Are you following the mess happening with WordPress? What do you think about it? š
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Context: wordpress.org has just claimed Advanced Custom Fields as their own (wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields)
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I'm following the wp drama. In my eyes, after wpengine was banned from using wordpress dot org, the wordpress team decide to fork an open source plugin and edit it to avoid users having no supprot in the future. also they removed premium upsels making it free. Ohh and they fixed a security issue too
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I side with wp on this drama, even if I'm not a wp user. WordPress takes advantage of WordPress and related technologies without giving back. when asked to comply to the laws and pay for the use of the trademark WordPress, they put preferred to sacrifice their users instead of agreeing. Greedy corporations at their worse point. Ahh and now their suing WordPress team so it makes sense to me that WordPress wants to isolate from them.
I am on the Open Source and WordPress community side š I have read many articles and Tweets (of people directly involved) and watched several videos including interviews with Matt Mullenweg.
Generally I agree that big companies should give back to Open Source. However, legally, there is no requirement. It is more in the moral/ethical realm. Matt has handled the entire situation terribly and continues to destroy the WordPress community.
He has:
- Kicked people out of WP's Slack
- Added the WP Engine affiliation checkbox upon logging into wordpress.org
- ACF plugin takeover (on a Saturday even)
- etc.
DHH has some good insight:
- world.hey.com/dhh/automattic-is-doing-open-source-dirty-b95cf128
- world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-a8f79d16
Along with ThePrimeagen and Theo:
- youtu.be/SLdwYl_RyB4?si=_LUuVQ5lp0x_XVNS
- youtu.be/grZg-BEhKMI?si=9mgm5r3Jq7e8pvq5
Both have other videos about the situation and interviews with Matt himself.
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But he asked for contributions to use the wordpress trademarks. these are completelly in his power as usage of opensource software doesn't imply you can use the trademarks as you please. Wpengine gave the confusion to users that wordpress is wpengine where when wpengine broke wp for it's customers the customers wrote to wordpress organization on twitter not to wpengine. (I side with wordress.org on this too)
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Except that the Wordpress trademark page use to say the following:
> The abbreviation āWPā is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
web.archive.org/web/20240501095015/https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy
It has since been changed but you cannot say one thing and then all of a sudden change it after companies have been built up using WP in their name.
Automattic use to be part owner of WP Engine as well and they never said anything about the trademark.
Matt also said in an interview that he was going after the trademarks as a legal way to get them to contribute more - youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU?si=5FyK2H82kIujB--g&t=1801 (30:00 to 32:00).
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They didn't attack for "wp" part only. They went against the "wordpress" and woocomerce trademarks