On September 17, Matt Mullenweg published WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking, sharing his belief that an open source ecosystem can only thrive when those who benefit from it also give back. In the post, he highlighted WPEngine, noting that while the company has profited significantly from the WordPress ecosystem, its contributions to the WordPress commons have been minimal.

Since then, there has been much discussion about that post, as well as comments from Matt and others in the community.

It’s natural for people to have different opinions and to take sides on an issue like this.

For those still trying to make sense of it, I thought I might share my perspective on the situation.

First, who am I?

I’m Dave Martin. I’m a product designer who has worked at Automattic for 10+ years. 

So, what is this all about?

There’s been a lot of discussion and speculation. My one sentence summation would be that:

WPEngine extracts a great deal of value from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back to the WordPress commons in return.

That’s the primary issue at hand.

What is meant by ‘the commons’?

Wikipedia’s definition of Tragedy of the Commons, does a good job of encapsulating it:

The tragedy of the commons is the concept which states that if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether.

The first reference I could find of Matt speaking about Five for the Future was back in September 2014, where he shared:

First on the state of things: there are more companies genuinely and altruistically contributing to growing WordPress than ever before. In our ecosystem web hosts definitely make the most revenue and profits, and it’s been great to see them stepping up their game, but also the consultancies and agencies around WordPress have been pretty amazing about their people contributions, as demonstrated most recently by the fact the 4.0 and 4.1 release leads both hail from WP agencies (10up and Code for the People, respectively).

I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.

It’s a big commitment, but I can’t think of a better long-term investment in the health of WordPress overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in hindsight. This ratio is probably the bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem, avoiding the tragedy of the commons. I think the 5% rule is one that all open source projects and companies should follow, at least if they want to be vibrant a decade from now.

My personal definition of “the commons” would be something along the lines of:

Any investment of time or money that primarily benefits the community.

As Matt highlights, contributing back to the commons could include a wide variety of activities:

development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation

But it needs to be primarily for the benefit of everyone in the community for it to qualify.

As an example, it would not include things like working on the free version of a premium plugin that you sell. That’s a distribution strategy to grow your premium offering—something that primarily benefits you. As such it’s not considered a contribution back to the commons.

The easy litmus test here is whether it primarily benefits you, or the community.

So, how does this relate to WPEngine?

Here’s some data

This data is gathered from various sources across the web. If any of this data is inaccurate, please feel free to point it out in the comments below. 

• WPEngine was started in 2010.
• WPEngine is a privately held company, as such their actual revenue numbers are not publicly available.
• GetLatka reports WPEngine revenue is north of $400M per year based on this Founder Path presentation by Jason Cohen.
• WPEngines revenue primarily comes from hosting WordPress and WooCommerce sites.
• Pitchbook reports that WPEngine has raised $395M.
• The majority shareholder of WPEngine since their $250M investment in 2018 is Silver Lake, a private equity firm based in Menlo Park, California.
• According to WPEngine’s Five for the Future page, WPEngine contributes back a collective total of 40 hours per week to the WordPress commons.

Again, my assessment of the situation, based on this data is that:

WPEngine extracts a great deal of value from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back to the WordPress commons in return.

Is that to say that they don’t do any good as a company?

No. That’s not what I’m saying. Maybe they do a lot of great things. But outside the 40 hours that they self report, contributing back to the WordPress commons is not one of them.

Is this to say that the people who work at WPEngine are bad?

Absolutely not. This has nothing to do with the people who work at WP Engine.

Again, the primary issue here is:

WPEngine extracts a great deal of value from the WordPress ecosystem without giving much back to the WordPress commons in return.

So, what can be done about that?

Asking them to increase their contribution apparently has continuously failed.

Five for the Future isn’t something that can or should be legally enforced. Ideally, a company of this size, having benefited so greatly from the WordPress community, would altruistically want to contribute a small portion of their revenue back to the commons.

Unfortunately, that is not how things have played out.

On September 23, 2024, WPEngine received this cease & desist letter from Automattic, outlining multiple trademark infractions. Automattic has the exclusive worldwide license to use the WordPress trademark commercially as well as the exclusive worldwide trademark for WooCommerce. 

It’s unfortunate, but despite the vision for Five for the Future being shared way back in 2014, WPEngine has still remained largely non-participatory 10 years later—even as their revenue grew from ~$20M in 2014 to over ~$400M today, a 1900% increase.

It’s been 10 years… 

Summary

I work at Automattic. I recognize that this post will come across as biased, but my aim has been to remain objective.

With many perspectives being shared, I wanted to share my own.

Everyone is of course entitled to their own beliefs. 

My belief is that Matt Mullenweg is taking a public stand, acting in good faith, to defend the future sustainability and well-being of the WordPress commons.