In techie circles over the past few weeks, the hashtag #WPDrama has been trending. This isn’t a new Netflix series – there’s trouble brewing in the WordPress community

At its most basic level, a major hosting company specialising in WordPress (WPEngine) and its leadership have had a spectacular and public falling out with WordPress’s creator and key contributor, Matt Mullenweg. Whilst that may sound like a storm in a teacup, things have rapidly progressed from name calling to lawyers, with WPEngine suing Mullenweg and his company Automattic for allegedly illegal business practices including extortion and abuse of power.

So what does this Silicon Valley drama have to do with us in the Arts? How does this affect your website, and what does it mean more widely? Buckle up and find out.

Open Source in a Nutshell

Somewhere in your organisation you’re using open-source software.

Some software – such as Windows, iOS or indeed PatronBase – is closed source, meaning that whilst you can buy the right to use it, you have no right to dig into how it’s made.

The alternative – open source – gives you far more freedom to tinker, add to, change or extend the software. As a result, the software is often free-of-charge provided you meet certain licensing conditions. Open-source software includes WordPress, Apache, Linux, PHP, and MySQL – which may well be the key components of your website. Commercial software – including your iOS or Android phone – often incorporates open-source software components.

It’s easy to see the benefits of open-source for consumers – freedom and free price! What’s not to love?

Well, there’s always a cost. And the cost of open-source is that there is no warranty that the software is safe, bug-free or fit for purpose, and no guarantee of anything including support or future development or maintenance. In short, you are free of many obligations, but in return have little in the way of guarantees from the product’s creators in return for the vast sum (£0) you paid them.

Most organisations handle that risk by paying someone else – web developer, IT support, IT colleagues on payroll – to make the risks manageable.

So your WordPress software was free – you just paid for someone to add features and build your site using WordPress – but on the basis WordPress could disappear or fall apart at any time. Probably won’t happen, but no guarantees.

So what about the drama?

Where to start?!

In short, WPEngine and Mullenweg fell out over money.

As I explained above, Mullenweg created the software you (and we) use for free. But, the guy has to eat, and Silicon Valley isn’t cheap. So, somehow, he needs to get paid. Without making this article a treatise in open-source economics, Mullenweg’s pay cheque comes from activities adjacent to WordPress including hosting (WordPress.com) and developing commercial “addons” for WordPress such as WooCommerce.

WPEngine also provides hosting, develops commercial plugins etc., making Mullenweg and WPEngine competitors. However, Mullenweg has control over a key component of WPEngine’s business model – the WordPress software – for which WPEngine pays nothing and has no guarantees, at least in cash.

WPEngine has substantial investment from private equity, and private equity exists to make a profit. The row ostensibly started with Mullenweg being aggrieved about how much WPEngine and its investors Silver Lake were making from WordPress and how little they were giving back. So the row started (or at least erupted from) a demand from Mullenweg that WPEngine contribute back 8% of its revenue to WordPress, either in cash or people.

Where things got sticky was that whilst Mullenweg can demand what he wishes, WPEngine have the same freedoms you do to use WordPress for free. So to create leverage, Mullenweg used allegations of breach of trademark against WPEngine for calling themselves a WordPress hosting company.

So far, no impact on you. But here’s where it started to impact customers. As the row escalated, Mullenweg blocked WPEngine customers – organisations like you – from updating their sites, blocked WPEngine from releasing new features and addons to WordPress plugins and added messages to the control panel in WordPress telling people not to use WPEngine. A further spat blew up over a WordPress component offered by WPEngine – Advanced Custom Fields / ACF – with changes by Mullenweg to appropriate this causing many sites around the world to break with no notice or warning.

This meant organisations like you suddenly had more maintenance costs and more risk depending on where you host your website and what components of WordPress you use.

The row shows no sign of abating – with WPEngine subsequently filing for an injunction against Mullenweg and his company, and Mullenweg filing a response which in effect says “you understand the risks of using WordPress when you start using it – buyer beware”.

Software as a business risk

You will have plans to consider risk in your arts, heritage or culture organisation. That likely includes fire, flood, pandemic (added: 2020) and more. You’ve probably also added cybersecurity in recent years too.

