81–90 of 110 posts
"David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers." This is kind of intriguing to me too...
Rich people arguing on the internet. We've only got one life to live, it's just not worth the time to follow this soap opera.
Counterpoint, nearly half of the internet uses WordPress. Learning that it's fully under the control of a vindictive techbro who is showing an ability and willingness to damage large swaths of the internet at a time is kinda a big deal.
“DHH has a toxic personality” in paragraph three. Uh oh.
What is the endgoal for WpEngine.I am not following the drama closely. 1.Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally) 2.Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
Not paying $30mil a year in extortion?
> Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally)
IANAL, but:
The code is GPL ("GPL2 or newer"). That gives WPEngine (and you and me) a clear license to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code, with some very well understood restrictions (which do require you to share your modifications under the same GPL, but absolutely do not require "contributing back to the community" or paying a competitor 8% of your gross revenue).
For about 2 decades up until last week the WordPress trademark page explicitly told everyone that the use of "WP" was not covered by any of their trademarks.
US law has a concept of "Nominative Use" of trademarks: "Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit, by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
I guess a lot of lawyers are about to get richer determining whether or not WPEngine's use of the "WordPress" trademark was "as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own." To me (remember, not a lawyer) it seems quite obvious that "We sell WordPress hosting" is a reference to the trademarked Wordpress product, and is exactly what is allowed by Nominative use.
> Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
I doubt they need or want to. They can fork Wordpress core itself under their rights granted by the GPL and they could name that something like WPEnginePress, or choose to use any other fork like ClassicPress or AspirePress. The Nominative Use "or to compare it to their own" clause allows them to say "We sell WPEnginePress Hosting, which is 100% compatible with WordPress and has an identical admin interface for users."
The wordpress.org theme/plugin repo is a bigger problem, but most (all?) of that is under the same GPL2.0 or newer licence, so WPEngine or any other fork can copy/modify/redistribute those as well (and WPE are already mirroring it), and at least AspirePress has said they've planning on getting plugin/theme authors to use their repo as well as the wordpress.org one.
What is the endgoal for WpEngine.I am not following the drama closely. 1.Are they legally in the clear?(Note:Legally) 2.Can they rebrand to something other than Wp?
the 'wp' word never been legally trademarked. The usage is okay until Sep 24th [1], but becoming problematic since the king mad [2] 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress... 2. https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
In 1, the WordPress Foundation who owns the Wordpress trademark says:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
WPEngine, quite reasonably, for more than a decade have been running/building a business using a name based on what the WordPress Foundation said in 1. I find it extremely hard to believe that a court/judge could possibly find that "problematic" or rude that WordPress (.com, .org, or foundations) or Matt or Automattic - have any rights that prevent WPEngine (or any other company) from using "WP" in their name, even if it is widely understood to be an abbreviation of WordPress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what I was referring to. For all we know these are self-dealing tax write-offs to his own foundation. The one that is currently doing dirty work for his private business.
The Foundation's public filings are online, and I think they only had $22k in donations last year. Doesn't mean his contributions were all charitable, but they don't appear to have gone to the Foundation at least.
> Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”? Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?
Keep in mind that PHP is way more verbose and LOC-hungry than Ruby! So, to compare apples to apples, you need to device the PHP LOCs by at least 2!
Plus, WordPress bundles all JS and PHP dependencies, including a whole userland PHP polyfill for libsodium.
This is currently flagged, but I don't think it should be. Yes, it's unlikely to result in any constructive discussion here. At best we could remark that the author appears to be unwell and that taking this down could save him some face. However, the author is also an adult who is capable of taking responsibility for their own actions. In addition they are presenting themselves genuinely and sincerely here, which IMO…