Although the matter is now in court with WPEngine (WPE) filing a law suit over Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress [link], this bizzare incident has forced many developers to reconsider their perspectives.
WPEngine was banned from WordPress.org, the 1.5million users of WPE were unable to receive any updates from WordPress.org.
The concern : If WP starts to apply a trademark fee, the cost of using and hosting WordPress is going to go up.
The argument that you’re too small for WP does not apply, the outcome of these law suits affects us all using WordPress, hosting WordPress, selling WordPress items. If WP starts to apply a trademark license the cost of hosting and using WordPress is going to go up in future.
The events that lead to this state can be seen here , more details and discussions about this you can see in this link . There are some very concerning issues that arise in the WP space. Many companies are now re-considering using WP.
First some basics to get clarity on the issue as it is really confusing:
Automattic : A for profit company that runs commercial entity WordPress.com and also employs people who work in maintaining wordpress.org
WordPress: World’s most popular open source CMS forked from an open source CMS. b2Cafe GPL v2
WordPress.org : The site for the open source project and all the free themes, plugins and the source for all the plugin updates.
WPEngine.com : A private entity, a web host specifically designed for hosting WordPress sites. Generates over $400m sales.
Matt Mullenweg : The founder of WordPress.
Matt’s Claim : WP Engine’s business is built on violating the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, 8% is typical for a franchise fee. They confuse customers in the marketplace who think they’re official WordPress. [source]
After this both parties have led allegations, publically defaming each other and then suing each other in court.
The discussion has revealed some STARTLING REVELATIONS which has really taken the world of WordPress by a storm.
I am sharing few :
- WordPress foundation was created in 2010 owns the trademark but it gave unlimited license Automattic to use the WordPress trademark. This is a total of 3 people one is Matt himself while other 2 are unknown. [link]
- WordPress.org is 100% owned by MattMullenweg [source]
- WP Engine claims this as extortion from Automattic.
- Automattic was an investor in WP engine in 2011 -2018 [source]
- WordPress provides updates to 10′-1000’s of servers with 30000 requests a second.
- Automattic demand 8% trademark fees or $32m/yr for 7 years from WPEngine
At this point I am pretty sure we all can agree that this could have been resolved in a better way but the chain of events indicate something is fishy and all is not well in WordPress.
The reply from Matt adds to a lot of confusion.
What is abuse of WordPress trademark?
How could a hosting company which is a totally different product abuse a trademark of a software firm ?
Can this be used against other players, like WP Rocket, WPSuper cache, WP SMTP
WPEngine has developed Local a development engine for WordPress Hosts WordPress so in a way it promotes WordPress as well, why the trademark demand ?
WP has put a fork ban on WPEngine, can an open source project put a ban on cloning the software ?
An open source project is promoted by all of the users who use it commercially, non-commercially. The owner of the project should not be envious about a company which is making money and call them filthy. This goes against the very nature of an Open source platform. Matt’s claim might be true in spirit that WPEngine should contribute more especially their entire business is built on WordPress. Or there is something more that is about to unfold, we will see in coming months for sure.