The father of WordPress forked 200,000 lines of code to retaliate against the blood-sucking enterprise. DHH: Don’t go crazy.

At the beginning, this seemed to be a long-standing issue in the open-source community: "I have open-sourced the project, so why are those who profit from it not sharing the benefits with me?" WordPress's co-creator Automattic also appears to have encountered a similar dilemma.

As one of the main contributors to WordPress, Automattic provides commercial hosting services for WordPress blogs. However, another company, WP Engine, also offers a similar service and uses the name "WP Engine."

Automattic's CEO Matt Mullenweg argues that WP Engine benefits from the software's release but has not contributed enough manpower or funds to the community (note that these obligations are not included in the GPLv2 WordPress license). Automattic has made contributions to the software's development, and Mullenweg believes that WP Engine earns a significant amount of money annually by hosting WordPress blogs but has not provided much in return, which he deems unfair.

Therefore, Mullenweg attempted to have WP Engine, supported by the venture capital firm Silver Lake, sign a seven-year trademark licensing agreement.

According to the proposed terms, WP Engine needs to choose one of the following two methods for compensation:

Pay 8% of its total income to Automattic each month.

Allocate development time equivalent to 8% of total revenue to improve WordPress code.

WP Engine also offers the option to choose a combination of these two methods. In return, WP Engine can use its trademark and brand for marketing and operational activities.

However, WP Engine believes that they should not foot the bill for this. The conflict between the two parties continues to escalate, from legal disputes to technical blockades, and then to the competition for popular plugins, almost depleting all resources of both sides. Now, this dispute has evolved into a major crisis in the WordPress ecosystem.

The most recent conflict began last Saturday, when Mullenweg "forked" and took control of the popular plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) maintained by the competitor WP Engine.

ACF has over 2 million active installations. Against the backdrop of escalating legal conflicts between the two companies, WP Engine was officially banned from accessing the infrastructure of WordPress.org in September 2024. Supporters of this move argue that it is necessary to "protect the security of the project" (i.e., effectively provide repairs and patches).

However, WP Engine did not back down. Instead, it made a strong response last weekend, emphasizing that "in the 21-year history of WordPress development, no actively developed plugin has been unilaterally taken away without the creator's consent." Critics also stated that such "face-ripping" behavior has gone beyond the scope of code forking.

The vice president of Microsoft Developer Community, Scott Hanselman, made a short and strong response to Mullenweg's actions, saying, "Dude, what are you doing?" The news led to at least one WordPress core developer immediately quitting the project: Scott Kingsley-Clark announced on GitHub last weekend that he "officially terminated his core contributions and involvement in the WordPress project... I feel extremely pained, but I can only go this far. I can no longer make excuses for Matt's behavior, nor will I maintain any contact with the core team."

In the world of open source software (OSS), forking a project and maintaining and developing it separately is a completely acceptable behavior.

The official social media channel of WordPress on the X platform has released a message stating that the action taken to control ACF "is in line with the terms agreed upon by users in the regulations" (these terms state that WordPress can make changes to plugins "for public safety purposes without the consent of the developers").

But critics argue that WordPress.org, or Mullenweg himself, is not just forking the ACF code - this is a quite popular WordPress development plugin containing over 200,000 lines of code, designed to allow developers "full control over custom content with fields, post types, and taxonomy methods." This plugin came under the control of WP Engine in 2022, belonging to a series of high-profile tools that the company acquired from Delicious Brains at that time.

Mullenweg's team has actually taken over: (1) the "slug" or identifier of ACF on WordPress.org; (2) over 2 million active installation users; (3) even including customer reviews on WordPress.org. Mullenweg also boldly took action last Saturday night by automatically switching websites to the forked version of ACF through automatic updates.

According to reports, this has even caused damage to some websites.

A frustrated end user posted on the Hackernews forum, "Oh my, I almost had a heart attack. We use over 20 ACF fields on over 150 websites. I thought it was going to completely break away from the WordPress ecosystem. Luckily, they still provide zip downloads and continuous automatic updates."

According to the ACF team, "The release we made and the user identified solely under our 'slug' in the ACF plugin code repository at WordPress.org conflicted with open source values and principles. This change was maliciously used to update millions of existing ACF installations, and the related code was not approved or adopted by the Advanced Custom Fields team."

On the platform X, a netizen posted saying, "The things you have done to destroy the WordPress community have caused irreversible consequences. You have stolen intellectual property, violated the GPL, and your own established rules. This is not a fork, but a blatantly unprecedented takeover."

And this seems to be the general consensus among most people regarding this earth-shattering change.

Many people believe that plugin developers will no longer trust to collaborate with WordPress. (Some friends may not be familiar, WordPress.org is an independent non-profit organization established by Mullenweg for hosting various open source WordPress projects; while Wordperss.com is owned by Automattic.)

