WPEngine, Inc. vs. Automattic– Order on Motion for Preliminary Injunction

Ehh. I speak as a pretty long-term WP-oriented developer who is no fan of WP Engine for reasons that are defined by having used their product when I say:

This was the only sensible and just outcome.

The "Secure Custom Fields" thing is one of the most egregious things to happen in open source for at least a decade. Just crazy.

Hopefully Matt understands he has become self-limiting and steps back from some of his positions/takes off one of his too many hats.

Can you link to that explanation, please, for those of us not well versed in how this works?

Matt's attorney - or someone claiming to be him - was saying that Matt is in the right and everything he's posted since the start was cleared by him. On here and on Twitter.

That jives with Matt's claims that his lawyers were on board with all of his nonsense (and now, probably legally incriminating!) posts. But it could also have just been someone LARPing.

It's always lame when somebody's arguments get shut down in court and then they just repeat the same failed arguments after.

Like, come up with some new material.

In almost every example you cited, the very wealthy people were also very stupid and violated bedrock principles of the court system in a way that could not be swept under the rug. Specifically:

- Elon Musk put it in writing that he was going to buy Twitter with no due diligence. Contracts are nine tenths of the law; no court in the world is going to get you out of one because the biggest value the court system has to the wealthy is contract enforcement.

- Alex Jones never actually argued the merits of the defamation case against him. He didn't even show up to court. Judges have wide latitude to rule against people who don't show up to defend their cases, because otherwise nobody would be dumb enough to actually defend themself in a (neutral) court of law.

- One of the few things US law can actually still protect you against is all the classic failure modes of banks and investments, both because the wealthy demand protection for their wealth and because the less-wealthy have been fleeced by investment fraud for so long that the list of memestock victims includes Issac Newton. SBF did the one kind of financial crime that the system actually cares about[0].

Today's system is corrupt on the margins: it needs to at least provide the appearance of impartiality, because the wealthy still rely on it being an impartial arbitrator of competing interests. In 1500s England, wealthy people didn't get divorces, they got annulments, where they paid a priest to go squint at Bible verses and find something to explain why the marriage was spiritually invalid. The wealthy person gets to sidestep the rules, but only if someone can find their desired loophole. Sometimes, they can't.

And then sometimes a Henry VIII comes along, tries to have it both ways, gets told no, says "fuck that, I'm the church now", and completely replaces the partially corrupt system with a completely corrupt one. Matt Mullenweg seems to be playing at the same bit, doing ideological purges of Automattic and such; but he doesn't own the WordPress community, and he doesn't own the law.

Enjoy it while it lasts, because it might not survive convicted felon / ex-President / President-Elect Donald Trump, depending on how many of Big Tech's Henry VIIIths come running to Trump for protection from countries that actually enforce their antitrust laws.

[0] This also goes for Martin Shkreli; whose first criminal charge was for running a Ponzi scheme, not for jacking up the cost of generic drugs to exploit FDA regulations on sole-supplier drugs.