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Hosting provider WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. The lawsuit comes after nearly two weeks of tussling between Mullenweg, who is also CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine over trademark infringement and contributing to the WordPress community.
WP Engine accused Automattic and Mullenweg of not keeping promises to run WordPress open-source projects without any constraints and giving developers the freedom to build, run, modify, and redistribute the software.
“Matt Mullenweg’s conduct over the last ten days has exposed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy that trust. WP Engine has no choice but to pursue these claims to protect its people, agency partners, customers, and the broader WordPress community,” the company added.
The case document, filed in a court in California, also accused Mullenweg of having a “long history of
obfuscating the true facts” about his control of WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org
The story until now
For over a week, Mullenweg has criticized WP Engine for infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. He called them the “Cancer of WordPress” and also called out WP Engine’s private equity partner, Silver Lake, for not caring about the open-source community. Later, WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter asking Mullenweg and Automattic to withdraw these comments. Automattic sent its own cease-and-desist letter alleging WP Engine of infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Notably, Mullenweg then banned WP Engine on September 25 from accessing WordPress.org resources, including plug-ins and themes, preventing sites from updating them. Two days later, Mullenweg provided a temporary reprieve and unblocked WP Engine until October 1.
On Wednesday, Automattic published a proposed seven-year term sheet that it sent to WP Engine on September 20, which asks the hosting company to pay 8% of its gross revenues as a royalty fee on a monthly basis for using WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Alternatively, WP Engine could also commit 8% by deploying employees to contribute to WordPress’s core features and functionalities or combination of both hours and money.
WP Engine didn’t accept these terms, which included a probation on forking plugins and extension from Automattic and WooCommerce.
You can contact this reporter at im@ivanmehta.com or on Signal: @ivan.42
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
