In reply to Jan Dembowski.

According to trademark law cited above (Lexus case), Mr Yablon is allowed to use the word Wordpress as long as he makes clear that he is not associated with Automattic. Which Mr Yablon has.

Why should Mr Yablon (or me or you) be allowed to do this? Here's a few reasons.

Personally I have a big issue with Automattic walking off with our collective intellectual property (the rights to use the word Wordpress in relation to our consulting, hosting or coding services). I have another issue with Automattic telling me what license I have to use on my commercial code (or banning my company from Wordcamp after sponsoring Wordcamp Slovakia three times). I have further issues with Automattic trying to eliminate the pro plugin market via the fake free Jetpack borg collection. I have more issues with favoritism within Wordpress.org for favoured developers like Yoast.

For all my admiration for the origins of Wordpress and our open source community at the beginning, it seems to me we are no longer playing on a level playing field. While Matt Mullenweg is the flavour of the day for his apparently high minded altruism that all code should GPL, those of us who have been developing Wordpress from almost day one remember that when the high minded Mr. Mullenweg ran hidden gambling and porn links at Wordpress.org for big payola. Google intervened and Mr. Mullenweg was overcome with remorse and removed the links.

Apparently Mr. Mullenweg has reformed since. This is comforting to know: successful criminal rehabilitation is an important component of a healthy society. On the other hand, now that Mr. Mullenweg has aligned himself with VC (well known for their altruism, the importance they place on the GPL and their deep respect for the open source community), it would seem prudent to scrutinise his and Automattic's actions rather carefully.

In this context, Mr Yablon (and all of us who have contributed to Wordpress's success) should be able to use the name Wordpress in our products and our domains as long as we are clear that we are not associated with Automattic or Wordpress.com in any way. I can just see the case for not allowing any top level domain which is just Wordpress by itself (as that could confuse visitors about whom the site belongs to).

In my opinion, the foundation should content itself with enforcing the existing strong "not associated" protections and stop bullying individuals who are using the word Wordpress in good faith. I salute Mr. Yablon for standing up for all of us.