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Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

Well charitably I would suspect that for the first question, he probably didn't want to rock the open source community too much. Look at the trouble the rust foundation got into for trademark enforcement, and it hasn't really been a decade. In general, there's no good time to start flexing on your trademark.

For your second question, Matt claims that it's partly because WP engine disabled core features of WordPress. I can imagine a world where you are inundated with complaints that your software doesn't do X basic thing (because the top provider has disabled it) but ITS BEEN THERE THIS WHOLE FUCKING TIME TIME STOP COMPLAINING (put a smile on and explain calmly). You get my point. And then you snap.

No idea if that's what is in his mind but I have some sympathy for Matt. In principle. (This is me steelmanning Matt)

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Disabling/limiting revisions is built in to WordPress.

All WP Engine did is add:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

to their configs.

Even if they had literally disabled 80% of the functionality of wordpress, would that still be the concern of anyone other than WP Engine and their customers?

Why would anyone using open source software be required to use 100% of the functionality that the software is capable of providing?

Trademark is exactly supposed to protect the reputation of WordPress. If people confuse WPEngine for WordPress, and assume if WPEngine doesn't have it, WordPress doesn't then that's damaging to WordPress. Except that WordPress doesn't (and legally can't) claim "WP". I'd be frustrated.

This is like asking what is it a concern of McDonald's if you open up your own restaurant call McDonald in your town and make it a dump

If McDonalds for years had a page on their website that said “you can use McD any way you want, it isn’t trademarked”, that would be a good analogy.

I don't know about three letters but two letters cannot be trademarked. The exact point is that WordPress cannot do anything legally, and that's understandably frustrating.

But until the last few weeks the Wordpress site enthusiastically endorsed its use by third parties.

It wasn’t “we really wish you wouldn’t”.

Yep. This is what it said on September 19, the day before Matt launched his nuclear war:

> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.

It was changed to its current spiteful text on September 25.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240919043912/https://wordpressf...

Doesn't this serve as evidence that my speculation that Matt is frustrated with the behavior of WP engine? Please and spiteful language is not legally binding.

I don't think "Matt is frustrated with WP Engine" is speculation. That much is abundantly clear.

What's not clear is if they did anything wrong to deserve it.

Which is also something done by his own hosting companies (unsure if it's in all cases, but at least some).

Who cares if WP Engine disables revisions. Wordpress.com disables the use of plugins, arguably a core feature of WordPress, unless you pony up $300 a year for a "Business" tier account.

I don't know about you but I would be more frustrated not being able to revise posts? It's bad enough on twitter I can't update my posts, I have to delete and repost

Every WordPress installation I have seen has had plugins. And likely used revisions too. So I would say about the same, both are mandatory features for most users.

Revisions in this discussion is a copy of revisions you've made so you can reference or revert to one. You can still update posts all you want.

I can't speak for blogging usecases, but for agency websites we would disable revisions and a bunch of other things for every single wordpress installation(even the blog posts that show up on the main admin area)

Heck even Jetpack, Automattics official plugin, recommends limiting revisions: https://jetpack.com/blog/wordpress-revisions/

Lastly, Wpengine never fully disabled post revisions, they just limited it to 2-3.

> Lastly, Wpengine never fully disabled post revisions, they just limited it to 2-3.

Not quite. https://wpengine.com/support/platform-settings/#Post_Revisio...

"Every WP Engine site has WordPress revisions disabled by default... Revisions can only be enabled by contacting Support... Support can help you enable 3 revisions for your posts to start. Revisions should not exceed 5."

Well isn't that the thing about open-source software, that you can change the code and redistribute it? What is wrong about that? The WP Engine customers can ask WP Engine about that, it has nothing to do with Automattic.

Or WP Engine customers don't understand and are coming to Automattic for this? Well you can answer to refer to the WP Engine docs? You don't have to give them support if they're not your customer.

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