Automattic is doing open source dirty (opens in new tab)

Worth noting that less than a week ago Matt reached to Steve Huffman (spez), ceo of Reddit to capitalize the 'p' in `/r/Wordpress`. I guess to have legal ground to use trademark to get to own the subreddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fwnybm/lets_cap...

It was posted here as well, but it got flagged to oblivion.

Matt is frantically trying to justify his behaviour to dhh:

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843802126281257347 https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843803465719620012 https://x.com/photomatt/status/1843804108932944122

Matt seems to have missed that dhh called out his use of the WordPress trademark as the strategy to "get Al Capone" which Matt has admitted to multiple times.

What's the truth, Matt?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...

"“The analogy I made is they got Al Capone for taxes,” Mullenweg says. “So, if a company was making half a billion dollars from WordPress and contributing back about $100,000 a year, yes, I would be trying to get them to contribute more.” WP Engine competes directly with the hosting services offered by Automattic and WordPress.com, and Mullenweg argues one of the reasons for its success is the use of “WordPress” across its site. “That’s why we’re using that legal avenue to really, yeah, pressure them. That’s true: we are pressuring them.”"

Is this about the trademark or not?

> Look, Automattic can change their license away from the GPL any time they wish. The new license will only apply to new code, though, and WP Engine, or anyone else, are eligible to fork the project. That's what happened with Redis after Redis Labs dropped their BSD license and went with a commercial source-available alternative.

No, that would not be a possibility. Since Automattic is not the copyright holder and GPL prohibits redistribution under an incompatible license, unlike BSD.

GPLv2 operates on Copyright law.

This blowhard seems unaware there are also separate sets of laws around patents, trademarks and trade secrets the GPLv2 doesn't address.

Pot, meet kettle.

It's astounding to me how little self-awareness DHH has…as if he himself wasn't the target of controversy over the past few years and didn't cause an exodus of people leaving both Basecamp/37signals the company and Rails the ecosystem.

The flip side is…if (checks notes) DHH is calling you out on your poor stewardship of open source because of bad optics, wow, that is really something.