What the hell is happening at Automattic (part 2)?

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, doesn’t blog much these days. So it’s always interesting to see a post from him pop up in my feed reader:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually, they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. 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.

“Cancer”? Blimey.

This very site used to run on WordPress and WP Engine, before my move to Ghost. I had mixed feelings about WP Engine — my site was rock solid, as were the student sites we ran on it. (It was one of the few affordable hosts we found that could handle dozens of students working on the backend at the same during our live UK Budget coverage). But it felt very impersonal, and there was a constant drumbeat of upsell messages.

I wasn’t sad to leave.

The WP Engine strikes back

However, they haven’t exactly taken the criticism lying down, and are telling quite a story, through a cease and desist letter they’ve published:

Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses.

Somewhere in the back of my head, WordPress is the scrappy blog platform that rode the crest of the wave of Six Apart’s Movable Type pricing disaster back in the mid-2000s. But these are deeply-VC-backed businesses, turning over 100s of millions in revenue.

These are big businesses fighting over who makes the most money from the software that powers a ludicrously large percentage of the web.

Fight for your VC masters

Why is the CEO of Automattic getting so punchy online? It’s the second time this year. I can’t help wondering if that big VC backing I mentioned is a factor here. VCs don’t invest for the fun of it. They want a return. And that means a profit-making business, or a business they can sell or float, or even a mix of these. Automattic and WP Engine are big companies, with lots invested in them. And those backers want their reward.

This is a fight about who gets to make the most out of the WordPress ecosystem. And I worry that much smaller hosts and businesses are going to get trampled by the WordPress kaiju fighting.