I can't imagine the professional reputational damage I'd incur if I were to recommended wordpress, or worse, wordpress.com after all of this.

The court opinion doesn't mean what he is implying, although he isn't outright lying. See my explanation in this top-level comment I just made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228927

Agreed about Matt, completely. It should be remembered that although it's framed as a legal win, it's not THE legal win. I am not a lawyer, but I think the practice is generally to make as many arguments as the law will support up front– but not all of them were ever going to stick. And WP Engine can still remedy any deficiencies in their pleading to try to make them stick (I'll wait for legal minds to finish reading this and explain it to me, though).

> I’m appalled that the courts sided with Automattic

There are 11 claims in WPE's complaint, three were dismissed, and as I understand it, only one of them decisively. Matt wants to spin it as good news, good for him. He's still potentially getting taken to the cleaners if he doesn't settle.

It's not clear to you that trying to use trademark law to prevent a company selling WordPress software from saying they offer WordPress software is "being in the wrong"?

you didnt even link to the right version of the DHH post! The original had this gem of a paragraph:

> David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?

https://archive.md/4yLNR

I wrote to DHH at the time hoping the Hey World part could be open sourced or ONCE as a blogging platform. But he wasn't interested in the idea.

IIRC: guy made a CMS, built a successful company and organization and trademarks around it, decided last year that another company was using it unfairly, created lots of drama, lost his marbles

One of his first posts on the topic: https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/

A collection of crazy quotes and events, biased towards the other perspective: https://mullenweg.wtf/

Edit: and HN commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

I remember this to be a pretty good recap of the whole fiasco:

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

It ain't working for him, but it's all he's got.

He didn't win. He won in the way Apple won over Epic. (Apple lost.) People seem not to understand that in a lawsuit like this the lawyers throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. WPEngine surely didn't expect all of this to fly... but some of it did.

he hasnt come even slightly close to winning his case