WP Engine VS WordPress.org: Mullenweg asks court to dismiss WP Engine’s lawsuit
WordPress.org, amidst the ongoing battle, has asked a court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by WP Engine, accusing them of extortion, filed on the 2nd of October.
Matt Mullenweg, the CEO and cofounder of WordPress, and his company Automattic has asked a court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by WP Engine accusing them of Extortion and abuse of power on 2nd October 2024 in a court of California. The battle between WordPress.org and WP Engine is the most heated topic among the WordPress community, the core issue is the fight between Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress and Automattic and WP Engine.
The motion to dismiss the lawsuit
On their official page, Automattic has described briefly about the issue and their motion asking to dismiss the lawsuit by saying, “This court filing seeks to dismiss WP Engine’s complaint, filed on October 2, 2024. As we previously stated, Automattic and Matt vehemently deny all of WP Engine’s allegations, which are gross mischaracterizations of reality and focus solely on cherry-picked events of the last two months. Additionally, WP Engine’s complaint fails to recognize that Matt attempted to privately resolve the dispute for the good of the community before WP Engine decided to file this lawsuit.”
The filings read, “The mere fact that WP Engine made the risky decision to base its growing business on a site to which it has no rights or guarantee of access, without making backup plans, is not enough for it to conjure a claim out of legal thin air.”
A brief overview of the ongoing WordPress.org and WP Engine battle
In mid-September, Matt Mullenweg in a post called WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress” and criticized the host for disabling users to track their revision history for every post. Matt Mullenweg said that WP Engines disabled the feature to save money. Matt Mullenweg said to Silver Lake, WP Engine investor, that they are not sufficiently contributing into the open- source project and the usage of “WP” brand is confusing for users.
In reply to it WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter, which reads, “Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic — his for-profit entity — a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described ‘scorched earth nuclear approach’ toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond.”
The company claimed that Mullenweg had said he would take a “scorched earth nuclear approach” against WP Engine unless it agreed to pay “a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.”
“The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress,” the updated page reads.
