As we mentioned in our last post, Matt Mullenweg continued his extortion campaign against WP Engine over the weekend by taking over WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. The day before, a new conversation with him was released on Youtube. The conversation was with someone who has a questionable history, including editing his own Wikipedia page. The conversation included many misleading to false statements, including one that other person in the conversation actually stumbled in to exposing.

When he was asked if his extortion campaign could help competitors to WordPress, he answered it this way after mentioning Webflow:

You’re on a proprietary system. You’re not open source anymore. Rug pull from you in a day. Open source gives you the security, the trust, the continuity. It is the future. It’s why WordPress runs 43% of all the website in the world.

None of that matches what happened for those using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and now finding that it has been replaced with a new plugin.

Another stand out moment was Matt Mullenweg explaining the blocking of WP Engine’s customers from getting software updates. He started explaining that this way:

To this is this is a little geeky and so all of WP engine servers were using free resources on wordpress.org to update their sites so they were charging their customers and then using free services from wordpress.org to update to their sites.

The reality is that WordPress itself is hardwired to get updates from wordpress.org. Not only did WP Engine not do anything to have that happen, but Matt Mullenweg has called WP Engine a cancer for claim that they modifying WordPress:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread.

They are not actually doing that. Matt Mullenweg is publicly opposed to WordPress allowing using other servers than coming from wordpress.org. He is in control of what goes in to WordPress, so he can stop that from happening.

The charging customers claim seems to be referring to them charging their customers for hosting, not charging extra to do updates.