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Comment by tcfunk | Hacker News Reader

As someone only familiar with WP at the surface level, I had assumed that WP Engine actually was affiliated with WP, so it seems to me the market confusion is certainly intentional.

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No it is not. If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic. I have worked with WP for 10+ years now and in my opinion like many others, this is nothing but jealously from Matt whose for profit competitor (wordpress.com and VIP) got beaten by WPEngine.

In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com.

I will not comment on any legalities of course but the fact remains that WPEngine is not doing anything different than all the others for profit WordPress providers except 1 thing. Guess what that is ? They make more revenue than WordPress.com.

Who do you think is more likely to look for someone to host WordPress for them? Someone who knows everything and can do it themselves anyway?

> If you have remotely worked with WordPress at any level, you know that WPEngine has nothing to do with the WordPress company Automattic.

Obviously YOU know because YOU have worked with WordPress for over 10 years now.

> In fact, you know what confuses regular users ? wordpress.org vs wordpress.com.

Yup, it's mentioned by others in this thread but I was also confused by this for a small period before doing further research early in the .COM beginning.

WordPress.com has hosting services. It’s one of the first things anyone runs into when searching for WordPress hosting. It’s hard to mistake it for anything other than the official affiliated hosting provider.

They’ve had the Wordpress.org and .com distinction for a long time. You can’t miss it if you’re searching for Wordpress things online.

I don’t think you can blame a Wordpress hosting service for using WP in their name, given that doing so has respected the nature of the Wordpress/WP distinction that they’ve had going for years. Something is very off about this recent attack on WP Engine and the released text messages show that Mullenweg is not the noble guy he’s been portrayed as for years.

For many years, the official guidance on the trademark has explicitly been that WP was not the trademark and people should use that instead of WordPress. Tons and tons of people use WP in their businesses, domains, product names, etc.

And, as it turns out, consumer confusion happened anyway.

Who are these confused consumers? The people who don’t know much anything about Wordpress except that they want it will end up at Wordpress.com. You have to go out of your way to find alternative hosting providers like WP Engine.

The “confused consumers” thing feels like a manufactured justification for whatever this spat is.

But WPEngine is toeing the line especially precariously.

The company is called WPEngine, sure, but their tagline says "Most trusted WordPress platform". Their plans are named "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", etc. Are those products they're selling, or just descriptions? There's enough gray area there to attract a lawyer's attention, which Mullenweg is clearly using to his advantage.

Honestly, what do you expect these people to call their services?

“Essential Blog Hosting Service using a Commonly Used Open Source Software That We Cannot Name”?

Yeah nominative use explicitly covers this.

>"In other words, individuals are not compelled by trademark law to use "absurd turns of phrase" simply to avoid trademark liability."

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

"Welcome to the Something Like A Hyper Plate for 2024".

The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark, not an explosion of articles, interviews, shutdown of network access and demands for money paid to a private company in order to prevent the explosion.

> The proper response would be a suit to enforce a trademark

Which I believe was their legal response. The problem is it should have stopped there.

I'm sure Matt's lawyers aren't very happy with him at the moment. Legally, it's usually not advantageous to retaliate so strongly and publicly. It greatly muddies the legal waters.

> Which I believe was their legal response

Really? I see extortion in those texts, not a legal lawsuit to enforce a trademark.

I mean, is this a legal and well crafted lawsuit? Or just extortion.

> Just called. Should I run these slides or not?

> Is next week a negotiation on the % or it happening at all? I am not going to be able to walk it back

> I know that this is the nuclear option, it sets us down a specific path

If their name was "Wordpress Engine", I think you'd have a point. But I don't think the use of "WP" has the same implication. Why would Wordpress proper abbreviate their own name like that?

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