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Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

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Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#21

Post by tbrooks »

I lost a lot of respect for Matt Mullenweg in this fiasco.

This comment in particular: http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p...

Pursuing the trademark cancellation further is just downright vindictive. It's not too late for him, to say, "I f-ed up and I've let this blind my decision making. I've asked the legal team to rescind the trademark dispute and we won't pursuing this any further."

Until that happens, this cloud will continue to hover over Matt and the WP community.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#22

Post by kijin »

michaelpinto wrote: post #16

You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed: - Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site). - That said the quality of…

I couldn't care less about whether WordPress is a mobile-first platform or how easy it should be to wrap a WordPress site in an app. Most of that is presentation layer problem, which can and should be handled by individual themes and plugins. WordPress themes are incredibly powerful; they can do that and much more. The only part of the presentation layer that WordPress needs to concern itself with is the admin interface.

The "open web" might no longer be a cash cow worth billions, but a significant number of people still love to tinker with it and resist the trend of app-ifying everything. Most of them don't care whether they are worth billions, they care about being open and tweakable. If you don't, then you're simply not their target user.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#23

Post by kijin »

jessaustin wrote: post #10

I don't understand how the word "thesis" can be both "generic", as Automattic repeatedly claim, and "merely descriptive", as they claim in their trademark attack. There is probably some intersection between these two concepts, but it's very small. Perhaps "Salty" as a potential trademark for potato chips would be an example?

It sounds like Mullenweg just filed that complaint in order to threaten Pearson to drop the domain dispute. Filing frivolous suits and countersuits is a pretty popular, albeit dirty, tactic among some people.

If Apple can trademark the name of one of the world's most common fruits, I'm sure Pearson has a right to trademark "thesis".

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#24

Post by ubernostrum »

chc wrote: post #13
caseysoftware wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law != the GPL. This is a matter of (potentially) breaking licensing terms, not the law. Worse, this is a personal vendetta at this point. There is no legitimate reason why Matt/Automattic should own thesis.com or would try to invalidate the trademarks. The worse part is that project leaders set the tone and establish acceptable behavior for the project. Instead of saying: "Chris is a $%^#$& and breaking the lice…

Copyright law is the law. Breaking the GPL and continuing to use and distribute the GPL-licensed software means violating copyright law. So I'm not sure why you'd say it's "not the law."

As noted in the article, there's a long-running problem with confusing the FSF's preferred interpretation of the interaction between copyright law and the GPL's wording with the reality of how copyright law would interact with the GPL's wording, especially on the matter of what does or does not constitute a derivative work of a piece of software.

And as noted in the article, there are potentially significant negative consequences -- including for the FSF's goals -- if the FSF's interpretation were to be endorsed by courts and applied uniformly.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#25

Post by spc476 »

JonathonW wrote: post #18
powertower wrote: post #8

The last time I looked into the WP theme GPL issue, by some of the mentioned logic, every PHP script ever written and distributed would end up being a derivative work of the PHP engine. One way to get around some of it, is to use WP as a data store and management layer, with your own 2nd layer on top of it, that does use WP's functions to pull that data out, but is not a theme that has to be installed nor activated.…

It might, if PHP were distributed under a copyleft license that cared about such things. PHP is not (it's licensed under a BSD-style license [1], which permits redistribution under another license with attribution). I'm actually having trouble finding an interpreted language (and accompanying standard library) that is licensed under a copyleft license. Python isn't (the PSFL isn't copyleft); Ruby isn't (it's dual-lic…

Would guile [1] fit the criteria of a GPL'ed interpreted language?

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#26

Post by jordanlev »

bovermyer wrote: post #20

And what does WordPress do for humanity that makes this legal spat of any interest? I see only a drive for greater profits at play here - on both/all sides.

> And what does WordPress do for humanity that makes this legal spat of any interest?

By some estimates, it powers 25% of all sites on the internet (http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all)! I am not a fan of wordpress from a technical perspective, but you can't deny that it has had a HUGE impact on people having their own websites.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#27

Post by ploxiln »

pdonis wrote: post #17
chc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last time I looked into the WP theme GPL issue, by some of the mentioned logic, every PHP script ever written and distributed would end up being a derivative work of the PHP engine. Running code through an interpreter or compiler has never in the past been held to create a derived work under the GPL. Linking with a library is pretty much the definitive example of what the GPL views as a derived work. I'm not su…

> Running code through an interpreter or compiler has never in the past been held to create a derived work under the GPL. That's true, but the article mentions an interesting twist that might not be so clear. The key statement (which, AFAIK, is a direct quote from the FSF) is: "Subclassing is creating a derivative work." In certain programming languages (Java is the example given in the article), you can't write code…

But as noted above, python is not copyleft.

The (now obsolete) GNU implementation of the java class libraries was GPL licensed, and had a special exception just for this, called the "classpath exception": http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

The Sun Java implementation was not GPL until 2006/2007. And since Oracle successfully sued Google for making its own compatible function prototypes and class definitions and such ... well I'll agree that the java situation may in fact be a shitshow.

Also, did you know that the GPL has a system library exception? So you can legally dynamically link to OS X's libc or Windows' win32 as needed to run a normal process. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryExcep...

So really there's no language (except maybe sun's java, I dunno) where this is actually a problem.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#28

Post by ploxiln »

spc476 wrote: post #25
JonathonW wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might, if PHP were distributed under a copyleft license that cared about such things. PHP is not (it's licensed under a BSD-style license [1], which permits redistribution under another license with attribution). I'm actually having trouble finding an interpreted language (and accompanying standard library) that is licensed under a copyleft license. Python isn't (the PSFL isn't copyleft); Ruby isn't (it's dual-lic…

Would guile [1] fit the criteria of a GPL'ed interpreted language? [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

guile is LGPL, "dynamic" linking is allowed http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=guile.git;a=blob;f=LIC...

(damn it's hard to find a reference to the license on the web site)

EDIT: found a related link; some extra/common libraries are also LGPL http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/gnu-guile-projects.html#Co...

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#29

Post by michaelpinto »

kijin wrote: post #22
michaelpinto wrote: post #16

You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed: - Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site). - That said the quality of…

I couldn't care less about whether WordPress is a mobile-first platform or how easy it should be to wrap a WordPress site in an app. Most of that is presentation layer problem, which can and should be handled by individual themes and plugins. WordPress themes are incredibly powerful; they can do that and much more. The only part of the presentation layer that WordPress needs to concern itself with is the admin interf…

So then you're agreeing that Automattic isn't a unicorn, and you also hinting that they should be a non-profit. And if that's the case and if that's what they want to do (wikipedia is that) then you're right. But I don't get the impression that Automattic views itself as a non-profit, but maybe they should.

Re: Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology

#30

Post by kijin »

michaelpinto wrote: post #29
kijin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't care less about whether WordPress is a mobile-first platform or how easy it should be to wrap a WordPress site in an app. Most of that is presentation layer problem, which can and should be handled by individual themes and plugins. WordPress themes are incredibly powerful; they can do that and much more. The only part of the presentation layer that WordPress needs to concern itself with is the admin interf…

So then you're agreeing that Automattic isn't a unicorn, and you also hinting that they should be a non-profit. And if that's the case and if that's what they want to do (wikipedia is that) then you're right. But I don't get the impression that Automattic views itself as a non-profit, but maybe they should.

Contrary to what some people in the startup scene would like to believe, there are many business models in between "unicorn" and "non-profit". There's nothing wrong with being a regular hornless horse as long as you're making enough money to live a comfortable middle-class life.
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