[flagged]
Yeah, Jobs probably went "only I get to be rude... and to my employees, too"
Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#42This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?
If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today.
Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engine was very clear about being a third party provider for hosting WordPress blogs. They weren't claiming to be the original WordPress, or the original WordPress hosting provider, or anything similar.
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#43[flagged]
Steve Jobs was famously mean, and had a 'flexible' relationship with the truth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5l3hys/commen...
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#44This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?
>As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine I'm only slightly following the dispute between Automattic and WPEngine but it might have more to do with WPEngine rewriting the payment identifier on Automattic's open source Woo Commerce ecommerce plugin. WPEngine's payment identifier rewrite results in WPEngine getting a cut of ecommerce payments processed through their hosted si…
If you read through the lawsuit, that's not even the case.
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#45[deleted]
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#46> "Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case." I don't think I have ever before seen, in an official public statement, a "The lawyer we just hired always beats the lawyer they just hired!" boast, and it seems ridiculous - it's almost even hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer rather than that their case should win on merit.
Selecting a lawyer with a proven record, and expressing confidence in them are not "hinting in the direction that they think the case should be decided on quality of lawyer". They're smart strategies, whether you decide to take the case to court, or seek a settlement (on either side).
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure which way this will go, but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago. I am not sure whether it was trademark infringement, but they did seem to be leaning heavily on the trademarked term. I compared WPE's website to Dreamhost's (as I am familiar with the latter as a provider of hosting for WordPress-based websites), and the latter used…
I’m not a lawyer, but why would they remove uses of WordPress from their website right before suing Automattic if their position is that they weren’t violating the trademark?
That’s easy - limiting potential liability if they lose. It’s not an admission of guilt though.
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#48From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same. Yes, that's why WordPress silently and secretly licensed back the WordPress trademarks to Matt's for-profit company without telling anybody. For the good of the customers. That's why they forced the new boondoggle editing UI that everyone hates. For the good of the customers. That's why the WordPress code is…
> That's why the WordPress code is still spaghetti more than 15 years after it was originally launched. For the good of the customers.
Thats actually true. Backward compatibility was and still is the #1 thing in WP, and its why it won over the web: No small business or individual customer cares about 'better code' in the backend if those 'improvements' break their websites. This was what a lot of wordpress competitors did in the past and they suffered for it.
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?
If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today. Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engin…
In that case I have no idea why Automattic would attempt to try to get WPE to license the trademark.
Re: Response to WP Engine’s Lawsuit
#50[flagged]
Steve Jobs was famously mean, and had a 'flexible' relationship with the truth. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5l3hys/commen...
But he was also famously reasonable at times when most people would have been just mean. [0] He had a complex and conflicting personality.