Mullenweg.wtf

After months of lawsuits, injunctions, plugin disputes, and public sparring between Automattic and WP Engine, WordPress is showing its first sustained market share decline in years.

Newly unsealed passages cited in WP Engine’s complaint allege that Automattic categorized hosting companies as “friends,” “would-be friends,” and “charlatans,” and planned to “steal every single” site from those who refused a trademark deal.

In its trademark filing, Automattic lists the word “automatic” as a disclaimer, meaning an unregistrable word, “such as wording or a design that doesn’t indicate the source of your goods or services or is otherwise merely descriptive of them,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

WordPress cannot—must not—continue at the whims of one centralized company or person. We’ve seen, time and again, the problems this can cause the project.

Mullenweg.wtf is on hiatus. This website will remain online as a record of Mullenweg's unhinged attack on WordPress and its community. The WP Engine vs Mullenweg court case will drag on beyond 2026. I will return should anything spicy occur before the final verdict.

Matt Mullenweg commented that the conflict he initiated could eventually lead to the closure of WordPress.org. He claimed that the only way to end the conflict was for WP Engine to drop their lawsuit, which would have the effect of enabling Mullenweg to resume his campaign to drive WP Engine out of business.

WordPress co-founder Matthew Mullenweg on Saturday deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of five members of the WordPress community, and justified his actions by saying it will encourage them to fork the open source content management system.

This is tiresome, folks. It was tiresome when I was a part of the community. It was tiresome when Matt was building dramas on my back. It was tiresome when his fanboys joined right in.

Automattic noted it would focus its open source hours on “security and critical updates”. The other hours would be redirected to for-profit projects like WordPress.com. This means that the community will be expected to take up the slack if it wants WordPress to improve.

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members, two of whom he says planned to spearhead a new fork of the open source WordPress project.

Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has described Matt Mullenweg’s move to shut down WordPress’s sustainability team as “bizarrely heinous behavior.”

Automattic will only contribute 45 hours each week to ‘match’ the amount of time spent by third-party hosting platform WP Engine.

I’m very open to suggestions. Should we stop naming releases after jazz musicians and name them after Drake lyrics? Eliminate all dashboard notices? Take over any plugins into core? Change from blue to purple?

I’ve often considered how the WordPress world “worked” unhealthy. I’ve spoken to many slightly outside of our industry over the past months about what was happening and several people, independent of each other, described WordPress as “a cult” to me. And I understand why.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on Friday announced a shutdown of almost all services on WordPress.org, the open source project site that’s the home of the software, plugins, and the WordPress community, but was unclear on when the shutdown would end.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg expresses "disgust" at having to provide "free labor" to WP Engine, calls court decision a bad precedent.

The court determined that WP Engine’s evidence of harm, including the loss of a $40,000 client contract, was persuasive. Defendants countered with four arguments but “None is persuasive.” The court accepted that WPEngine will suffer irreparable harm without preliminary injunctive relief.

Automattic is ordered to undo several of the actions of its CEO Matt Mullenweg in its ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. “It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this," Mullenweg said in a community Slack message.

Mullenweg and co ordered to restore WP Engine's access to wordpress.org and stop touching WordPress installations

Court grants WP Engine's request for a preliminary injunction, handing Mullenweg and Automattic an across the board defeat

Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg also have to quit interfering with WP Engine’s ACF plugin.

The ruling orders Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access and control of ACF on WordPress.org.

Judge is inclined to grant preliminary injunction against Automattic, but WP Engine’s fight isn’t over yet

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said she was “inclined to grant some sort of injunction” but described WP Engine’s proposed order as “exceedingly vague,” making it difficult to enforce.

Tim Brugman, a Full-Stack Developer, pointed out, “A8c’s _new_ SCF plugin deactivates Advanced Custom Fields PRO when it is activated. An action that is not allowed by the dot org Plugin Handbook.”

