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Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

This is getting embarrassing. I was a big fan of Matt's before this whole charade started but he's basically flushing 20 years of goodwill down the drain for not a whole lot in return. As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?

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As I understand it the claimed trademark infringement is WPE saying they ‘provide WordPress hosting’. If they are successful can anyone built an opens source hosting business?

If WordPress won on the trademark infringement issue, it would be a fundamental rewriting of trademark law as it exists in the U.S. today.

Companies even competitors are allowed to use trademarks when they are making factual statements, like "we provide Wordpress hosting" as long as they make it clear that they are not the trademark holder (i.e., confusing customers). Even before they revamped their website, WP Engine was very clear about being a third party provider for hosting WordPress blogs. They weren't claiming to be the original WordPress, or the original WordPress hosting provider, or anything similar.

In that case I have no idea why Automattic would attempt to try to get WPE to license the trademark.

Based on Matt's voluminous posts yesterday, the concept of the law isn't really relevant to how he run's WordPress.org or Autommatic.

He admitted to violating labor laws and non-profit tax laws, and perpetuated several ongoing torts. He had a very productive day; it explains why he had to hire one of the most sadistic corporate lawyers in America.

Perhaps if they were called WPHosting, but WPEngine sounds very like core wordpress.

I have no opinion on this one way or the other, but when I saw WPEngine, I thought it was core wordpress.

I am not sure which way this will go, but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago. I am not sure whether it was trademark infringement, but they did seem to be leaning heavily on the trademarked term. I compared WPE's website to Dreamhost's (as I am familiar with the latter as a provider of hosting for WordPress-based websites), and the latter used the term far more sparingly.

> but WPE's website was using the word "WordPress" in every possible way before they 'cleaned it up' a few days ago

https://wpengine.com/ mentions "wordpress" 56 times today.

And here is the website from a month ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20240903110405/https://wpengine...., still 56 times "wordpress" is mentioned.

Looks mostly the same to me, at least compared to a month ago.

I’m not a lawyer, but why would they remove uses of WordPress from their website right before suing Automattic if their position is that they weren’t violating the trademark?

That’s easy - limiting potential liability if they lose. It’s not an admission of guilt though.

Fair enough - I can see there are limits but the material in Automattic’s lawsuit didn’t seem that problematic. Not sure how the law can distinguish between ok and too much use of ‘WordPress’.

This is exactly what trademark law is set up to do: https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark-infringement

It would give a lot of power to trademark policies.

Mozilla has one of the stricter trademark policies but it's for a good reason and the community mostly trusts them. WordPress not so much.

> As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine (and a hand-forcing by Automattic to implement a retroactive licensing agreement)?

Not just a retroactive agreement, a retroactive rewriting of trademark usage. Up until a few days into this dispute, the appropriate text on WordPress's site explicitly permitted people to use "WP" as they saw fit (as much as they can, as I don't believe they have a trademark on WP, just WordPress). Matt hastily edited things to imply WPEngine was in violation.

>As best as I can tell this is all over a trademark dispute over the "WP" in WPEngine

I'm only slightly following the dispute between Automattic and WPEngine but it might have more to do with WPEngine rewriting the payment identifier on Automattic's open source Woo Commerce ecommerce plugin.

WPEngine's payment identifier rewrite results in WPEngine getting a cut of ecommerce payments processed through their hosted sites and not Automattic.

I don't know the details though and probably didn't even explain it right. Matt talked about it recently in a Youtube interview.

If you read through the lawsuit, that's not even the case.

I understand what's in the lawsuit, I am just speculating on what might have been the last straw that led to the lawsuit.

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