the things people are saying about the guy behind WordPress right now are absolutely brutal he has main character syndrome a cancer to his own Community Matt has the legal acument of a pissed-off Preen who thought he was clever naming his company automatic really says it all automatic is doing open source dirty it's sad to watch really the internet really seems to hate this guy right now move this man which is ironic because it's his own tool that's responsible for over 40% of the websites on the internet but is he really a tyrannical leader who's losing his mind or is he actually an open source Freedom Fighter battling evil private Equity firms to make the world a better place in today's video you decide we'll look at a timeline of the recent WordPress drama which began to spiral out of control a couple weeks ago when automatic the owner of the WordPress trademark requested millions of dollars from WP engine one of the most popular WordPress hosting platforms that's led to a bunch of Mean Tweets and lawsuits but the drama hit New Heights yesterday with the most controversial checkbox ever implemented on a website what the hell is going on with WordPress it is October 11th 2024 and you're watching the code report if you're a JavaScript developer it may come as a shock to you that nearly half the websites on the Internet run WordPress an open source tool built on PHP and jQuery and easily the most successful website builder of all time because why write code when you can just put a bunch of plugins together like Lego breaks the main reason WordPress is so prolific is that it has a massive ecosystem of themes and plugins that allow both programmers and non-programmers to build almost anything I've deployed many WordPress sites for clients in the past and simply hosting WordPress sites is a multi-billion dollar industry WordPress self is licensed under the gnu general public license which means you're free to modify and use it commercially as long as derivative Works have the same license but that doesn't include the WordPress logo and name trademarks which require permission from the WordPress Foundation to be used in any project or product but what you should know is that the WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization created by Matt mullenweg now one curious detail is that up until about 2 weeks ago it said the abbreviation WP is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you're free to use it in any way you see fit but that line was recently updated to say now you can't use it if it confuses people and then proceeds to trash WP engine you can find it on wordpress. org which differs from wordpress. com the commercial arm of Wordpress which provides hosting Services which itself is owned by automatic a multi-billion dollar company where Matt mullenweg is the CEO you would think that wordpress.
com is the default host everyone goes with but there's this other highly successful company out there called WP engine it makes hundreds of millions of dollars hosting WordPress and is backed by private Equity Firm Silver Lake where the main goal is to provide a return on Capital and that means they put far less effort contributing back to the nonprofit arm of Wordpress at least compared to automatic one important fact to know here is that automatic was an investor and part owner of WP engine until it sold to Silver Lake in 2018 there's likely Bad Blood between the two companies going back years but the main catalyst for the recent drama happened on September 20th when automatic sent this trademark license agreement to WP engine it's basically a ransom note demanding that they pay automatic a royalty of 8% of its gross revenue Vue on a monthly basis which in this case would be millions of dollars per month the reason Mullen WG was so pissed was a that WP engine profits off of Wordpress and doesn't give back B they improperly use the trademark like their payment plans which look like official WordPress products and C they quote strip mine the WordPress ecosystem giving users a crappier experience in other words they don't want them forking and remarketing their open source plugins like woocommerce now as you might imagine WP engine didn't sign the term sheet what's crazy though is that the very next day on September 21st Matt Mullen goes on stage at the world Camp us conference and calls WP engine quote a cancer to Wordpress how private Equity can hollow out and Destroy open- Source communities very interesting timing for that presentation but things are about to get a lot crazier if you're just hearing about this situation though you really should be on daily. deev the sponsor of today's video not only is it a great place to level up your programming skills by keeping up to date on all the latest and greatest content out there but you can also find out what real developers think about controversial issues like this WordPress drama when you're part of the controversy. deev squad you'll never miss a big story then you can discuss these topics and network with like-minded developers instead of arguing with a bunch of anonymous bots on Reddit as a developer the amount of information you need to keep up on is absurd instead of dumpster diving across the internet just go to daily.
deev to get all the information that matters in one place it's completely free and you can use my invite link to sign up but now back to Wordpress wordpress. org also made a blog post called WP engine is not WordPress which reiterates that they don't give enough back and describes how they turn off features like revisions to save money on their back-end infrastructure 2 days later on September 23rd WP engine claps back with a seasoned assist which accuses mullenweg of making salacious and outrageous statements that same day automatic claps back on their clapback with its own seasoned assist telling WP engine to stop the unauthorized use of their trademarks at this point it's just been a bunch of legal talking but then 2 days later on September 25th WP engine gets banned from wordpress. org that's a big deal because it means the WordPress installs on their platform can no longer get updates or add plugins from the.
org repo thus having a direct impact on WordPress developers and end users and that's kind of crazy considering that mullenweg is offering a competing platform with wordpress. com and he also went to his blog and said quote WP engine is free to offer their own hacked up bastardized simular of wordpress's GPL code to their customers and they can experience WordPress as WP engine envisions it that's harsh but Mullen wag does have a good number of support ERS online if you don't agree with them automatic even offered a severance package to employees who wanted to leave offering $30,000 or 6 months pay and 159 employees took that deal or 8. 4% of the entire staff now after the initial ban Mullen WG went on a media tour where he argued his position on the primagen and Theo streams this stuff I think it attack so much I can imagine night one point I'm like not feeling the best so I I I know this is a video stream I probably don't look the best but please oh look great don't worry about how you look you're I mean don't worry you have me next to you he's fighting a battle in the court of public opinion but I can't imagine his lawyers advised him to do that because then immediately after WP engine filed a lawsuit and it even cited those stream appearances inside the lawsuit there's all kinds of claims like Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations attempted extortion unfair competition liable and slander and many other claims but then things got even more nutty when the wordpress.
