WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this is about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment is the basis of our democracy. It is inconvenient and important. It’s also short, so I’m going to quote the First Amendment in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This means that, with rare exceptions, the government cannot tell you not to say something.
Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach
The First Amendment says I should be able to state facts and my opinions about WP Engine. However, the New York Times is not required or compelled to publish them in their newspaper and distribute them to their subscribers.
WP Engine is free to publish whatever GPL code they want to the world. WordPress.org should not be compelled to distribute it or provide it free hosting.
Quiet For A While
After this post, I will refrain from personally commenting on the WP Engine case until a judge rules on the injunction. I will continue to exercise my First Amendment rights to promote others’ speech. However, I hope others speak up on our battle with WP Engine, and I will boost their speech wherever I can.
WP Engine’s GPL code should remain accessible, but platforms like WordPress.org have the right to choose what they host or promote.
I also understand why you’ve decided to hold back from personal commentary on the case. It shows a lot of restraint and respect for the legal process. Still, I hope this sparks a deeper conversation in the community. This issue isn’t just about legalities—it’s also about core values like free expression and the open-source spirit that make platforms like WordPress thrive.
Wishing you the best as you navigate this, and I know many in the community will continue to support and amplify this important discussion.
I hope that once everything gets sorted out, WordPress continues to thrive as a platform for creators. Your contributions have been immense, and these recent challenges shouldn’t overshadow the years of positive impact you’ve made.
I’m not sure why so many people seem to want businesses and their representatives to stay silent, and treat the critique of bad practices as “unprofessional” or “unsportsmanlike.” For a space to flourish there needs to be critique, there needs to be an open discussion.
You’re giving Elon Musk vibes when he went to the far right.
Hah! I don’t endorse candidates publicly but my donation history is pretty clear.
Matt to WordPress is what Linus Torvalds is to Linux Kernel. He sets the direction and is acting the central decision-maker. He is the arbiter. He is unique and has his own unique visionary imprint. I do not see WordPress without Matt and I do not see anyone come even close to filling his shoes.
Good luck!
I can speak on the battle with WP Engine, but it would not be positive to you. Which is not the same as being positive to WP Engine.
You are just doing the job of making them look like the good side of this battle yourself.
I admire your courage Matt.
In this regard, I guess you will be remembered as the guy who showed all the actual IT community that savage businesses shouldn’t be acceptable in this so called “developed world.”
Way to go, Matt. You have my support. We can argue with opinions all day long, but never with the facts. In this case, you have (and own) the facts. Best wishes.
I completely agree with you and have been following this situation from the start. The WP Engine has generated millions upon millions in revenue, yet it does very little to support WordPress compared to the countless developers and contributors who work for free, build essential plugins, and support code updates.
Sometimes it is better (although incredibly difficult) to just let things work out through the courts. When we are speaking on things that are being argued in court, due to our passion we can inadvertently say something that can be detrimental. Deep breaths and try and keep the stress under control. Never let the bad in life, change the good in you. Peace, Matt!
Generals throughout history proceed with wars, whether in defense or aggression, because they believe the collateral damage is worth the perceived gain. And so often, we look back and ask ourselves could we have resolved such conflicts without so much loss.
Matt, I fully understand your view and I totally support it as I was in similar situations before in my corporate work – so I know you’re doing the right thing!
I see how the community is pushing back (by “pushing back”, I mean deliberately and openly bullying and insulting you), so I just want you to please stay strong.
There are 1000’s of people like me, but we get downvoted to infinity if we say anything positive about your position or try to explain your point of view.
Please don’t surrender because I know WordPress will pass this hiccup and rise higher than it ever has, and will set the right expectations for new developers, so that they know they have to support the platform. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing, Matt. While I would love to hear more from you, it’s best to keep comments on WPE private so that WPE have no bullets against you.
As my previous comments, I appreciate what you’ve done for WordPress and hope to see a win-win situation. Hopefully WPE settles.
Also, WordPress isn’t the first to enforce your trademark. Moodle does the same and don’t allow any non-partners to use the word, Moodle Hosting.
God Bless, bro 🙂
Hi Matt.
WordPress is a valuable platform, and as the co-creator, founder of the Foundation, and trustee of the trademark, you wear many hats that are confusing to those looking in; you are therefore the perfect target and scapegoat for attacks to destabilise the platform. Furthermore, any attacks and conflicts can be monetised by others.
If the New York Times are preventing the correct information from being published and you suspect them of controlling a biased narrative, then sue them. However, be careful; depleting resources is another tactic that bad actors rely on. Joe Public is entitled to be confused, but anyone publishing inaccurate information, whether mistakenly or not, needs to be held accountable. Omission of facts and withholding information are equally relevant.
I’m fairly sure that the 20-year-old version of you coding away didn’t plan to be vilified and targeted like this when you were 40. I suspect control of assets and monetary gain is the goal here. I speak with some bias/experience here as I am involved in defending my late father’s assets and recognise some of the tactics. However, I am dealing with actual fraudsters and criminals, but I digress.
As I said in a previous comment, don’t fight the straw men battles designed to waste your time/vilify you. I’d also make any lawyers understand what their jobs are. Legally setting up public charity in 2010 should be providing you and your 2005 company some protection.
Disagree with calls to “take the high road”. ACF sent out an email to all their “pro” users, calling Matt out by name. The title of the email was “Security incident” and it was no such thing—just an excuse to slam Matt in a mass email.
Wp Engine is such a garbage company, and I’m stunned it has taken this long for someone to call for a boycott. I remember when a critical mass of developers had to demand the discontinuation of Internet Explorer 6, and I think of WP Engine as a similar problem. Clients just choose them, thinking they’re the standard and this makes life hell for the developers.
