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The recent significant deterioration of the relationship between WordPress and WP Engine places further strain on an already precarious open source landscape. This came to a head late last week, with WordPress going legal against WPE, serving them with cease and desist letters as a consequence of WPEs alleged trademark absuse of the WordPress and WooCommerce entities, and their unwillingness to enter in to a commercialised agreement.
Despite an 11th hour reprieve that allows WP Engine to still maintain some form of access to WordPress for the next 24 hours, when the latter’s CEO uses terms like “a cancer to WordPress” and “a hacked up, bastardised simulacra” (a word I today learned meant ‘unsatisfactory imitation’) to describe you, it’s pretty difficult to mount a case that the relationship is salvageable. Not even Noel and Liam got so nasty.
Regardless of the outcomes of the various legal claims and litigation, one thing is certain; there will be disruption, there will be impacts, there will be pain. This pain will be felt in both the short term and long term. The short term pain will come for the WP Engine customers in the form of security vulnerabilities, limited support and exposure to performance issues. However this also raises larger and somewhat darker questions about what precedent these events set for the broader WordPress open source community.
