WP Engine is suing Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg

Hosting provider WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, accusing them of fraud and abuse of power. The lawsuit comes after two weeks of wrangling between Mullenweg, who is also CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine over trademark infringement and contributions to the WordPress community.

WP Engine accused Automattic and Mullenweg of not keeping promises to run open source WordPress projects without any restrictions and give developers the freedom to build, run, modify, and redistribute the software.

“Matt Mullenweg’s conduct over the past ten days has exposed serious conflicts of interest and management issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy that trust. WP Engine has no choice but to pursue these claims to protect its people, partners, customers, and the wider WordPress community,” the company added.

The lawsuit document, filed in a California court, also accused Mllenweg of having “a long history of
obfuscating the true facts” about his control of the WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org

The story so far

For more than a week, Mullenweg has accused WP Engine of infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. He called them the “Cancer of WordPress” and called out WP Engine’s independent partner, Silver Lake, for ignoring the open source community. Later, WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter asking Mullenweg and Automattic to retract the comments. Automattic sent its cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine for infringing the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.

Notably, Mullenweg then blocked WP Engine on September 25 from accessing WordPress.org resources, including plug-ins and themes, to prevent sites from updating. Two days later, Mullenweg granted a temporary reprieve and opened WP Engine until October 1.

On Wednesday, Automattic published a proposed seven-year prospectus that it submitted to WP Engine on September 20, asking the hosting company to pay 8% of its gross revenue as a monthly royalty for using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.

Alternatively, WP Engine may also commit 8% for sending employees to contribute to core WordPress features and operations or a combination of both hours and money.

WP Engine has not adopted these terms, which include testing fork and extension plugins from Automattic and WooCommerce.

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