The lawyer thing was hilarious. Someone actually claiming to be his lawyer was on the HN threads and anytime he was asked a question the response was a version of "Oh, I hadn't heard about this. I can't answer that."
I've heard about corporations being persons too but a person claiming to be a corporation is a new one. Has that regal "L'État, c'est moi" ring to it.
What he says is that, because wordpress[dot]org is his personal site, telling him what to do with it would violate his First Amendment rights.
Well, a judge did indeed rule on the injuction.
He just retweeted this tweet about the case: https://x.com/brian_essig/status/1866640985842692452
> This is actually bullshit. Agree with him or not, the court is forcing an open source maintainer into providing services to a user. What’s next, a company finds a bug and a court orders a maintainer to fix it?
Even though you don't have a contract, you make a promise (Matt: wp.org is free forever to anyone), someone (WP Engine) relies on that promise to their detriment, and the plaintiff's reliance on that promise was reasonable. Discussion of promissory estoppel at 44:17 (over the next 3 minutes or so) in [1].
And note that singling out WP Engine for very explicitly a payment is part of the rationale.
Shortly after Mike also discusses the same point made by /u/DannyBee [2], ie that the attorneys seem to be considering this case not in the context of the wordpress business, in which Matt being allowed to say you all have access to the code / updates / plugins at my whim is not great for wordpress the company outside of this narrow cirumstance.
[1] A discussion by attorney Mike Dunford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdwiZEhRS3o
Like, come up with some new material.
