I had planned for my 2nd newsletter to be about searching for simplicity when designing products, or what it’s like being AuDHD in product, or really anything other than the current drama between Automattic and WP Engine, but here we are. 😅
Before diving into the main topic:
Bits&Letters, my new product and design engineering consultancy, has availability for new projects starting in October and November. Maybe you have a tricky product or UX/DX problem that could use fresh eyes, or maybe you need a kick-ass website — either way, hit me up at david@bitsandletters.co or grab a spot on my calendar.
I’ll be attending the Lenny and Friends Summit next month in San Francisco. It’s the same day as both Next.js Conf and Notion’s first-ever developer conference, so suffice to say it’s a good week for nerds of all stripes to meet up! If you’re SF-based or in town for one of these events, let me know if you wanna grab a coffee or say hi!
Speaking of Next.js, I’m putting the finishing touches on the “1.0” Bits&Letters website and am playing around with Server Actions, React’s cool new abstraction for connecting server-side functions to your client-side components. They’re a blast to work with, and I’m working on a post (likely for the B&L blog) sharing notes on how to make the most of them.
And now, speaking of website-building platforms…
WordPress 🫠
You probably know what WordPress is: a content management system (CMS) that started as a simple web app for managing a blog, but over its 22 year history has evolved into the world’s most-used platform for building all kinds of websites.
This week, WordPress co-creator and BDFL Matt Mullenweg blocked WP Engine, a big managed WP hosting company, from accessing the WP update servers (bolds his):
WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story […] What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.
WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, […] Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.
This is just the latest escalation in a “nuclear war” that seemed to start last Saturday at WordCamp 2024, when Matt went hard against WP Engine in his keynote talk and a follow-up blog post, all under the banner of protecting open source.
But then, the plot thickened: WP Engine publicly released a copy of their own cease-and-desist letter to Automattic, alleging (with receipts) that
[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.
Yikes.
The legal and practical basis for Matt and Automattic to demand money from WP Engine is… complicated. Here’s where things stand, as I see it:
Since 2010, WP Engine has built a huge business on top of the freely available WordPress source code. Their name is confusing, but honestly, no more confusing than the difference between wordpress.org
and wordpress.com
, and furthermore, whether it’s merely confusing or trademark infringement depends on whether you think “WordPress” or “WP” is an open standard like HTML, that belongs to everyone in its community, or intellectual property that Mullenweg and his company graciously let everyone use.
Mullenweg is trying to have it both ways. But, interestingly, WP Engine hasn’t really engaged with this debate other than to issue some very drily-worded statements and a copy of the cease-and-desist letter quoted above — this is a one-sided freakout, not a war.
As far as I can tell, it looks like Matt is demanding money because he thinks it’s morally wrong for WP Engine to use the “WP” name without his blessing, and morally right that a company that successful should pay for community resources even if up to now there’s been no rule saying they need to. But he’s not proposing a new rule that would (say) require any WordPress host above a certain size to make monetary or in-kind contributions in return for getting to use the not-trademarked “WP” nickname, which would seem fair, but be wildly unpopular, and FWIW may not hold up in court.
Instead, he’s abusing his and Automattic’s central role in the ecosystem to weaponize the WordPress platform and community against a competitor. Again, yikes.
What does it all mean?
One takeaway here, which I think is relevant to both developers and product folk: when you adopt open source, you’re adopting the code, but also the people behind the code. Open source projects are only as trustworthy as their stewards. Thousands of developers rely on WordPress because it’s ubiquitous, but also because they trust Matt to do the right thing. A lot of WP community members, sadly, are taking the bait and loudly criticizing WP Engine as a greedy predator. But others see what’s happening and are now asking questions.
But I think the big, open question is what this godforsaken mess means for how companies monetize open source going forward. Historically, a lot of businesses have been super hesitant to support open source much or at all. That’s not so much a commitment to squeezing profit out of every method call (though sometimes it is), and more an unwillingness to make big, open-ended commitments with unclear costs or benefits.
For most of the last 20 years, I think Matt Mullenweg and his company have been true believers in the open-source ethos and ideology, which is also why this kind of thing (commercial WordPress hosts making lots of money) has apparently never bothered him before now. This move seems to reflect a new ideology, where “open source” overlaps with “freemium” as a strategy for platforms to attract and lock in users, and and ultimate ownership of free IP is still an asset that Matt should be able to monetize at will.
I don’t think that’s a world we actually live in — again, WP Engine are following the rules that Matt and Automattic established — and I hope this turns out to be just one dude’s mid-life, mid-career freakout and not a trend in which companies with big open source footprints (like, say, Vercel) start to see their community stewardship as just one more lever to make money.