I could go on and on about WP Engine and how terrible they are, but just a few points:
1. They aren’t a real hosting company. They lease VPS from Linode and resell it at 1000% markup. Their “tech support” doesn’t know anything and when something goes wrong at the server level and you open a ticket with them, they likely just open a corresponding ticket with Linode.
2. They over-throttle everything. Dev sites barely load in WP Engine. If you’re SSHed into a server, they’ll boot you after 5 miinutes—sometimes in the middle of a process or transfer.
3. They over-cache everything—even on dev environments. Their extremely aggressive caching makes it prohibitively difficult to develop in their dev environment.
4. They will go in and delete plugins from your installation, and sometimes they won’t even tell you. If you ask where your plugin went, they’ll say it’s on their blacklist. They don’t even check to see if this broke your site or not.
5. Their chat support is full of flunkies who are glib, flippant, who will hang up on the chat or just disappear mid-conversation.
6. Their migration scheme obviously doesn’t work because I’ve inherited countless projects where the live site had links or assets pointing to xxx.wpengine.com and not the prod domain.
This review from over a decade ago identifies a number of other problems with the company:
https://www.searchlogistics.com/learn/reviews/wp-engine/
+ They pay hefty commissions for positive reviews and punish negative ones (like the above review itself), creating the false impression that WP Engine is liked and reputable.
+ Their sites don’t actually load quickly and throw 502 errors all the time (I have just experienced this, again, this week. All the throttling, blacklisting and caching is to save them money on resources and does not translate to high performance).
In the above article, the reviewer takes his problems all the way to the co-founder, who promises to make it right, doesn’t, ignores him, and eventually terminates his account, then takes his money anyway. This is a scam operation. The fish rots from the head down. WP Engine will eventually collapse because it’s built on false promises and garbage service. And when it does, do you think this company will prioritize you, making sure you can get your data off their servers before it all comes tumbling down? They don’t even protect your data now! They turn off revisions and don’t even make this clear to the customer until they need those revisions! They manually delete customer data without warning or permission! In the end, a lot of people are going to lose their website, WP Engine will be dissolved and there will be no recourse. Mark my words.
When I’m contracting for a company, I often have no choice but to deal with this company. As a freelancer, I have a long-standing policy that I won’t work with WP Engine, and that moving to a new hosting company is a condition of me taking the job. I would strongly urge all devs to support Matt in his noble effort and to join the boycott of WP Engine. I am willing to donate my time an energy to this cause if I can. They have to go!
I just hope I’m a few months these things don’t negatively impact the health of the overall community and platform, or at least they can heal from this. A lot of us, our livelihoods are pretty wrapped up in this little thing called WordPress
Hi Matt,
Your creed really strikes a chord with me, especially at this time:
“I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.”
COMMUNICATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
I know how stressful things have been lately for you, but I wish you the best!
Maybe like me, RedwoodSec has tried humanizing Elon Musk’s gradual retreat to an absolute corner, and wondering how it might have been different if he knew how to back down more gracefully. We lose worse by fighting dirty, in all the ways that matter…
I fell fully in love with WordPress in 2018, enough that I never did switch to flatfile CMS when Gutenberg was finding its feet… I just finished converting a senior dev to the Gutenberg way, funny enough, promising him that it’s worth every transitory discomfort.
Now, I find my heart actually racing when I realize that my trust in the WP ecosystem fundamentally depended on my faith that you were just a very nice person, who could handle serving as this critical node. I imagine it’s an awful lot of weight to have almost half the world take your kindness for granted (enough that they run critical processes through emails from your website) but there has to be a better way of addressing the weight of this complacency.
This unusually successful community does not need to find its future path through an anarchic upheaval. Too many bit-players like me will be shaken off, because hunkering down for this war will actually require some coding and sys-admin ability, and the risks of committing clearly outweigh the benefits. I’m not sure what a reasoned de-escalation will look like, but I sincerely pray you find the grace and the vision to effect one.
It’s interesting how many different folks have spoken out so strongly against your practices, despite you explaining your side of the issue. I personally don’t understand the issues involved. Good luck!
I honestly respect both platforms as I’m sure most of us developers use both WordPress and have at least 1 site if not all on WP Engine. But, WordPress is your baby dude and you aren’t going to just let someone take advantage of you especially when they are using your name in their name. I don’t want to judge anyone here but I just wish WP engine would focus on trying to partner with you rather than trying to just be a competitor. We all know what happened to Apple and Fortnite l which it looks like Apple had the final say on their own App Store. Personally I was surprised when WP Engine started buying all of the plugins like ACF and the author name switched to WP engine. But to find out they did all of these buy outs and didn’t contribute anything back to the real WordPress is very sad. There’s a common phrase, give a little, take a little and wp engine is taking A LOT. Hang in there dude
The irony in all of this is how often companies and individuals profit off someone else’s work without fairly sharing the benefits, only to face backlash when the original creator pushes back.
A perfect analogy is a woman pitching an idea at a meeting—she’s met with indifference, yet others quietly start implementing her idea without giving her credit. At the next meeting, a man pitches the same idea, and suddenly the company invests in it, markets it, and makes millions. The woman who originally pitched it is left with nothing.
It’s a prime example of the frustration that arises when original contributors are overlooked, while others benefit from their ideas and hard work.
I am not a yes-man. For instance I don’t want the government anywhere near the OS for age gating or any other purposes because they will pass some laws like “cryptography is munitions” or grandfather existing companies harming new ones or any other number of things slowing progress. However what you say here about non-contributing large companies that want to use free software but actually might not even agree with the principals and don’t contribute is spot on. I am well aware of the time and cost that can be associated with legal battles. Thank you and good luck!