In an extraordinary escalation of his public feud with WP Engine, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has overseen the release of a forked version of the hosting company’s premium ACF Pro plugin on WordPress.org.

The fork, rebranded as “Secure Custom Fields” (SCF) and using the secure-custom-fields slug, appeared in the WordPress.org repository over the weekend. It retains all of the premium features of ACF Pro—including repeater, gallery, flexible content, clone fields, options pages, and ACF Blocks—while removing its licensing and update checks, links to documentation, and any attribution to WP Engine.

ACF Pro pricing currently starts at $39 per year. Now, users can download the forked version from WordPress.org for free.

The move follows WordPress.org’s controversial takeover of the free version of ACF last month in a move Mullenweg justified for security reasons. The plugin was also named Secure Custom Fields, adding to the confusion, and continues to use the advanced-custom-fields slug in the plugin directory.

Mullenweg’s latest move in his battle with WP Engine and its private equity backer, Silver Lake, has drawn condemnation on Reddit and social media. It raises significant ethical questions about an open-source project seemingly endorsing the forking and redistribution of premium plugins without compensation or acknowledgment, potentially violating the GPL.

The ACF Pro fork was submitted by Brandon Kraft, Director of Project Engineering for Jetpack at Automattic. On Mastodon, Kraft responded to criticisms that the new plugin removed ACF Pro’s copyright notices, posting, “Being totally transparent, where are the copyright notices in ACF or ACF Pro? I wasn’t involved in forking the Pro code, but I just don’t see a notice.” He said he planned to add licensing information to the plugin that acknowledged the GPL and past contributors.

Referring to his involvement in submitting the plugin, Kraft also posted, “The decisions on forking ACF or ACF Pro, etc., are above my paygrade, so to speak, but I didn’t refuse to work on it because I wanted to try to do it right/better.”

A blog post Kraft published on October 14 about “conflation’ in the community since September offers some additional yet confusing context around his actions. “I don’t understand the login checkbox, folks being removed from Slack, or the voice of the WordPress Twitter account lately,” he wrote. “I saw folks mention ‘Automattic’s takeover of Advanced Custom Fields. It wasn’t Automattic, but everything has been so blurred lately—it isn’t a battle I will fight.” 

Kraft also wrote that he wanted  to stay at Automattic — referring to the company’s recent buyouts — so he could help WordPress and the community return to being a collaborative “neutral zone.”

A member of the WordPress Plugin Review Team, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that after Kraft submitted the ACF Pro fork it was approved by another Automattic employee, bypassing the Plugin Review Team’s usual processes and checks.

“Many things inside of the ACF Pro fork would not pass the plugin review process, and as far as I can see, no one on the Plugin Review Team was aware of or reviewed any of the code, because if we did we would have rejected it for violating many of the guidelines,” the reviewer said.

“It pisses me off that internal people at Automattic can go over our heads to approve anything they want. It minimizes our time and contributions as volunteers. 

“At this point, why not have internal people at Automattic maintain the plugin repo since they neglect the Plugin Review Team altogether on many of their actions? What’s the point of having an unbiased review team, if one company ultimately has complete control over it all?”

The ACF Pro fork pre-empts a court hearing tomorrow in WP Engine’s legal battle with Mullenweg and his company, Automattic. WP Engine is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop Mullenweg’s public attacks and restore the status quo as of September 20. If the court approves the injunction, Mullenweg may have to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org and return the free version of ACF.