WP Engine and Automattic are at war. If you read this article, you would realize how seriously Automattic at this point takes matters at hand. Their latest social media war is taking some serious turns in terms of lawsuits. Only time will tell, who’ll have the last laugh? Before we dig into this matter, let’s first understand what these companies basically offer to the customers.

Both these companies offer a hosting solution to an open-source tool called WordPress or its variant. This little PHP devil (I mean WordPress) has the 43.5% market share of all websites and over 62.5% market share on the content management system (CMS). Such a powerful tool can literally drive the internet traffic and whoever controls it is the web content king.

The fine print is that WP Engine is built on the open-source tool WordPress and is not WordPress in totality. The WordPress (WordPress.org) tool was originally written by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg in 2003. But, then Matt Mullenweg in 2005 went on to build a company around it called Automattic that takes care of the hosting experience for most non-technical users. Similarly, WP Engine came to light in 2010 to cater to the hosting needs for the variant of the same open-source tool WordPress (WordPress.org). Though they built their own version of WordPress, the core philosophy is still valid.

The main argument of Matt Mullenweg is that WP Engine hasn’t made any significant contributions to the open-source tool WordPress but instead they continue to use its variant for their private business purposes. For any open-source software to exist, developers have to keep on contributing to its features and core functionalities. But, the sole purpose of the tool to be open-source is to not have a single authority. The latest ban of WP Engine on the WordPress tool is nothing short of hypocrisy for the very main reason why the open-source tool exists. 

“If you exercise a control over an open-source tool, it ceases to exist in its very core.”

Let’s examine this argument through analogy. Linus Torvalds created GNU/Linux as an alternative to the mainstream operating systems. The companies like Canonical (Ubuntu), RedHat, and SuSe do have their own version of GNU/Linux which they sell either as community or enterprise driven. If one of these companies tried to ban their competitor, it would be disastrous for the very core of the Linux philosophy. So, in the retrospective, Automattic’s control over WordPress is dangerous even if it’s coming from its original developer Matt Mullenweg.

Ironically, I created my website on that open-source WordPress tool but chose to host on a third-party hosting service which is neither Automattic nor WP Engine. That’s the power of open-source. Now, imagine if my hosting provider gets banned for some illogical reason, what would be the fate of my website maintenance. Though the current discussion is not about me, it’s about those who chose to use WP Engine for their ease-of-use and hosting needs!