The blocked resources in question? Automatic security and features updates and plugin/theme repository access. Matt Mullenweg reasserted his claim that this was a trademark issue. In tandem, WordPress.org updated its Trademark Policy page to forbid WP Engine specifically (way after the Cease & Desist): from “you are free to use [‘WP’] n any way you see fit” to a diatribe:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/26/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained attempts to provide a full chronology so far.
Edit:
The WordPress Foundation, which owns the trademark, has also filed to trademark “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress.” Developers and providers are worried that if these trademarks are granted, they could be used against them.
Wow Matt really looking bad on this one. This just reeks of trying to push out a major business competitor to wordpress.com and abusing control over wordpress.org to do it.
ThePrimeagen invited Matt to explain what’s going on.
TL;DW Matt’s claim is that he tried to get WP Engine to pay for a Trademark license (or whatever it’s called - I’m recalling from watching yesterday), over several months, and they tried to legally block him in every way. Their self-claimed contributions to Wordpress were (as he tells it) that they held conferences where they promoted their own stuff only - code contributions have been minimal.
So the combination of not willing to pay for the trademark + not contributing back (not in code, not in helping the community) is Matt’s reasoning for blocking them from using Wordpress’ resources.
He also mentioned that he has good relations with other Wordpress hosts, so it’s not like he’s trying to block anyone else from hosting, but they were all willing to pay for the use of the Trademark (and/or contribute back).
This is accurate, but also, “minimal” here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic’s near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.
The open-source side of WordPress is pretty pissed off at Matt right now. The Slack is heavily downvoting/disliking all of this.
Hopefully this spurs Automaticc to put more attention into the fediverse. With Tumblr moving to use Wordpress code that could bring all tumblr blogs to the fediverse and get more programmers and resources interested
Wordpress is a security hole anyway, use something else if you have to use plugins for your usecase.
Just not Drupal. Its still pretty bad.
Would it be wrong to hope they manage to commit some gross act of mutual destruction, and that the outcome would be that I never have to deal with Wordpress ever again?
Genuine question: what is the real alternative to WP? Ghost sucks, Hugo, Jekyll has 0 client approval factor without some shitty third party thing. Wix, Squarespace is not open.
I’ve been pushing Squarespace for most people who come to me asking about setting up a small store or just simple business website.
Yeah, it’s closed source and blah blah blah, but the end of the day, it’s not about my opinions on software, it’s about the most cost-effective, simple, usable option for the client who is asking me for my expertise, which is almost always not something they’re going to have to keep paying me to maintain.
Like if you really really want Wordpress, I’ll get you set up, and then quote you a couple thousand a year for maintenance.
Unshockprisingly, very few people think that’s the right choice once they see what the keep-it-from-being-exploited cost is.
(And for anyone who thinks that’s an unreasonable amount, okay cool. But maintaining a staging environment and testing updates and then pushing everything into production assuming there’s no regressions you have to address takes a lot of time.)
Everytime checked someone else’s WP, the only thing that came to mind each time was a Jenga block tower. Bunch of themes and plugins that do god knows what and interact together in mysterious way. Touch anything and there’s a very good chance everything comes crashing down.
I personally send people to Wix, but I guess Squarespace is fine.
It’s that Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns is only alive because all the things that would kill him are cancelling each other out, but in PHP form.
I tend to use Squarespace because uh, they have a marketing budget and everyone tends to already know (or at least one of the people in the meeting anyways) who they are, which makes things an easier sell.
I don’t particularly think they’re the best or whatever, but they at least do what they say at a price that’s reasonable enough and I’ve yet to be burned by suggesting them, sooooo…
Wix and Squarespace managed to be even worse options anyway.
Anyway who cares what the client thinks, they don’t know anything that’s why they’re hiring a professional. The professional thing to do would be to convince them of the advantages of one of the listed options.
Anytime I’ve ever had to deal with WordPress I’ve always run up against the fact that it has limitations that the client doesn’t understand, and then at some point you end up redesigning it custom anyway. May as well save time and start out custom.
Genuine question: what is the real alternative to WP?
What’s wrong with html/css/js? It can do anything you want it to do.
It doesn’t allow Dick from marketing to update the content without having to learn a skill.
Even though wordpress is an unsecure piece of shit, it’s very good at doing a just good enough shitty job quickly and cheaply (most of the time by adding a metric crap ton of even shittier plugins). Hence it’s massive popularity.
Drupal? About as old as WP ;)
It’s so much worse than WP though.
If you’re a glutton for punishment maybe
That would be great but the reality is that client’s mindsets need to change. I tried to explain to a client that Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application and yet they didn’t wanna switch to anything else. People are way too worried about new tech and wanna stick with whatever they know, even if it causes massive problems.
This year I stopped to let my clients pick the CMS. I tell them you wouldn’t ask a carpenter to make a chair, but restrict them to only use metal.
Wordpress is not a good fit for their complex web application
Seriously. People want to shove everything into Wordpress then get cranky when you can’t make Wordpress into a ecommerce store, marketing platform, personal blog, file sharing service, and NFT marketplace.
