Comment on WordPress.com blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms | TechCrunch
Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 1 year agoIt is not the case that Automattic and the Foundation “legally […] have to be separate”, that’s a choice that Automattic/Mullenweg made.
Yes, it is literally illegal in the US for a for-profit business to also be a non-profit entity, thus Automattic and the WordPress Foundation are separate entities. (I don’t know if you’re intentionally being obtuse. Would you also consider Volkswagen and the Nazis are “the same people”?) Additionally, while the software on WordPress.com is a fork of the WordPress software and based on it, they are very different. I have had to migrate sites away from WP.com to use the open-source WordPress software many times and it is a pain in the ass every time because of that.
Nothing of what you mentioned has any bearing on my point. Automattic is a for-profit that is essentially using the name and trademark of a non-profit business to trick people into thinking that Automattic/WordPress.com and the free and open source software provided by WordPress.org are the same thing.
It is particularly fucked up when you consider the WordPress Foundation’s clear stance on using the name WordPress in your domain (wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/) or the logo for your business. Why does WordPress.com get a free pass? They are a for-profit business just the same as many others with the main difference being that the owner and CEO of the for-profit business is the same person as the founder and lead developer of the non-profit organization. That is super fucked up!
Also, WordPress.com does nothing to make it clear that they are a separate entity from WordPress.org, particularly for people who don’t know any better. They hear “You should make a WordPress site.” from people and stumble on WordPress.com and then learn they have to pay significantly more money to simply install plugins, which is a big reason why WordPress has such a large userbase, and there are more issues that they run into than just the ridiculous costs.
WordPress.org even has a link to WordPress.com in their footer. Do they provide any other link to competitor for-profit businesses?
Can you tell which of these two tabs you can find the free and open source software? Image
dot20@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is Red Hat a conflict of interest? MongoDB (pre-2018)? Docker? Nginx? They all sell proprietary software alongside their open-source offerings.
Is it a conflict of interest that I can pay Plausible Analytics for a hosted version of their software, even though it’s open source? How about GitLab? How about Bitwarden?
If you take issue with companies selling products based on open-source software they created, there are a LOT more companies you should take issue with than just Automattic (who, as discussed, voluntarily spun off their trademarks into a non-profit, unlike the companies named above).
(Incidentally, even the Free Software Foundation encourages charging money for FOSS software.)
Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A for-profit business also offering an open-source software is not a conflict of interest and perfectly fine, and like you show, there are plenty of examples of this behavior.
However, what absolutely is a conflict of interest, and is scummy as fuck, is running an non-profit that actively works as an advertising platform for your for-profit business as well as making it intentionally confusing to people that there are two separate entities of a non-profit and for-profit while giving preferential treatment towards that business among other competitors in the market.
dot20@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So, all the companies I named and many more, then.
Go on, go on Docker’s or GitLab’s website, and let me know how clear the distinction between their proprietary and open-source software is.
Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do people think that Docker is a non-profit? Is there a separate non-profit called “Docker.org” that runs over 43% of the Internet that the for-profit “Docker.com” (a separate entity) intentionally conflates with themselves and uses the non-profit organization to get a major advantage over many other for-profit businesses that sell hosting for Docker?