An unofficial transcript of the WP Engine v Automattic & Matt Mullenweg preliminary injunction hearing on November 26, 2024.

Matt Mullenweg’s latest move in his battle with WP Engine raises questions about an open-source project seemingly endorsing the forking and redistribution of premium plugins without compensation or acknowledgment, potentially violating the GPL.

ACF Pro is now available for download from WordPress.org under the name Secure Custom Fields. I take a look at this new addition to the WordPress plugin directory and wonder if this is a fork or a nulled plugin?

The drastic actions taken by Matt Mullenweg have caused immense stress and anxiety within the community. Even those who agree with Mullenweg in principle often find his actions confusing, at best, chaotic, at worst.

WP Engine escalated its Federal complaint by citing Automattic’s publication of the WP Engine Tracker website as evidence of intent to harm WP Engine and exposing customers to potential cybercrimes. The updated complaint incorporates recent actions by Mullenweg to further strengthen their case.

The inclusion of thousands of domains that no longer use WordPress raises significant questions about how long identifiable information about WordPress installations has been collected and stored.

WP Engine has already alleged that Automattic's conduct amounts to attempted extortion, libel, interference with contractual relations, computer fraud and abuse, and unfair competition, among others.

The amended complaint, which now spans 144 pages—up from its original 62—alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg are using the WordPress trademarks to block WP Engine from the WordPress community as a means to “extort monopolistic pricing,” violating United States antitrust laws.

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.

In an ironic twist to the ongoing dispute between Automattic and WP Engine, a newly published website on WPEngineTracker.com is displaying a protest message against CEO Matt Mullenweg.

Veteran WordPress core committers and contributors have described a “culture of fear” within the project, driven by co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s “outsized control” and the potentially career-ending consequences of opposing him. Many say the lack of formal governance has left them vulnerable to the whims of Mullenweg, whose recent actions have raised questions about the future direction of WordPress.

While data about WP Engine websites can be gathered from public sources, it's not clear whether the .csv file of WP Engine websites was obtained from a public source. There's some speculation that the data may have come from non-public WordPress.org access logs rather than DNS queries or a website crawler.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my WordPress installation to see how difficult it would be to actually use a different API endpoint entirely instead of the default WordPress.org site.

In this video I am explaining the drama, but I am also sharing my opinion on how I think the WordPress founder is a bit hypocritical in some areas, and I offer some solutions for a better WordPress future.

The first comment notes that the counter is incorrect because it claims to count websites that have left WP Engine but that it should be saying how many domains have left. The reason is because of the “websites” listed redirect to one domain, which means that the count is inflated.

This post is a response to “Defending Open Source: Protecting the Future of WordPress,” which was recently published on Automattic’s website as an explanation of the company’s ongoing dispute with WP Engine. I feel it’s important to issue a critical reading of Automattic’s post, as it doesn’t seem to offer much of a serious or objective examination of the issues at hand.

To take Mullenweg’s argument about “bastardized simulacra” to its logical end, Mullenweg must believe that millions of customers have been wrong all along—they’ve somehow been duped. The product they’re using isn’t WordPress, even though that’s what they’re buying. And, what’s more, the changes WP Engine has made are so bad, so egregious, that virtually every major WordPress host does the exact same thing… including Automattic’s WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP products, which both limited revisions before Mullenweg’s September 21 blog post, and all heavily modify WordPress through custom code, whether direct or via mu-plugins.

This new legal filing makes it crystal clear that Mullenweg has sole discretion over who can access it. If he’s ever upset with you for any reason, he can turn off your access or take over your plugin. I think that should deeply frighten anyone using WordPress today.

I have personally been blocked on X/Twitter by Matt, Automattic, and by the WordPress account itself. Sadly, it's become somewhat of a badge of honour, meaning at least we went out standing up for what we believed in instead of staying silent.

This very public spat has raised concerns among developers across the WordPress ecosystem who now worry whether they, too, could get cut off from WordPress. But Mullenweg doesn’t seem too worried about the impact.

