The Wordpress and WP Engine battle continues.

Ivan Mehta has a good summary on TechCrunch:

In response [to the WP Engine cease-and-desist], Automattic sent its own cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine, saying that they had breached WordPress and WooCommerce trademark usage rules.

Mullenweg then banned WP Engine from accessing the resources of WordPress.org. While elements like plug-ins and themes are under open source license, providers like WP Engine have to run a service to fetch them, which is not covered under the open source license.

This broke a lot of websites and prevented them from updating plug-ins and themes. It also left some of them open to security attacks. The community was not pleased with this approach of leaving small websites helpless.

This really messed a bunch of folks up and I feel bad for the developers and maintainers of the sites hosted on WP Engine now. I would guess the vast majority of WP Engine customers were completely unaware of these issues when they chose the hosting provider. Now their sites are left vulnerable and they’re having to move hosting or explain to their customers what’s going on.

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I have a few friends still in the Wordpress development game, and this is just a shame for them. Good people, trying to make a decent living, working off of an open source project and good brand reputation. Now all of that is up in the air.

I can certainly see Mullenweg’s key points here, and I sympathize. But was this the correct way to go about all of this?

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Also earlier this month, Mullenweg announced that they’d offer a salary buyout for any Automattic employee that wanted to leave the company because they disagree with the direction. 159 people (8.4% of the company) took the offer.

What’s next…?