Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors planning a fork

Huh, the injunction against "blocking, disabling, or interfering with WPEngine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ (hereinafter “WPEngine and Related Entities”) access to wordpress.org;" [0] is still in effect right? There's nothing on the docket saying otherwise...

These contributors are "partners" under the common meaning of the word right? After all the tweet [1] that Matt links to from his own blog post [2] says

> We are committed to working with Joost, Karim, and other respected voices in the community to ensure WordPress’s future is stronger than ever.

That sounds like a partnership to me.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

[1] https://x.com/wpengine/status/1870242287218790849

[2] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

That does not sound like a partnership at all. It sounds like an intent to work with the community.

Is "committed to working with" not a subset of the class of "partners" in your vernacular? What do you think is required to be "partners"?

And it names the specific members of the community, Joost, Karim, who subsequently had their accounts deactivated, not just the community at large.

> with WPEngine’s

"WPEngine's" being key here. Some of the banned people are wordpress contributors, unrelated to WPE. The other banned people are not contributors at all and seemingly the only reason they were banned is that matt is angry at their tweets.

You can't cut "WPEngine’s" off from the disjunctive that follows.

> and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’

That clause is why I discussed the evidence that the people banned seem to me to fall under the meaning of the word partners.

> What do you think is required to be "partners"?

We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition. And while I'm not sure of the particular definition that's going to be in play, I strongly suspect that the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction.

"We are committed to working with [...] We stand ready" isn't strong enough to actually constitute a partnership, I'm pretty sure--it is at best an expression of intent to make one.

> We're not working on vernacular definition here, we're working on legal definition

Indeed we are not, but absent various exceptions the legal definition of a term is its ordinary meaning.

I don't know if there's a history here of courts interpreting (or legislatures defining, or so on) "partner" in a particular technical way that would cause a deviation from that default, I'm certainly not going to try and prove that negative, but as a starting point for an informal discussion on the internet it's a reasonable guess that there is not.

Parters involved in WPEngine so yes, you can cut it off. If they aren’t working on that specifically it’s irrelevant if they’re partners on a separate project, even if it’s similar

I don't know, that legal concept likely goes back to the Phoenicians, eg the start of codified law.

I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker: https://journal.rmccue.io/468/on-contribution/

The only potential cause of this were some posts discussing the arguments behind the original lawsuit - they’re written in my personal capacity, and I’m not a partner of WP Engine. Matt is simply banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made - it’s nothing to do with their partnership status.

(I’m not a WP Engine partner, and my day job is running a competitor to them. Aside from that, I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.)

> the actual definition is going to require some sort of "meeting of the minds" and (not necessarily written) partnership agreement to qualify as a "partner" for the purpose of the injunction

It almost certainly refers to WP Engine's partnership program [1]. The catch-all is WP Engine users. It would seem prudent for anyone doing business with Wordpress to become a WP Engine user so they can benefit from the injunction. (Not legal advice.)

[1] https://wpengine.com/partners/

I find this astounding given your contributions. Feel free not to answer but how is this affecting businesses such as the one you work for? How is the rest of the Wordpress agency/consultancy community reacting to all this? It’s not a space I play in, despite having heavily built on Wordpress in the past (and since abandoned it after this debacle), but I am curious. Are agencies just pretending it isn’t happening? Making contingency plans?

In my vernacular, a partnership is actually working together. Talk is cheap, lots of people say they're committed to stuff but aren't really.

They didn't, they emphasized it.

How do you figure that the people mentioned are partners with an unrelated wordpress hosting platform?