A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the new and growing fight between Automattic/Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine.
Back then, the two were mainly trading words, and dueling cease and desist letters. However, the scope seems to be continuing to expand, including WP Engine filing an actual lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic.
This news post is about what I think to be one of the most dramatic moves in the entire thing:
On the weekend of October 12th, Matt Mullenweg and his team made the dramatic move of taking over the Advanced Custom Fields plugin (ACF) from Delicious Brains, a company that was acquired by WP Engine a couple of years ago.
If you’re on Mullenweg’s side, you would say that they “forked” Advanced Custom Fields, which would be a legitimate action under the GPL.
However, I called it a takeover because there’s one huge difference between what Mullenweg did and what a fork does.
Rather than forking ACF’s codebase and creating a new, standalone plugin, Mullenweg opted to actually take over the Advanced Custom FIelds plugin at WordPress.org and rename it to Secure Custom Fields.
Here’s the biggest issue with that, in my opinion:
If a user automatically updates Advanced Custom Fields through their WordPress dashboard, the plugin will change to Secure Custom Fields, which kind of makes it seem more like a malicious supply chain attack than a “fork.”
The new Secure Custom Fields plugin is also continuing to use the Advanced Custom Fields slug, which technically violates Rule 17 of the WordPress.org plugin directory.
What to do if you’ve been using ACF
Two paths:
Note – none of these issues affect ACF Pro, which already updates from ACF’s servers even before these issues.
Could it get any worse?
This issue has obviously stirred up a ton of debate, as it’s pretty unprecedented in the history of WordPress (and most open-source projects in general). It’s also getting some mainstream press, such as this article from The Verge.
I wonder if this is just the first takeover that we’ll see, as some other WP Engine plugins are also blocked from WordPress.org (such as NitroPack).
I also wonder how a judge will feel about these actions, given that Mullenweg/WordPress has tweeted that he will stop them if WP Engine drops its lawsuit.
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