But your website will be contributing a significant part of your income. What would be the impact on your business if it stopped working tomorrow and took a month to repair? Have you got contingency plans?

The first step is knowing what you actually have. The big obvious systems are easy – your finance department can give you a list of people they pay bills to – but there will be tools, components and dependencies dotted around your network, web hosting and staff devices that just quietly do their thing, until one day they don’t. Knowing what those things are in advance is half the battle.

Your contingency planning should cover all the software you use on a daily basis – both the obvious stuff and the hidden: commercial and free. If it’s important to how you function as an organisation, do you understand the risks and have plans in place to recover if the worst should happen?

Commercial software providers – we included – have a responsibility to do this planning if we have an ongoing relationship and will feed into your planning on request. But for open-source software, you will need to either do the work yourself or contract with others who can do it for you. Even with commercial software though, you should understand your suppliers’ plans and any gaps you need to fill in-house.

The WPEngine drama is a timely reminder – if you’re using open-source software such as WordPress, it almost certainly comes with no warranty or guarantees.

How is your software funded? Stuff you pay for

Well, that’s obvious, right? We pay, that funds the software.

Well, yes, and no. Not all software business models are the same.

Many software companies are largely self-funded. There may well have been some initial, modest investment to get started – or perhaps it was all sweat equity – but the founders and key team fund most of what they do from what their customers spend. These companies live within their means and depend on meeting their customers’ needs. They may have less resources behind them but make their own decisions and call their own shots.

That’s us at PatronBase – we are proud of the fact we have no equity investors to satisfy, and that the people you work with are the people making the decisions.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are publicly owned companies – the Apples and Microsofts of the world. These are publicly traded and have a broad base of many investors so that no one person can exert control without majority agreement.

Many software companies sit in the middle, though, in the murky world of private equity and venture capital. Behind the founding team are a small group of behind-the-scenes investors whose main purpose is to make money. Whilst these firms will often give in the early stages – growing rapidly at a loss through undercutting competitors, developing aggressively and building community – at some point investors demand a change of pace from loss to profit, and these companies switch from “give” to “take”.

That, rightly or wrongly, is Mullenweg’s beef with WPEngine and owners Silver Lake – that they take far more from the WordPress community than they are willing to give back, making hundreds of $m from others’ hard work.

That’s not to suggest Mullenweg’s motives are pure or his tactics are defensible – no to both, in my humble opinion – but he has a germ of a point. For an example from another industry, here’s a viewpoint on how Uber grows and competes.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/12/why-everyone-hates-uber-seven-step-playbook

Uber’s approach is classic venture capital – offer new features at rock bottom below cost pricing, squeeze out the competition then jack prices through the roof and cut service when you’re the only gig in town – if you are getting love-bombed by a software company’s sales team, ask how they’re funded, and dollars to donuts you’re in stages 1 or 2 of the VC playbook with future price rises and service decline on the horizon.

There’s nothing inherently bad about venture capital funded software, but it shouldn’t be the only part of the software ecosystem. If you are going into a long-term relationship with a VC-backed supplier, have a contingency plan for “what will I do when we pass into stage 3 of higher prices and lower service?” because it’s always coming.

How is your software funded? Stuff you don’t pay for

The stuff you don’t pay for is trickier. You are probably a charity and have responsibilities to your mission (or shareholders, if you are a business).

However, you will have an element of social conscience towards society as a whole, more broadly than your mission. Open-source depends on millions of individuals and organisations choosing to “do their bit” to develop software for the good of society as a whole.

There are many ways to contribute to open-source software: making donations to non-profits such as the Linux Foundation, .NET Foundation, Apache Software Foundation etc., sponsoring open-source projects, contributing time and skills to open-source projects or employing suppliers and subcontractors who contribute to open-source on your behalf.

Of course, some organisations may be unable to do so, but I’d encourage you to consider the value of open-source software to your business and how you might contribute.

So, what next?

The #wpdrama is far from over. For now, it’s possible that for some users continued maintenance of their WordPress websites may become a little more costly or inconvenient, but we don’t envisage major disruption.

Longer term, we’d advise you to include the availability of WordPress – and other software your organisation depends on – in your organisation’s risk register and keep the situation under review in case more disruptive steps are taken by WordPress’s custodians.