We have been following the confusing situation with what WordPress.org is and who owns the website hosted at wordpress.org. That has included Matt Mullenweg disagreeing Automattic’s lawyers over that, which became a legal “mystery”. One place that you can’t find answers to those questions is the About page on wordpress.org and the rest of the About section on of the website. In the text of that page, there are 11 references to WordPress and none for WordPress.org. The title of the page does include WordPress.org. So you would reasonably think that the website of WordPress is wordpress.org. Not so says the lawyers defending Automattic and Matt Mullenweg in the lawsuit brought against them by WP Engine. Instead, they make this claim in a legal filing submitted yesterday:

WordPress.org is not WordPress. WordPress.org is not Automattic or the WordPress Foundation, and is not controlled by either. To the contrary, as Plaintiff itself acknowledges, WordPress.org is Mr. Mullenweg’s responsibility.

That not only runs counter to the About page, but plenty of other things. For example, the meeting minutes from last week’s annual meeting of the WordPress Foundation references WordPress.org multiple times in a way that would suggest they are connected. Why would they be having an additional meeting to get an update from the new Executive Director of WordPress.org if they are not connected? The new Executive Director of WordPress.org is also an Automattic employee, as was the previous one.

Saying that WordPress.org is not Automattic and not controlled by them runs up against the reality that parts of the website are clearly hosted by Automattic. Look at the URL of an image on the homepage, https://i0.wp.com/wordpress.org/files/2024/04/brush.png?w=1198&ssl=1. The domain name is wp.com, which redirects to wordpress.com. That is part of Automattic. Here is the URL of icon image for the Classic Editor, https://ps.w.org/classic-editor/assets/icon-128×128.png?rev=1998671. That is coming from s.w.org, which is hosted by Automattic from the same range IP range as i0.wp.com.

Other claims in the filing are equally hard to square with what else is going on. There is this claim about Matt Mullenweg’s love for the WordPress community:

Rather than being about access to WordPress software, this case instead is about WordPress.org – a website owned and run by Defendant Matt Mullenweg individually, for the benefit of the community he loves.

That doesn’t match with his response to the community recently, including personal attacks and banning people from the website for expressing reservations towards his actions.

The brief also has this stunning telling of what has gone on so far:

Now, because of WP Engine’s conduct, because of the threat WP Engine poses to the beloved community Mr. Mullenweg has worked so hard to build, and because of WP Engine’s legal threats and actions against him personally, Mr. Mullenweg has decided that he no longer will provide free access to his website to the corporation that is suing him. Understandably, WP Engine is not happy with Mr. Mullenweg’s decision, and this lawsuit is WP Engine’s attempt to use this Court to compel the access it never secured by contract and has no right to by law.

WP Engine’s conduct that started this involved them not giving in to an extortion demand from Matt Mullenweg. There are plenty of problems with WP Engine, but many are equally true of Matt Mullenweg’s company (sometimes with the two companies working together). It would be hard to argue that those problems are really a threat to the WordPress community. The same can’t be said about what Matt Mullenweg is doing.