The behaviour of both parties is, at best, childish.<p>Thesis is clearly breaking the law (as WordPress has defined it -and rightly so-); but it should not ignite more than a tweet or a blog post by Matt. Matt can also go a <i>long</i> way as suggesting not to buy non-GPL licensed products for WordPress.<p>I don't really understand Matt aggressive (and childish) reaction. He is obviously not in the same play field, size or ambitions as Thesis. He also got his whole company (Automattic) into this strictly personal issue, by purchasing the domain (and probably hiring the lawyers) with Automattic assets/$$.
I suppose directing your 384-employee company to spend $100,000+ and a whole lot of lawyer-hours getting revenge over a personal grudge is a benefit of keeping the company private and closely held.<p>Mr. Pearson wrote things up from his point of view this month as well: <a href="http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p...</a>
You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed:<p>- Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site).<p>- That said the quality of WordPress themes can be terrible. They can have conflicting plugins or terrible security holes. So the quality of the developer base is uneven at best (quite a few script kiddies).<p>- WordPress still feels like it's stuck in the year 2008. The usability has only grown more complex, yet the functionality feels stuck in the web 2.0 era.<p>- Automattic is not a unicorn, in fact I feel that it's doomed. Right now the open web feels like it's in deep trouble, and WordPress just isn't mobile first platform. This should have their management in panic mode, but it does not.<p>- For example there should be a way to wrap a WordPress site into an app. Yes there are third party solutions that do this, but Automattic should be doing that. In fact WordPress should have done that in say 2010.<p>- There are also a number of third party plugins that allow you to create a web page sort of like InDesign, but they're all terrible hacks. Again this is something that Automattic should do, but doesn't.<p>- Even the branding of WordPress is a convoluted mess. I find myself time and time again explaining the difference between WordPress.com and self hosting the software itself.<p>So in the end you have a product that is too complex for a normal person (this is why squarespace or facebook pages do well) yet it's a platform that tech people feel is a bit of an old hack.<p>But what's sad to me is that this feels like a reflection of the dead end that the open web has become.
I lost a lot of respect for Matt Mullenweg in this fiasco.<p>This comment in particular: <a href="http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php#comment-1509046" rel="nofollow">http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p...</a><p>Pursuing the trademark cancellation further is just downright vindictive. It's not too late for him, to say, "I f-ed up and I've let this blind my decision making. I've asked the legal team to rescind the trademark dispute and we won't pursuing this any further."<p>Until that happens, this cloud will continue to hover over Matt and the WP community.
Thank you WP and thank you Automattic. I find all the negative comments directed at Matt here both surprising and deeply disappointing.<p>Wordpress powers about 20% of all the sites on the web. It's been a boon to humanity and much of the reason it has flourished as it has is its open sourced nature. Automattic has made profit, but only a tiny sliver of what it could have if concern for the rest of the world weren't an issue.<p>The Thesis guy, on the other hand, grossly violated copyrights while trying to play the victim (literally had copied WP code in his project) and is now applying for patents that would pretty much wreak blogging and with it the web if granted. Personally, I'm very happy to have people like Matt putting their efforts and money where their principles are. I'm all for building a business, but not that entails stealing from the open source community or breaking the web.<p>Automattic paid for thisis.com and I'm glad Chris wasn't able to take it by force.
I agree with Mullenweg on every aspect of this conflict, and I think that Pearson is an unpleasant person trying to make money on the back of GPL'd software without sharing back.<p>That being said, I don't understand how he could prevail over Pearson on the thesis.com dispute, as Mullenweg clearly bought it out of spite and has no business connection to the name. His willingness to settle shows that he probably thought he was going to lose as well. I would think that the judge would accept the technicalities offered by Mullenweg's lawyers, and possibly force Pearson to move the trademarks to his business entity - but I guess that's my ignorance of the legal system showing.
I don't understand how the word "thesis" can be both "generic", as Automattic repeatedly claim, and "merely descriptive", as they claim in their trademark attack. There is probably some intersection between these two concepts, but it's very small. Perhaps "Salty" as a potential trademark for potato chips would be an example?
<i>"During that debate, I got defensive and acted like an asshole. At the time, I was woefully ignorant about software licensing, and I felt as though I was being backed into a corner and asked to accept something I didn’t fully understand. Instead of handling it in a measured, polite manner, I was a jerk. I made a mistake, and I paid dearly for it."</i><p>This something to keep in mind, stay calm. When you are agitated you don't think straight. What I don't understand is why Mullenweg and Pearson don't work together and increase the size of the market?<p>Having read this article, <a href="http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php#more-1096" rel="nofollow">http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p...</a> now I see why.
The last time I looked into the WP theme GPL issue, by some of the mentioned logic, every PHP script ever written and distributed would end up being a derivative work of the PHP engine.<p>One way to get around some of it, is to use WP as a data store and management layer, with your own 2nd layer on top of it, that does use WP's functions to pull that data out, but is not a theme that has to be installed nor activated.<p>Which is a actually what I've done with my website - but that's not why... It's basically a mini-cms that first checks the file system for the page, and if not found, calls into wordpress.
Well we know that a controversy and dispute makes for a good article, but this could easily be about the shared benefits of WordPress, and how different people use WordPress to make money in different ways.
I dont know why but every wordpress update breaks some or other thing. Like their latest update broke woo commerce which they have acquired now.<p>Dont they test before release?
And what does WordPress do for humanity that makes this legal spat of any interest?<p>I see only a drive for greater profits at play here - on both/all sides.
> Automattic filed cancellation requests for all three trademarks<p>umm... why Automattic is after DIYTHEMES trademark?<p>> There is a tendency to think that there are two things: WordPress, and the active theme. But they do not run separately. They run as one cohesive unit. They don’t even run in a sequential order.<p>So, by this analogy, every app/piece of code you write for a GPL licensed OS, then the people who hold the copyright, can claim over your code?<p>> The answer given in the GPL FAQ is short and to the point: “Subclassing is creating a derivative work.”<p>So, if tomorrow Apple releases Swift with GPL or Microsoft releases C# with GPL, then everything that is written using those languages has to be GPL?