Over the past few weeks the WordPress community has gone through some corporate drama, starting with extortion-like messages and slander, escalating t

Timeline of the WordPress Drama

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Style Pass

2024-10-11 14:30:06

Over the past few weeks the WordPress community has gone through some corporate drama, starting with extortion-like messages and slander, escalating to cease and deists letters, and finally ending in a lawsuit. As I’ve closely followed the unraveling, I want to document a more detailed timeline and update it, as more data comes in. I try to keep my personal views and comments at the end of the article, but it’s clear that there will be some bias in the reporting.

tl;dr After Matt Mullenweg, BDFL of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, has dragged WP Engine publicly through the mud for not paying a ludicrous amount of money or contributing (enough) to the open source project, WP Engine is suing Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, while Automattic claims misuse of WordPress trademarks.

A very brief overview of the different stakeholders in this whole drama, as to reduce confusion later on and because it is a bit tricky. I hope to expand this a bit more at a later point.