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A decade and a half ago it was "BlackBerry" not "Blackberry". Now get off my grassy hill.
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/capital_...
There's a "no forking" clause in the term sheet Automattic sent to WP Engine: https://automattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/term-sheet... IANAL, but the WordPress license (GPLv2) says that if you attempt to sublicense the software or otherwise distribute it under different terms, you forfeit your own license to it: "4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided un…
A few things: First, something general - one thing to keep in mind is that open source folks think of these things as license violations/etc, but that's not actually a thing, legally. Breach of contract and copyright infringement are. That is how a claim would be analyzed. Not as a "GPL violation". Why is this relevant? Well, you really have to think of this stuff as contracts to use a given copy of software, and not…
That seems to be what's happened here. The b2 software is a strict "GPL v2". There is no later clause. Then WordPress has re-licensed their derivative work as "GPL v2 or later". Now we are talking about a GPL v3 derivative work.
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I don’t know about that, it’s normal to name a business after the founder. For example JCPenney, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Disney, Boeing, Wells Fargo. The reference is also quite oblique.
King Gilette
Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist.[16] He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894)[17] which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls.
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If you were considering Wordpress for a "large enterprise CMS", you shouldn't be making those kinds of decisions.
Can you explain your reasoning? Wordpress is pretty scalable, if done right. Even Microsoft uses Wordpress in some of its microsites. I know some of the new federal government sites even use it (for instance whitehouse.gov as part of the USDS project). It's highly supported and has been tested vigorously for decades now. It can at least be considered for various projects, even large ones. Sometimes you don't need a c…
Exactly. That's not a large scale enterprise CMS. WordPress is fine for that.
But if you wanted to do something that requires fine-grained access control, publishing control, audit logs etc, you're not going to use WP, or you're building a CMS on top of WP. I'm doing that all day because I work in an industry that loves WP and everybody knows WP, so it's easy to collaborate. I've built dozens of plugins to accommodate for our various needs because you will hit some hard walls if you scale to large amounts of URLs, and you will run into problems with the code quality in popular plugins when you're going beyond "I just want it to look nice and work okay".
I don't hate WP. I'd consider myself a WP veteran, I've worked a lot with WP over the years, I've contributed code to core, I've found various bugs. I wouldn't ever consider it for anything that I'd call "enterprise" or "large". It's like when somebody talks about building an enterprise data management system and then says "the fact that the inventor of the CSV format liked pineapple of pizza will make sure that I won't consider CSV as the data store for my system". If they considered CSV before finding that out, they really shouldn't be making decisions in that type of project.
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Definitely true and all of his communication - this thread, he’s given some interviews, etc. is very odd for a legal strategy.
Right, this all feels like (and I'm not trying to be rude with this, I'm speaking from experience) a mental break. Or he's got some sort of vendetta that he feels burning everything down is worth it over. Some of his comments from the other day on reddit have already been used in this very lawsuit, you'd think he would know to shut the hell up at this point if it's #2.
I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort…
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The trademark originally belonged 100% to Automattic. It transferred it to the Foundation, and retained the commercial license and the ability to commercially sub-license. The Foundation gave me a license to run WordPress.org. This has all been public, though I agree it's complicated and not widely understood.
I’m curious: what else is there to a trademark? Nominal ownership may lie with the Foundation, but if they’ve granted “irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic” (as claimed in this lawsuit), what else is there? Maybe there is something, I’m no lawyer or particularly deeply familiar with trademark law, but it sounds to me like, for all practical purposes, ownersh…
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All these WP Engine threads are full of people alleging--either directly or through insinuation like you're doing here--of Mullenweg extorting other WordPress hosts. I've seen no evidence of this though; do you have any?
The obvious unanswered question is “why just WP Engine?” Matt has thus far dodged it. Other prominent WP hosts and service providers would be wise to at least be anxious about also being asked for 8% of their revenue.
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wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. The actual non-profit [1] had expenses of $41k in 2022, which wouldn't come anywhere near paying for wordpress.org infrastructure and personnel. I guess Wordpress is going the RHEL route. You can clone it, but can't use their trademarks or infrastructure. [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205...
> wp.org is not a non-profit, despite the name. Automattic's associate legal counsel begs to differ [1]: > Let’s apply this to the WordPress trademarks (also called simply “marks”). The WordPress Foundation owns the right to use the WordPress marks for non-commercial purposes. It can also sublicense out this right for particular events (e.g., WordCamps) and to people supporting the WordPress project and community. Th…
"We could not get wordpress.org being part of the foundation approved by the IRS."
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It's hard for me to believe your idea of a racket is pressuring a single business. You can't have it both ways.
Doesn't every protection racket start with a first victim/customer?
But all that aside, it sounds like Mullenweg's basic argument is: WP Engine dilutes the WordPress trademark, offers a limited (I think he would be stronger about this characterization) implementation of WordPress, doesn't give back to the community, and that's bad. I can understand that, it sounds like it's the beginning of a race to the bottom where hosts compete to find exactly how many features they can shave off of WordPress--while still calling it WordPress--in order to maximize their profits, entirely at the expense of users and WordPress itself. It is completely his right for him to cut them off from the stuff he owns and runs for any reason, but in particular this seems to be a pretty good cause. I really don't understand why people are so against him here.