Content is sacred — so own your revision history

We’ve had a few weeks to observe the ongoing drama affecting the WordPress community. I won't recap it here; just keeping up is a full-time job. (See Ivan Mehta's ongoing updates at TechCrunch if you'd like to catch up.). And as fascinating as this has been to watch from a reasonably safe distance (I migrated my last sites from WordPress a couple of years ago), I'm certain we haven't seen the end of it.

I'm equally sure that this isn’t the whole story. It’s just the bits we know, the pieces we’ve been told. There will almost certainly have been numerous back-channel discussions, increasingly less polite requests for payment, and possibly even more silent service disruptions that have brought these Automattic and WP Engine to this point. It’s only now that tensions have escalated that the disputes have been made public.

There are also, quite obviously, huge sums of money at stake here, in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue. According, there’s serious competition: Automattic and WP Engine compete for users seeking managed WordPress installs and hosting, and both base their business model on the open-source WordPress software. The big issue is that only one of those commercial enterprises has a (likely controlling) vote on the future of the open-source software, as well as the news feeds and servers that all WordPress users connect to.

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