WP is GPLv2. Is WP Engine distributing their modifications without releasing their changes?
No trademark issue, license seems fine. From what I can tell this is nothing.
This really doesn't seem to be much about Trademarks, but more like what every other open source project complains about, that someone ELSE made a ton of money from the open source project, not them (even though that someone else is following the original license).
Couldn't they have just changed the license to WP? It wouldn't have affected most customers.
There's also the question of who would relicense it. Automattic doesn't own the WordPress trademarks and if there were a contributor agreement, it would likely be assigning the code to the WordPress Foundation, not Automattic.
The WordPress Foundation non-profit doesn't have a good incentive to put a restrictive license on it. Part of the problem is that the WordPress Foundation doesn't seem to be truly independent of the for-profit Automattic. The point of creating a non-profit to hold the IP of an open source project is to prevent stuff like this from happening.
Not just every WordPress contributor, but every b2/cafelog contributor pre-fork too, since WordPress is a fork of b2/cafelog in the first place:
https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...
If that code was all entirely rewritten and replaced by now, and no original b2/cafelog code remains in the WordPress codebase, then I would expect that modern WordPress is unaffected by the original b2/cafelog copyright and license. But I am not a lawyer.
Actually, they own an exclusive license to the commercial exploitation of the WordPress trademark, including sublicensing rights. Given to them for free by the WordPress Foundation. The licensing rights could mean millions for the foundation, but it's all funneled straight to Automattic.
Yep, truly independent foundation.
Personally, I don't care either way, I don't like either party.
Automattic isn't a good steward of WP and has a lot of conflict of interest that they don't want to acknowledge and WP decisions are "what benefits wp.com" first.
WP Engine is an aggressive sales company that also has hosting attached. They're extremely overpriced, the GoDaddy of WP Hosting. Whenever I hear somebody uses them it's a strong indicator that they're making enough money but have no technical knowledge on the team.
Following the money brings clarity. It's pretty obvious that .com controls .org.
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.
Someone should have stopped him from making the rambling statements he's made.
If it's a trademark dispute, limit the the public statements to the trademark issue. Don't muddy the waters with demands for revenue share or upstream code contributions.
Remember he only just now updated that policy to say that, and tried to make it retroactive.
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt Scroll down or search to "But Matt wasn’t done."
https://adland.tv/wordpress-shuts-down-several-feminist-blog...
2018 is a long time ago, and an honest mistake false positive once in a while is no crime, but I still don't see any excuse for the lack of integrity to do something like modify terms after the fact and yet still try to apply them retroactively.
That's not an accident or a mistake. It is dishonest, deliberate, and part of a consistent pattern with today.
Their messaging around this has been messy and rambling. The drowning out any point they're trying to make with their own messaging.
Who can say the offer "WordPress" hosting? How much do they have to pay? That question was dodged several times in the interviews I've listened to.
If it's a trademark issue, make the claims and let the courts figure it out.
Stay focused or stop talking.
WordPress is the name of the software that they provide services about. There is no way to control who can simply state that fact.