The response, though, was beyond the pale. I can’t even link to it, it was so vile and hateful. Matt (or someone working for Matt but I assume not) took the post of a little community of six hundred Twitter followers and little more than 1,000 people globally and viciously attacked it in overtly sexual and sexist language.

After 159 Automattic employees took the first deal, which included six months of severance, Mullenweg posted another alignment offer on Automattic Slack on October 17. This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.

The ongoing dispute between WordPress and WP Engine has led to significant disruptions in the plugin ecosystem.

The utter hypocrisy of Matt Mullenweg’s actions isn’t really unsurprising to anyone who has watched Automattic for the last decade or more but it is my final straw.

A source familiar with Sydney WordCamp's operations told The Register that volunteers saw the takedown request as a personal threat – as non-compliance with the request would have led to them being forced from the event's organizing team.

WordPress.org is Matt Mullenweg’s personal website [source link in article]. Matt is also the owner of our largest competitor, WooCommerce. The conflict of interest was always there, but in the weeks following WordCamp US 2024, Matt crossed several lines that make it crystal clear that he has no intentions of running WordPress.org as an open and fair platform.

One of the world's biggest web publishing platforms - used by a large chunk of the internet - is locked in a spat which is affecting thousands of businesses worldwide.

Matt Mullenweg portrayed himself as a victim in his dispute with WP Engine, claiming in a tweet and blog post that they are ‘trying to curtail’ his free speech. Social media responses ranged from polite debunking of his First Amendment claim to accusations of hypocrisy.

On October 12th we sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic and WordPress.com regarding the unauthorized use of the WP Fusion trademark on .com's private mirror of the WordPress plugin repository. Automattic has responded and agreed to take down the listing. Here's a bit of background on why we filed the C&D, and the outcome.

Within the hour he announced that he had just spoken to the leaker and accepted their resignation. Within minutes a post to the Access-Checklist P2 would reveal the identity to the entire company.

Automattic’s actions also echo a supply chain attack in some ways. In a plugin directory, it’s considered a supply chain attack if an actor silently takes over a plugin and ships functional changes without disclosure, which is exactly what happened in this case. Automattic didn’t merely take ownership of the ACF plugin: it shipped smaller business logic changes which customers were not notified about. As a result, hundreds of sites were broken.

WP Engine claims it’s facing ‘multiple forms of immediate irreparable harm’ following Mullenweg’s public campaign against the company.

Following the recent ban and ACF to Secure Custom Fields fork/takeover incident, some plugin authors have announced their decision to remove their plugins from the WordPress.org repository.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg offered employees nine months of pay if they weren’t on board with his WP Engine dispute.

I'm #teamWordPress and #teamautomattician all day, every day. But I still believe in the creed, even though I believe Matt Mullenweg has perverted it into an unrecognizable jumble of BS to enrich himself on the backs of underpaid staff and unpaid volunteers.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made another buyout offer this week, and threatened employees who speak to the press with termination.

A timeline of key events in the dispute between WordPress (or, better to say Matt Mullenweg) and WP Engine, documenting important moments and changes in their relationship.

Wordpress and Automattic started what was initially a fairly reasonable complaint against WP Engine but what has since turned in to an absolute mess putting the entire Wordpress ecosystem at stake.

WordPress has been the most popular content management system for years — and WP Engine was one of the most popular WordPress hosting services around. Not long ago, everyone was happy. Now, it's a miserable open-source business war. What happened?

From investments and trademarks to lawsuits and bans, this timeline highlights the key events that have shaken the WordPress ecosystem and put its open-source future in jeopardy.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has weaponized WordPress.org and appropriated the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin from its creators. This action sets a dangerous precedent, and violates the integrity and security of the platform.

As Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson feud over FOSS, community worries about the fallout

Have you suffered financial losses due to the financial fallout from this WP Engine vs Automattic dispute? Please post your details here so we can add it to the tracker!