And then it gets hacked because they needed 14 SEO plugins, 2 different form plugins, and were not going to pay for managed updates because that’s easy they can do it themselves.
If you’re trying to turn WordPress into an application, for christs sake go use Django, Laravel, or Rails. Don’t send a CMS to do an applications’ job.
Shit you don’t even need a CMS at this point. I moved off WordPress to Hugo and SFTP and i’m happier than a pig in shit. Shit loads fast and no external threats.
Wordpress is the Excel of CMSs. It can do just about anything, but at this point it barely manages content well.
That’s a great analogy actually. You can do almost anything with it but what the vast majority of people choose to do with it is wrong.
Just like how people insist on using Excel as a database or Excel as a form.
I haven’t done web work for well over a decade and recently was surprised to learn that Wordpress is still very relevant. I remember back then, seeking alternatives as we expected it to become more of a legacy thing a few years down the track, so we were on the lookout for future-proofing client sites with a better foundation. At that point it was a decade old and annoying af because it morphed into a messy way of doing websites because people misused it’s original purpose. Brain had to think like a blog and then trick it into doing what you want, kind of like using tables to structure pages before CSS-P saved the day.
Wordpress is not a good fit for virtually any modern application. It’s designed as a blogging platform and basically no one makes blogs anymore. That functionality kind of got eaten up by Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, so no one needs blogs.
Instead of letting WordPress die the death it most definitely deserves they shoehorned in functionality, which would be fine if it wasn’t such a bodge job.
I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?
Depends on if you need a CMS, or if you can use a static site generator.
For a CMS, I’m still a fan of Ghost and it has (mostly) not enshittified to the point it’s unpleasant to use.
If you don’t need the whole CMS thing, there’s an awful lot of options. (And hosting them is super simplified since you can just stuff the output into a S3 bucket/Cloudflare Pages/Github Pages/a dozen other providers for basically free.)
There’s Contao, Drupal, Blogger, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace…
Shopify seems like it was purposely designed to be as dreadful as possible. They seemed to go out of their way to make dumb decisions.
Had to use Squarespace for work. Did not enjoy.
That’s fair. Interesting how blanket advertising often means the opposite of better.
Is contao still around? I used to use it back in the early 2000s
It moved to symfony starting with contao 4. You can now either use it as a self-managed CMS or add it to an existing symfony application to add CMS functionality. Great stuff.
Most of the community is German speaking though, keep that in mind.
They released 5.4 in August.
Any suggestions for a free easy to use alternative to wp?
There really isn’t one that’s a true alternative to WP.
There are plenty of nice static site generators, but those are significantly harder to use and not just drag and drop, they also don’t have the huge plugin marketplace that WP does.
Everyone loves to complain about WP (rightfully so in some cases, it has its own problems), but will suggest alternatives that are nothing like it.
I use WP to post weekly (sometimes more frequently) updates about my new releases and events happening in my shop (a game shop). It works for what I need, I just wish I could find I build a theme that displayed the way I want it to display.
Good luck! Not sure if you have time, but to their credit, they do have a handbook on making themes. Since WordPress 5.0 block editor, which a lot of people apparently abhor, themes are mostly HTML templates (with a lot of WP-specific invis comments) and CSS styles.
Thanks. I really know nothing about that kind of stuff. I have tried and only make things worse.
After December 2018, which is when WordPress 5.0 released?
No idea. I only started to use it in 22 I think. I have seen a lot of themes that look great, but every one of my posts has an image attached and the theme I use will not display a thumbnail when on the main page, only the title of the post and a snippet of the text.
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/480078/WordPress-org-bans-WP-Engine-blocks-it-from-accessing-its-resources/comment/4249030#entry-comment-4249030
Wix was not free when I looked last, I cannot stand using websites that use Shopify.
I will look into some of those others.
I have one that you may not like, but fits your description.
I don’t know what wordpress is, so I would suggest just not bothering at all with whatever that is. Maybe use wordpad.
“your description”? Where, which?
that’s a local text editor. CMSes are for e.g. hosting blogs
Personally I recommend Ms paint
I am sure I can make an amazing website with wordpad. Thanks!
Please make one and share
Yeah, open source licenses don’t entitle you to use trademarks.
This looks pretty bad to me.
WP Engine for WordPress.
That seems to be the commonly accepted solution if you look at other 3rd party trademark cases - situations like “RIF is fun for Reddit” coming to mind.Wordoress engine for wordpress ?
RIF did have to change their name though. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/
Yes, because it used to be"Reddit is Fun", which wasn’t okay. That was the point.
Like JohnEdwa said, using a trademark to refer to someone else’s product is considered nominative fair use: “referencing a mark to identify the actual goods and services that the trademark holder identifies with the mark.”
They’re very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.
That is absolutely trademark infringement.
At most, they just ambiguously used “Powered by WordPress Experts” once. I don’t see how the evidence misleads people into thinking there was an endorsement.
