I'm hopeful Automattic will win this one; WP Engine repackages WordPress and delivers it as a service. Fine. Software license allows for that. That does not give them the right to describe their service as "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond". They clearly say so in their policy: https://wordpressfoundation.org/trademark-policy/
You can't prevent someone from using your Trademark as a description with your trademark policy. Everyone can use your Trademark to identify the thing, they don't need your permission. I could call myself the best Linux admin ever and the Linux Mark Institute can do nothing.
The law is not black-and-white. Absolutes like "Everyone can use your Trademark to identify the thing" don't fit in this context. Your reliance on Wikipedia to summarize a doctrine further demonstrates you don't have a firm grasp on the subject. Of course none on HN should listen to legal interpretations (including mine) because it's often not that simple. You can get a glimpse of the issue by reading this commentary from the American Bar: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...
I think (and that's my opinion) that a jury would see that what wpengine is doing is not fair use and that their offering is creating confusion among consumers, but that's not for me (or you, or anyone else here on HN) to decide.
Well I’ll be ready to watch the lawsuit for trademark infringement then. Except there won’t be one because there’s no chance that’s trademark infringement. All the statements on the website of WP engine (as I currently see it of course) don’t imply any affiliation with the Wordpress trademark owners and are pretty factual. Do you have some more explicit reasoning for statements on the website that you find infringing?
...a business related to WordPress themes can describe itself as “XYZ Themes, the world’s best WordPress themes,” but cannot call itself “The WordPress Theme Portal.”
It sounds like "[the] Most Trusted WordPress Hosting and Beyond" would be allowed.
It doesn't matter what the policy says if there is no legal basis for it. WordPress can't prevent Nominative Use, everyone can call the thing they are doing "WordPress hosting" if it is WordPress hosting. If the policy doesn't allow that, the policy can be ignored.
Even if WordPress could suppress nominative use, do they really want a world where everyone selling wordpress-based services and products avoids saying "WordPress" like it was the name of The Dark Lord Himself? Maybe it's time for some malicious compliance by way of a hard fork that strips the word "WordPress" everywhere except where legally required.
Even if Mullenweg somehow had 100% of the facts and law on his side, he's still an embarrassment to both the company and the foundation.
>>All other WordPress-related businesses or projects can use the WordPress name and logo to refer to and explain their services
I think the policy is somewhat vague on this; does 'Wordpress Hosting' refer to and explain the offered service? Clearly. Is 'Wordpress Hosting' a "product" WP Engine is selling? Kind of, yah?
My understanding of trademark is also that "we've been doing this for ages and you didn't say anything" is a pretty solid defense, and "Wordpress Hosting" is about the most generic hosting service offered on the internet at this point, everyone and their dog offers it.
The AGPL is great, even for business. I make a living from AGPL software. Lots of people generally don't like it, because AGPL was not written to please the largest number of developers, but rather to protect the basic software freedoms of end-users. In a sense, the AGPL guarantees more freedoms, is more free, than other licenses such as MIT/BSD for end-users. But depends on the point of view.
Many developers don’t like to have their freedom to steal to be restricted by such strong terms as those imposed by the AGPL. And that’s a good thing for you, my fellow maintainers. It’s also a great thing for you, dear end-users.
I am not going to debate whether it's "fine", but it's certainly not stealing. If I make someone a beautiful necklace and they sell it in an auction, I might wish they hadn't done that with my gift - but they haven't stolen anything either.
I handle this by redirecting all questions (anything that isn't a feature request or a bug report) to the project's community forum (hosted on discourse). Then I wrote and deployed https://github.com/pierotofy/issuewhiz to automatically catch and close issues that are identified as questions. GitHub issues is not the place to ask questions, in my opinion.
Thank you for using discourse! It is sooooo much better than discord. I really, really can't stand discord. Searching for an issue or topic is like wading into the ocean looking for a bluegill.
Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendor failures.
There’s no workable Excel alternative, FOSS, OSS or paid. You can deal with the word processor and presentation software, but Excel is alone in a class for itself.
Also not sure how you deal with LDAP/Kerberos - is samba good enough for large deployments?
Hem... I fail to see a single reasons to use a spreadsheet or create slides in PowerPoint alike software actually...
We can compute easily in R, Python, Clojure, also with some wrappers from Jupyter to R-Studio to Clerk for those who want it, personally I present in org-mode (dslide) with easy and no extra overhead. Maybe it's about time to teach administrative people how to use a computer...
The app looks very cool, but you might have a licensing issue; Meta's NLLB models are CC-BY-NC 4.0 (non-commercial use only). I could recommend checking out the OPUS-NLP models, which are truly open.
In that case, it is not open source. Part 6 of the open source definition by OSI (the only commonly accepted definition) includes this requirement:
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This app looks really cool and I'm glad OP made it. I'm just asking that the inaccurate "open source" descriptor be removed. Don't let my comment discourage you.
Meta defines NLLB as open source, but assuming it isn't (I know Meta It's not a company that has a problem with lying), my code is open source, so how should I define my app? I personally make a distinction between open source and completely open source (or 100% open source), because otherwise there is no intermediate definition, according to the OSI definition my app is not open source, but it is not closed source either, OSI does it have an intermediate definition?
Ok, I think I found the perfect solution, In the readme I added near open-source "(almost)" with a link to the libraries and models section when I explained clearer what components are open-source, closed-source, and cc-by-nc.
it's the closest, but it's a very broad and not so well known term, maybe defining my app open source is not technically a perfect term, but it's the clearest in describing it (considering that in the libraries and models section I specified which are open-source and which are not, Ml-Kit, used to recognize the language, for example is closed source), if a developer doesn't see the open source writing anywhere he will only get confused in understanding what the license of my app is. However, based on your feedback I added the specification (in the "libraries and models" section) that NLLB has a non-commercial license.
Instead of "almost", maybe "Open Source Code (and free for non-commercial use due to model licencing)" since your contributions are free as in freedom,and that is amazing!
Thank you for building this, I have been using a web interface connected to a local server for inference but the latency was about 1 second, too much for my taste!
I think it is too long for the preface, but I will better specify that my code is open source in the libraries and models section, thank you for the suggestion and the appreciation!
I know that, but since I make money only from donations without giving anything in return of the money I am considered non commercial. For now I decided to use NLLB instead of Opus because it has good quality and is a single model for all languages (so I didn't have to implement the download management logic for the various languages and I was able to make the app faster), but it is a temporary solution, I will certainly replace NLLB in the future, either with OpusMt Big or with other models with a less restrictive license.
It's a pretty basic "free for non-commercial use, contact us for commercial use" license.
And the Inria rasterizer is not proprietary either. It's non-commercial open source with the option to purchase a commercial license.
These are perfectly reasonable tech stacks for research projects to build off of. If you have an issue with the license, implement it yourself based on the papers (which all outline the necessary details to do so).
Rasterization is actually why 3D Gaussian Splats have been so successful. Being able to render 3DGS scenes by iterating over the objects and drawing the pixels each one covers is much faster than ray-marching every pixel, which is how neural radiance fields (the last hot 3D reconstruction technology) are rendered.
