Former direct employee of Matt Mullenweg, Samuel Sidler, wrote an interesting post about the unclear ownership of the Openverse, which is a WordPress project. One piece of the story ties into something we have looked at. The extent that the WordPress Foundation is intertwined with Automattic, especially with trademark applications. He wrote this:

The application of the wordmark was made by the WordPress Foundation, with Mullenweg signing the paperwork with a title of “CEO.”[9] Meanwhile, on the trademark application for the logo, Mullenweg signed the paperwork with a title of “Founder.” On November 10, 2022, Chloe Bringmann—with a title of “Chief of Staff”—signed a “statement of use” for the logo, noting first use was July 20, 2021. Bringmann signed a “statement of use” for the wordmark on May 23, 2023, noting first use was April 27, 2021. [Read more]

As part of Matt Mullenweg’s attempt to post through his own bad actions, earlier this week he was criticizing people behind a couple of other open source projects over the ownership of the trademarks. He wrote this:

Let’s talk about trademarks! I don’t own the WordPress trademark personally, it belongs to a foundation on which I’m one of three votes. Rails? [Read more]

So far, with everything going on with WordPress, there has been a decided lack of new details exposed by journalists. There have been plenty of stories, but most just repeating claims made by various parties in the situation. That changed today, as TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta reported on an internal Automattic blog post that laid out the strategy of trying to gain more control over the WordPress trademark. Here is part of how he described that:

The message – penned by Automattic’s then-chief legal officer Paul Sieminski in January 2024 on the company’s “P2” (a version of WordPress aimed at internal communications) – outlined a plan for how Automattic would approach this strategy, through direct negotiations with companies and via legal action from “nice and not nice lawyers and trademark enforcers.” And Automattic potentially would register further trademarks going forward. [Read more]