Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire community loses it's legal right to exist.
> WP Engine's lawsuit points to promises made by Mullenweg and Automattic nearly 15 years ago. "In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all," the lawsuit said.
> Mullenweg wrote at the time that "Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company."
This sure sounds like Automattic made WordPress - both it's technology and the trademark - free to use. Apparently Automattic basically lied about making WordPress open:
> WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg did not disclose "that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being 'independent of any company' as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."
It's possible that Automattic's trademark claims are not valid. Trademark claims become weaker if companies don't actively defend the use of their trademark. Even if the secret revocation of its permission to use the WordPress trademark is real, the fact that they've ignored 15 years of WP Engine's use of the trademark really weakens their case.
Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody. Then, after a decade and a half, I start claiming infringement and demanding that people pay royalties to use the trademark. Is that valid business practice?
This is one of the reasons why trademarks have to be actively defended to stay viable. This is why companies can be very aggressive and paranoid about use of their trademarks: inaction people infringe on the trademark can lead to the trademark being considered abandoned. In this case, Automattic let WP Engine and others use the trademark for well over a decade. There's as strong case that the trademark was abandoned by Automattic due to this inaction.
> Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody.
I've been around WordPress since it was beta (though I got disillusioned after Gutenberg). Automattic/the Foundation has never let people "build products and services using the trademark free of charge".
Many people in the ecosystem have honoured that and avoided trouble by naming their WordPress products using the "WP" abbreviation.
The problem here is that even though many people have used WP from the start, Matt somehow thinks now that "WP Engine" is confusing enough people [1]:
> 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.
Up until the 2024-09-24 that section of the trademark policy read:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240924024555/https://wordpress...
The "Wordpress era" has gone on a really long time.
That longevity makes it easy to forget how quickly these things can change; remember Movable Type was the king of the blogging systems for a good while, until THEY (if I recall correctly) did a gross moneygrab and WP filled the gap.
How quickly MT became a footnote should be something Matt keeps in mind.
Once you reach a certain size, inertia alone will allow you to survive for a very long time, even making bad mistakes. Digg died because it was still small enough that a mistake could kill it; Reddit is now so big that the exact same mistakes (or even worse ones) will just not stop it. Same for Twitter or Facebook. Wordpress is way past the size where it will take something more than an isolated legal case to cut it to size.
I disagree about Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately; it's been in all the papers.
I know, but it has taken more than two years to take serious wounds and it's still very far from being dead.
As of now, it’s 80%.
Are you saying that your threshold for “serious” is more than a 71% loss of value?
These losses are squarely in the territory of those who are commonly labeled as “worst ceo’s of all time”.
Every shared host had PHP/MySQL, which made WP installs dead simple.