Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology(poststatus.com) |
Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress: A Conflict of Ideology(poststatus.com) |
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 long way as suggesting not to buy non-GPL licensed products for WordPress.
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/$$.
Worse, this is a personal vendetta at this point. There is no legitimate reason why Matt/Automattic should own thesis.com or would try to invalidate the trademarks.
The worse part is that project leaders set the tone and establish acceptable behavior for the project. Instead of saying:
"Chris is a $%^#$& and breaking the license, let's follow the legal path."
Matt has said (publicly by his actions and supposedly privately):
"Chris is a $%^#$& and breaking the license, let's harass him personally and destroy his business."
Bad, bad precedent.
WordPress Foundation is the non-profit that owns the WordPress trademarks and source code. Automattic is a commercial entity working to "defend" the trademark and attack a license infringer. And Matt Mullenweg runs both organizations.
If they're using funds from the commercial to support the non-profit and Matt Mullenweg runs both organizations, who's behalf are they acting on? Are they really separate organizations? Legally they are, but in practice, is that the case?
Does this begin to create legal liability because a) WPF isn't really being a non-profit; or b) Automattic has been attaching requirements to their contributions and support?
I honestly don't know. I'm wondering.
Mr. Pearson wrote things up from his point of view this month as well: http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.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).
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
But what's sad to me is that this feels like a reflection of the dead end that the open web has become.
This comment in particular: http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.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."
Until that happens, this cloud will continue to hover over Matt and the WP community.
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.
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.
Automattic paid for thisis.com and I'm glad Chris wasn't able to take it by force.
All negative comments directed towards Matt are surprising?
How so? What's so surprising?
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.
If Apple can trademark the name of one of the world's most common fruits, I'm sure Pearson has a right to trademark "thesis".
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?
Having read this article, http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.p... now I see why.
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.
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.
Dont they test before release?
I see only a drive for greater profits at play here - on both/all sides.
By some estimates, it powers 25% of all sites on the internet (http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all)! I am not a fan of wordpress from a technical perspective, but you can't deny that it has had a HUGE impact on people having their own websites.
umm... why Automattic is after DIYTHEMES trademark?
> 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.
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?
> The answer given in the GPL FAQ is short and to the point: “Subclassing is creating a derivative work.”
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?
This is exactly why LGPL exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_Lice...
For open source class libraries, LGPL makes the most sense and is used by the vast majority of libraries in the Linux world.
Also, some libraries are GPL-licensed specifically to protect commercial interests. Under such a dual licensing scheme, you can use the free GPL version, but then your app has to be GPL as well... Or you can pay for a commercial license that lets you build closed-source apps using the library.
Qt used to have that kind of dual license, but they switched to LGPL after Nokia acquired Qt sometime around 2008.
The "open web" might no longer be a cash cow worth billions, but a significant number of people still love to tinker with it and resist the trend of app-ifying everything. Most of them don't care whether they are worth billions, they care about being open and tweakable. If you don't, then you're simply not their target user.
If only this were the case. WP's underlying processes and database structure are so unbelievably stunted and entirely coupled to the core WP application, that to do something as simple as pull rendered posts from the database generally involves performing a series of SQL gymnastics just to retrieve the relevant data. Not to mention all of the convoluted WP functions that are needed to render the final content snippet.
The WordPress UI hasn't changed in the 6 years that I've been using it. Everything about it feels "heavy".
Not a good experience, honestly.
Just that the free alternatives (Ghost, for example) are even more technically challenging.
Running code through an interpreter or compiler has never in the past been held to create a derived work under the GPL. Linking with a library is pretty much the definitive example of what the GPL views as a derived work. I'm not sure how you see this case as particularly odd.
That's true, but the article mentions an interesting twist that might not be so clear. The key statement (which, AFAIK, is a direct quote from the FSF) is: "Subclassing is creating a derivative work." In certain programming languages (Java is the example given in the article), you can't write code without subclassing one of the classes built into the language (in Java, you have to, at a minimum, subclass Object), so if subclassing is creating a derivative work, you can't write a program in such a language that isn't a derivative work of the language. Even in languages that don't force you to subclass to write a program at all, there can still be a large set of programs that can't be written without subclassing (for example, in Python 3 any time you use the class statement you are subclassing, at a minimum, the built-in object class).
I don't think the FSF's intent was to make any Java program a derivative work of Java, or any Python 3 program that uses the class statement a derivative work of Python. But if so, they need to qualify their bald statement about subclassing being a derivative work.
I'm actually having trouble finding an interpreted language (and accompanying standard library) that is licensed under a copyleft license. Python isn't (the PSFL isn't copyleft); Ruby isn't (it's dual-licensed under 2-clause BSD and a Ruby license that's their own); Perl isn't (it's dual-licensed under GPL and the Artistic License, with an explicit note by Larry Wall that scripts are not considered derivative works for GPL purposes).
Which would completely decouple the front/back ends and therefore, you could have a separate license on each.
More importantly, if WordPress/Matt/Automattic wanted to fight that the entire API community would be on opposite side because of the implications.
And as noted in the article, there are potentially significant negative consequences -- including for the FSF's goals -- if the FSF's interpretation were to be endorsed by courts and applied uniformly.
(damn it's hard to find a reference to the license on the web site)
EDIT: found a related link; some extra/common libraries are also LGPL http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/gnu-guile-projects.html#Co...
The (now obsolete) GNU implementation of the java class libraries was GPL licensed, and had a special exception just for this, called the "classpath exception": http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html
The Sun Java implementation was not GPL until 2006/2007. And since Oracle successfully sued Google for making its own compatible function prototypes and class definitions and such ... well I'll agree that the java situation may in fact be a shitshow.
Also, did you know that the GPL has a system library exception? So you can legally dynamically link to OS X's libc or Windows' win32 as needed to run a normal process. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryExcep...
So really there's no language (except maybe sun's java, I dunno) where this is actually a problem.
1. The parent class (more to the point, the interface which must be copied to be compatible as a theme) is not sufficiently specialized to be copyrightable in the first place.
2. Even if the code is derivative, the use and intent in copying is fair use because it was done to be compatible with the greater Wordpress system.
Sadly, because of the names involved (subclass, etc), I doubt that any judge without specific programming knowledge would rule that subclassing isn't automatically derivative.
My gut feeling is that those two idiots are on a collision course to sue each other. I'd say it'll be fun to watch the fireworks, but it's a bit hard to enjoy them when they're aimed at you.
(I think you're right about WordPress being a primarily Web 2.0 platform. My disagreement with you is that I don't think there's anything wrong with being a Web 2.0 platform.)