WordPress moves to ban WP Engine from accessing its resources

Update: WP Engine sues WordPress and 8.4% of Auttomatic’s staff quit in apparent protest — see below.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg is mad.

“WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit. 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.“WordPress blog (bold in the original)

This seems to mean that sites using WP Engine cannot install plugins or update their themes (full disclosure, MarTech.org is among them). Mullenweg is CEO of Auttomatic which counts WordPress as one of its products.

Cease and desist. Cease and desist letters are going back and forth between the leading CMS and the hosting platform. Mullenweg had been complaining loudly about trademark violations, alleging that WP Engine was illegitimately monetizing them while misleading consumers to believe that there is a formal affiliation between WP Engine and WordPress.

WP Engine served a cease and desist letter on WordPress saying it complies with trademark law. Auttomatic responded a day later with its own cease-and-desist letter, again alleging unauthorized use of WordPress’s intellectual property leading to “unjust enrichment and undue profits.”

WP Engine sues WordPress. All that happened, then WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Mullenweg and Auttomatic accusing them of extortion. WP Engine said: “Matt Mullenweg’s conduct over the last ten days has exposed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy that trust. WP Engine has no choice but to pursue these claims to protect its people, agency partners, customers, and the broader WordPress community.”

159 employees leave Auttomatic. In an apparent protest against Mullenweg’s actions, 159 employees (8.4% of the workforce) accepted severance packages offered to anyone who disagreed with his handling of the WP Engine feud. Eighty percent of those who took the package worked in Auttomatic’s WordPress division. Mullenweg said they would not be eligible to be re-hired for the company.

“It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone, you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired; you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit,” Mullenweg wrote.

Please de-escalate. As WordPress users weigh in, the general sense of their comments seems to be that WordPress’ rhetoric is getting out of hand. “Absolutely ridiculous. The letters WP are used on hundreds of plugins and themes, and have for decades without issue. Even the WordPress Foundation’s own Trademark Policy page acknowledges they have no case: “The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks.”

Cody Bromley wrote on Threads: “Absolutely ridiculous. The letters WP are used on hundreds of plugins and themes, and have for decades without issue. Even the WordPress Foundation’s own Trademark Policy page acknowledges they have no case: “The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks.”

Why we care. For Mullenweg this is clearly personal: “WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers…” For WP Engine it’s surely an existential issue.

For all the users, for all the marketers relying on a WordPress instance that draws on WP Engine’s resources, it just makes life that little bit more difficult.