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Why WordPress’s CEO is spooking the internet
Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress has spilled into the public, causing confusion and concern among developers.
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Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images
ByCassandra Cassidy
October 20, 2024
• 4 min read
The company that invented blogging is on the verge of self-destruction. Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress.com has spilled into the public domain, causing chaos for a large portion of the internet that relies on its open-source technology.
WordPress.com 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, including the ones from NASA, the White House, and Harvard University. It’s often held up as a shining example of the internet’s OG promise to democratize information by allowing developers to collaborate, study, use, and distribute software with full transparency.
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.
Meet Matt Mullenweg
He’s the founder of WordPress.com as well as its owner, Automattic, which is a website operator that users pay to service ads, manage security, and do other back-end website management. Worth $7.5 billion in 2021, Automattic has one competitor, called WP Engine (WPE). And in September, Mullenweg went after it:
He called it a “cancer to WordPress,” and accused the company of extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from his platform.
After exchanging cease and desist letters with WPE, Mullenweg banned WPE from accessing WordPress.com, a move that rendered numerous websites unusable and vulnerable to cyberattacks. (WordPress.com temporarily lifted the ban for four days before reinstating it.)
On October 3, WPE sued Automattic and Mullenweg, alleging abuse of power. WPE maintains that Automattic and Mullenweg, by taking away WPE’s access, reneged on their promises to run WordPress open-source projects without constraints. The same day, 159 employees left WordPress.com after Mullenweg offered anyone who disagreed with his decisions to take a severance package and walk out. Of that group, 80% had worked on Automattic/WordPress.
At the crux of this internet beef is that Automattic/Mullenweg sees WPE as a leech: WPE profits off of WordPress.com technology but doesn’t contribute to any of its research and development, according to a blog post written by Mullenweg.
To address “confusion” over what WordPress.com actually is, Mullenweg proposed changes to the trademark.
He said that using “WP” in its name confuses people, allowing WPE to make “billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”
Because of this, Automattic/Mullenweg asked WPE to hand over 8% of its annual revenue.
Such a request, which was part of a larger set of non-negotiable conditions outlined by Automattic, has prompted scrutiny from prominent software developers. David Hansson, the creator of influential web-app platform Ruby on Rails, called it a “violation of general open source ideals.”
Mullenweg’s weaponization of WordPress’s open source platform has sparked a fury among other software developers, who fear that their domains could be taken away at any time. Automattic continues to change the rules of its trademark, and the developer community hasn’t received clarification on whether they can or cannot use the term “WordPress.”
In a statement, Automattic said it has a right to enforce its trademark to eliminate confusion and that it remains committed to supporting developers.
Zoom out: Mullenweg’s complaints echo gripes from other open source platforms being scraped by large AI systems for training. Reddit, for example, began charging for access to its application programming interface (API) last year, resulting in massive backlash and boycotts from Redditors who found the decision to be against the ethos of open source. Mullenweg, and Automattic, face a similar reckoning: allow other entities, like WPE, to profit off of WordPress’s open source model, or change the governance of the model to only benefit the originator, foregoing its original purpose. The future of 43% of the internet is at stake.—CC
