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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

I'm at a loss - what exactly has WP Engine done that is "dumb"? As far as I can see, it's an umbrella for "will not cave to Matt's every wish".

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Misuse the trademarks licensed to one of their competitors while relying on that competitor to provide them infrastructure for software updates and provide product improvements.

Adjusting their product names sounds like a small change they could have made to avoid antagonising a close partner.

Running their own plug-in mirror infrastructure is something companies often do to reduce the risk from relying on a third party.

Similarly having some stake in the development of WordPress reduces risk of them being shut out if there is a license change that necessitates a fork.

Less about caving in on wishes as more that it's risky to choose both to rely on a third party and wind them up at the same time.

> Misuse the trademarks licensed to one of their competitors while relying on that competitor to provide them infrastructure for software updates and provide product improvements.

> Adjusting their product names sounds like a small change they could have made to avoid antagonising a close partner.

WP Engine updated everything that was potentially infringing two weeks ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ftg581/finally_...

As a hosting provider, getting into a conflict with people who you have a software and service dependency on could be described as non-recommendable, especially if there is no formal contract involve. There are a few historical examples of companies being based on accessing free apis of youtube/social networks and then having their access removed suddenly, killing the company over night. Initiating lawsuits in response to a trademark dispute (a dispute that had yet to become a lawsuit) managed to escalate things fairly fast.

I’m honestly not sure what they’ve done wrong (or illegally). But it seems like Mullenweg has alienated a lot of people by what seems to be very erratic behavior.

I am curious to see what many WP employees think of all this.

Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic. WP Engine is the other party in the current drama.

I know. I'm asking what many WordPress employees think of his erratic behavior. Because it can't be helping too much.

WordPress doesn't have employees. It's open source software. Do you mean Automattic (i.e., wordpress.com) employees or WP Engine employees? Or just anyone who is employed and working on WordPress?

I believe the short of it is, create a massive business built on Wordpress but contribute zero funding or resources back to Wordpress, and then bicker with wp throughout this drama.

So…did everything they are legally allowed to do? I get Redis and Elastic Search are mad at Amazon, but that’s what happens when you release code under an open license.

Also, the recent ACF business would show that WPE were being stewards of one of the backbone plugins of the ecosystem.

>contribute zero funding or resources

Demonstrably not true. Matt may not be happy with the amount of resource, but people associated with WPE make all sorts of contributions to the Wordpress community.

The Wordpress license does not require any contributions. If they wanted that to be forced they should have licensed accordingly. To demand payment to Matt's for-profit company and withhold access to the non-profit Wordpress.org is a shakedown akin to demanding protection money, full stop.

If WP was supposed to have a new class of license (let's call it "transactional source"), they really should have published with that license.

Instead, they licensed under Stallman's GPL2. Given his general ethos around freedom of software, I would honestly be curious to hear his thoughts on using trademark as a cudgel to arbitrarily prevent otherwise-permitted uses of GPL-licensed code.

WordPress was a fork of b2/cafelog to start with [1], which meant that they had to stick with the GPL.

[1] https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/the-blogging-software-dil...

Correct, which adds to the reasons they really shouldn’t be trying to shake down users.

Building a massive business out of an open source project is by itself a huge contribution to the project. Ecosystem growth is a tide that lifts all ships.

Can't wait for Linus to start badmouthing everybody that offers linux hosting.

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