WordPress CEO quits community Slack after court injunction

A massive reason WP became the de facto web CMS was the community, including volunteers supporting plugins they wrote and published for free.

For example, in the early 2010s I manned a help booth at wordcamp. I frequented the forums and gave folk advice on issues they had with free plugins.

This is entirely distinct from Wordpress core and I would say that the ecosystem of plugins was the driving force behind WP’s rise to dominance. I neither wanted or needed Matt Mulenwegs blessing to participate, but he seems to have forgotten that lately.

It's described in the preliminary injunction linked in the article. I can't seem to copy-paste, but it's multipart test including whether the plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits, and also public interest. It's under the heading "legal standard." Every part of the test went in WP Engine's favor.

Refusing to do business with someone is one thing. Using your power over a competitor to shove them out of the marketplace and, in effect, giving them reverse special treatment in order to punish them and only them, that's not the same.

You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".

For those who might be wondering what comes next - IANAL, but, this is what seems to usually happen:

Automattic has 72 hours to comply with the order. They probably will, plus or minus Matt being a whiny child about it. They have competent attorneys who are surely telling them to do so. They can also appeal the order, and they could even ask for the appeal to be granted on an emergency basis, but there's no promise that'd work, and usually it doesn't. The whole point of injunctions is that they stop things from changing until they're overturned by appeal or trial.

If they do comply, the status quo resumes until this goes to trial. There's no guarantee that WP Engine prevails at trial, but the fact that the injunction was granted means it's pretty likely they will, unless facts or law materially changes in the meantime. The statement Automattic released suggests to me that this is the path they'll take.

If they do not comply, things become... interesting. Of course, the case still eventually goes to trial. In the meantime, though, WP Engine can ask the court to force Automattic to comply. That probably looks like a motion to show cause why they have not complied, followed by further orders to comply and possible contempt findings. Contempt findings often come with monetary fines that escalate (e. g. $1,000 per day the first week, $2,000 per day the next, and so on). It can also come with jail time, though I am not sure how that works in cases where the entity being sued is a company.

It probably won't get to that, though. Refusing to comply with a preliminary injunction is an extremely bad idea, which is why almost nobody does it. Even states and government actors with strong political desires for things and a lot of power nearly always comply. While Matt Mullenweg is clearly not a rational actor, and clearly is willing to do extremely dumb things despite the advice of council, the other people who work for Automattic (and certainly its investors) are unlikely to be so willing to ignore the order of a federal court. If they do, their lives are going to get worse, not better, and possibly rapidly.

As of this writing, the Automattic WP Engine tracker site is still up.

(Hopefully some actual attorneys who read HN can correct anything I got wrong. I just haven't seen anyone write this out yet.)