The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
What the hell are you on about? Wordpress is GPL. Are all Linux distro profiting off Linus’ brand?
There is a very simple thing you can do if you don’t want people to do this: use a different license. You cannot eat your cake and keep having it.
> Maintaining a fork and building a new brand will be expensive.
Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
The whole “WPE does not contribute” point is completely disingenuous and I cannot believe that people are still uttering it in good faith.
> The best scenario for all parties is to burry the hatch and for Matt to step down.
The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
Not taking sides here, but the GPL did not include a trademark grant the last time I checked. In fact, treating copyright and trademark rights separately is a fairly well-established strategy in the open source world (e.g.Firefox and Ubuntu).
1- I don’t think that would hold any water against “WPE”
2- trademark needs to be defended (in the US at least) and you cannot let things slide for 5 years and then claim infringement.
In any case, that’s not what happened. The trademark aspect was clearly an afterthought and is not the central point of the dispute.
Those aren't forks. Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.
> Publishing free software is a decision. You cannot come years later to say “no, actually you need to pay”, or “yeah, it’s free but not like that”.
That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.
> The best scenario is Wordpress going up in flames, Matt being utterly ridiculed for his dishonest behaviour and the whole thing serving as a cautionary tale.
Why would that be better?
> That's not my point. My point is: if they want to fork it, it will be expensive.
That was your second point, and I don’t disagree with it.
Now, for the rest of your post.
> Those aren't forks.
I am not sure what point you are making here. Forking has nothing to do with either ripping off anyone or trademarks. The possibility to fork software is a fundamental principle of free software. As in, you cannot have free software that cannot be forked. If you don’t want people to fork it, don’t make it free.
Wordpress itself is a rebranded fork of b2, and nobody has any issue with that.
> Full forking the Linux kernel and rebranding it would be hard for the same reasons as forking and rebranding Wordpress.
If you fork a project you cannot use someone else’s IP, so you have to rebrand if the project name is a trademark. AFAIK, the Android kernels are forks and don’t use the Linux trademark, for example. Rebranding does not make forking any easier or harder, it’s completely orthogonal.
You mean that it would be difficult because they would need to pay developers to maintain the fork, right? This is true, but it has nothing to do with ripping off anyone. Matt is not embarrassing himself because forking would be complicated. His message is clear, and you wrote it yourself: “they profit off Wordpress' brand for free”. Which is dishonest and misleading.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming Matt’s scope is limited to WPEngine; the kind of personality that acts in this way will do the same to anyone.
It just gets better and better the more you learn about this guy.
WPEngine are profiting off of the service they provide, which is hosting software, which happens to be Wordpress.
Wordpress can't say anything about contributing to wordpress core when Wordpress the supposedly seperate foundation in fact only serves the purposes of Automattic, and inhibits or rejects prs that Matt and Automattic don't want, ie anything that works against their paid addons and services. No one should volunteer 5 minutes of their time to wordpress untill wordpress is actually a community-serving project rather than just a Matt-serving product.
Same goes for the plugin updates. They can't cry that anyone else is using them as a free distribution service when they actively work to keep it that way themselves.
I specifically said it would not be easy. But as the difficulty factors go, WPEngine is in the best position to pull it off. They have an existing customer base, probably many of whom are concerned that their websites may be "updated" in undesirable ways. And for those unaware, the magical appearance of SCF in their install(s) will let them know. Beyond the pale IMO, messing with my website in a surprise way like that... Giving these folks a clean off-ramp is a no brainer, and they may well be able to charge extra for the peace of mind.
It's an easy idea to test. Do you actually work at a startup?
And you are overplaying the branding thing a bit IMO. I sit down the hall from a team of five guys that crank out a new brand in about 2-3 days. All the time. And their work is pretty damn good. And I mean all of it, graphics, brand names, websites and product renders. Videos do take longer.