For some reason, WordPress has decided to incinerate itself. It’s true, but not really true, because WordPress is a million different things. It’s an open source CMS. It’s a hosting provider of said CMS. It’s the flagship product, of sorts, of an extremely successful and (on the surface, at least?) cool looking tech company. It’s also an ecosystem of service providers and product companies that aren’t affiliated with that tech company, and that’s where it’s all decided to come apart.
Basically, the people (person, really) who control WordPress have a problem with how much WPEngine, the very profitable company that hosts this website, contributes back to the open-source WordPress project. After that, everyone’s opinion sort of goes into a black box and there’s copyright infringement accusations and plugin seizing and all kinds of nonsense, but it all sort of stems from the feeling Automattic (and more specifically, Matt Mullenweg) have that WPEngine is free-riding off an open source project that Automattic effectively leads development of.
Are they right?
Not even a little! I really, really, truly do not care about the financial specifics of the slowly advancing WordPress project, or who makes money from it. That’s the beauty of it being open-source! If I felt like things were moving too slowly, I could go work on it, or give someone money to work on it, or whatever, but that would be entirely up to me. As it happens, I feel (or felt) fine about WordPress until this entire thing blew up, so like Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard, I do not care.
Unfortunately, now I have to care for several reasons.
- This site is hosted by WPEngine, an entirely unsexy and uninteresting IT provider that has generally served me well over the years here and elsewhere. Whether they like it or not, they are now in a protracted legal and PR war with Matt Mullengweg, and thus WordPress.org, which does not appear to have any sort of governance outside of doing whatever Mullenweg says.
- I left WordPress once, but came back years ago and was planning on never switching again. If for some reason this place starts to fall apart for reasons beyond my control, I might have to rebuild all of this on another CMS. Please… don’t make me figure out Ghost or something, I’m old now, everything takes longer.
Annoying logistics aside, the real bummer is Mullenweg, the heart and soul of a company that represents so many cool things on the internet, either (a) going completely insane, or (b) taking off his “I love the internet mask” to reveal the same egomaniacal tech bro persona ruining everything else in tech. I guess I’m rooting for the second one just because I have a hard time rooting for the existence of mental health problems in a person, but man, that’s a depressing outcome. Do they not have enough money over there? Can you not just continue to be profitable and make cool things? Automattic runs the journal I keep track of my kids childhood with, for God’s sake. Somebody take the wheel over there, and fast.