Since he knows that this move will trigger widespread questioning and anger from the developer community, why does Mullenweg insist on taking over the ACF project single-handedly?

40-year-old Matt Mullenweg has devoted half of his life to the WordPress project.

WordPress is a well-known content management system, currently used by hundreds of millions of websites that utilize its templates, tools, and plugins. However, the WordPress ecosystem is complex, consisting of various elements like open-source products, non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, trademarks, and licenses.

The technology of WordPress is open source, which means anyone can install and use it for free. However, Mullenweg is still the founder and CEO of Automattic, a venture capital company valued at $7.5 billion (as of 2021). The core business of Automattic is WordPress.com, where individuals and companies can pay fees ranging from $4 per month to $25,000 per year for services such as advertising products, security protection, customer support, and inventory management.

His competitor is WP Engine, a leading WordPress hosting service provider. In 2018, Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake acquired the majority of WP Engine's shares for $250 million and obtained three seats on the board.

In other words, WP Engine is built on WordPress. Without WordPress, this business would not exist. It is a large enterprise with huge revenue, but it does not "give back" to WordPress.

Therefore, Automattic requires WP Engine to pay 8% of the revenue.

Mullenweg sent a letter to WP Engine on September 23 requesting them to stop infringing on his trademark rights, accusing them of infringing on his trademark rights for many years. In a personal blog post, he stated, "In short, WP Engine has infringed on WordPress's trademark rights. For a long time, we at Automattic have been trying to reach a licensing agreement with them, but they have repeatedly deceived us... We have offered WP Engine a fair deal to pay fees based on their actual share: either pay a licensing fee directly, or make tangible contributions to the open-source project."

He later wrote on September 26th, "This is not about making money, but a requirement that any company making hundreds of millions of dollars through open source projects should take on. If they don't, they can no longer use the WordPress trademark."

And in response to the demands made by Mullenweg, WP Engine not only did not negotiate but instead filed an explosive lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic. WP Engine accuses Mullenweg of defamation due to his public comments, stating that, given the open-source nature of the technology, there are significant conflicts of interest with WordPress founder in how to operate the community and company.

Regarding this conflict, Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, said it reflects a perennial challenge of open source software. "What is the legitimate way to monetize open source software? How much control should the commercial entity created by the author have over commercialization efforts?" Tunguz said. He added that in this case, "hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue are at stake between the parties."

However, in this dispute, public opinion is very unfriendly to Mullenweg, to the point that even the FOSS legendary figure David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is flipping him off.

DHH has posted two alarming articles in a row, offering some level of "criticism" towards Mullenweg, and calling for a reconciliation between WordPress and WP Engine. He believes that the dispute between the two parties has seriously violated the principles of the open-source community.

Hansson said that the struggle had been going on for several weeks, during which a series of extreme events occurred, such as the fight for control of the ACF plugin by WP Engine.

DHH described the requisition of the ACF plugin as the "most out of control" scene in this incident.

He emphasized that open source code repositories should not become tools for commercial competition but should remain neutral.

He added, "In this contractual dispute, leveraging open-source projects like WordPress could endanger the years of effort to maintain peace in the open-source community, allowing everyone to enjoy the peace dividends. Since the SCO-Linux dispute in the early 2000s, we have never faced such great fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the open-source field."

DHH has made an appeal to Mullenweg: "Don't become a tyrant. I have great respect for your contributions to WordPress and other fields. I understand that there is often anger from those who benefit from our work but contribute little, but this indignation should remain at the moral level and should not turn into a commercial struggle."

At the same time, DHH expressed that he understands Mullenweg completely. If he had to choose one side, "from creating one of the most widely used open-source programs to supporting half of the Internet, there are enough reasons to support Automattic rather than WP Engine's private equity owner Silver Lake."

"The open-source web framework Ruby on Rails that I created has been used to build enterprises worth billions of dollars in total value. Some of these enterprises express their gratitude and self-interest by providing dedicated developers, joining The Rails Foundation, or sponsoring conferences. However, many enterprises do not do so! This is their absolute right, even if it can be a bit frustrating at times."

"This is open source. I share the code as a gift with you, and you only need to agree to the license terms. Once you use this code, you should not add any additional conditions, especially when you profit from it. Otherwise, the license becomes meaningless, clarity becomes muddled, and certainty is lost."

He went on to say, "Please do not have me support private equity firms like Silver Lake, Matt." He urged Mullenweg to address this issue.

"It's not too late. Although some bridges have already been burned, consider it a sunk cost. The additional expenses incurred from now on may not be worthwhile. There is still a chance to turn things around and reach a gentle agreement that allows all parties to save face. I urge you to strive for this outcome," Hansson warned that if this dispute continues to escalate, it will have a negative impact on the entire open-source ecosystem. He pleads for both parties to handle the situation rationally and find a solution that everyone can be happy with.

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