“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.”
To put this move into context, the shutdown only directly impacts WordPress.org, whereas most enterprises using Automattic’s WordPress are leveraging WordPress.com, the commercial hosting site. But given the ripple effects across all of WordPress, it is likely that enterprise users would also be impacted.
“The WordPress CMS is licensed under the GPL, so it is permanently available for free. However, a lot of WP’s value comes from themes and plugins,” Rosen said. “My understanding is that in some cases, the wordpress.org URL is hardcoded into WordPress, which can make it difficult or impossible to update your themes and plugins if they haven’t been added to the directory. It really depends on the particular website’s configuration.”
