I never would have thought that I would agree with David Heinemeier Hansson ever again – on anything, really. But in the case of Automattic vs. WPEngine, I agree with at least some of his points:

And yet, I can see where this is coming from. Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little.

That’s the deal. That’s open source. I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations that might suddenly apply, if you strike it rich using the software. Then the license is meaningless, the clarity all muddled, and certainty lost.

Look, Automattic can change their license away from the GPL any time they wish. The new license will only apply to new code, though, and WP Engine, or anyone else, are eligible to fork the project. That’s what happened with Redis after Redis Labs dropped their BSD license and went with a commercial source-available alternative. Valkey was forked from the last free Redis version, and now that’s where anyone interested in an open-source Redis implementation is likely to go.

I think Matt Mullenweg was allowed to reign as a dictator over Wordpress for far too long. Either no one ever thought about him and Automattic “going rogue”, or they did not care – or they approve his actions. No matter why no one acted in the past, but after all that happened now, I think it is very clear that allowing Matt to be CEO of Automattic and in charge of the Foundation was a pretty bad idea right from the start.

If you ask me, three things need to happen to prevent further harm to the project and brand “Wordpress.org”:

  • Matt Mullenweg needs to resign from the Wordpress foundation and a new board needs to be elected by the Wordpress community. He must not be eligible as candidate, as long as he has such a major conflict of interest being affiliated with Automattic.
  • Automattic needs to be untangled from the Wordpress project and wordpress.org. Any domains and infrastructure to run the project and further development needs to be transferred to the foundation.
  • Automattic should be treated as anybody else when it comes to branding and marketing. After a grace period they should cease to use wordpress.com amd use their own domain name. The domain could then forward to wordpress.org. This would eventually strengthen the foundation and the project itself.

The Wordpress foundation probably needs to be restructured entirely to ensure that core developers and community have a strong, guaranteed voice when it comes to code of conduct, future development and to have a clear course of action going forward. Last but not least it needs to find a way to fund itself, apart from depending solely or mainly on Automattic.