IMO, dumb people confuse stuff all the time, like the Minecraft Gamepedia with the Minecraft Wikia back then. The meager amount of evidence presented does not convince me that WP Engine has done any actual harm to the WordPress brand.
But yeah, the smart way out would’ve been adding a “WP Engine is not associated with WordPress.org”, at least one below the “WP ENGINE®, VELOCITIZE®, TORQUE®, EVERCACHE®, and the cog logo service marks are owned by WPEngine, Inc.” footer. All in the past now, though. At the best both companies are tomfools.
They explicitly call their engine Wordpress more than once in those examples. You cannot do that.
Yes they can. It’s actually WordPress, so it’s nominative.
No, they can’t, because no, it isn’t. That’s what trademarks are for. You can’t use a trademarked name to refer to your competing product.
Open source projects are generally permissive in terms of people repackaging their code for distribution for different platforms within reasonable guidelines, but even that is a sufficient change that they aren’t obligated to allow their trademarks to be used that way.
It is no longer Wordpress once it’s modified. That’s what trademark is for.
I think we should agree to disagree that it was modified enough here.
greymatter blog superiority
Fuck WordPress, but also it kinda sounds like WordPress is more in the right here.
Nah. WordPress is GPL, they can’t bitch about someone else reselling it. That would be like Linus Thorvalds blocking a company that sells linux distro because he doesn’t like them.
And also wordpress is a piece of trash.
GPL doesn’t give you any rights to trademarks.
It’s been debated to death in the thread linked below. I tend to fall on the side of the nominative fair use, but that’s for lawyer and judge to sort out because I’m neither.
A cursory check of law review tells me the US doesn’t have a uniform nominative fair use test applicable to the resell of goods and that the supreme court has refused to endorse a test creating a lot of inconsistency between circuit court. So everyone in that thread probably right in a different circuit court.
There is no debate.
Nominative fair use has no relevance to a separate, competing product. Nominative fair use gives you permission to use the term in the exact manner they do and no more. Their notice that your version is not “WordPress”, in and of itself, completely nullifies the argument.
There’s always a debate. That why there are court, judges and lawyers. They can sort that out.
There is a debate, and it’s in that thread. I have replied to you there, and you have not yet.
No, there isn’t. You’re just repeating incorrect information.
The second you change how a project works in any way in any context, it is no longer the same product and you are not entitled to use their trademark to reference it.
Functionally, any scenario where there’s any room at all for brand confusion or implied endorsement is trademark infringement. But even if you buy the outrageous lie that what they were doing was somehow ambiguous, as soon as they were contacted and told that their use was unacceptable, that ambiguity goes away.
The second you change how a project works in any way in any context, it is no longer the same product and you are not entitled to use their trademark to reference it.
However, it’s quite plausible that they did not modify the project at all. Instead, they are providing their own servers and dictate how their servers work while the WordPress source code (& binaries) themselves are isolated from any changes. That’s a new service.
There’s a past case where “an independent auto repair shop that specialized in repairing Volkswagen cars and mentioned that fact in their advertising was not liable for trademark infringement so long as they did not claim or imply that they had any business relationship with the Volkswagen company”, which I think holds just as well here.
as soon as they were contacted and told that their use was unacceptable, that ambiguity goes away.
Think that over. If that were true, you’d have endless corporate bullying. Every past “nominative use” case has originated from a trademark holder suing a plaintiff.
(IANAL)
Let’s just keep this conversation to the same thread.
If people post lies about trademark rights multiple places, they should be responded to multiple places.
Yeah, I agree with telling them it, but I also don’t like following up on the same thing in multiple places. I’m putting it here so Inter can respond there later.
There’s still the compelling-ish point of them only contributing 40 hours to the project per week, though.
The GPL doesn’t say you have to contribute anything other than the changes you make. If automattic is not happy with the terms of the GPL they should have picked something else. But then the product wouldn’t be so popular.
Honestly, I don’t see the difference from buying managed service for a software from a random cloud provider. You can go anywhere and get a fully managed postgresql, kubernetes and so many others, most of them probably dont contribute much.
I’m not saying it’s legal, I’m saying it’s part of being “nice”. Matt claims Automattic also gave WP Engine the option to pay the license in contributing development hours.
What does WP stand for then?
I must be old - it’s WordPerfect to me.
Exactly what I thought. I’d love to sit a young person today in front of that blank blue screen with the blinking cursor. Now, I have to go take my pills before bed.
WillPeoplenoticethecashgrab
Wordpress is junk.
WordPress is total garbage and businesses should really stop outsourcing web development to a bunch of 3rd world outsourcing companies who hire “developers” for poverty wages that can’t even write a single line of code. Sites are getting stuffed with dozens of useless freemium plugins, everything uses jQuery, and it’s one giant security risk. Often times a static site generator can do the job just fine or use a headless CMS like payload. There are plenty of alternatives: https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Wix, and all the other mutant leftover abominations belong in the trash and set on fire. Fucking normies and corpo boomers.
That’s a lot of hate from you there. I can almost smell it in my room.
Drupal…damn it’s been years since someone mentioned Drupal. I remember it being the next big thing…
