On Friday, the law firm representing WP Engine in their lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg filed a motion for preliminary injunction. One claim made by the lawyers from Quinn Emanuel in that stood out to us, because they claimed something was a mystery, but it isn’t. It suggests that maybe the lawyers are not doing as good a job as they should be or they were not telling the truth.

Here is the statement with the claim:

Indeed, Automattic’s own counsel recently posted (and then mysteriously deleted) a statement that wordpress.org is a non-profit. Compare Jenkins Ex. 3 at 1; id. Ex. 4.

Two things they said there are true. Automattic’s own counsel recently posted that WordPress.org is a non-profit, and it was deleted. What happened isn’t a mystery, though.

On October 3, we covered that an associate general counsel of Automattic had written a post on Automattic’s news blog with this statement:

The Foundation also licensed the name WordPress to the non-profit WordPress.org, which runs a website that facilitates access to WordPress-related software.

That contradicted with Matt Mullenweg’s own claims that he personally owns the website.

We reached out to Automattic’s press email address for clarification before publishing the post. We still haven’t heard back from them.

In a follow up post on October 11, we explained how the deletion came about:

We previously covered how a lawyer for Automattic was claiming that a non-profit owned WordPress.org, while Matt Mullenweg is claiming he owns it. On the Hacker News, Matt Mullenweg responded to a reply about that by claiming that “All the information in the links you shared is totally wrong.” One of three links he claimed contained information that is totally wrong was a post he had written. He then responded, “Sorry for that error, the post has been updated now.” The change made to the post doesn’t make sense from a legal perspective, but it also involved Matt Mullenweg making a striking claim based on what else he is doing.

So Matt Mullenweg changed the post. This is how it looks now:

The Foundation also licensed the name to the website WordPress.org, which facilitates widespread access to WordPress-related software at no charge.

It doesn’t make sense that a website has a trademark license, there must be a legal entity. It apparently is Matt Mullenweg that personally has the license and it seems likely he issued it to himself.

While the text of the post was updated, the graphic included still claims there is a non-profit involved, as the graphic claims that “Right to use name as part of non-profit activities” went to WordPress: