alt Hacker NewsOk so if they changed their plans to "Core" and said "Includes vanilla WordPress" is Ma.tt going to have an issue with it?
This really doesn't seem to be much about Trademarks, but more like what every other open source project complains about, that someone ELSE made a ton of money from the open source project, not them (even though that someone else is following the original license).
Couldn't they have just changed the license to WP? It wouldn't have affected most customers.
Replies
I don't know what he would or would not have an issue with, I'm just saying what his claim is.
Personally, I don't care either way, I don't like either party.
Automattic isn't a good steward of WP and has a lot of conflict of interest that they don't want to acknowledge and WP decisions are "what benefits wp.com" first.
WP Engine is an aggressive sales company that also has hosting attached. They're extremely overpriced, the GoDaddy of WP Hosting. Whenever I hear somebody uses them it's a strong indicator that they're making enough money but have no technical knowledge on the team.
They probably can't change the license for WordPress. It's under the GPL and it looks like WordPress doesn't require a contributor agreement assigning copyright to someone else. They'd need to get every contributor to agree to relicense it.
There's also the question of who would relicense it. Automattic doesn't own the WordPress trademarks and if there were a contributor agreement, it would likely be assigning the code to the WordPress Foundation, not Automattic.
The WordPress Foundation non-profit doesn't have a good incentive to put a restrictive license on it. Part of the problem is that the WordPress Foundation doesn't seem to be truly independent of the for-profit Automattic. The point of creating a non-profit to hold the IP of an open source project is to prevent stuff like this from happening.