The second you change how a project works in any way in any context, it is no longer the same product and you are not entitled to use their trademark to reference it.

However, it’s quite plausible that they did not modify the project at all. Instead, they are providing their own servers and dictate how their servers work while the WordPress source code (& binaries) themselves are isolated from any changes. That’s a new service.

There’s a past case where “an independent auto repair shop that specialized in repairing Volkswagen cars and mentioned that fact in their advertising was not liable for trademark infringement so long as they did not claim or imply that they had any business relationship with the Volkswagen company”, which I think holds just as well here.

as soon as they were contacted and told that their use was unacceptable, that ambiguity goes away.

Think that over. If that were true, you’d have endless corporate bullying. Every past “nominative use” case has originated from a trademark holder suing a plaintiff.

(IANAL)

This is accurate, but also, “minimal” here is 40 hours of code contributions per week compared to Automattic’s near-4000. Additionally, WP Engine is the biggest Wordpress.com competitor.

There is a debate, and it’s in that thread. I have replied to you there, and you have not yet.

I’m not saying it’s legal, I’m saying it’s part of being “nice”. Matt claims Automattic also gave WP Engine the option to pay the license in contributing development hours.

They do still have some basic protection. Steam’s default, loose, DRM requires you to launch Steam when you open a game’s executable.

Manjaro has a stability track record miles worse than Arch, to the point where someone made a GitHub wiki called “Manjarno”.

I’d doubt that. Everyone hated S mode: Corporate hated it, power users hated it, newbies…probably ignored it. Even if MS continued down it, it’d just be like Digg v4.

Personally, I think the profit incentive is a way to improve SteamOS further for free.

After December 2018, which is when WordPress 5.0 released?

It’s Medium, whaddya expect?

Yeah, I agree with telling them it, but I also don’t like following up on the same thing in multiple places. I’m putting it here so Inter can respond there later.

There’s still the compelling-ish point of them only contributing 40 hours to the project per week, though.

Let’s just keep this conversation to the same thread.

IMO that part’s entirely fine. After all, it is a webhosting engine for WordPress. Would you say the same about e.g. NameMC.com?

Good luck! Not sure if you have time, but to their credit, they do have a handbook on making themes. Since WordPress 5.0 block editor, which a lot of people apparently abhor, themes are mostly HTML templates (with a lot of WP-specific invis comments) and CSS styles.

That is the question. I think this is all perfectly achievable by only writing new, separate software to selectively gatekeep the configuration files without changing the source code of WordPress itself. Like I said, not dedicating more resources to WordPress.org doesn’t give WP Engine the moral high ground either, though.

You can’t, and I’m disagreeing that what they were doing counts as modification.

They released 5.4 in August.

But is gatekeeping the configuration files or wrapping around the software really modification?

I think we should agree to disagree that it was modified enough here.

Yes they can. It’s actually WordPress, so it’s nominative.