[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.