WordPress Developer Automattic and Hosting Provider WPEngine in Dispute

TapTechNews September 28th news, WordPress developer Automattic and hosting provider WPEngine announced a breakup yesterday, and Automattic has now banned WPEngine from accessing WordPress.org.

Referring to TapTechNews' report the day before yesterday, Automattic's CEO and co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg criticized WPEngine for making more than $400 million (TapTechNews note: currently about 2.8 billion Chinese yuan) in revenue from the open-source WordPress project, calling it a 'tumor of WordPress', and accusing the company of making little contribution to the community.

WPEngine refuted Mullenweg's accusations, claiming that it is the number one WordPress platform and is proud of its contribution to the WordPress ecosystem, and believes that the relevant attacks are just Automattic's attempt to demand more licensing fees, alleging that Automattic requires it to continue to pay tens of millions of dollars to continue using the WordPress trademark.

Both sides are in a deadlock. Eventually, Automattic officially banned WPEngine's access privileges yesterday Beijing time, which means that users hosted by WPEngine will not be able to update/install WordPress theme plugins through the backend. In response, WPEngine said that Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg is abusing his control over WordPress.

WPEngine informed users that the policy implemented by Automattic means they cannot install or update themes/plugins through WPAdmin, but it has no impact on the website's performance and security.

TapTechNews will continue to follow the development of the situation.