WordPress’s Mullenweg Puts Lipstick on His WP Engine Argument

Those who aren’t familiar with the recent brouhaha between WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg and the hosting site WP Engine need not worry. The story will unfold as we go along. Otherwise, follow the links along the way.

You know what they say about lipstick on a pig…

About 50 minutes into the onstage interview that opened the day at Nerdearla on Saturday, just after Automattic’s CEO and WordPress’s co-founder Matt Mullenweg had finished telling his life story — and the story of WordPress — interviewer Ariel Jolo (who’s also the conference’s founder) asked Mullenweg to explain himself about WP Engine.

“I want to jump back two months ago,” Jolo said. “What happened?”

After that — other than a rather sudden run offstage by Mullenweg about a minute after the question was asked for an unplanned three-minute bathroom break — the conversation went about like anyone who’s been following recent events around Mullenweg and WordPress might expect.

In all, the answer to Jolo’s question took a little over a half-hour to flesh out, but we’re just going to look at the first 11 minutes or so, which in my estimation was longer than Mullenweg needed to hang himself.

“There’s a company called WP Engine which started in like 2013, and for five or six years did things in a really nice way,” Mullenweg began. “They contributed back to WordPress, they were kind of part of everything, but then they got bought by this private equity firm called Silver Lake, this 100 billion dollar firm that buys things, maximizes for profit, then sells it — they flip it.”

Jolo, who quickly proved to be well prepared for this part of the interview, said, “Just to set the record stage straight, at some point you own part of WP Engine or invested…”

“A very small amount; we invested $25,000,” Mullenweg interrupted, “but then when Silver Lake came in they kicked us out. They kind of took over the company.”

“Why did you invest in the company?” Jolo asked. “Twenty-five thousand dollars, you said? That’s pocket change for a big corporation.”

“At the time it was a lot for us and it was a lot for them. We try to support everything in the ecosystem, so I invest in a lot of things in the WordPress ecosystem,” said Mullenweg. “Then, kind of from 2018, they started to get more and more… I would call it evil.”

“You used a stronger word,” Jolo said and paused for a beat, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. “OK, you call them evil. So 2018…”

That’s when Mullenweg needed his bathroom break (“Sorry, I gotta use the restroom real quick. Can I be right back?”) and quickly fled the stage.

I only mention the bathroom break because at that point I wasn’t sure at all whether he really needed to go, or whether he suddenly wanted to talk to a lawyer or somebody he had standing by in the hall, or whether this was his way of ending the interview in a hurry.

When he returned, he said that he must have had “too much coffee or something.”

Mullenweg Unhinged

Who owns what in the WordPress ecosphere is complicated.

WordPress.com is owned by Automattic, the company that owns the WordPress branded hosting service and which also contributes software to the project. Automattic is privately held, and was founded by Mullenweg who is its CEO. Representing the software project itself is the nonprofit WordPress Foundation, which is largely run by Mullenweg, who’s the foundation’s director, with little community input. WordPress.org seems on the surface to represent the project itself (it’s where you go to download WordPress if you want to self-host it, and it’s where the plugin repository is maintained), but is totally controlled by Mullenweg.

The later came to light in the incident that involved the “stronger word” that Jolo mentioned before Mullenweg’s bathroom break. He was referencing a blog piece that Mullenweg posted on September 21 on WordPress.org. In that post, a screed against WP Engine called WP Engine is not WordPress, he likens WP Engine to a cancer.

“This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread,” Mullenweg wrote. “WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is OK to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.”

The word choice, “cancer”, didn’t set well with the open source community.

“Wow. He went there,” open-source tech pundit Steven Vaughan-Nichols wrote in Computerworld on October 16. “The most famous example of cancer and open source being mentioned together is when former Microsoft bigwig Steve Ballmer went off on Linux. Is this really where Mullenweg wanted to go? Yes, it is.”

In his blog post, Mullenweg went on to say that WP Engine’s WordPress offering is “chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off,” which is mostly not true.

I’ve had to work with sites running on WP Engine in the past and I didn’t really care for it much and don’t recommend it. However, it’s pretty much a straightforward WordPress experience, and even if the code has undergone some minor modifications to accommodate WP Engine’s infrastructure, it’s anything but “a cheap knockoff.”

While Mullenweg brings up code modifications and the like under the guise of consumer advocacy, his real gripe is competition, but even there he attacks the company as a self proclaimed Ralph Nader — the consumer advocate who pressured General Motors to end production of its popular Chevrolet Corvair model back in the 1960s due to safety concerns.

His big claim that users are buying into WP Engine because the branding causes them to think they’re dealing directly with WordPress — perhaps somewhat legitimate from an unfair competition perspective — is spun to indicate that somehow hapless users are being harmed in the process (which also goes to reveal his motive for claiming WP Engine’s product to be inferior when it’s basically the same code offered by any WordPress host).

“They started really abusing the WordPress trademark and the WooCommerce trademark, and they create a lot of confusion, where people thought WP Engine was like an official thing from us,” he said. “They got a lot of customers through this, including friends of mine. Even my own mom thought WP Engine was part of us.

“They built a really large business, like 400-500 million dollars in revenue,” he added. “We kept trying to do a deal with them, saying, ‘Hey, license the trademark, do something.’ They refused.”

It was here that Mullenweg mentioned the speech he gave in Portland in September at a WordCamp conference, which led to a cease and desist notice from WP Engine, which was followed by WP Engine suing WordPress.org in federal court. In other words, kinda ground zero in this fight.

