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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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