Conflation Hurts

The last few weeks have been hard for those in the #WordPress community. I’m trying my best to focus on the work ahead, but recent events have made that more challenging and complicated for folks on the ground.

I have friends who work or have worked at WP Engine, and I obviously have friends at Automattic. I am very loyal to Automattic, WordPress, and the open-source concept.

I don’t like that this “war” has had collateral damage.

I’ve worked in Jetpack—straddling between WordPress.com and WordPress.org—for 11 years. I’ve worked tirelessly to be clear about WordPress.com is different than WordPress.org internally and externally. I don’t work at “WordPress”. I work at “the company behind WordPress.com”. We’ve been huge within Jetpack about following procedures and protocols—we go through the Plugins and Security teams and not through any a8c channels where there may be overlap.

It pains me that the last few weeks have conflated everything. Automattic has the exclusive trademark license for commercial usage of “WordPress.” The license is a fact, whether you think it is good, bad, or neutral. Automattic allowing in-kind donations (e.g., sponsored time) as consideration for a sublicense seems fine. Having a policy that entities violating the trademark are not allowed to sponsor WordCamps also makes sense to me. Automattic going after an entity for violating the “WordPress” trademark commercially seems fine and in line with the license. There are lines of connection, but each entity has a specific role and acts relatively independently.

It pains me to confuse the commercial trademark license conflict with WordPress.org, the WordPress Foundation, and the community behind it. I don’t understand the login checkbox, folks being removed from Slack, or the voice of the WordPress Twitter account lately. I saw folks mention “Automattic’s takeover” of Advanced Custom Fields. It wasn’t Automattic, but everything has been so blurred lately—it isn’t a battle I will fight.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m behind Matt’s open-source vision. If a major player is arguably violating the trademark and unwilling to find a solution, they should be taken to court. They shouldn’t be sponsoring WordCamps (or in other positions that seem like it could imply some sort of endorsement). I’d prefer to keep that battle in the courtroom all-in-all, though.

I appreciate that competitors have been able to collaborate on the project. Joost (then at Yoast) and I (with Jetpack) were both involved in figuring out sitemaps in Core despite each of us having our own sitemap solutions in our respective plugins. The project itself felt like a neutral zone—a software Switzerland—where we all agreed that working together helped raise us all up, and our common “enemy” was proprietary software.

I’m not leaving because I want to be there to make it that space again. There have been a lot of burnt bridges, and anything close to trust will take a long time, but I believe that open-source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.