WordPress is kil

https://x.com/bgardner/status/1839070322617643212
27
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oh wow. What's the lawsuit about?


Krayon sexually assaulted his sister. https://i.rdrama.net/images/17118241526738973.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17118241426254768.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17156480765435808.webp

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WP founder Matt (Automattic, who also now owns Tumblr) claims WPEngine hasn't contributed to WP open source development for many years even though they make $400M/yr in revenue selling a customized hosted version of WP, using WP trademark in marketing. They repeatedly tried to get WPEngine to invest more dev hours in open source WP, therefore benefiting the OSS dev community and Automattic's for profit company which also sells hosted versions of the mainline version of WP. But they basically blew them off.

Automattic asked for 8% of WPEngine profit to be reinvested in WP code via a foundation, or given directly to Automattic to do it themselves, they said no, Matt sperged out online, and WPEngine sent cease and desist to Automattic to make him shut up.

Matt owns commercial trademark rights to WordPress name and also controls widgets (JS embeds) that WPEngine uses on their customer sites and has influence over the WP code update pipeline. So he's putting the grips on. Maybe because a trademark suit by itself is not very winnable or something

Also Automattic raised hundreds of millions of $$ from investors in 2021 so they need money and need WP code modernized so it doesnt die off

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oh wow interesting. Thanks for the explanation! I'm interested in seeing how this turns out.


Krayon sexually assaulted his sister. https://i.rdrama.net/images/17118241526738973.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17118241426254768.webp https://i.rdrama.net/images/17156480765435808.webp

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Yeah let's modernize all this PHP

:#marseygunshotsuicide:

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using WP trademark in marketing.

You're implying they're doing something that requires permission, but descriptive use of trademarks doesn't.

Do they use the trademarks in their marketing? Yes.

Do they use the trademarks in a way that requires licensing? Unlikely.

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The dude what wrote it? is mad they're making so much money off it and not giving back to the community or whatever. Apparently he still owns the trademark for WordPress so he's asked for the following:

They had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.

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"asking"

He's suddenly doing quite a few things to coerce WPE into paying. Some of his methods are probably legal, but puppeting the 501c3 to perform most of the coercion to pay the for-profit side is quite likely illegal. It's probably illegal to have the 501c3 act non-arm's-length in the for-profit's interests even before considering extortion claims.

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