It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion. WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.

— Matt Mullenweg, « WP Engine is not WordPress », WordPress News, 21 septembre 2024.

La marque WordPress appartient à la fondation du même nom, créée comme WordPress lui-même par Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg dirige Automattic, qui contrôle fermement le développement de WordPress et possède WordPress.com, un service d’hébergement concurrent de WP Engine. La fondation WordPress autorisait explicitement l’usage de l’abréviation « WP »… jusqu’à ce qu’elle change discrètement de fusil d’épaule la semaine dernière.

WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. […] We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks. WP Engine has refused to do either, and has instead taken to casting aspersions on my attempt to make a fair deal with them.

Matt Mullenweg, « WPE & Trademarks », 26 septembre 2024.

WP n’est pas (et ne peut pas être) une marque déposée.

I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102B assets under management, can hollow out an open source community. (To summarize, they do about half a billion in revenue on top of WordPress and contribute back 40 hours a week, Automattic is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.)

— Matt Mullenweg, « WP Engine is not WordPress », WordPress News, 21 septembre 2024.

La licence GNU GPL se moque heureusement de ce genre de considérations.

It has to be said and repeated: WordPress.com is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WordPress.com was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.

— Ángel F. Plaza, « WordPress.com is not WordPress », WPHercules, 22 septembre 2024.

Ce serait drôle si ce n’était pas si triste.

But increasingly, Mullenweg has centered himself in the conversation around WordPress in ways that are increasingly troubling. People use WordPress because it’s a stable tool with a big community. This week, he has repeatedly taken steps to shrink the community and destabilize the tool. Just this evening he blocked WP Engine from WordPress.org, effectively preventing every customer of WP Engine from doing critical plugin and theme updates in an automated fashion. Meanwhile, his company’s subsidiary Pressable is offering to buy out your contract from WP Engine.

— Ernie Smith, « Content Fighting Systems », Tedium, 25 septembre 2024.

Le problème avec les dictateurs bienveillants, disais-je, c’est que lorsqu’ils ne sont plus bienveillants, ils sont encore dictateurs.

In my decade-plus web development career, I’ve met dozens of kind, humble, and helpful people working in the WordPress ecosystem. A tech project run by a “benevolent” dictator just doesn’t feel like the right fit for my web presence long term.

— Nick Simson, « The future of this website », 28 septembre 2024.

Zinzolin utilise maintenant le système de gestion de contenus Ghost.