| The popcorn value on this saga is awesome! As far as I can figure, from watching Matt's recent interviews and my own conjecture... Matt's seen his open source creation go, over the course of 20 years, from a hobbyist product to now one with a multitude of companies creating billions of revenue from it. But as it's grown certain companies are now huge and flush with VC cash. Which does change the equation. In the early days it might be reasonable to turn a blind eye to trademark infringement when it helps all boats rise, but now things are very imbalanced. IMHO WPEngine is rent-extracting in the same way that AWS does with many open-source solutions. Customers want products not source-code and are prepared to pay for packaged value-added products compatible with Wordpress.
But none of this revenue is going back to the developers and fostering the development ecosystem in any meaningful way.
If opensource projects like Redis & Elasticsearch could have had developers hired from 8% of revenues from those AWS sales imagine how much better off those projects could have been. As Wordpress itself is open-source Matt doesn't have any levers except the name Wordpress. As anybody in open-source should know - the code might well be open for forking but the name is very protected. Just because the trademark hasn't been entirely well enforced doesn't mean the protection is lost - the right always belongs to the trademark holder to use and enforce how they please as unilaterally as they wish. Trademarks can lose their protection if they start referring to generics but that's not the case here. Wordpress doesn't mean generic CMS - it's always referring to a Wordpress source code hosted by various companies. Matt's clearly acting emotionally and not terribly logically - that's clear for everyone to see. But I do think its with the long term intention of making a more sustainable community. Ultimately WPEngine can just rename their company and the only lever Matt has over them goes away. Or they can embrace the name and pay a fair licensing cost - a rate significantly lower than if they were licensing some other commercial CRM software. |
WP Engine also acquired, and continues to maintain, projects like Advanced Custom Fields [1] and Local [2].
Local used to have pro features, which became free for everyone after the acquisition [3].
[1] https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/reflecting-on-two-...
[2] https://wpengine.com/blog/better-together-wp-engine-and-flyw...
[3] https://localwp.com/pro-for-everyone/