The WordPress vs. WP Engine Debacle - The Battle of Private Equity

[Dome]

To be fair it requires two to tango to contribute to open source. There is always a group who controls what goes in. I’d have to do some research to know for sure but it is very possible to have huge numbers like that when you are the one choosing what’s allowed in and what’s not. Open source doesn’t just mean anyone’s contributions are accepted.

Also the not contributing financial donations thing is a slightly imperfect angle too - look how many businesses have Wordpress sites that don’t donate either. Targeting the entity hosting versus the businesses actually choosing and using the tech is a little strange no? It’s basically make it a paid software indirectly.

Yes, it's not a 100% valid way to show things, but we can clearly see other big contributors. Also, it just supports the 40 hours a week vs 3,915 a week point. Do you know any company that "sells WordPress" and makes more than +10mio a year revenue that doesn't contribute, or at least is donating something back? Most companies using WordPress don't sell WordPress. I think thats the point here.

This is really misleading, as are most of the talking points from the Matt/Automattic/WP.com camp.

- The WordPress core that WP Engine offers is unchanged. They disabled revisions, which is largely a bogus feature that causes massive bloat in databases. They also have caching at the server level, which is an improvement over caching plugins.

- WP Engine has never been referred to or marketed as WordPress engine. The WP letters are free-to-use and not trademarked,. It's not on them if some less than savvy users refer to that as WordPress Engine.

- Revenue/hours comparison:

GoDaddy: $4 billion/year revenue (335 hours)
Bluehost: $1 billion/year revenue (76 hours)
WP Engine: $400 million/year revenue (35 hours)

Of course Matt is going to self-aggrandize and bloat the hours of Automattic here - he owns WordPress.com while also being the founder of The WordPress Founation and having control over WordPress.org. Every hour tracked goes back to directly benefiting his companies. WP Engine's success is a rising tide that lifts all boats. They are driving significant progress on Headless WordPress and ACF. Their contributions far exceed the 35 hours in the image you shared.

- This really doesn't need to be said but website hosts can price their services however they want. There are many "premium managed WordPress hosts" who charge exactly the same as WP Engine or more - Kinsta, Pantheon, A2, etc. - it's an entire industry. A host's product positioning/pricing/positioning/success does not dictate how many hours per week they should have to contribute.




The WordPress.com scam that Matt is running is losing market share, so his private equity investors like BlackRock are putting on the pressure. This same exact thing happened two years ago when he publicly called out GoDaddy - Matt Mullenweg Identifies GoDaddy as a “Parasitic Company” and an “Existential Threat to WordPress’ Future”. As the owner of the trademark logo and WordPress.com, the biggest beneficiary of any contributed hours is Matt himself and the private equity behind Autoattic. There cannot be true alignment with open source ideals when you run a for-profit company stealing the same name of your own open source company. WordPress.com is way more confusing to new users who are seeking out WordPress services than WP Engine is.

I'm the one misleading? Sure, let's go straight into it.

The WordPress core that WP Engine offers is unchanged:
- The WordPress core is not unchanged. They disabled revisions, they also removed the news widget from the WordPress Admin Dashboard. While they are free to do, it is no longer vanilla core WordPress. Revisions doesn't bloat. And any decent hoster nowadays offers server-side caching. And anyone who sells WordPress Websites in a high price segment should have an understanding on how to self-host WordPress and how to set up things like server-side caching. Or at least should have someone in the agency who knows the "server" stuff.


WP Engine has never been referred to or marketed as WordPress engine:
They even bid on the keyword in google.



Revenue/hours comparison:
So, while I compared WordPress Hoster to WordPress Hoster you are now comparing a WordPress Hoster to general boutique Hoster?
What is the % of the revenue that is from WordPress-Hosting? Could you please provide the numbers? Because you aren't trying to mislead us here, or?

WPEngine puts time into a plugin that they're selling? Great, WPEngine. And there are plenty of perfect alternatives to ACF out there.
The only open source they offer is the faustjs headless WordPress. Also, we have the 40 hours a week against ~4,000 hours a week.


This really doesn't need to be said but website hosts can price their services however they want.
And yes, they can also host their own API's. I will just copy a old point from me in here:
Yes, WP is free to use. But if it is free to use and open source, how could wp engine even get banned from using WordPress? Doesn't add up or? Maybe wpengine is using server infrastructure from WordPress.org for free, like we all? Maybe we all take this infrastructure for granted?
The plugin, theme and update library and some more API's cost money to operate. But who pays for it? The WordPress.org foundation and so most likely the biggest piece automattic.


So, to put this into perspective, we have now two firms with private equity investors fighting right?
Both firms will try to generate as much of revenue as possible. Should we go with the one who contributes the most? Who has the most value from having a good ecosystem? Or with the one who leeches the most? Doesn't really well contribute and so on. A user who ends up using WordPress com is at least a user where a chunk of its money gets put back into evolving the whole ecosystem. While the money of a user ending up on wpengine goes mostly straight to the investors and not back into the ecosystem.

Open-Source overall is in a tuff position nowadays. There is big money to make with open-source and hosting. Like vercel did with nextjs. Offering something open-source and then bill hard on the hosting. And to bring this back, I'm not 100% on Matt's side. Sometimes you have to pick shit over some bigger shit. And that's my decision, why I’m aligning more with org foundation.

 

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