[spankalee]

Can anyone here summarize the legal principle involved here?

Why does Matt legally have to provide services to people he doesn't want to, even if he's morally wrong or generally being an asshole?

To my non-lawyer and only-watching-from-the-sidelines self, the ACF situation seems more clearly actionable, but the other things are very interesting.

[sonofhans]

“Tortious interference” is wrongful interference in others’ contractual or business relationships. Wordpress does not have to provide free services to anyone in particular, only to honor their legal agreements and treat their users equally. In this case they did not; they took action specifically to damage WPEngine.

Matt may even be morally correct in some ways, but that doesn’t give him the right to use his position as Wordpress leader to damage the business of someone who competes with Automattic.

[ImPostingOnHN]

It's not a long document, but to take one of the example torts mentioned: torturous interference with a business contract is illegal, even if you own the means of interfering.

Could matt/automattic/wordpress.org/wordpress.com (they all act as the same entity: matt) have withdrawn services in a way that didn't tortiously interfere with a business contract? Of course. But he didn't, because tortiously interfering with WPEngine's customer contracts was his primary goal. His complaints about cost were secondary at best, and seem to have been entirely a pretext.

To add more perspective: withdrawing services from everybody usually requires one to simply stop working and/or paying bills. To withdraw services from WPEngine, matt had to consciously expend time/effort/money, just to interfere with WPEngine's customer contracts. Doing nothing would have been less work and cost matt less.

[crowcroft]

I get the impression this injunction is really just saying that WPEngine's legal case has some veracity, and Automattic's actions seem to be retaliatory and/or not legal (depending on the eventual outcome of the actual case), and so is saying everything needs to be set back to where it was, while the courts work through an actual legal decision.