Wordpress is using their trademark though… do you mean to say that you must enforce a trademark to keep it? That’s different, and a subject of some controversy; I’m not sure that it’s been decided conclusively.
It's been decided conclusively, but it is also relatively rare in a practical sense. Trademark law requires the owner to protect their trademark to avoid dilution or genericide, which occurs when a trademark becomes so common it loses its distinctiveness (like what happened with "Aspirin" or "Escalator").
Not a lawyer, but talked about it at length with a trademark attorney when having to defend over the years. It was conveyed that if we aren't willing to legally defend a mark, we could potentially lose it.
Do you think WordPress is diluted? It definitely doesn’t seem to generically refer to blogging or website building software. It seems to me that even WP Engine isn’t diluting it, they’re hijacking it.
"We offer WordPress hosting" is a perfectly legal thing for people to say if they actually offer WordPress hosting, and no amount of trademarks can prevent that. This is specifically called out to try to avoid trademark fuckery.
Sure, everyone refers to the "Big Game" versus the "Super Bowl", but that's largely because the NFL can afford more lawyers than they can, and it's not worth the fight.
Agreed, but that goes back to defensibility. WP Engine has been doing their thing since 2011 without a peep from Matt. He should have been issuing cease and desists, etc. back then.
Maybe it’s that WP Engine operates differently now. They got a massive investment from Silver Lake, a terrible private equity firm with a track record of doing evil things. They probably have changed how they support Wordpress (the open source project), how they pollute the ecosystem, how they make it harder to leave, etc. In other words, they’re free riding on Matt’s creation and extracting all they can from it.
Oh yes, Matt's all about how evil Private Equity is and how they leech from communities and add zero value...
It's an interesting take, given that the three board members of the WordPress Foundation are Matt and a ... managing partner of a PE firm (the third is a retired coder, I believe).
Please correct me if I’m wrong here (in any way).