Updates from the WP Engine and Keller cases against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg

Settlement conference On 9 July, a settlement conference was held in the court hearing the WPEngine v Automattic proceedings (proceedings that are now so well-known that there’s no need to describe them). Unfortunately, no settlement was reached. The court’s ‘Minute Entry’ records: Minute Entry for proceedings held before Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler: Settlement Conference held on 7/9/2025. Settlement conference held today. The case did not settle. The court asks the parties to confer with their clients, including decision-makers who were not at the settlement conference, to see whether a session with principals makes sense to identify if there is a path forward short of litigation. There is a utility to discussing settlement now: the parties should have a good understanding of the timeline that led up to the litigation, and discovery is not going to change that. The court envisions a process with the decision-makers and in-house counsel only. If this is something that could work, the parties should discuss it and circle back in the next couple of weeks with their proposals on timing. …

Updates from the WP Engine and Keller cases against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg

Who owns your contributions to the WordPress project, and how are those contributions licensed?

Header image: The Gutenberg logo was made by Cristel Rossignol, and is released under the GPL license How the Gutenberg project beganFrom idea to releaseWhat I loveAbout the block editorAbout the site

Header photo by Paco Marchante ContextMeeting with Mary at WCEUSwitzerland and Typo3 as examplesTrust restorationMy personal opinion, as written in the documentThe documentRelated posts Context Three

This post is part of a series. Links to upcoming posts will be added once published. The application team membersThe Local teamThank you organisersIt couldn’t have happened without P

Looking at Mullenweg’s comments about the WordPress Foundation and Five for the Future at WordCamp Europe 2025.

Can WordPress power real-time, data-driven digital experiences? Enterprise teams are starting to ask. Here's what that means.

Updates from the WP Engine and Keller cases against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg

Looking at Mullenweg’s comments about the FAIR project at WordCamp Europe 2025.

Back in December, I wrote about the state of leadership in the WordPress ecosystem. I shared how too much power rests with one person, and how the lack of clear governance puts contributors and businesses alike in difficult positions. That post ended with a call: we need to lead. That wasn’t rhetorical. It was a ... Read more

Introduction  Recent observations have highlighted a significant surge in new plugin submissions to the WordPress repository, as noted in this post. We also know that Automattic recently “unpaused” their contributions, leading to some pretty critical articles like this one from Roger Montti. The increase in plugin submissions got Marieke and me wondering about the relationship ... Read more

BlackRock further devalued its shares in Automattic, now valuing it at just 36.5% of its 2021 Series E valuation.

More background in support of my conclusion to avoid donating to the WordPress Foundation

Back in February, I started posting quick links for subscribers (including free subscribers!). That went so well that I thought I’d start another new subscriber-only feature, writing about the latest updates in the ongoing legal dramas. At inconsistent and random intervals, I’m going to cover the latest updates

Donations to the WordPress Foundation do not further the mission of the WordPress Foundation, nor benefit the WordPress community.

*Header image: The four ferries that cross the river using only the natural power of the river's current connect the larger southern part of the city (Grossbasel) with the northern side of the

Did Mullenweg’s campaign of reflection originate from the death of Pope Francis? The timeline tells us no.

Conversation with ChatGPT Pro, model 4o, 18 January 2025. It’s quite fascinating to see the “big picture” of how things evolve when many people are involved. So I came up with the idea of ​​ask

Last week was a whirlwind, first diving deep into AI and WordPress while working with the WP CLI as MCP host team at Cloudfest, then heading off to SMX Munich for non-stop conversations about SEO, AI, and the future of search. Two very different settings, one clear takeaway: The web has come full circle. Despite ... Read more

At Yoast, we had one mission: make SEO easier. For a long time, SEO for everyone was Yoast’s tagline, and we meant it. We helped millions of people optimize their content. We made technical SEO more accessible. We gave small businesses, bloggers, and creators a real chance to be found online. And we were successful. ... Read more

Another city in our European Family Holiday.

A big city with lots to see.

Hudson Atwell is a fellow Post Status (a WordPress community) member. He just published a nifty and light weight plugin that strips the meta data from