WP Engine and Automattic Trade Cease-and-Desist Letters

If you follow WordPress at any level, it’s hard not to have heard about the drama surrounding Matt Mullenweg’s attack on WP Engine at the tail end of WordCamp US, something that marred what otherwise seemed like a very lovely event.

If you haven’t heard anything about his comments yet, the short version is that he attacked WP Engine for allegedly free-riding on WordPress and not pulling its weight when it comes to contributions, going so far as to call WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.”

He also claimed that WP Engine confuses users about what “WordPress” is and doesn’t deliver the “real” WordPress experience because it disables post revisions by default.

A lot of this has already been hashed out on Twitter/X, so I won’t spend too much time pointing out that…

• I’ve never met a WordPress user who has been confused about the difference between WP Engine and WordPress, but nearly every single new WordPress user is confused about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We even have a post about it, as does every other WordPress blog. So…a weird hill to die on for the guy behind WordPress.com. 🤷‍♂️
• WordPress.com has an $18 per month plan that doesn’t allow users to install themes and plugins, which seems like a bigger limitation than WP Engine disabling revisions by default (and then letting users enable revisions if they talk to support). Matt says that WordPress.com can’t afford to let people install plugins/themes on this plan, but many other WordPress hosts seem to have figured out the economics. 🤷‍♂️

What’s new, though, is that WP Engine doesn’t seem to be taking Matt’s comments lying down:

WP Engine sends a cease-and-desist letter

On Monday, September 23, WP Engine responded with a cease-and-desist letter…and let’s just say that there are some very interesting allegations in the letter. You can read the full text here, but let me cover what I think are the highlights:

As far as I can tell, WP Engine seems to be accusing Matt of allegedly extorting them for money, with him making his comments at the WordCamp US Q&A contingent on whether or not WP Engine played ball:

In the days leading up to Mr. Mullenweg’s September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, Automattic suddenly began demanding that WP Engine pay Automattic large sums of money, and if it didn’t, Automattic would wage a war against WP Engine.

The letter includes screenshots of text messages between Matt and various high-level executives at WP Engine, including one that seems to imply he threatened to “proceed with the scorched earth nuclear approach to WPE.” The implication in the letter is that this is how Matt would proceed if WP Engine did not meet his/Automattic’s financial demands.

I mean, let’s be real, some of the text messages are kind of ridiculous and bring to mind some type of Mafia shakedown.

What’s crazy to me here is that WP Engine alleges the demands were to contribute money to Automattic/WordPress.com – not even to the non-profit WordPress Foundation. 

Based on Matt’s Reddit comment, this amount was to be 8% of WP Engine’s total revenue (around $32 million based on 2024 numbers), though Matt also claimed that they could make this contribution via “people” as part of Five for the Future commitments.

A lot of these problems come back to the longstanding issues with Matt holding positions as both the CEO of Automattic and the “benevolent dictator” of the open-source WordPress project.

When he calls WP Engine a cancer, is he speaking as the CEO of a for-profit competitor to WP Engine or is he speaking as a representative for the open-source WordPress project? Who knows!

Automattic and Matt Mullenweg fire back

Not to be outdone, though, Automattic then responded with its own cease-and-desist letter regarding alleged unauthorized trademark usage.

Matt (or someone else with access) also surreptitiously updated the WordPress Foundation trademark policy, specifically calling out WP Engine. You can see those differences here, which display what is quite honestly an impressive level of pettiness.

And on a somewhat related note, people also noticed that the WordPress Foundation filed two trademark applications back in July – one for “managed WordPress” and another for “hosted WordPress.”

So yeah…lots of drama. As things are going, it seems like this might expand from regular ‘ole internet drama into real lawsuits, so I’m sure that I’ll be covering this more in the future.

What do you think, though? Let us know in the comments, or get in on the action on Twitter/X.

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