I did not follow the details so far.
but I have high respect for and trust in Matt.
isn’t it about a trademark misuse? that could have easily be solved?
There’s tons of drama going on over in WordPress land. Private equity Silverlake has bought up and is running WP Engine. They’re apparently not contributing back to the WordPress Foundation as much as the foundation people think is fair. That much seems fine, but Mullenweg also seems to be wanting to completely destroy WP Engine to the point where his company Automatic can buy them up for pennies on the dollar. Getting companies to contribute to the open source the use seems good, but weaponizing trademark to try and destroy another company in the ecosystem seems really questionable.
It’s interesting to think about because we don’t have a Nostr foundation or trademark. How would we handle if private equity came in to the Nostr ecosystem and didn’t contribute? We don’t have clear expectations of the role of companies in the Nostr space, nor do we have a central company or foundation the way Word Press does.
I think it’s worth thinking about the best way to set up Nostr to handle this going forward. Many people here know the saga around Craig Wright and the struggle to define who and what bitcoin is… That feels somewhat similar as well.
What do people think is the best way to handle this?
https://www.therepository.email/mullenweg-threatens-corporate-takeover-of-wp-engine
I did not follow the details so far.
but I have high respect for and trust in Matt.
isn’t it about a trademark misuse? that could have easily be solved?
My reading is that Matt was basically extorting WP Engine and the trademark thing is just a post hoc justification.
It can't easily be solved. They built an entire brand around WP (as the trademark rules allowed) years ago and now he's changing the rules after extorting them. That isn't worthy of respect in my opinion.
He is making weak claims in an attempt to avoid competing with them.
+1 I'm biased towards Automattic, for sure, because everything I've seen them do has been to support Free Code ecosystems and social web communities. Like hiring the ActivityPub for WP developer fulltime to work on the plugin.
I've only skimmed the first half of the article you linked. But if even half of Matt's claims about what WP Engine are doing are true, It reminds me of the shitfuckery LibLime / PTFS tried with the Koha project, or Oracle with OpenOffice.
In which case, Automattic and the WP Foundation are well within their rights to use any means at their disposal to protect the WP ecosystem from this kind of corporate parasitism. Especially in its particularly pernicious private equity firm, see;
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-private-equity-firms-plundering-the-u-s-economy/
https://www.theverge.com/23758492/private-equity-brendan-ballou-plunder-finance-doj
Also
Private equity rips off its investors, too:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance