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WordPress retaliation impacts community

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Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#121

Post by spiderfarmer »

y-curious wrote: post #86
spiderfarmer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.

Just so you know, the phrase is "bury the hatchet" which comes from the Native American practice of burying weapons in times of peace.

Thanks. I should have googled it before posting, I'm not a native speaker.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#122

Post by spiderfarmer »

kergonath wrote: post #68
spiderfarmer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. As much as I despise Matt's antics, there's not much to gain for WPEngine by forking it. The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand?

Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.

> Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.

That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.

> The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.

Why would that be better?

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#123

Post by atonse »

silverliver wrote: post #95
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? > There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well…

He’s using trademarks because that’s all he can do.

But this is about the money and jealousy about how WP Engine is making a ton of money Without adding more developers to contribute.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#124

Post by immibis »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #101
Sharlin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the moral of the story is that everything must be assumed to be bait-and-switch in the presence of capital interests.

Why can’t other interests, such as labour interests, also bait-and-switch?

They CAN, but capital interests ARE. Speculation: labour interests care about making enough money to get by, while capital interests care about making maximum money and are therefore insatiable.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#125

Post by immibis »

bilekas wrote: post #32
dovin wrote: post #4

I've been trying to wrap my head around why this feels so wrong. If the project had been run like this from the beginning, in an opinionated way that prioritizes what the few creators of the project think are important, then that's one thing. But it seems like Wordpress has generally been the stable, boring, slow-moving project that isn't run like a personal fiefdom, and Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one m…

> Mullenweg is trying to force it from the one model to the other There are proper ways to do that, changing the license in a next version for example is how I think it should have been done in the first place. I've said it before here but this has all the markings of being extremely petty and Mullenweg not happy with their own licensing model.

That would be illegal, since Matt doesn't own the full copyright to WordPress, since it's a fork of another project.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#126

Post by immibis »

silverliver wrote: post #95
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? > There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well…

WPEngine hasn't actually violated any trademarks. Matt's using trademark law because it's the least stupid lawsuit he could think of, not because he has a case

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#127

Post by crabmusket »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #101
Sharlin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the moral of the story is that everything must be assumed to be bait-and-switch in the presence of capital interests.

Why can’t other interests, such as labour interests, also bait-and-switch?

Here's my conjecture: doing so is not in the interests of labour. So to the extent that labour has power, it would tend to act differently.

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#128

Post by immibis »

ookblah wrote: post #2

Been randomly thinking about it since this whole thing started, and beyond the drama it's clear that whether legal or not, Matt intends to use the trademark as a weapon to serve his purposes. If you just look at the timeline and even that response to DHH it feels to me that he has much resentment against others using the software and him not being able to be the largest beneficiary of it. The examples to Shopify bein…

"WordPress hosting" is an accurate description of what the product does and uses the term nominatively, which is legal. You couldn't call your company that, but within the company, you could call the product that hosts WordPress "WordPress hosting". (IANAL;TINLA)

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#129

Post by e40 »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #122
kergonath wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They profit off Wordpress' brand for free. What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it. > Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive. Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years la…

> Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand? Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress. > Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”. That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.…

This is precisely what Red Hat did, right?

Re: WordPress retaliation impacts community

#130

Post by dylan604 »

icehawk wrote: post #92
dylan604 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don't like being involved in drama, Which is kind of a weird thing, as people sure do love to sit back with their popcorn and watch the drama. There's entire TV networks dedicated to banality just like this.

How is it weird that people who do not like being involved in drama do things where they are not involved in the drama.

Because it's a sad comment on human nature. We know what it's like to be part of the drama, and it's never a good thing. Yet we perversely enjoy sitting back watching people go through it. We like to say schadenfreude because it's a fun word to say for non native speakers, but it's not a good thing.
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