Wow Matt really looking bad on this one. This just reeks of trying to push out a major business competitor to wordpress.com and abusing control over wordpress.org to do it.
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ThePrimeagen invited Matt to explain what's going on.
TL;DW Matt's claim is that he tried to get WP Engine to pay for a Trademark license (or whatever it's called - I'm recalling from watching yesterday), over several months, and they tried to legally block him in every way. Their self-claimed contributions to Wordpress were (as he tells it) that they held conferences where they promoted their own stuff only - code contributions have been minimal.
So the combination of not willing to pay for the trademark + not contributing back (not in code, not in helping the community) is Matt's reasoning for blocking them from using Wordpress' resources.
He also mentioned that he has good relations with other Wordpress hosts, so it's not like he's trying to block anyone else from hosting, but they were all willing to pay for the use of the Trademark (and/or contribute back).
This is accurate, but also, "minimal" here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic's near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.
The open-source side of WordPress is pretty pissed off at Matt right now. The Slack is heavily downvoting/disliking all of this.
Yeah, open source licenses don't entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
WP Engine for WordPress.
That seems to be the commonly accepted solution if you look at other 3rd party trademark cases - situations like "RIF is fun for Reddit" coming to mind.
Fuck WordPress, but also it kinda sounds like WordPress is more in the right here.
Hopefully this spurs Automaticc to put more attention into the fediverse. With Tumblr moving to use Wordpress code that could bring all tumblr blogs to the fediverse and get more programmers and resources interested
Would it be wrong to hope they manage to commit some gross act of mutual destruction, and that the outcome would be that I never have to deal with Wordpress ever again?