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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

1. The shared resources are baked into Wordpress code, and used by wordpress users no matter which host they are with. Does Matt wish webhosts to fork the repository?

2. Nominative use allows companies to refer to things by their name. It isn't obvious that "Wordpress Hosting" or "Wordpress plugin" is a violation or causes consumer confusion. Does Matt wish for all companies in the ecosystem to stop referring to their products as Wordpress Themes, Wordpress Plugins and Wordpress hosts?

It's worth noting that for years Wordpress.org has routinely referred to companies as "Wordpress hosts"

For example: https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/migrating-your-wordpres...

They don't seem to find it confusing and I suspect it would be difficult for Wordpress to launch a legal claim given tolerance of and direct use of those terms.

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>Nominative use allows companies to refer to things by their name. It isn't obvious that "Wordpress Hosting" or "Wordpress plugin" is a violation or causes consumer confusion. Does Matt wish for all companies in the ecosystem to stop referring to their products as Wordpress Themes, Wordpress Plugins and Wordpress hosts?

I think Matt's position is that WP Engine is not Wordpress, so it's not appropriate to call their offerings Wordpress-anything.

That would be a truth in advertising issue if anything, not a trademark issue.

Why do you think it's not both?

>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.

Referential use doesn't allow someone to use marks to imply an association or endorsement, and I think it's clear what they're calling out in the trademark policy changes.

So? The GPL doesn't say anything about "baking resources into the code"; the point of the GPL is that you can change the code, and WPE, a gigantic company, should do so.

What I meant was does Matt wish for all hosts to fork the repository so it is not a central place for plugins? To appearances Wordpress was architected to work the way it does, suggesting that he wished it to work the way it does.

If the central repository is a problem, then each site draws on it in proportion to their usage and it isn't obvious why one site is an issue and others aren't.

Hence my question, does he wish hosts to move away from a central repository? He certainly can advocate for that but it's a larger issue than WPEngine.

Also sort of adjacent but Matthew Prince of Cloudfare has just offered to donate resources to fund the whole central repository: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1841154152006627663

I don't think anybody, including Mullenweg, is seriously claiming WPE is threatening the integrity of the WP.org servers with all their load. It seems pretty clear that WP.org is a stick the Foundation is going to use to get commercial WP users to kick in resources, along with the WP trademarks.

The norms of open source software don't really have much to say about this. Mullenweg is right: the typical thing companies that run GPL projects do when they end up competing with firms that don't pay their freight is to relicense. Being a little ruthless with trademarks seems strictly superior to switching to a "source available" license.

As announced by @wpengine on that ex-bird-site, they are mirroring the wordpress.org repos now, as well as serving their own compatible plugin management API (one caveat they mentioned is that search isn't exactly the same).

I do hope they open source the API. I might take a stab at implementing it using wpackagist (though possibly that's what they're using to mirror already)

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