[belorn]

> I can’t see how Matt’s recent ideas on the rights to use the WordPress logo, the name or the wordmark requiring companies that he doesn’t like to pay up are in compliance with the GPL license.

Trademarks and logos are not attached to the software license. The Linux kernel has a trademark page (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark) which is separated from the gplv2 license. Python has their own trademark page (https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) which is separated from the bsd-like python license that the python software use. Take any major free software project and they will likely have a trademark legal page detailing what is or isn't allowed, which will be separated from the software license. Neither the free software foundation nor Open Source Initiative provide trademark under same terms as the software license. FSF specifically has the following statement:

"While our software is available under a free and open source software license, the copyright license does not include an implied right or license to use our trademark" (https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/licensing/2020/ModelTrademarkGu...)

OSI also has a guide for their trademarks (https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines), which limits how people and company uses wordmarks and icons. OSI says in their introduction:

"In fact, the law obligates trademark owners to police their marks and prevent the use of confusingly similar names by third parties"

Last, there are historical examples where non-profits that produce free software, that being Mozilla, was in a trademark conflict with Debian, a project based on free software. The Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute resulted in Firefox, licensed under gpl, being renamed Iceweasel with a new icon that replaced the original icon that is owned by Mozilla. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian%E2%80%93Mozilla_tradema...) That 10 years dispute ended in 2016.

[aldavigdis]

Author here. To clarify, the trademark rights were transferred to the WordPress Foundation 14 years ago and then licenced to Automattic to use for WordPress.com. (The internal verbal story was that it even involved a separate shade of blue to identify .com from .org.)

The foundation was open about the use of the WordPress logo, wordmark and the WP acronym until a couple of weeks ago. (Here's the previous version of the trademark policy (https://web.archive.org/web/20240101165105/https://wordpress...) and here is the current one for comparison (https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/))

Just like with attaching a permissive license to your code means that you can't just yank it back when you feel like it, there's a long history of case law proofing that you can't do the same with trademarks, especially when there's a whole economy that has built up around your FOSS project.

[belorn]

If your intention is to highlight the changes in the policy, I would remove the word "gpl" in that above quoted text, since the trademark is not under GPL. I would also enjoy reading a take on what the policy has changed, the implication of it, and how it effects the ecosystem. Such analysis is especially interesting if you are a trademark lawyer by profession, or if a lawyer was consulted before publishing in order to keep the legal aspects as true to trademark law as possible.

Companies and organizations do update their trademark policies, so I am not sure how set in stone a policy is in term of case law. If you have such long history of case law, I would enjoy reading it. Software do change licenses from time to time (VLC comes in mind, but there are plenty of other examples, including projects going from a permissive BSD license to something like AGPL). Old version of the software are under the old license, but all new version of the software will be covered under the new license. Trademark as a concept is quite different here since it always refer to the current product or company.

[g-b-r]

I wouldn't take Mozilla's handling of trademarks as an example to follow.

They were the first to be so drastic in the open source world, and they were and probably still are despised for that

[belorn]

I would not claim which project has the best trademark policy to emulate. My comment is mostly to illustrate how a software license is handled separated from trademark agreements and that practically every major free software project and non-profit foundation has a trademark policy. The FSF/OSI guides are also very illustrative in how those communities view trademark law compared to copyright law.

The Mozilla trademark dispute is mostly an example of a non-profit free software community being in a trademark dispute with an other non-profit free software community, and which initial solution was simple and direct. Changing the name and icon resolved the disputed until 10 years later where Mozilla lawyers decided that the Debian version was close enough to Mozilla version that it could be argued as being identical, in which the package returned to using the trademarks owned by Mozilla. I am not sure if people really despise Mozilla for it, but I recall that people found it a major waste of time. There is just so much energy that people will spend arguing about a name and an icon.

[g-b-r]

Well, yes to the first paragraph.

For the second, using variations of a product name was common and not equivocal, their new policy was a major hassle; it also made it harder for forks of Mozilla to be discovered, and placed a serious burden on making them.

It was just not in the spirit of open source software.

But this is fairly off-topic