“Starting September 17, at WordCamp US in Portland, I sort of gave a presentation. I said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have to kick them out of community, because what they’re doing is actually really harmful to WordPress, and if they continue, it’ll harm the WordPress community and potentially even kill it.'”

“You say that they are infringing trade,” Jolo replied. “Who owns the trademark of WordPress today?”

“The trademark belongs to the WordPress Foundation, then Automattic has a license, and I have a license to the trademark.”

“Anybody else have a license or it’s just…” Jolo said, and stopped. “You personally, Matt Mullenweg…?”

“Automattic has a commercial license and can sub-license it, so it sub-licenses it to companies like Bluehost. We were trying to create a sub-license for WP Engine and they wouldn’t do it, so we decided, ‘OK, well, all right, we’re just gonna start telling your customers what you’re doing.'”

That sounds a bit like a mobster’s way of selling a project to me. Like, “Nice business you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

Locking the Barn After Letting the Horse Escape

If reports from Mullenweg are to be believed, these efforts to drive customers away from WP Engine are having their desired effect. He’s gone so far as to setup a site that keeps track of the number of sites leaving WP Engine.

“What we did is we built something where we just took some public data sources and mapped every single site hosted by WP Engine,” Mullenweg explained. “I think it was like 800,000 that we found, and then we started tracking how many have left. I think that as of yesterday 16,000 have already left, and that number is picking up. So what’s happening is that as our customers [sic] are learning all the bad stuff that WP Engine has been doing, they’re now switching to other hosts. They’re going to Pressable, they’re going to Bluehost, they’re going to SiteGround, they’re going to all the other hosts that are actually part of the WordPress ecosystem.”

Here, interviewer Ariel Jolo took the conversation to the crux of the matter, the point that not only makes Mullenweg’s argument disappears into thin air as far as trademark law is concerned, but which illustrates that where money’s involved (reports are that Mullenweg’s been pushing WP Engine to pay 8% of its revenues in licensing fees) Mullenweg is not interested in a level playing field. (Remember, this is ultimately so WP Engine can use the term “WP”.)

“What’s different from WP Engine,” Jolo asked. “What are they doing that’s different from Bluehost, GoDaddy, or all of these other platforms — companies that use WordPress as a platform to get customers and profit from that?”

“They offer WordPress, but they’re not being confusing about it,” Mullenweg answered. “If you go to GoDaddy you don’t think you’re signing up with WordPress. No one’s ever thought that, it’s called GoDaddy. They are on brand. They spend millions of dollars marketing this whole GoDaddy brand. They offer WordPress, but they don’t call it WordPress hosting. That would make it confusing. Kind of like, you could have a restaurant that sells Coca Cola. You say you sell Coca Cola, but you don’t call it the Coca Cola restaurant.”

I’m pretty sure that in a courtroom that explanation from the witness stand would get at least two or three objections from opposing council. I mention that, because even though this wasn’t a courtroom — meaning there was no objection — like a good lawyer, Jolo the interviewer stayed on point.

“But they are called WP Engine,” Jolo said, “and before this whole thing ‘WP’ wasn’t trademarked, right?”

“WP is still not trademarked,” Mullenweg jumped in. “WP is a very common abbreviation. Lots of people do ‘WP-something’, but there’s a way to use it that is clear that you’re doing something different, and there’s a way to use it that is confusing to people. What we found in surveys, polls, etc. is that a lot of people were confused. If you look at their [evidently WP Engine’s] branding guidelines, they were actually kind of leaning into this. They were actually, I think, actively trying to confuse people, to make people think they were an official WordPress thing.”

Jolo’s next question was also on point, as it shows that Mullenweg is attempting to change rules that he’s already established.

“Since this whole thing started, if you went to the documentation from WordPress it said that ‘WP’ is OK to use free, it’s not trademarked, and now you have changed that.”

“No, it actually says it’s still free to use,” was the answer. “It’s still free to use, but we said don’t do what WP Engine did. So, yeah, still use WP or whatever, but don’t do what WP Engine did.”

I can imagine how that answer would go over in a trademark infringement case. What I can’t imagine, is that the courts would ignore the fact that WP Engine was a big player in the WordPress arena for something like 11 years before Mullenweg threw his hissy fit. It’s kinda late to be locking the door now, isn’t it?

Another Wannabe Open Source Monopoly

At this point we’re only about eight minutes into the half hour in which the interview with Mullenweg specifically dealt with the WordPress/WP Engine fiasco. The rest of the interview was basically just more of the same, with Mullenweg never even coming close to convincing me that he had any kind of legitimate case against WP Engine.

In fact, I now think that if WP Engine were so inclined, it could probably find a lawyer or two who might think they could mount a good case against Mullenweg and his foundation for libel.

During the earlier part of the interview, before the focus turned to WP Engine, Mullenweg commented that because WordPress is open source it belongs to all of us who uses it. That’s true, but that doesn’t seem to be how he actually treats the WordPress ecosphere he’s created. It’s a fiefdom in which he wants to call all the shots, and community only seems to be legitimate to him if it’s a community he can own and monetize.

Editor’s note: The quotes from Mullenweg and Jolo have been lightly edited for readability. The article was also updated on November 17 to better explain who owns and controls the various WordPress organizations and properties. The article originally stated that WordPress.org was controlled by WordPress Foundation, which was not correct.