The Great Wordpress war is upon us as Automattic (the company that currently owns Wordpress, and sells Wordpress hosting as a service) and its CEO Matthew Mullenweg have started a "scorched earth nuclear approach" campaign (in his own words) against WP Engine, another company that offers Wordpress hosting. The stakes are high as Wordpress constitutes almost half of all websites on the internet and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
A few days ago Mullenweg ran a Q&A at a huge Wordpress conference where he slandered WP Engine in a big way, including direct calls for customers to switch away from their services:
He has also written a hit piece on the official Wordpress blog, attacking several aspects of WP Engine's offering:
Excerpt:
[WP Engine] are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.
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.
This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.
Every Wordpress instance management panel includes a "WP News" widget at the top, and this blog post landed there as well, meaning WP Engine customers (and anyone else using Wordpress) who try managing their instances are treated to this obloquy and it's the first thing they see. Word is, WP Engine have already done something to remove this widget from their management UI.
In response, WP Engine have issued a Cease&Desist letter to Automattic and Mullenweg, the full text is available here:
https://wpengine.com/wp-content/upl...ic-and-Request-to-Preserve-Documents-Sent.pdf
It includes a long list of accusations and documents Automattic's amusing antics very thoroughly
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.
Chief among these are accusations of outright extortion where Mullenweg and other C-level executives at Automattic have sent text messages to WP Engine board members threatening to "go to war", unless they started paying tens of millions of dollars on an ongoing basis.
Mullenweg use his upcoming presentations and various Wordpress conferences as a bargaining chip, threatening to dedicate them to slandering WP Engine unless they paid up, up until the very last moment where he sent them a photo of the audience waiting to hear his speech, with the message that he could shift gears and turn his talk into “just a Q&A” if WP Engine agreed to pay up.
Mullenweg also alleged that WP Engine have fired an employee that spoke up against them agreeing with Automattic that they do not contribute to open source as much as they should. Here's what a hacker news user has to say (could be true or false):
It looks like people here are missing the context of the source of the issue between Matt and WP engine. Couple days ago he posted on X that wpengine has similar revenue to automattic, yet doesn’t contribute back to open source as much as they promised to (5 hour per week per employee or something like that). A wpengine employee replied to a post saying that management doesn’t allow them to contribute to Wordpress open source because it doesn’t align with KPI targets. That employee got fired the next day. That’s when Matt’s issue with wpengine escalated.
Of course, as Automattic own Wordpress, they surely would like if their competitor's employees were dedicating 12.5% of their job to working for their benefit.
