An argument between one man and one company could threaten large parts of the world-wide web. That might sound like hyperbole, but it will make sense. I hope.
It’s one of those niche disagreements that gets mostly ignore by anyone not in the trade, save the odd tech reporter, but which has the capacity to blow up in a bad way and cause lots of collateral damage. In true geek fashion though, there’s an RSS feed available so you can follow the story as it progresses (although it is on hiatus, until the court cases moves on).
The short version: Matt Mullenweg, owner of Automattic and wordpress.com, accused a company called WP Engine of not pulling its weight when it comes to funding development of WordPress.
WordPress is… complicated. It’s an open source blogging and (it thinks) content management system. Being open source you can’t package it for sale but you can provide chargeable services, which is what wordpress.com does. So does WP Engine.
There’s a version you can download to set up your own site – such as this one – or even your own multi-site platform. That software is available on wordpress.org.
The kicker is that wordpress.org is owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation, which was formed to own and manage the trademarks of WordPress project.
Scores on the doors
For those of us who self-host, wordpress.org is a resource of plugins, advice, tutorials and support. And Mullenweg has threatened to close it down. He owns the domain, remember?
According to W3Techs (as I write, and updated daily):
WordPress is used by 61.3% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 43.5% of all websites.
Apparently, that’s around 22.52% of the top one million websites 1. That’s a lot of websites, and they won’t all be the hosted variety.
If wordpress.org closes it would be like having your legs taken from under you by a typical Vinnie Jones tackle. It’ll definitely hurt, especially in the short term. Imagine a world in which wordpress.org closes, and the next week a security-critical update to WordPress is made available. Will the automatic updates work?
WordPress will stay open source… but how do you access it? A whole new ecosystem would need to be built. Unless everyone migrates to wordpress.com, of course. Other hosting platforms are available, but if you want WordPress, go WordPress.
Forking
WordPress itself started as a ‘fork’ of a package called b2/cafelog. This is allowed; any open source program can be forked. There was a hint of a suggestion of doing the same for WordPress… at which point Mullenweg deleted the .org accounts of five people he thought most likely to do so, one of whom hadn’t done anything with WordPress for over five years.
Mullenweg also appropriated a plugin owned by WP Engine, Advanced Custom Fields and released it as Secure Custom Fields – but in a way that is contrary to the rules drawn up by WordPress(.org).
The whole thing is getting messy. And it creates a problem, because there is no comparable platform out there.
I’ve used several, open source or proprietary CMS platforms in my time; Ektron, Joomla!, Drupal, Microsoft CMS, Umbraco. None offer the simplicity of WordPress. Nor the complexity – WordPress really is all things to all people. To say it has helped democratise the web isn’t really an understatement.
So where are we all going to go now?