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.
greymatter blog superiority
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.
Fuck WordPress, but also it kinda sounds like WordPress is more in the right here.
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.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.
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.)
Drupal? About as old as WP ;)
If you’re a glutton for punishment maybe
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any suggestions for a free easy to use alternative to wp?
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/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.
Personally I recommend Ms paint
that’s a local text editor. CMSes are for e.g. hosting blogs
I am sure I can make an amazing website with wordpad. Thanks!
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…
Is contao still around? I used to use it back in the early 2000s
They released 5.4 in August.
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.
Wordpress is junk.
