I've been helping you keep up with the WordPress vs WP Engine drama for the past couple weeks, and I thought the drama was coming to an end last week. However, unfortunately for the WordPress community at large, the tumultuous storyline continues…
Quick Recap:
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg thinks WP Engine should contribute more to the WordPress open source project, so he called them out at a recent WordCamp US event. He later went as far as saying that WP Engine “are a cancer to WordPress, and it's important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread.”
WP Engine sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic demanding that Mullenweg stop disparaging their company. Automattic responded with a cease and desist letter to WP Engine demanding that they stop improperly using the trademarked terms “WordPress” and “WooCommerce.”
It became public that Mullenweg demanded either 8% of WP Engine's $400M annual revenue to license the trademarks, or an equivalent amount of developer hours donated to The WordPress Foundation. Then he blocked access to the Plugin Repository for WP Engine customers, and subsequently unblocked it.
Flash Forward to Last Week:
Not everyone at Automattic agreed with Mullenweg on the way he was handlings things with WP Engine, so he decided to clean house of all dissent at the company by offering employees the option to resign immediately and receive $30k or six months of salary (whichever was higher) if they disagreed with his leadership decisions — or stay and kiss his ring.
159 employees, or roughly 8.4% of staff, accepted the “alignment offer” (as he called it), of which 80% worked at the company's Ecosystem / WordPress division, and the rest were in Automattic's Cosmos businesses, which consist of apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, and Cloudup.
Mullenweg wrote in the blog post:
- “I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!”
- “159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!”
- “I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.”
The comments on the blog post are hilariously positive and obviously moderated, as there are only 20 of them. I'd imagine if Mullenweg let anyone comment on the post, there'd be thousands of comments from the other side. However obviously Mullenweg isn't looking to hear from the opposition in his blog post comment section nor within his company.
Mullenweg later told The Verge, “WordPress.org just belongs to me personally. In my role as owning WordPress.org, I don’t want to promote a company, which is A: legally threatening me and B: using the WordPress trademark. That’s part of why we cut off access from the servers.”