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by safety1st
635 days ago
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1.5 million sites impacted including some of the biggest. For every day that this persists, 1.5 million websites are at a heightened risk for exploitation and security vulnerabilities. All Matt needed to do to avoid this catastrophe was pursue his central claim (which is a trademark claim) the usual way - in a court of law - and give WP Engine 30 days or something to get off of his infrastructure before cutting them off. Or even 10 days. In other words, think of the users before you think about yourself. But he didn't. He is doing catastrophic damage to the reputation of WordPress. The best thing for WordPress is now for him to resign from his job and end his participation in the community immediately. He did not seem to understand that this action was going to create thousands of enemies at thousands of companies overnight. He seems totally shocked by the reaction. To the extent that many businesses depend on WordPress and its good reputation which Matt may have irrevocably damaged - from what I'm hearing there's already talk about a class action lawsuit against him. |
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As such it's easier to try to negotiation something in the backrooms and since that didn't work, try to extort them, and since that failed, try to publicly ruin them, which seems to backfire in a spectacular way.
Automattic has sponsored WP Engine in the past. Matt has talked very good about WP Engine in the past. WP Engine's use of WP is not a violation and WP Engine's use of "Wordpress" is arguably a descriptive usage - at the very least, it's very hard to argue that WP Engine could be confused with Wordpress itself. So even if there's really something to sue over regarding trademark usage, it will be really hard to argue, because of how long the usage has been accepted.
I've been really surprised that wordpress.org isn't under community governance, but seems to be a quasi "charity" project by Matt. It's at the core of the whole community, but a single person holds the key to it? We should really get wordpress.org into the hands of the community and transparently finance it through the foundation.
Personally, I don't think it's right to block anyone from using wordpress.org's theme/plugin/update repository functionality over a dispute with Automattic or personal grudge from Matt.