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The legal battle kicked off when Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, called WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ at an event.
A US judge granted a preliminary injunction yesterday (10 December) ordering WordPress owner Automattic to stop interfering with WP Engine’s plugins.
WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting web content, made headlines earlier this year after becoming embroiled in a public spat with hosting provider WP Engine.
It kicked off when Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” at an event back in September. This prompted WP Engine to send a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic, which in turn responded with its own cease-and-desist letter relating to alleged trademark infringement.
In October, WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power.
Yesterday, WP Engine enjoyed a legal victory when California District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and WP Engine’s own ACF plugin. The judge found that Mullenweg’s conduct was “designed to induce breach or disruption”.
The ruling in the filing also noted: “While [the] Defendants characterise WPEngine’s harm as self-imposed because it built its business around a website ‘that it had no contractual right to use …’ [the] Defendants’ role in helping that harm materialise through their recent targeted actions toward WPEngine, and no other competitor, cannot be ignored.”
Siding with the concerns raised by WP Engine, Judge Martínez-Olguín granted a preliminary injunction. As part of this order, Automattic will have to take down the list of companies it displayed on a site it created to track outgoing WP Engine customers.
The company must also remove the checkbox which asks WordPress users to verify that they are not affiliated with WP Engine when logging in.
WordPress is open-source software, meaning its original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.
Automattic is a for-profit company that sells a hosted version of WordPress software. In 2010, Automattic transferred the WordPress trademark and logo to the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded by Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open-source project.
That same year, WP Engine was founded in the US state of Texas. The hosting provider specialises in WordPress technology, providing managed hosting as well as e-commerce and enterprise offerings.
The company has grown to have more than 1,000 employees worldwide, including an office in Limerick, Ireland. It has also raised more than $250m in funding over its 14-year history, most of which came from private equity firm Silver Lake.
According to data published last week, WordPress powers 43.7pc of all websites as their CMS, and it is estimated that around 488.6m websites are built on WordPress.
In related news, Automattic announced on 9 December that it had acquired artificial intelligence start-up WPAI.
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