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.

> 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.