WordPress is in trouble | anderegg.ca
Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems like fair marketing given everything that’s going on. It should be noted that many sites are leaving for Pressable — owned by Mullenweg’s company, Automattic — because of a sweetheart deal.
But the drama ramped up quickly after WP Engine won a preliminary injunction against Automattic on December 10th. The injunction required that WP Engine be allowed to access WordPress.org resources, and that Automattic stop interfering with WP Engine plugins, while the trial moves forward. Ernie Smith wrote an excellent piece with more details on outcome of the injunction, including a note about Mullenweg quitting a community Slack instance with a hammy message. Mullenweg complied with the injunction, though the “loyalty test checkbox” text was changed to a still-required note about pineapple on pizza.
On December 20th, Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org would be on holiday break for an unspecified amount of time. In a post on the WordPress.org blog, he again mentioned being “compelled to provide free labor and services to WP Engine thanks to the success of their expensive lawyers”. He also invited people to fund legal attacks against him by signing up for WP Engine services, and hoped “time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year”.
