WPEngine Wins Injunction in ‘War’ With WordPress Creator

Update: This story was updated to include statements from WPEngine and Automattic.

The popular WordPress hosting and plugin company WPEngine won a substantial, albeit preliminary, court victory on Tuesday against WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, who had been waging a “scorched earth nuclear” war against the smaller company.

A federal district judge in California granted WPEngine’s request for a preliminary injunction against Mullenweg and his companies, ordering them to stop interfering in WPEngine’s contracts with its customers and to restore its access to the wordpress.org platform.

WordPress is an open source website-building software that more than 40 percent of websites, including Gizmodo’s, rely on to publish content and operate their businesses. After helping to create WordPress, Mullenweg went on to found Automattic which, among other things, hosts WordPress websites. He is also the director of the WordPress foundation and owner of the wordpress.org domain.

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

The dispute erupted into public view in September when Mullenweg gave a speech at the WordCamp US convention in which 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 range of offenses including extortion and libel, Mullenweg’s tirade was preceded by a series of demands he made to WordPress, including a demand that the company sign a licensing agreement that would require it to pay Automattic 8 percent of its monthly revenue or allow Mullenweg’s WordPress Foundation to control a certain amount of its employees’ work. During calls in the days immediately before Mullenweg’s keynote, 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 it distributed its plugins and tools, according to the lawsuit. Customers who hosted their websites through WPEngine were also allegedly blocked from accessing some tools.

In October, Mullenweg allegedly caused the login page for wordpress.org to be updated with a checkbox that required users to certify that they weren’t affiliated with WPEngine in any way. Unless they checked the box, users couldn’t sign in. Another Mullenweg company, Pressable, also began advertising to WPEngine customers, encouraging them to break their contracts with the company and offering to cover the costs of doing so.

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-Olguin granted the injunction request, finding that WPEngine is likely to prevail on its claim that Mullenweg interfered with its customer contracts. She also wrote that millions of websites rely on WPEngine’s tools and that maintaining their access to those tools and “preventing arbitrary disruption stemming [from] a corporate dispute is in the public interest.”

In response to the ruling, Automattic released a statement saying: “Yesterday’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.”

WPEngine said the order “will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem.”