Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the WordPress open source project and CEO of AutomatticAnnounce, the free version of WordPress.org service will be suspended, including the temporary opening of new account applications, as well as the submission and review of plug-ins and background themes. The expected time for resumption of use has not yet been confirmed.
The announcement of the suspension of the free version of WordPress.org is primarily due to a recent dispute with WP Engine. Automattic, in late September of this year, accused WP Engine of contributing too little to the WordPress free open source project and, as a result, banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org resources.
Matt Mullenweg said that although WP Engine is one of the main hosting service providers for WordPress and provides WordPress enterprise solutions, tools and services, it has long been considered a part of WordPress. Therefore, he hopes that WP Engine will pay to obtain WordPress trademark authorization.
In subsequent developments, Automattic briefly lifted restrictions on WP Engine and proposed that WP Engine pay 8% of its monthly revenue as licensing fees or as employee salaries to help develop application services that can be used for WordPress.org. However, WP Engine did not agree, so Automattic subsequently restricted WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources again.
However, the market also believes that Automattic's request for an 8% revenue share from WP Engine is unreasonable and may even affect the development model of the WordPress open source community. Once Automattic successfully requires WP Engine to set aside a monthly revenue share, it means that more software projects that choose to develop in an open source environment may face the risk of being asked to pay fees after they grow in scale.
In fact, many people, even employees within Automattic, do not support Matt Mullenweg's approach because it may cause uncertainty in the subsequent development of the WordPress project and may even cause the open source community to develop other projects to replace WordPress.org.
