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Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

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Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#61

Post by graemep »

Ukv wrote: post #60
createaccount99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.

To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events. Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.

I thought the trademarks were owned by the Wordpress Foundation?

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#62

Post by graemep »

raverbashing wrote: post #50

Matt needs to calm down, talk to their lawyers and keep the ego in check Yes you released WP as GPL or whatever, you'll get competitors like WP Engine. Sure, it's your prerogative to block access to plugins, but that won't win you any points, quite the contrary. And now there's a reason for WPE to come up with a competing store

Wordpress is a fork of a GPL licensed blog CMS so they had no choice but for it to be GPL.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#63

Post by Ukv »

graemep wrote: post #61
Ukv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my understanding WP Engine already sponsor a dozen developers on the WordPress project, maintain their own open source projects, and host events. Matt's demand was allegedly specifically for "tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic" (i.e. WordPress.com, a for-profit competitor of WP Engine, not WordPress.org) for a trademark license.

I thought the trademarks were owned by the Wordpress Foundation?

They are, and the foundation's policy[0] already explicitly states:

> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

Matt's whole "WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one", to try to extract money from WP Engine, is legally toothless as far as I can tell.

According to WP Engine:

> Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#64

Post by snatchpiesinger »

createaccount99 wrote: post #55
snatchpiesinger wrote: post #19

I wonder what the fallout of this will be. If this results in a successful fork of wordpress with a registry independent from Wordpress.org that would be quite ironic.

The issue started from WP Engine not contributing back to WordPress, I don't see how they'd ever put up the resources to fork anything.

There are two paths:

1. Fork and cherry-pick from upstream, don't accept contributions from outside. They need minimal changes.

2. Fork and maintain their fork independently, try to get community contributors too.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#65

Post by dns_snek »

dspillett wrote: post #56
Freak_NL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the claims made, that is a startlingly immature piece of communication.

Yep. Also: “The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, […]” — as opposed to not putting the vulnerabilities in⁰ in the first place! ---- [0] Though I've not worked with WP for a long time. I'm told the quality control of the core product has improved a lot over the years and people still running old versions, and/or with unverified…

> [...] and/or with unverified extensions, is a large part of the current level of issues

I'm occasionally forced to work with Wordpress, so I'm not an expert or anything, but that's my impression as well. Wordpress was designed for publishing articles but people want to use it as a foundation for building highly dynamic websites.

The paradox of these highly dynamic WP websites is that people usually try to build that way because they don't have the development expertise to make a custom solution, so they need lots of plugins to achieve what they want, but those plugins are often built to such poor quality and security standards that they really need to be reviewed before use, but to review them you need developer expertise.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#66

Post by bmelton »

notpushkin wrote: post #35
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by both? What should have WPEngine done differently?

Contribute to the ecosystem they’re feeding off? (If they already do, they could claim so, but as far as I know they didn’t; and there are claims from WPE employees that they are even explicitly prohibited from contributing any open source code.) Not that Matt’s behaviour is any better, but I do see his point here.

I've seen conflicting claims made. Everything from "WPEngine gives nothing" to (in this thread) "WPEngine sponsors a dozen developers" [1]

I do not use either Wordpress nor WPEngine, so I don't have any stake in this nor insight into the dispute.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656542

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#69

Post by batuhanicoz »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #23

Has WP Engine actually done anything wrong? Wordpress is released under GPLv2 which allows modification and commercial use. I don't see the justification for Automattic demanding royalties.

Using WordPress the software is totally free, in both senses of the word.

Using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks outside of fair use is not.

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.

Re: Incident: Wordpress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from registry

#70

Post by batuhanicoz »

notpushkin wrote: post #49
genmon wrote: post #37

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/ and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all. Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the proje…

> did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? WP/Matt’s actions would only make them fork faster, no?

If WP Engine wanted to dedicate resources to build on the code they are using, they would've contributed more to the core itself.

Instead of forking, they could channel their resources to give back and that would be a good step to resolve this.

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.

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