Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg: WordPress vs WP Engine  ## Metadata - Author: [["World of DaaS"]] - Full Title: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg: WordPress vs WP Engine - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d9791def-9ea0-4738-9004-1e20cbc7a043 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **WP Engine's Trademark Confusion** - WP Engine built a $400M+ business while confusing customers into thinking they were affiliated with WordPress. - Matt Mullenweg tried for years to get WP Engine to license the WordPress trademark but was delayed repeatedly. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Sure. So there is a business called WP Engine, which many people, including my own mother, thought was WordPress Engine or officially associated with WordPress. Yep. And so we tried to get that. Auren Hoffman And they were like built on like a skin of WordPress Is that kind of the idea? Yeah. And so we tried to get them to get a trademark license. Matt Mullenweg And they kept delaying, delaying, delaying, delaying. And now they built this business to be pretty big. $400 million plus. $400 million in revenue. Okay, that's a pretty big business. $1 employees owned by Silver Lake, which is a private equity firm, bought it in 2018. So they've run this play for a while while abusing our trademarks. Auren Hoffman And I assume like you guys have, I don't know the backstory, but like, I assume you guys have talked to them over many years about this, right? It's not just like just come up today, right? We've been trying to get them to have a trademark license for many years. And I assume it's in their best interest to not do it, right? They would just prefer not to do it, right? They kept leading us on. Matt Mullenweg I think they were trying to maybe flip the asset this year or something. They couldn't sell it. So I don't know. I can't speak for them. But yeah, we were really trying to get a license in place because it's very confusing to people. Yeah. There's examples like in CNBC Art Girl, where a close friend of mine, Bart Berkowitz, who I've known for 15 years, was hosted on WP Engine and thought it was me. And so when he heard all the news, he was like, oh, switched on my sites. ([Time 0:01:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc53db7f-4ca8-433e-8503-770a16f5dc5a)) - **Automattic vs WP Engine Contributions** - Automattic contributes significantly to open source with 100+ full-time engineers maintaining millions of lines of code. - WP Engine does not contribute to WordPress open source; they only use the code and brand it as their own. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg That's a whole other thing is that so Automatic and its history as a very open source, open web company. So we devote over a hundred full-time people to dedicate just to open source. So we push, I think we maintain six or seven million lines of code of public. Because WordPress, you could just use open source, right? Auren Hoffman You could use it for free if you choose to. Matt Mullenweg They use the WordPress open source just fine. So they don't publish any, they don't maintain open source code like we do. So we publish a large amount of open source code. ([Time 0:04:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a455e81-ac66-4e59-a357-15686540aafe)) - **Open Source Contribution as Payment** - Companies can credit contributing engineer hours to the WordPress open source project instead of paying licensing fees. - Donating to open source can substitute financial payments for trademark licensing. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Said you don't just have to pay us for the trademark license we if you want to donate hours into the open source community you can do that too we'll credit instead yeah so you don't have To give me any money you don't have to give me a dollar if you want to spend 30 million a year on engineers making WordPress better, you can do that. ([Time 0:08:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9f02c4a-dc9a-454d-9c32-4c3fb32e4ab3)) - **WP Engine Lawsuit Escalation** - WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Matt personally, escalating the dispute legally. - Matt emphasizes he usually resolves issues quietly but had to respond publicly due to WP Engine's aggressive legal actions. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Know, I've been maintaining the word for 21 years now yeah i've never had an issue with anyone else and usually when there's trademark issues you just pick up the phone you call you talk About talk about it like hey yeah don't do this don't do that like uh no need to get lawyers involved uh By the way, we didn't even file the first lawsuits they did. Yeah. So, and they filed it not just against Automatic, but against me personally, which I run WordPress.org. So, it's affecting the whole WordPress community is being attacked by their legal lawfare, you know? Auren Hoffman Now, and then at some ([Time 0:10:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b0276cc-8919-49f7-87d9-87458863c7cc)) - **WP Engine's Use of Free Update Servers** - WP Engine used WordPress.org’s free update servers while charging customers, without paying for usage. - Automattic blocked WP Engine’s data center access after the lawsuit, causing WP Engine product degradation for users. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg This is a little geeky. And so all of WP Engine's servers were using free resources on WordPress.org to update their sites. So they were charging their customers and then using free services from WordPress.org to update their sites. When they filed a lawsuit against us and me, our data center, people were like, let's block the network. Auren Hoffman Like, right. Can't talk to our servers. Right. Right. Makes sense. Uh, right. So they were, they were using, they were using, so it was almost like they were using like these API calls to wordpress.org or wordpress.com. Matt Mullenweg And then they weren't, were never paying for those or something or they never paid they ever had a contract they they just free open you know network calls and um to serve their hundreds Of thousands of customers that they were making 400 million plus on you know okay interesting so when we uh blocked their network so basically their data center can talk to our data center. Yeah. And they tried to make it like we were breaking their sites, but we're like, hey, you promised our customers that you could update your sites. You said you promised them security and WordPress and manage WordPress and everything. ([Time 0:16:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8482023e-a65a-48d5-b460-4e0755070cbf)) - **Open Source Powers WordPress Success** - Open source software like WordPress thrives due to collective global collaboration, similar to Wikipedia. - WordPress acts as the operating system of the web, ranging from small blogs to major government websites. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg So how open source works is that it basically, it's like the Wikipedia. It allows all of humanity to get behind a common solution and make it better. So, you know, TikTok and Facebook and Snapchat all run on Linux, right? They don't all make their own operating systems. Of course. Yeah. So, but I know that sounds kind of ridiculous. Just said it, but that's open source working. If you don't think about it, that's when open source works. So it's the same thing. Like websites are sort of coalescing around WordPress as a standard as the operating system for the web. ([Time 0:21:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/90f8666a-d914-4395-85fc-d5b73b981098)) - **Open Source Market Domination** - When open source works, it dominates markets with 90-95% share, seen in browsers, Linux, and databases. - WordPress’s massive share reflects widespread adoption of a common open source standard for websites. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Kind of like the operating system of the web and uh so yeah it's open source so you could that's the standard i i'm still i just still i know it's open source i know it's like it's just shocking Auren Hoffman To me that like there's a cms that has that high of a market share that's out there. And you just don't see that in many other kind of scenarios. You actually see it in a lot of other scenarios if you look at sort of browsers. I guess if you're like SMTP or something like that. Matt Mullenweg I know Chromium usage. So like if you're looking at browser engines, there chrome but there's also brave and arc and other browsers that use the chromium engine yep which have i think like 90 of market share Uh look at it with linux look at it with databases when open source works it becomes like 90 to 95 of the market there's always going to be others yeah like uh everyone kind of says okay there's This like main thing that we all work on and make it really secure safe awesome ([Time 0:22:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0001b780-3e91-4710-96e6-53529ea5b743))