WordPress.org declares war on WP Engine; takes control of some of their plugins and calls WP Engine a “cancer”

WordPress is open source. WP Engine is not. It’s hard to give a very brief summary of what’s going on, but WP Engine essentially uses a ton of open source tools to offer its services, but doesn’t contribute to the open source community. The founder of WordPress got fed up with this and declared war on them. In response, WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Mullenweg and Automattic, asking them to withdraw their comments. She also said her use of the WordPress trademark was covered by fair use. But this is where it gets very interesting. WordPress.org has taken over WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields plugin, renaming it “Secure Custom Fields” and removing commercial elements. The creator of Ruby on Rails commented on this, and it seems a bit crazy.

Imagine this happening on npm? Imagine that Meta finds itself in a legal dispute with Microsoft (the owners of GitHub, who in turn own npm), and that Microsoft responds by ordering GitHub to ban all Meta employees from accessing their repositories. And then Microsoft simply takes control of the official React repository, pointing it to its own fork of Super React. This is the kind of madness we’re talking about. Weaponizing open source code registries is something we simply cannot let become a priority. They must remain neutral territory, little Switzerlands in a world of constant trade conflicts. And that’s really the main reason why I want to comment on this whole sordid ordeal. If this fight was just a fight between two billion dollar companies, like Automattic and WPE are, I wouldn’t have wanted to get involved. But the principles at play go far beyond those two.