Drama at WordPress
Until about last week I was blissfully unaware of what has been happening at WordPress. I noticed that a couple of people on my subscribed feeds had written about it—Rodrigo Ghedin and Kev Quirk—and I decided to find out more, which led me to Adrienne L. Travis’s fantastic gist chronicling the entire soap opera.
And boy is it a soap opera. I left WordPress seven years ago but have used it for building others’ websites since. It had its place on the web today despite what people have you believe year after year, and while the 40% figure for the number of websites that WordPress is powering might not be accurate, there is no denying that WordPress does shape some parts of the web as we know it. But to think of this event as WordPress-centric (or worse still Matt Mullenweg-centric) would be to miss the forest for the trees. This is really about open source software and the elephant in the room: people profiting from it without contributing to it.
Matt has a point. But he is making his point woefully. I doubt everyone criticising WordPress is actually against the core idea of Matt’s argument. They are more likely condemning his approach. Moreover there is the deal WordPress and WPEngine struck which is legally binding on WordPress, so what really is Matt going on about?
It is clear in my mind that WordPress wants a slice of WPEngine’s pie. If anyone is going to be so successful at making money from WordPress, it ought to be Automattic—or so Matt thinks. It is also correct that WPEngine has little by way of regular contribution to WordPress; but their primary contribution in the form of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin is central to how many developers choose to extend WordPress functionality in a client-friendly manner. Without ACF (or its many copycats) WordPress will likely be crippled for everyone but the baseline blogger. This, I think, is something Matt & co. are missing—perhaps haughtily—when they criticise WPEngine of not “giving back” to the community. But it is more likely they simply do not want to admit it explicitly because they did take over ACF during the course of this drama, showing they knew its real value. Automattic’s own trump card, the Gutenberg editor, offers precious little to the user. It was never the transformative upgrade to the “classic editor” that Automattic thought it was.
From calling WPEngine a “cancer” to blocking access to servers for WPEngine users to trolling the community on Christmas eve to calling WPEngine “scammy” and publicly calling for people to switch to different hosts to disclosing an unpatched vulnerability in ACF while simultaneously blocking WPEngine’s access to fix said vulnerability to threatening a hostile takeover to actually taking over ACF for themselves to rejecting the idea that WordPress’s use of ‘WP Fusion’ infringes copyright in the exact same way that WordPress itself says ‘WPEngine’ is infringing its own copyright to accusing WPEngine of violating his freedom of speech to promising to stay quiet for a while before promptly resuming attacks on WPEngine using the WordPress account instead—all within the span of just one month—Matt’s approach has been generally churlish and childish.
Joost de Valk, an old and trusted name in the WordPress community, hit the nail on the head when he addressed this soap opera following Matt suddenly sending everyone off on a ‘holiday break’ and pausing even basic community services:
We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we’re ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is “Democratizing publishing”, we’ve been very low on exactly that: democracy.
To me, WordPress was always the good guy on the internet. The quiet, supportive, mature platform that truly empowered people and got out of the way. The old figure who still held their place despite several new kids taking over the block simply because everyone new needed somewhere to start and there was trust in longevity. Perhaps the rosy glasses have to come off at some point. For all the good that WordPress is, it is still run by a company of human beings looking to make a buck.
Joost, Josh Collinsworth and possibly others have called for Matt to step down. Will whoever take his place do any better? Or will Automattic under new leadership stop pretending to be a force for good and act like just another tech company? Can things get worse or can a new, more democratic leadership better address the real pandora’s box opened by this mess: the relationship between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ of open source software, at least one side among which has already started to make a case for themselves?