This is a trademark dispute. WP-Engine uses the trademark, and made a tactical decision not to license it. Their thought was better to ask for forgiveness later then pay up front. Protecting your trademark is critical for an organization governing an open source product. Just look at Docker to see what happens when you lose control of your trademark. Last I checked, most owners aggressively protect their trademark. It's one of the few IP protections open source companies have. Why are you all defending the freeloading open source strip miner? Is WP Engine's use of the trademark fair use? Something tells me that they will end up settling this out of court...
Bollocks and hallucinatory nonsense. The trademark page had made it abundantly clear that use of "WP" was not protected by trademark and only made it an issue ex-post-facto when Matt decided one day that he didn't like the competition. The trademark claims are bollocks, nonsense, bogus — entirely without merit.
If you don't like your open source work being used by others to do for-profit things then don't license it as GPL or don't open source it to begin with. You can't retroactively come out and complain after the fact once you've already given all your IP away and made it abundantly clear that "WP" isn't a trademark, and BY THE WAY the jurisprudence on trademark law makes it difficult to even try to claim a trademark or servicemark from two letters put together!
We will see. You can say it's bollocks, but I'm betting you are not an IP lawyer. Silverlake, the PE firm that acquired WP-Engine has a gaggle of IP lawyers that assessed the risk before the investment. Were they right or wrong? Like any sporting event, everyone has a strong opinion before the game. But it's only the final score that matters. I'm wishing Automatic the best of luck.
No one ever won a law suit by putting forward a tepid case. They will position for maximum damage as a bargaining position, just like any of you would.
Are you talking about Automattic? I'm not talking about the lawsuit, I'm talking about the things surrounding. Especially the checkbox when logging into Wordpress.org in which you must proclaim you aren't affiliated with WPEngine.
That is simply terrible behavior, one that impacts users, not just WPEngine. I personally will never use Wordpress again because of this.
