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.
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.
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.