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.