This sounds more like a modern CTO felt the need to refactor the a big part of the codebase for the sake of it and if that wasn't foolish enough, they decided to not roll it out incrementally.
It’s not necessarily more easy to be great in a low performance organisation. Often these organisations are low performant for a reason. The worst one egos, drama and politics
The image is not very common, most of the time they have elevated the space before and after the bikepath, forcing cars to slow down before going on it.
However one of the downsides is that often the front space is a too bit small in cities, so not always easy to fully go on it without blocking the bike path. And in busy bike paths at times cars will get impatient.
At some size a corporate and government have a lot of similarities. Much more then small vs big companies. Only difference I've seen is that companies do a big clean up every now and then, which helps although doesn't solve everything. Governments just keep pestering on.
Fixed pricing put lot of risk on the creator, but hourly pricing there is no risk. I prefer a proper balance of partially fixed, with a limit and out clauses, and then maintenance and further development on an hourly basis.
Could you give some examples of out clauses and limits? This sounds very appealing to me as someone who has gotten bit by the “one more thing” loop but has had a hard time selling hourly.
They've always been actively protecting their trademark. Also small companies or meetups using WordPress were asked to change that. I think they even have to do that legally to some degree to protect their trademark.
WP Engine has build their success on piggybacking the WordPress trademark, their slogan is "Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond".
It's probably fair they pay a fee for that.
If they would just use the open source software & would market it as a blog-hosting they would most likely be in the clear.
And it has been a standard in this industry for decades (e.g. LAMP) that saying 'X Hosting' does not mean that you should be considered the owner of X. It just means you host it.
The claim is that, while WP is legal, it is “WordPress Engine” that was also used (in press releases or tolerated in the writings of 3rd parties), alongside “WordPress Core”, a plan which they later renamed.
I don't know if this changes anything, but I'm guessing a lawsuit is coming, so we shall see. But it would be great if people did some research before commenting on the story.
Whenever someone's asking for 8% of gross revenue, they've lost the plot regardless of the underlying claim. For most businesses that's easily much more they're taking in profit. One imagines were this agreement in place, WPEngine would have to raise their prices to levels beyond what any customer would pay.
Likewise, the use of "wordpress" as a trademark is clearly permitted when referring to wordpress; it's a common part of trademark law that you can refer to products in this manner. WPE customers do not think WPE is wordpress, it's a host.
It's complicated. The trademark is indeed owned by The Foundation but they have granted Automattic an "exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable right and license to use and otherwise exploit the trademarks". This is only just coming to light.
So the Foundation appears to only own the trademarks on paper. Despite that, this is how Matt Mullenweg framed the trademark ownership situation to the community:
"the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company." he also claimed that Automattic had "give[n] up control" of the trademarks. Those statements are demonstrably untrue.
> Similarly, a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
The question is when is a company piggybacking on a brand.
Maybe Automattic is asking for too much, but it’s very clear wp engine strongly benefited from the brand, not only the software. Just Google them now, they are marketing full on with Wordpress.
I don’t see a way how they won’t win this in court.
Yeah when I go to WPEngine site it feels like they copy-pasted it.
This is the thing about open source is MOST people do not contribute anything. And we’re seeing this trend with the whole Continue.dev situation too. Copy-paste, rebrand, make some money.
I think everyone needs to consider what the O.G. Wordpress team has created—and how many hours of blood, sweat, and tears went in. And then some folks just copy-paste and siphon out their business.
Fun fact. Matt Mullenweg himself was a seed investor in WPEngine. He has either sold since then, or his share has been diluted to the point of being meaningless.
The reality is that he had no problem with WPEngine until recently. Just last year he spoke at their conference.
They explicitly allowed it. If you don't want to be taken advantage of, put it in the license. It's honestly hard to feel sympathy for companies that release a product under a what some meme circles have called a "cuck license"¹ and then complain when some other entity adheres to the license.
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