I doubt many developers will get on a WP Engine fork of WordPress. Maybe if they funded an independent non-profit foundation that would take care of a fork that could work, but you still need the traction of the community to make it a success.
- GoDaddy
- Amazon (AWS)
- Bluehost
- Dreamhost
and about a thousand smaller hosts, all of whom would be very unhappy to suddenly have to pay 8% of revenue to Automattic.
A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.
I'd guess a _huge_ part of WordPress's "customer acquisition" comes from small businesses who started out on cheap shared hosting for their email/dns/website using cPanel or Plesk (or similar). That's clearly a big market, given how much Wix and SquareSpace spend advertising for it.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn cPanel had as many WordPress using customers as WPEngine - and it's now owned by PE as well.
> A real community-owned fork could quickly get a lot of traction.
I suspect a WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service? Perhaps a having them all fund a non-profit Mozilla like foundation (well, Mozilla circa 2015, before they decided to become and AI and Ad company who's apparent goal is to attract more and more sketchy grifting C level execs and make them rich).
I would bet that WPE is not nearly the largest WP host by # of sites. Bluehost, for ex, is claiming millions of WP sites.
> WordPress fork developed by a consortium of companies who offer Wp as a Service
Exactly this. And folks working in the broader ecosystem (themes, plugins, retailers of the above, potentially contract WP developers as they also have to use trademarked terms in marketing) also have an incentive to work with such a fork.
MariaDB is a solid example of a community fork taking root when the corporate owner became perceived as being unstable.
Amazon has a product they call Amazon lightsail. The only trademark issue I can identify is that they use the wordpress logo, which is fairly simple to remove if wordpress decide that it is no longer allowed. Do anyone else see something there that could be a trademark issue?
GoDaddy has a menu item for "WordPress hosting," which is exactly what got WPE into trouble. Namecheap has "WordPress" in its navbar.
Beyond hosting, the theme retailers (like Themeforest) could find themselves in the crosshairs. The plugin developers.
Anybody who uses "WordPress" in their marketing. If you sell an add-on for WordPress, you probably need to say "WordPress" somewhere in your collateral, and this may mean you own Automattic a percentage of your revenue.
The problem is nobody knows, because the proposed rules are unwritten. Working in the WordPress ecosystem just had an unquantifiable amount of platform risk added, where there was effectively none at the beginning of the year.
Under US law, trademarks can be used by other companies under fair use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_(U.S._trademark_law)
It'll ultimately be up to the courts to decide what the extent of this fair use is.
That's the unquantifiable platform risk that has been added.
From what I see it seems a fairly common practice that companies get explicit trademark permissions if they are an official retailer, official supplier, have employees that is official trained, or has some other direct relationship with the trademark holder. Companies without such permissions have to rely on fair use rules. Retailers and webshops generally also list what product or brands that they sell without being in conflict with trademark.
If the answer is yes, then I expect to see a fork happen quickly. That may be the only way (or best way) for them to keep some degree of control over their system.
This is certainly one of their goals, if only to prevent or reduce churn.
But WP Engine is now owned by Silver Lake, a private equity firm, they no doubt have aggressive growth and profitability targets. Anything that injects confusion into their branding or increases costs is counter to their goals
The real question is the 8% "contribution" that WP is asking for cheaper than other alternatives. The lawsuits are cheaper if they win, but a dead loss if they don't.