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Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine. EmDash is clearly "inspired" by WordPress including in its UI, so there's definitely something to it.

• rectang 6mo ago
  The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
  • halapro 6mo ago
    Wording never stopped a-holes and lawyers from being annoying. The only difference in this case is that Matt is the small fish.
• danudey 6mo ago
  The problem with WP Engine was that the name is confusing to users who aren't familiar with it. Presumably the WordPress Engine is the core of Wordpress? Or it's the thing powering Wordpress? It's easy to see ways in which an end user could be confused which was which. Conversely, this product is called something else, and while their blog post references Wordpress repeatedly it's in a way as to make it very clear that this is not that.
  • chuckadams 6mo ago
    Matt seemed pretty fine with the name for at least 14 years, including investing in them at one point.
• echelon 6mo ago
  Matt got upset because they forked his open source project and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top of it without contributing anything back to WordPress. He'd have more of a leg to stand on if WordPress wasn't itself a fork of an open source project. Matt should have built something open core or fair source licensed - free for customers, but stops competitors from stealing your lunch. He has no legal ground to argue his case now. It's a much bigger deal with hyperscalers poaching and stealing, like AWS and GCP ripping off and stealing most of the revenue from Redis and Elasticsearch. That's dishonest and evil in my mind. Totally orthogonal to this issue of marketing comparisons.
  • chuckadams 6mo ago
    WPE never forked a thing. They were a successful company after he backed out of an investment with them, he resented the success, blackmailed them for 8% of their top-line revenue, then threw a tantrum when they told him to pound sand.
  • halapro 6mo ago
    Have you looked at the screenshots? The admin literally looks like WordPress. You don't have to steal code to become liable. EmDash is an explicit direct competitor to WordPress and it copied the whole interface. It's like Pepsi suddenly shipping red bottles with the (I can't believe it's not) Coca Cola branding. If I did this and not CloudFlare, I would have gotten a cease and desist yesterday.
• chuckadams 6mo ago
  I'd really love to see Matt go after CloudFlare over the trademark. WPE might grind him into the dust, but CF will obliterate every constituent atom.
• Dylan16807 6mo ago
  >> It's not illegal to make product comparisons. That's just competition. > Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine. Why? That situation had nothing to do with comparisons.
  • halapro 6mo ago
    That situation had nothing to do with reality either. It was just some guy being upset at someone and starting a war all of the sudden. War it lost anyway.