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Comment by timkq | Hacker News Reader

This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company. WordPress powers about 40% of the web - it is too big to fail (as of now).

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> This only tanks the reputation of Mullenweg himself and his WordPress hosting company.

I am only looking at this from the outside but given that Wordpress.org (not the wordpress hosting company wordpress.com) is involved here, it's clear that this dispute involves the Wordpress project itself and not just the commercial Automattic entity/Matt Mullenweg.

Yeah, I'm afraid if WordPress.org doesn't have control over their own API's then they are compromised and reduces trust in them.

Do you have some references to that 40% number, because if that's true, thats terrifying.

It's 40% of websites, but bear in mind that not all websites are of equal significance. Some websites are just spam and never receive any visits. If we measured how much time people spend on different websites, I would guess that WordPress wouldn't even reach 5% of time spent web surfing.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

The question still stands though. Why does wp engine get to infringe on WordPress trademark AND get access to server resources for free?

WordPress's trademark policy[0] explicitly said:

> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

and

> Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240901224354/https://wordpress...

That makes this seem pretty cut and dry…

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