Somewhat bewildered at what’s going on between the ultra famous web content management system that powers a good chunk of the internet, Wordpress (well, its CEO Matt Mullenweg) and WP Engine - a service that hosts Wordpress sites.

The former has been virulently criticising the latter all of a sudden. In one blog post Mullenweg writes that WP Engine is “a cancer to Wordpress” seemingly for turning off the revision history feature. In another he implies that they’re a “parasitic entity”. I understand he made similarly negative comments in a recent conference speech.

And now WP Engine publicly shared a cease and desist letter they sent which portrays Wullenweg’s comments as being some kind of petty revenge for WP Engine resisting an extortion attempt to cough up some vast sum of money.

Hard to know what to believe. I hope it’s not that Wullenweg has developed a strange revenge obsession. He is that very rare thing, a big tech CEO who in recent times I still had substantial respect for. I suspect there are very many hosts out there that “exploit” Wordpress without giving anything back - which is a real and important problem, but not one that as far as I know is specific to WP Engine.