NEWS: A Judge handed WP Engine a preliminary win in the legal fight with Automattic – Read more here.
Everyone that makes a living from the WordPress open-source eco-system has felt the cringe from Matts actions in the last couple months (years really). This whole WP Engine lawsuit stinks of a kid who’s jealous because someone has a better toy than he does. Which let’s be fair, WP Engine is a better hosting platform by far than WordPress.com.
I watched the 2024 State of WordPress in disbelief as Matt publicly talked himself into believing his own Bulls**t in real time, while trying to sell it to everyone else in the room. His I want to be hip like Steve Jobs and tech savvy like Musk or Zuckerberg act kinda fell flat while spewing a delusional rant that ultimately caused major plugin devs to leave WP all together, 10% of his developers to straight up quit, and get Automatic slapped with a massive defamation lawsuit.
I guess lots of CEO tech giants fumble, but someone in his PR department really (like in big air quote with my hands) needs to “tell him to shut the f*** up”.
Truth be told, WordPress’s culture was fractured way before any of this drama anyways. Ever since Matt divided everyone with the Gutenberg editor MANY devs were looking elsewhere already. ClassicPress was born and suddenly now there’s a world in which clients and business see HubSpot as a real alternative for a corporate website. Also, there are now more installations of Divi and Visual Bakery, than Gutenberg. Not to mention the Classic Editor and Classic Widgets plugin are still one of the top 4 downloaded plugins of ALL TIME. … fractured.
Yep, WordPress is a mess, and this (unfortunately) – is just one more nail in the coffin. The stupid thing is, if he (Matt) goes nuclear on the opens-source front because he got his hand slapped by a Judge, this could have serious far reaching impacts for almost all hosting providers.
Almost all of them offer some type of WordPress hosting. So will this mean GoDaddy, BlueHost, A2, DreamHost, Host Gator, Liquid Web, Network Solution (The list goes on) all need to pay an extortion fee too to keep offering WordPress hosting and access to the WordPress repository of plugins? Does the WordPress.org go away and it all becomes a pay-to-play model?
Who knows anymore. Regardless, Matt needs to be removed as CEO. I doubt that’s even a possibility, because this is America, where our monsters are CEOs. So here’s to a brave new world where other peoples tantrums ruin innovation and good things for the rest of us.
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