Now, more than 150 employees have left WordPress’s parent company Automattic (nearly 10% of the workforce) after Mullenweg offered buyouts to anyone who disagreed with his approach with WP Engine.

According to an internal blog post a source shared with TechCrunch, Automattic was crafting a plan to get significantly stricter about trademark enforcement across WordPress and its e-commerce platform WooCommerce since at least the beginning of the year. Separate sources have confirmed the authenticity of the post.

WordPress's latest move of hijacking the ACF plugin firmly solidified that it can't be trusted, regardless of the reasoning behind it.

In late September 2024, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, started a public dispute with hosting provider WP Engine, calling the company “a cancer to WordPress.” He accused WP Engine of not contributing enough to the WordPress ecosystem and profiting off of trademark confusion. The story only got stranger from there…

As part of Matt’s increasing irresponsible and irrational behaviour, WordPress took over the extremely popular plugin, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), renaming it “Secure Custom Fields” (SCF). With it, they stole years of reputation, good reviews and most importantly, trust from ACF.

Every time Matt Mullenweg has lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner.

Here’s the kicker: Any fork, especially if WP Engine backs it, will be a win for Matt. It means they’re finally contributing. Since it’s GPL their modifications are available to everyone else, including Automattic.

Just when the community thought things couldn’t get more disruptive – because they’re already mighty disruptive – they have.

So while I always try to keep things from getting personal, I'll break practice to make this plea: Matt, don't turn into a mad king.

Over the last few weeks, the web has watched in horror as Matt Mullenweg has "gone nuclear" after starting his own personal crusade against WP Engine. At this point, it doesn't really matter whether Matt had a valid point or not, because in the process he's executed a supply chain attack, thrown WordPress users under a bus and then proceeded to lock core contributors out.

I am officially terminating my core contributions and involvement with the WordPress project. This project was something I poured hundreds of hours into and it greatly pains me to just stop here. Anyone is free to lead the project again in the #core-fields channel of Slack. I am done making excuses for Matt's actions and will not associate myself with core any longer.

We were saddened and appalled by Matt Mullenweg’s actions this morning appropriating the Advanced Custom Fields plugin that our ACF team has been actively developing for the WordPress community since 2011.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg calls it “a rare and unusual situation” resulting from WP Engine’s legal moves.

Several people who were banned at the same time are more important to the community. Having their voices taken away in this way is more damaging. I guess this is the start of the fallout from going nuclear that was talked about at the beginning of the fight.

One way or another, letting go of power is the only cure for tyranny. It’s not too late for Matt to embark on a path to deeper growth as a leader.

In a word, it's a godawful mess. And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not. Instead of looking like a hero who is protecting a community, Matt looks like a multimillionaire corporate executive who has come to see a nonprofit, open-source community as an extension of himself, with his own needs or desires as the only criteria for taking action. It's not good for WordPress or the open-source community and ecosystem as a whole, and it is unlikely to end well.

In a public beef with a major client, co-founder Matt Mullenweg is showing the world that he’s one of the pettiest CEOs out there.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg recently started a crusade against WP Engine, a profit-driven company based on WordPress’s open source platform, which has evolved into a lawsuit that could blow a hole in the internet.

Developers have expressed concerns over relying on commercial open source products related to WordPress, especially when their access can go away quickly.

WordPress.org users are forced to confirm they are not "affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise" before registering a new account or logging in.

Matt Mullenweg has said things that are misleading and in other cases appear to be outright false. One of his own lawyers is disagreeing with him over fundamental issue (it isn’t the only issue they disagree with him). Was the trademark donated to the WordPress Foundation or not?

But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to retain WordPress' shine of open source, but also be able to extract their pound of flesh from any competitor that might appear, whenever they see fit. Screw that.

I think I can get behind the general idea that some companies need a little prodding to pull their weight to something like the Five for the Future campaign. Encouraging developers to pull their projects from a company and employees to jeopardize their careers? Eek.

