Yeah, open source licenses don't entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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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.
RIF did have to change their name though. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/
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Like JohnEdwa said, using a trademark to refer to someone else's product is considered nominative fair use: "referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark."
They're very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.
That is absolutely trademark infringement.
At most, they just ambiguously used "Powered by WordPress Experts" once. I don't see how the evidence misleads people into thinking there was an endorsement.
IMO, dumb people confuse stuff all the time, like the Minecraft Gamepedia with the Minecraft Wikia back then. The meager amount of evidence presented does not convince me that WP Engine has done any actual harm to the WordPress brand.
But yeah, the smart way out would've been adding a "WP Engine is not associated with WordPress.org", at least one below the "WP ENGINE®, VELOCITIZE®, TORQUE®, EVERCACHE®, and the cog logo service marks are owned by WPEngine, Inc." footer. All in the past now, though. At the best both companies are tomfools.
They explicitly call their engine Wordpress more than once in those examples. You cannot do that.
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What does WP stand for then?
WillPeoplenoticethecashgrab
Fuck WordPress, but also it kinda sounds like WordPress is more in the right here.
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greymatter blog superiority
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?
That would be great but the reality is that client’s mindsets need to change. I tried to explain to a client that Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application and yet they didn’t wanna switch to anything else. People are way too worried about new tech and wanna stick with whatever they know, even if it causes massive problems.
I haven't done web work for well over a decade and recently was surprised to learn that Wordpress is still very relevant. I remember back then, seeking alternatives as we expected it to become more of a legacy thing a few years down the track, so we were on the lookout for future-proofing client sites with a better foundation. At that point it was a decade old and annoying af because it morphed into a messy way of doing websites because people misused it's original purpose. Brain had to think like a blog and then trick it into doing what you want, kind of like using tables to structure pages before CSS-P saved the day.
Wordpress is not a good fit for virtually any modern application. It's designed as a blogging platform and basically no one makes blogs anymore. That functionality kind of got eaten up by Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, so no one needs blogs.
Instead of letting WordPress die the death it most definitely deserves they shoehorned in functionality, which would be fine if it wasn't such a bodge job.
Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application
Seriously. People want to shove everything into Wordpress then get cranky when you can't make Wordpress into a ecommerce store, marketing platform, personal blog, file sharing service, and NFT marketplace.
And then it gets hacked because they needed 14 SEO plugins, 2 different form plugins, and were not going to pay for managed updates because that's easy they can do it themselves.
If you're trying to turn WordPress into an application, for christs sake go use Django, Laravel, or Rails. Don't send a CMS to do an applications' job.
Shit you don't even need a CMS at this point. I moved off WordPress to Hugo and SFTP and i'm happier than a pig in shit. Shit loads fast and no external threats.
Wordpress is the Excel of CMSs. It can do just about anything, but at this point it barely manages content well.
That's a great analogy actually. You can do almost anything with it but what the vast majority of people choose to do with it is wrong.
Just like how people insist on using Excel as a database or Excel as a form.
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Genuine question: what is the real alternative to WP? Ghost sucks, Hugo, Jekyll has 0 client approval factor without some shitty third party thing. Wix, Squarespace is not open.
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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.
The open-source side of WordPress is pretty pissed off at Matt right now. The Slack is heavily downvoting/disliking all of this.
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).
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