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WP Engine Asks Court To Stop Matt Mullenweg From Blocking Access To WordPress Resources

(Friday October 18, 2024 @11:24AM (msmash) from the tussle-continues dept.)


WP Engine [1]has filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg, seeking to halt their public campaign and regain access to WordPress resources. The hosting platform claims it's suffering "immediate irreparable harm," including a 14% spike in cancellation requests following Mullenweg's criticism.

WP Engine alleges the dispute has created anxiety among developers and increased security risks for the WordPress community. The legal action comes after Automattic [2]accused WP Engine of trademark infringement , leading to [3]exchanged cease-and-desist orders and a lawsuit. Last week, the WordPress.org project, led by Mullenweg, [4]took control of WP Engine's Advanced Custom Fields plugin , redirecting users to a forked version.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/18/24273448/wp-engine-injunction-matt-mullenweg-wordpress-resources

[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/09/23/1348226/wordpress-founder-calls-wp-engine-a-cancer-to-wordpress-and-urges-community-to-switch-providers

[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/09/24/1547236/wp-engine-sends-cease-and-desist-letter-to-automattic-over-mullenwegs-comments

[4] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/14/1526251/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings


I just can't be sympathetic to Automattic (Score:3)

by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 )

Mullenweg's handling of the governance has been an absolute shit show AFAICT for the FOSS side, and it seems like a lot of FOSS decisions were set up to subtly financially advantage one vendor.

Generally speaking, mature FOSS projects with the ASF, CNCF, GNU, etc. have governance models that actively avoid this "BDFL wearing two hats for great profit" scenario, among other obvious conflicts of interest.

Sorry, guys. Y'all chose the GPL v2 and WP Engine is compliant.

Re: (Score:1, Troll)

by MikeDataLink ( 536925 )

> Mullenweg's handling of the governance has been an absolute shit show AFAICT for the FOSS side, and it seems like a lot of FOSS decisions were set up to subtly financially advantage one vendor.

> Generally speaking, mature FOSS projects with the ASF, CNCF, GNU, etc. have governance models that actively avoid this "BDFL wearing two hats for great profit" scenario, among other obvious conflicts of interest.

> Sorry, guys. Y'all chose the GPL v2 and WP Engine is compliant.

Wow, it’s like an acronym convention exploded! You've got the FOSS brigade, the ASF squad, the CNCF crew, and don’t forget GNU’s marching band. It’s a wonder anyone can understand what they’re saying between the BDFLs and the AFAICTs! Honestly, with that many acronyms, I half expected a secret handshake to come next. Did they all just win a game of buzzword bingo?

If The Courts Side With WP Engine ... (Score:2)

by garett_spencley ( 193892 )

I haven't been following this story in any kind of deep way, so I'm just familiar at a very high level. From what I remember, the WP creator is restricting access to their servers, for whatever reasons, and this is impacting WP Engine directly. WP says that if WP Engine wants to continue to consume WP's server resources at the rate they current are, that they will need to compensate WP for this.

Others have said that the way that WP's creator is handling this is bad, and that might be true but unless they've

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