The story so far: Since September 21, a dispute between Matt Mullenweg, the technologist at the centre of the WordPress community, and a company called WP Engine has snowballed rapidly into a crisis for lakhs of WordPress users around the world. WordPress reputedly powers more than 40% of all websites on the internet, which is several millions, so policies that affect users’ ability to access the software’s essential features could have a wide-ranging impact. The dispute is ostensibly over a trademark violation but also relates to the principles of open-source software development, trademark enforcement, and role clarity.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the name of a piece of software people can use to build a website, blog or e-commerce portal on the internet; its most popular use has been as a content management system. Its competitors include Ghost, Drupal, and Wix. WordPress is an oft-cited example of open-source software, built by volunteer developers who contribute/and or improve its code, test the software on new platforms and fix bugs, build themes and plug-ins that expand the functionality of WordPress beyond its core features, and routinely conduct camps, workshops, and conference to popularise its adoption for various businesses and use-cases.

It is made available under a GPL licence – a type of license that allows others to modify the software while obligating them to distribute the new version under the same license.

WordPress is available to use in two ways. The self-hosted version refers to copies of WordPress that users can download for free from the website WordPress.org to use for websites hosted on their own servers. This is the open-source version. The hosted version refers to platforms or services where a third party manages your website’s WordPress setup and infrastructure in exchange for a fee. WP Engine is one such provider.

Matt Mullenweg is the founder and CEO of Automattic, a for-profit company that makes and distributes many digital products. One of them is WordPress.com, a hosted WordPress offering.

Automattic is also a major contributor to the development of open-source WordPress (3,988 hours/week). It isn’t directly affiliated with WordPress.org or the WordPress Foundation. This said, Mullenweg personally owns WordPress.org, although the WordPress Foundation has a separate website (wordpressfoundation.org).

Along with WordPress.com, Automattic also owns WordPress VIP (targeted at developers maintaining large, high-traffic websites) and Pressable, all of which offer the same services to different segments of the market.

How did the dispute begin?

On September 21, Mullenweg published a post on WordPress.org accusing WP Engine of being a “cancer” to the WordPress community. His ire was directed at a core feature of WordPress: its ability to record all revisions a user has made to content created on WordPress. WP Engine has disabled this functionality stating that each change adds to the site’s database, and which over time becomes heavy and slows the website down. Instead, WP Engine has asked its users to contact its support staff if they need to enable revision control on a per-website basis. Mullenweg had charged that WP Engine is thus not WordPress.

He also alleged WP Engine was profiting from free access to WordPress without itself contributing to WordPress’s development. WP Engine helps its users set up new WordPress websites by automatically connecting to WordPress.org, downloading a copy of WordPress, and installing it. It also offers tools that regularly check for updates to WordPress and updates its users’ websites in turn. WordPress.org recommends these updates in order to keep websites secure. WordPress websites are also able to access the plug-ins directory hosted on WordPress.org. Plug-ins are ‘smaller’ pieces of software the WordPress community has built; users are free to install plug-ins to extend their sites’ functionality in specific ways.

After Mullenweg’s post appeared, WP Engine’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist (C&D) letter to Automattic on September 23 asking that Mullenweg stop disparaging WP Engine. Later the same day, Automattic’s lawyers responded with a C&D letter to WP Engine alleging that the latter had violated the former’s trademark policy.

What is the trademark issue?

According to Automattic’s C&D letter, WP Engine’s use of the label “WP” in its name has confused consumers into equating WP Engine with WordPress itself — a continuation of something Mullenweg had mentioned in his September 21 post. This part of the dispute centres on whether Automattic had a trademark on the label “WP”.

In its C&D letter, WP Engine responded by quoting a line from the WordPress Foundation website’s page on “Trademark Policy”. The line read: “The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.” But at some point after September 21 the line on the website was changed to: “The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people.” Based on the previous wording, WP Engine said it had complied with trademark law.

WP Engine also said in its letter that it had been using the label “WP” for “more than a decade”. Trademark law in the U.S. requires trademark owners to look out for and act to sanction potentially infringing uses. If they don’t, they are liable to lose the trademark. In this regard, WP Engine’s argument is that it has been able to use the “WP” label for many years without inviting punitive action from Automattic.

How did the dispute evolve?

