As any reader perusing this subreddit can plainly see, Matt is on a power trip that threatens to destroy the credibility of WordPress as a platform. However, many web devs feel helpless to influence the situation, since clients often were sold on the stability of WordPress, so changing platforms is a difficult horse to sell.

Recently, Matt's been claiming that WPEngine replaces the stripe partner id in Automattic's woocommerce stripe gateway plugin. This appears to be a false claim, but more than that, it is in no way a violation of the GPL license on woocommerce. In fact, it's pretty trivial to write a plugin that does just that without ever touching woocommerce/automattic-owned code.

It's pretty obvious, from the level of attention Matt is giving this issue, that the partner code is used to track adoption of woocommerce, and likely gives Matt/Automattic a small kickback from every sale.

Here's where we have the power

By adding a very simple custom plugin or mu-plugin to all your client sites, you can remove your clients from the pool of referrals that Matt gets, and hit him personally in the wallet.

How to?

• Create an mu-plugin that attaches a new filter to http_request_args with 2 arguments
• In the callback, the first argument is the http request arguments ($args) and the second argument is the URL where the request is being sent ($url).
• check to see if the URL host is api.stripe.com
• if so, modify the array of headers, stored in $args['headers']:
• modify the User-Agent header to strip all references to woocommerce.
• modify the X-Stripe-Client-User-Agent (JSON encoded) header to strip all references to woocommerce and null the partner_id field in the application array.
• return the modified request arguments

Reference Implementation

I've prepared a gist with a reference implementation to work from. You are free to use it as is, in your clients' mu-plugins folders, or modify it as you wish.

Next steps

A protest is most effective if it's visible. Post about this change on your blog or social media. Tell your friends in the industry, etc.

One particularly scathing option would be to make this protest plugin (or another similar implementation) available in the WordPress plugin repo.

It's been years since I touched the repo, but I don't believe this plugin breaks any rules for submission and approval.

I'm personally swamped at work right now, so navigating SVN and submission requirements is really outside my current capacity, but I'm happy to partner with anyone who wants to take this idea to the repo.