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Over the past year and a half, the WordPress ecosystem has been consumed by the dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. The legal battles, the public confrontations, the hostile takeover of Advanced Custom Fields. I’ve written about these events as they unfolded. A lot of people have. A lot of opinions have been shared, from all sides. Most of that conversation has focused on the people involved. On who said what, who was right, who went too far. And while those conversations have their place, they’ve been a distraction from something more fundamental. A structural problem that was there long…
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I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Months. Probably even longer. The reason I haven’t is, ironically, the exact thing I want to write about. There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.
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Well, shit. I didn’t expect the events unfolding last week, that ultimately were mainly hurting the end users of the WordPress software, would be the end of it all. But this whole dispute between Automattic and WP Engine has been cranked up a notch over the last couple days. And that is the biggest understatement I can make. I am deeply uncomfortable with the way this legal battle has been unfolding, with it being fought out in public and affecting end users of the software. If it would end there, maybe it would take some time, but I would be…