WPEngine wins ban in WordPress builder ‘war’

Update: This story has been updated to include announcements from WPEngine and Automattic.

Popular WordPress hosting and app company WPEngine scored a significant, albeit tentative, court victory Tuesday against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, who has been waging a “scorched-earth nuclear” war against the small company.

Federal District Judge in California was given WPEngine’s request for a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and his companies, ordering them to stop interfering with WPEngine’s contracts with its customers and restore access to the wordpress.org platform.

WordPress is the open source website builder that more than 40 percent of websites, including Gizmodo, rely on to publish content and run their businesses. After helping create WordPress, Mullenweg went on to found Automattic, which, among Among other things, he hosts WordPress sites. He is also the director of the WordPress Foundation and the owner of the wordpress.org domain.

WPEngine is a hosting company that competes with Automattic.For years, the relationship was mostly peaceful with WPEngine creating themes, plugins, and other tools for its customers that were distributed through wordpress.org.

The dispute came to public attention in September when Mullenweg spoke at the WordCamp US convention, where he accused WPEngine of being a parasite that “feeds off the host without giving anything back” and encouraged the company’s customers not to renew their contracts.

According to a lawsuit later filed by WPEngine alleging a variety of torts, including extortion and defamation, Mullenweg’s theft was preceded by a series of demands he made to WordPress, including demanding that the company sign a license agreement that would require it to pay to Automattic: 8 percent of its monthly revenue or to allow Mullenweg’s WordPress Foundation to monitor a certain amount of its employees’ work just before Mullenweg’s keynote speech Automattic CFO Mark Davies allegedly told WPEngine executives that his company would “go to war” and take a “scorched earth nuclear approach” if they didn’t sign the licensing agreement.

After WPEngine refused to sign the agreement, Mullenweg, through his roles at Automattic and the WordPress Foundation, restricted WPEngine’s access to wordpress.org, the main platform through which he distributed his plugins and tools, according to the lawsuit. : Customers who hosted their websites with WPEngine were also allegedly blocked from accessing some tools.

In October, Mullenweg allegedly caused the WordPress.org login page to be updated with a box that required users to certify that they were not affiliated with WPEngine in any way. If they did not check the box, users could not log in. Another Mullenweg company, Pressable, also began advertising to WPEngine customers, encouraging them to terminate their contracts with the company and offering to cover its costs.

As a result, WPEngine sued Mullenweg and his companies and sought an injunction that would restore its customers’ access to wordpress.org and prevent Mullenweg’s companies from interfering with its contracts.

California Federal District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Holguin granted the injunction, finding that WPEngine would likely prevail on its claim that Mullenweg interfered with its customers’ contracts. She also wrote that millions of websites rely on WPEngine on the instruments of and that maintaining their access to those instruments and preventing “arbitrary disruptions arising from corporate dispute is in the public interest”.

In response to the decision, Automattic released a statement saying: “Yesterday’s ruling is a preliminary injunction designed to preserve the status quo. It was made without discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will soon file against WP Engine. We look forward to winning at trial because We continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full fact-finding and full merit review.”

WPEngine said the order would “return much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem.”