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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

TBH i don't mind this, open-source means you can use the code, but you're not entitled to infra and services.

If you integrate your code to have hard dependencies on a third party server that is provided for free, that's as much part of an implicit social contract as is channeling a subset of earnings back at a project if you're successful. So it may be okay in this instance, but the no notice part is still bad.

WordPress used to not even have a way to have plugins and themes that didn't ask to be updated via WP.org - so you could provoke an update to someone's private plugin if you knew its name. I know because I filed the bug that lead to it being fixed.

But everything in this instance is making Matt and his company look bad. Their complaint seems to be that revisions are not enabled by default on WP Engine and this is somehow breaking the core philosophy of WordPress and the few bytes of text WP Engine saves are supposedly profit seeking, not a performance problem as WP Engine claims.

Additionally, one of Matt's commercial ventures, Pressable, is currently offering to buy out your WP Engine contract if you switch to them. Breaking a competitors product and then offering to buy out their customers should be a red flag in choosing an open source solution.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you built a multi-million business around that code, it is just sane for you to patch the code so that your core business doesn't 100% depend on someone else's free service (plugin marketplace hosting for example)

This entire situation screams drama but I can see where Matt is coming from, even though he could have handled things with more grace.

I also don't have a dog in the fight but reading for a few minutes I have the impression there have been previous attempts to engage with WPE to contribute. I might be wrong.

I think WPE committed to contributing 40h per week of work on WordPress. I'm not clear if they didn't fulfill their commitment or Matt thinks that is not enough.

Infra, services and trademarks. They are not part of the GPL license. Everyone is welcomed to use any GPL code as they see fit, as long as they are within their limits as outlined in the license.

But this does not mean W.ORG has to keep providing these free services to you and your customers, and it does not mean you are free to use trademarks in a misleading way.

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic.

I've been a WPE customer for about 3 years and have never been confused by the "WP" in their name.

It's not about WP in the company name. It's about loosely using the words "Wordpress" and "WooCommerce" all over their website in ways that violate trademarks.

Could you please explain in which way trademarks were violated? Nominative use is explicitly allowed according to long established caselaw.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

I'm not a lawyer, but WP Engine is selling products on their website literally named "Core Wordpress". That seems like it might be a violation.

For there to be a violation there has to be a reasonable prospect of consumer confusion by the consumers in the target market. The page is labelled "Choose your WordPress Hosting plan"

Someone who is in the market for Wordpress hosting is almost certainly aware they have Wordpress and that they need hosting for it. Wordpress is a nominative use to refer to the entity, and Core is an adjective which in context means central.

Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself? That would be the standard. Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis.

"Do you actually think there are meaningful numbers of people who have believed that WPEngine is actually wordpress itself?"

Yes.

"Wordpress.com leads to much more confusion on a regular basis."

Wordpress.com has a license to use the Wordpress trademark. I don't believe we should be comparing Wordpress.com to WP Engine here.

Fair enough on wordpress.com. It still doesn't strike me as plausible that any reasonable person in a purchasing decision thinks WPengine is wordpress itself. I certainly haven't seen any such confusion online.

I just found out today that WPEngine is not the same legal entity as WordPress.

So yeah, from my perspective there's a real case for confusion of marks here.

I have no opinion about the drama one way or the other, just providing a datum.

Would you agree that WPE automatically makes a mental connection to WordPress? I dare say this would not be the case if it was named Josh Mutton Engine JME

I only know about this from the two hn threads I've read, but it seems like he could have at least announced this publicly a week in advance or so and given them a bit of time to self-host all this stuff before cutting off their access. Right now seems like he's trying to harm WPEngine by harming their customers and that doesn't make him look good.

I don't think it is at all reasonable to claim that the name of a GPL 2.0 project is off-limits. This license goes back to 2003 and the name is the first word in the license. It is displayed all over the software. The community is full of commercial and open-source tools that include variations of the name. Automattic is betraying the spirit of the license at best, and I would _hope_ flat-out wrong legally to weaponize the name.

Would it be a good or bad look for the Fedora project if they went after a popular and commercially ruthless hosting provider offering "Fedora Hosting" for trademark infringement, while cutting off repo and update access to that provider specifically, unless they paid up some % of revenue?

Regardless of if Fedora was justified or not, it would totally destroy trust in the ecosystem and people would start to talk about seeking alternatives, which is exactly what is happening with WordPress.

Then the registry URL has to become null and the user has to enter a registry of his choice when installing wordpress.

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