WordPress is not WordPress.com | Hacker News Reader

WordPress is not WordPress.com

wpisnotwp.com

27 pointsValentineC22 comments

> Now imagine a company used the name of a non-commercial project you contributed to for commercial purposes—the very name you had put your love, sweat, and tears into....

Well that's not quite how it happened. Matt of WordPress.org fame and Matt of WordPress.com fame are the same person, and WordPress.com happened comparatively early in WordPress' history.

Yeah of all SaaS-and-OSS linked projects, Wordpress strikes me as incredibly innoffensive. This is like getting mad at Canonical for owning Ubuntu.com and selling addon services and support contracts.

Does Ubuntu / Canonical force their addons onto users of the open source project?

Considering the controversy over the Amazon search being added to the Unity start menu in 2011 or something, I'd say yes.

(The fine print: 1. I don't know any more recent examples and 2. I don't want to get into an argument about the definitions of "forcing", "their addons", "users of", and "the open source project".)

I hadn't heard of that, will check it out. Thanks.

WordPress is something that would exist in another form if not for Matt Mullenweg. There have been plenty of competing projects. Thanks to good timing WP became the one that a lot of different people contributed to, turning a small project into an 800 pound gorilla. Despite this, Matt Mullenweg and Automattic has used the copyright and trademark to assert and maintain control over it. Some agree with the leadership, some do not, but many website developers are pretty much stuck with it.

https://red-sweater.com/blog/825/getting-pretty-lonely

This makes it sound like WordPress.com is doing something underhanded, stealing the name or tricking users etc. However as far as I can tell WordPress.com has licensed the name from the WordPress foundation, so its legit. Endorsed even!

I'm not really following the purpose of this. Even from a non-technical viewpoint it doesn't tell me much.

- Free software project: Many casual users won't get this.

- SaaS: same as "free software project", not something the average user will always get.

- Trademark: I can't think of too many times when an end user gets really excited for or against trademarks.

Basically, yes technical folks like HN readers already know what this page is getting at, but for everyone else, it doesn't really clear anything up.

... so what's the point?

I'm really not sure.

WordPress was initially released by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Matt owns Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. The OSS project is run by the WordPress foundation, which now owns the "WordPress" trademark.

Given how linked Matt and his company is to the history of the project, I don't really see the issue here.

It certainly doesn't help that the writing is bad, the layout is bad, the communication is... bad. The very first thing any typical English-speaking reader is going to read doesn't even make sense. The entire paragraph is:

> The domain ending .com is not optional as it is usually—it is a key differentiator.

Which means nothing at all. It has insufficient context to carry any meaning to anyone of any technical level without major guessing and assumptions on the part of the reader.

And by that point, they've lost basically anyone that might benefit from this...

Is there a point to this rant over semantics?

Maybe it's kind of like the "Wikipedia is not Wiki" issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_abbreviate_%...

I can understand the criticisms of the article, but also the author's pain.

The confusion is a Real Thing that frustrates people every day. For example, WordPress-the-Software plug-ins don't work on WordPress-the-SaaS. Or maybe they do, but you need some special plan? Or maybe only certain plug-ins are approved, but you also need a paid plan? It's confusing.

So for better or worse, most conversations with new and less-savvy users has to start with a conversation about whether they're using a "normal" install, the WordPress.com sandboxed/SaaS product that prevents you from installing plug-ins, or WordPress on another managed WordPress host that may or may not limit users to certain plug-ins.

It can be frustrating.

It's not confusing, it's quite logical.

You either use the OSS software on your own server and can do with it whatever you want. Of course you will have to pay for the server.

Or you get to run an instance of the software running on the server or WP.com and thus get the software AND the hosting for free. However, the free part is limited, if you want more you'll have to pay - again for the hosting.

I'm not sure this is going to be very helpful to a non-technical audience. Do they know what a “free software project” is?

The line about "just like you can't download Facebook" is good though. I'll probably use that in future...

This seems to be hinting at some dispute. What is it? Is it a problem that someone is commercialising Wordpress and it's not the original authors?

No dispute -- just a mistake in naming their SAAS the same as their open-source project way back when and dooming the world to confusion.

how much confusion is there, really? developers already know the difference and casual users/bloggers will never care.

Presumably: you might want to pitch Wordpress as a CMS solution for a nonbloggy thing.

Automattic is the company that runs Wordpress.com. Its founder, CEO, and president is Matt Mullenweg. Wordpress was started by two people: Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Automattic was founded about 2 years after the Wordpress project was started.

So two guys forked an older OSS project, and a couple years later, created a company, licensed the Wordpress name to that company, and created an SaaS offering bearing the same name as the open source project. I guess that the author of this page has a problem with that, and thinks that other people should have a problem with it too.

Good, quick, and sure to get the job done. Now I have somewhere to link to when I get asked to explain the difference.

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