A Possible WordPress Implosion

WordPress and WordPress engine are fighting at the moment. Mullenweg wants WP-Engine to pay its fair share, or contribute more developer hours to keep improving WordPress as a whole. To be more specific “a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.” source

“The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress,” the updated page reads.

source

What surprised me is that more than one hundred and fifty nine people left automattic over this. From what I read Mullenweg wants 32 million from WP-engine which is valued at between 500 million to a billion dollars. This seems a clash between two titans.

I think that WordPress is right to fight to get more from a company like WP-engine, especially given the possible name and brand confusion but also because of the time and effort. He did speak about how WP-engine could devote many more hours to helping to develop WordPress rather than riding in the wake without contributing its fair share.

Free and Open Source software are possible because of the community that they are built by and around. I have been using WordPress for almost as long as it has been around. It made webmastering, to use the old term much easier. Instead of writing a page, and updating SSI pages (Server side include pages) I could write a post and things would update automatically. Now I use Hugo and I switched to ClassicPress today, temporarily, to see how it has changed, or remained the same.

And Finally

WordPress has gone from powering 30 percent of websites a few years ago to powering over 43 percent of websites and is now on its way to becoming a monopoly. They’re right to fight to protect theirtrademark but I don’t like that they are so dominant. I prefer to use Hugo and ClassicPress to have a static site that is fast to load, but also to move away from a monopolistic open source project.

I switched from ClassicPress to WordPress today out of curiousity, not necessity. Within a week I might be back on WordPress, if I see that spam or other issues are too time consuming via ClassicPress.