Automattic vs WP Engine

Posted on by Tim Kaye | Category: General

Many readers will be aware of the increasingly bitter dispute currently going on between Automattic and WP Engine. Automattic is a company that specializes in hosting WordPress websites. It was founded by its current CEO, Matt Mullenweg, who was also a co-creator of WordPress. WP Engine is a hosting company that also specializes in hosting WordPress websites. It is, therefore, a direct competitor of Automattic.

I’m not going to get into all the details of the dispute, but one action has proved particularly controversial. WP Engine has been banned from having its servers (and, therefore, its customers) access the repository of themes and plugins at wordpress.org, which is controlled by Matt. This has provoked many people to ask two questions about ClassicPress:

  1. Could ClassicPress users be banned from accessing the repository at wordpress.org?
  2. Could ClassicPress ever ban users from our directory of themes and plugins?

The answer to the first question is that it’s extremely unlikely. Automattic’s beef with WP Engine is that the latter is a for-profit company allegedly exploiting the WordPress trademark for profit while giving little back to the WordPress community. Whatever the merits of that claim, it doesn’t apply to ClassicPress. We are a nonprofit that does not use WordPress’s name at all. We are ClassicPress. And we do not host websites, so we are not in competition with Automattic. In addition, despite our modest size, we also give back to WordPress core, while WP developers have themselves contributed to ClassicPress code.

In case anyone points out that ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress, it’s worth remembering that Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little initially created WordPress by forking b2/cafelog. Matt himself has recently celebrated the concept of forking at https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/, where he also gives a shout-out to ClassicPress. So there is simply no reason for ClassicPress users to be denied access to the repository of themes and plugins at wordpress.org.

Could we ever shut anyone out from the ClassicPress directory? If we were ever foolish enough to try, it would be an utterly pointless gesture. The reason is that, unlike wordpress.org, we do not store the code of themes and plugins. We maintain a directory and not a repository. The latter stores things; the former just provides a convenient way of finding things (like an old-fashioned telephone directory). The code for ClassicPress themes and plugins resides not in the ClassicPress directory but in their respective developers’ Github repositories.

Anyone using a ClassicPress website therefore needs to have no fear that they will be locked out from updates and upgrades. Welcome to our world!