WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday, said he’s not worried that the recent legal drama between his company, Automattic, and WordPress host WP Engine may lead to a fork of the open source WordPress software. In fact, he said, he’d welcome it.
“There might be a fork. I mean, we’ve had WordPress forks before — probably about three or four times in the history [of WordPress],” Mullenweg said, in response to a question about whether he was worried about the potential of a fork. “That’s one of the beautiful things about open source is that there can be a fork.”
The Automattic CEO also suggested that rival WP Engine essentially had already forked the software because the version they run is “very, very different” from what the WordPress core is today. If WordPress was then officially forked as a result of this growing discontent with his direction of the community and the legal battle over the use of the WordPress trademark, Mullenweg suggested that would be the better path.
“I think that’d be fantastic, actually. So people can have alternative governance or an alternative approach,” he noted.
The exec also pointed out that the size of the WordPress community could support such a move. WordPress 6.7, which is coming out in a few weeks, had over 600 contributors, for example. “Only about 10% of those are from Automattic,” Mullenweg said.
Plus, he noted that the WordPress core software had seen some 40 million downloads since September 17. “The actual activity of WordPress is going quite strong,” he added.
The interview came amid a heated legal dispute with the WordPress hosting provider WP Engine, which has upset the open source community, and led to the departure of over 150 Automattic employees who disagree with Mullenweg’s new direction.
Mullenweg alleged that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand is meant to confuse people into thinking that WP Engine is officially associated with WordPress, when it is not, and suggests the company doesn’t do enough to contribute to WordPress, which WP Engine (and others) disagree with. As a result, he’s asking WP Engine to share 8% of its revenue (or the equivalent of revenue in terms of engineering hours working on the core).
“It’s not just about the money. It’s really about like … if you’re gonna profit off the WordPress trademark, you need to be part of the WordPress ecosystem,” Mullenweg said at Disrupt.
This is not the first time Mullenweg has suggested a fork could be a solution to the ongoing debate around the future of WordPress. Earlier in October, he posted on X that he would “welcome more forks.”