We're getting some feelings out about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg vs WP Engine drama

That brings us roughly to the present as I write, and a new wrinkle in the story. It seem like Mullenweg is now targeting Advanced Custom Fields (ACF).

In a follow-up statement to CNBC, a WP Engine spokesperson said Mullenweg’s antics had “harmed not just our company, but the entire WordPress ecosystem.” The spokesperson added that Mullenweg’s “conduct over the last ten days has exposed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy” the trust of the WordPress community.

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said on Thursday that 159 employees (roughly 8.4% of staff) accepted a severance package that the company had offered to those who disagreed with his direction of WordPress and his handling of the tussle with web hosting provider WP Engine.

And honestly, I can’t help but feel like it’s only gotten uglier and harder to defend. WordPress and its parent company, Automattic, are still fighting with WP Engine, and it hasn’t gotten any nicer.

The lines between the WordPress open-source project, the nonprofit backing it, and the commercial arm owned by Automattic are blurring.

TL;DR: Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, co-founder of WordPress, and single point of failure for WordPress.org is trying to bully me with legal threats over my commentary regarding his recent behavior.

After a brief reprieve, WP Engine has been banned again from WordPress.org

In an interview with The Repository, Mullenweg said Automattic now wanted more than 8% of WP Engine’s annual revenue, or an equivalent of resources invested into the WordPress project—or a combination of both—in exchange for the use of its “WordPress” and “WooCommerce” trademarks.

Matt Mullenweg’s unquestioned access to infrastructure and resources across the WordPress project, the WordPress Foundation and Automattic inc, which owns and operates the infrastructure the project depends on — in addition to the actions he has taken in the past week and earlier this year — is something that I would consider to be a grave security concern and the largest existential threat to the WordPress project itself.

MM (Matt) reached out wanting to clarify some things about the WordPress vs WP Engine drama, so I had him come over to my studio to talk it out

I believe that if WordPress is to survive, let alone thrive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed from all forms of official WordPress leadership, as expediently as possible.

The WordPress Foundation is the nonprofit which manages the WordPress code and ecosystem. Until this blowup started, it was widely believed to maintain the wordpress.org website (the domain, however, is owned by Matt Mullenweg rather than by the Foundation), which acts as the central repository for all updates, themes, and plugins, as well as managing the WordPress documentation and maintaining a large discussion forum for WordPress devs and users. The Foundation is administered by a board of three people, one of whom is Matt Mullenweg.

ThePrimeagen: he didn't answer, ThePrimeagen: i pressed him

The dispute between Automattic and WP Engine has intensified. Both companies have issued Cease and Desist orders to each other, leading WP Engine to remove the news feed from the WordPress admin dashboard. In response, WordPress.org has now banned WP Engine from utilizing any of its resources.

WP Engine must win this legal battle for the continued health and vibrancy of the WordPress project.

We can do better. We should do better. Never, ever, should end users be burdened by the result of a legal dispute, especially if it is done by choice in a (hopefully futile) attempt to swing the dispute in the favour of one of the parties involved. For the continued health of the WordPress project, WP Engine should win.

The co-founder of WordPress steps in it, repeatedly, in a forest-for-the-trees fight with WP Engine that makes me feel sad for the open internet.

Today WP Engine sent what is called a “cease and desist” letter to Automattic demanding that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine. In response to misinformation he has disseminated about the letter, its purpose, and who it is directed at, we are making the full letter available here

In case you missed it, WordCamp US 2024 ended on a very wild note, with Matt singling out WP Engine as enemy number one. To be clear: the main takeaway here is that Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, is very concerned. If you didn’t get that feeling from his presentation, then you missed the point of his speech. And it’s not your fault, because the speech missed the mark.

And that brings me to what is perhaps Matt’s greatest blunder; in criticizing a competitor, Matt is going to bring everyone’s attention to WordPress being Matt’s personal fiefdom.