Who do Open Source CMS like WordPress belong to?

Big Tech & capriciousness often go together like dogs & fleas. The sober world of CMS and content management seemed above such fluff - until its own toys/pram moment this week. It's not a good look.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 18:26, 03 October 2024

The world can quite likely agree that politics steered by the whims of an unpredictable leader prone to mood swings is probably a bad thing.

Equally, anyone in tech, or a business that relies on tech, can be shook into silence by the knowledge that critical technology platforms can be swung from one direction to another, or simply turned off, at the whim of an individual with a short temper.

And the sad reality is, we all know that is more common than we like to admit.

Be it Elon "Go f*** yourself" Musk at X, Sam "copyright, what copyright?" Altman at OpenAI, Sundar "talk to our lawyers" Pichai at Google, or Mark "we don't do news" Zuckerberg at Facebook, Big Tech's supremos are defined by the power they can wield - and how we hope they never do. We hope they at least answer to shareholders before doing anything too rash.

In the steady-as-she-goes world of content management and publishing CMS, which we at Glide inhabit, such drama rarely happens. In large part because no one person wields such control that the lights could be turned off for a large part of the internet.

Well, that's what we all took comfort in believing, until this week, when CMS's own unpredictable power player made their presence very clear.

CMS = Controversial Management Style
​Turmoil has hit the world of WordPress after Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and director of the WordPress Foundation, decided that a major vendor of WordPress packages, WP Engine, had transgressed his unwritten idea of fair play. 

At his behest, and his alone, WP Engine’s connection to open source WordPress.org resources, including plug-ins and themes, was severed. Customers and sites were left in limbo.

WordPress powers around 43% of the top 10 million websites in the world and consequently is a baseline toolset for an almost uncountable numbers of businesses of all sizes. 

As an open source project, WordPress success is built upon the contributions of a large number of those users, as the people who contribute time and effort to making the things that make WordPress better.

Ultimately, what appears to have tilted Mullenweg against WP Engine is the fact it is owned by private equity company Silver Lake, who have been doing what private equity typically is there to do - extract maximum profit from WP Engine. He even called WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress." 

Although he hasn't explicitly said that this is a form of investment he doesn't approve of, it's easy to see how the ruthless "buy it, pump it, get out" methodology of such businesses clashes head-on with the philosophy of someone such as Mullenweg, who has no shareholders to answer to in the traditional sense of the word, at WordPress.

It can only be surmised from the sidelines that he regards short-termism as anathema to the co-operative world of WordPress, which let's not forget is a world he's been part of for over 20 years. It looks like he feels responsible for embodying that ethos of WordPress, and you could argue that he is.

Yet in this case, it's hard not to see his protective and shepherding hand as a vindictive fist. If you care to watch the two hour interview he gave this week, Mullenweg offers a number of justifications for his actions, and is at least candid and human, in contrast to some other glacial tech leaders. 

At one point he offers this revealing thought: "They're a private equity firm; they bought into this a few years ago, they're going to be out in a few years. This is what I'm doing the rest of my life."

Mullenweg doesn't live the life of a monastic aesthete though. Automattic makes money, and his net worth is said to be around $400 million.

As legal action is launched by both sides in the dispute the very structure of the WordPress organisation is likely to come under scrutiny. 

Vendors of WordPress and the much wider development community are clearly unnerved at the apparent lack of checks and balances standing in the way of one person's actions and essentially being able to turn off WordPress for parts of the community.

As we have noted, capricious behaviour and business critical technologies do not make for happy bedfellows.

Indeed, it's actually taken a bit of work to find out who actually sits on the board of the WordPress Foundation, the body that controls the WordPress trademark. 

To the outside eye, the other two members who sit with Mullenweg look more like a like a council of "yes" rather than being there for any particular insight into the needs of an open source project of such scale and adoption.

So it could seem that successful association with WordPress can now depend on the whim of Mullenweg deciding that whomsoever wishes to be so associated has passed a suitability test, the criteria of which are ultimately known only by him.

WordPress wouldn't be what it is without the model it adopted, but it is the governance of that model that must now be questioned, and many in the WordPress community are doing just that.

As one developer put it: "The web needs more independent organisations, and it needs more diversity. 40% of the web and 80% of the CMS market should not be controlled by any one individual."