The company that invented blogging is on the verge of self-destruction. Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress has spilled into the public domain, causing chaos for a large portion of the internet that relies on its open-source technology. WordPress is a content management system that allows people with no coding experience to run a website. It’s immensely popular, hosting 43% of all websites in the world … It’s also experiencing a total meltdown stemming from a power struggle between its founder and its largest competitor, a feud that has the potential to damage–or at least meaningfully alter–the infrastructure of the internet.
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I doubt the average WordPress user will be affected by this, but it is a strange situation.
You could argue that WP Engine should be contributing more to WordPress development to support platform development, but ultimately they don’t have to: anyone can use WordPress’s code for commercial purposes (and do!) without payment to Automattic.
I think they are/were:
the ban also prevents WP Engine customers from accessing security updates, leaving them vulnerable.
The difficulty with all of this is that there are two organisations called Wordpress.
- the Foundation (Wordpress.org) which is supposed to own wordpress and keep it free to use as open source software; and,
- The Wordpress (Wordpress.com) company owned by Automattic which makes a profit through it’s use of the Wordpress open source software
So when in the quote above it talks about WordPress’s largest competitor, it’s the second. But the implication is that it also includes the first. But Wordpress.org is not a competitor for WP Engine.
Both Wordpress organisations being managed by the same person leads to a massive conflict of interest which has led to actions being taken against WP Engine which are contrary to the spirit of Wordpress.org
It’s a mess and needs to be sorted amicably, because as always, it’s the end users who are getting shafted at the moment.
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Mullenweg may have had a legitimate point in the beginning, but his subsequent actions are not ethical or particularly smart.
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Wordpress didn’t invent blogging. Hopefully the rest of the article is better than that statement.
Much of the internet runs on tradition and handshake agreements rather than contracts and law.
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Hopefully this doesn’t turn into a big mess like SCO vs Linux. I remember following the story on Groklaw for something like 10 years.
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Per my post about selecting a blogging platform, I may just stay with SquareSpace. It just works. I pay more than I’d like, but that may be the price of stability, reliability, and ease of use. I can copy markdown text from iA Writer and paste it into SquareSpace and it formats perfectly. Easy breezy. And, thus far, no corporate drama. 
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Uh, didn’t SquareSpace just get bought?
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If so, I had not heard about it. That must mean there’s no drama or “ignorance is bliss.” 
Just happened.
Permira completes Squarespace acquisition after upping bid to $7.2B | TechCrunch
2024-10-17 – Website builder Squarespace is no longer a publicly traded company, after private equity firm Permira procured all remaining common stock in the firm … On Monday, Permira announced that it had successfully bought most of the shares and would be completing a second-step merger to acquire all outstanding shares from remaining shareholders who didn’t participate in the tender offer — and that step is now complete.
I don’t know that any private web company has been more stable or reliable than WordPress. We’ll just have to see what happens. Remember that the media is typically after increased clicks and makes every conflict into a life-and-death drama.
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@WayneG, I was puzzled by your post (since deleted) crediting SquareSpace in the “we carried diesel fuel up 17 flights” story. I remembered that story. Here, perhaps, is another telling of that astonishing story …
2012-11-01 – Meanwhile, a data center at 75 Broad Street in lower Manhattan operated by Peer1 Hosting also faced a shutdown after diesel pumps in the building’s basement failed due to flooding caused by the storm.
However, data center customers and others showed up to form a bucket-brigade to get the fuel to the rooftop generator on the 17-story building. The brigade was able to transport enough fuel to the rooftop to keep the data center running.
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Oh, don’t worry. There’s no drama… yet. Jokes aside, better keep an eye on it, private equity does not play softball.
I just moved over to Ghost, which I’m hosting on PikaPods. Inexpensive, and reasonably straightforward.
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I also moved to Ghost, both because I needed a seamless membership feature but also because of the state of WordPress right now. If you can accept some of the compromises, it’s a breath of fresh air. No plugins, updates, or maintenance to worry about.
I’ve been on WordPress before, but this time I was coming from Blot — so I’ve landed somewhere in the middle of the complexity scale.
Yes, I don’t claim to fully know what’s going on, but I get the sense that he let his overheated emotions take over when he should have taken a breather and then followed up in a more measured way.
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Many in the community are afraid to speak out openly because they are being blocked left and right by MM in social media, WP Slack channel and in wp.org for expressing their opinions politely and even for disagreeing to his messages with a clown emoji.
I would argue that’s not “the average WordPress user.” WP Engine’s prices are rather high, and it thus doesn’t attract nearly as many customers. They estimate under 200k customers worldwide, which is a pretty tiny fraction of WordPress websites.
As a dev, I do think WP Engine’s name is confusing. I don’t think it crosses into “illegal” territory; I think it’s the sort of thing where they’re simultaneously capitalizing on confusion related to the WordPress name while maintaining plausible deniability.
None of that is intended to support Automattic’s actions, of course.
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