WP Engine’s C&D letter on September 23 contained a significant allegation. On September 20, Mullenweg delivered the keynote address at WordCamp U.S., an annual WordPress-focused conference. Up to a minute before he was to deliver his talk, according to WP Engine’s C&D letter, Mullenweg had allegedly messaged WP Engine’s CEO asking that the company divert a percentage of its revenue to Automattic as a form of giving back to the development of WordPress. The C&D letter included what it said were screenshots of Mullwenweg’s messages. These messages said that if WP Engine didn’t acquiesce to the sender’s demands, the sender would adopt a “scorched earth nuclear approach” towards WP Engine. The letter characterised the demands as “astronomical and extortionate”.

Automattic’s C&D letter didn’t mention any of these issues and focused instead on WP Engine’s alleged violation of WordPress trademark.

On September 24, in response to a user’s post on Reddit, Mullenweg wrote: “[WP Engine] had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.” Five for the Future is a programme developed at WordPress.org through which organisations that benefit from WordPress can help by committing some of their resources to its development.

The next day, Mullenweg banned WP Engine from directly accessing updates and plug-ins hosted on WordPress.org.

What were the ban’s consequences?

The unprecedented ban prevented several lakh WordPress websites from accessing the resources they needed to function normally. In his post, Mullenweg wrote that if WP Engine “wants to control your WordPress experience” by disabling revision controls, it could also develop and run by itself the various other resources the WordPress ecosystem availed it for free, including updates, the bug-tracker, and a user authentication system.

Public sentiment, especially within the community of WordPress users, was already negative towards Mullenweg after his September 21 post; the September 25 ban heightened it. On popular public fora where industry observers as well as insiders have been known to gather, including Reddit and Hacker News, users focused as much on the ban’s consequences — whose magnitude they didn’t dispute — as Mullenweg’s motivations.

One point of contention was private equity. Mullenweg had written on September 21 that WP Engine had decided to not pay for larger databases to accommodate revision controls in order to cut costs and increase the margins for its private equity owners. Since 2018, a private equity firm called Silver Lake has controlled WP Engine, and both Mullenweg and Automattic had singled the firm out by name in posts on September 25 and 26, respectively.

Another popular subject of debate was confusion surrounding Mullenweg’s role within the WordPress ecosystem. According to the “Trademark Policy” page on the WordPress Foundation website, the “WP” label is licensed for commercial use to two companies: Automattic and Newfold (another company like WP Engine that provides WordPress hosting services). Mullenweg has interpreted this to mean all other companies using the “WP” label in a confusing or misleading way, in his view, owes money to the WordPress Foundation.

Should WP Engine be liable to pay a trademark licence fee, it will be to the Foundation — whereas the C&D letter alleging trademark misuse was issued by Automattic, an unaffiliated entity. Many developers have also interpreted Mullenweg’s decision to ban WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org to mean a subversion of the WordPress open-source community’s equal-opportunity structure in favour of an Automattic CEO’s bid to resolve a dispute centred largely on himself. Some have even called for Mullenweg to step down as the leader of WordPress development.

They have also alleged that Mullenweg has a conflict of interest since WP Engine competes directly with Automattic’s WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and Pressable hosting products.

On the other hand, another section of developers and users have said WP Engine has erred by not contributing to the WordPress community despite its high revenue and that it has profited from confusion in the public that WP Engine is affiliated with WordPress itself.

What comes next?

The GPL licence under which WordPress is available doesn’t obligate WP Engine to contribute to the development of WordPress. At the same time, Mullenweg has maintained that WP Engine isn’t entitled to access WordPress.org and that such access is vouchsafed for services that benefit the WordPress community. “This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks,” he told The Verge.

On September 27, Mullenweg published another post on the WordPress.org website stating that he had restored WP Engine’s access to resources on WordPress.org until 12 am UTC on October 1. He added that WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner, Silver Lake managing director Lee Wittlinger, and the WP Engine board were to blame for putting “their customers at risk, not me”.

The C&D letters by themselves don’t constitute a legal dispute at this point; that will happen if and when the lawyers for either party take the matter to court. Meanwhile, the WordPress Foundation had filed an application on July 12 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the terms “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress”. This fact in the present context has sowed more uncertainty amid independent hosting providers concerned about drawing Automattic’s ire.

As TechCrunch reported, “The WordPress community and other projects feel this could also happen to them and want clarification from Automattic, which has an exclusive licence to the WordPress trademark. The community is also asking about clear guidance around how they can and can’t use ‘WordPress’.”