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?

“Rails”, “Ruby on Rails”, and the Rails logo are registered trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson, but are under exclusive license to The Rails Foundation, which is responsible for administering their use and permission. You may not use these trademarks in a commercial setting to imply that your product or service is endorsed or associated with Ruby on Rails without permission. You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association.

Huh, sounds like if I wanted to start RailsEngine I would need a trademark license. You are ignoring WP Engine’s trademark abuse while retaining the same for your Rails trademark. The same as Drupal, where “Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert, who retains sole ownership and control of this policy and any trademark licensing.” (Dries has also decided to drop in on this debate.)

He would later entirely rewrite the post and remove that.

It is true that WordPress Foundation owns the WordPress trademark, but what he left out there is they don’t in important ways control the trademark. Some of the rights to the trademark belong to Automattic, which he is the CEO of. It’s unclear what rights it actually has, as the WordPress Foundation hasn’t disclosed the licenses that currently exist. The public version of the license that Automattic seems to less broad than what Matt Mullenweg and Automattic are claiming.

Another claim that Matt Mullenweg has made recently is that the board of the foundation can revoke the license Automattic has. That doesn’t match with the public version of the license. When he made that claim, he also was stated that he personally has a license for the trademark:

I or Automattic could lose the license if the WordPress Foundation determines we are not good stewards of the WordPress trademark.

We have been unable to find a public copy of the license. And others that have been looking into this have said they also haven’t found it.

So we don’t know for sure that he has a license. It would make sense though, as he apparently personally owns the WordPress website. So he would need a license. We don’t know the scope of the license. What seems like another key detail we don’t know is when exactly he got the license. The timing seems important, as it could have been done when the foundation was just him.

While you wouldn’t know it from the WordPress Foundation’s website, the foundation has a board. It has consisted of three people for years according to public tax filings for the foundation. Matt Mullenweg is one of the directors. One of the other directors hasn’t had any apparent connection with WordPress in over a decade and the other hasn’t had any apparent connection at all.

Looking at the old tax filings, the board was created sometime in 2014. From 2011 through 2013, there were two offices. Matt Mullenweg, who is listed as President, Treasurer, and Rose Goldman, who is listed as Secretary:

Rose Goldman wasn’t reported as receiving any compensation from the foundation. She appears to have at the time been an employee at both Automattic and Audrey Capital, which are both Matt Mullenweg entities. (She is last mentioned in the tax filings in 2018 and wasn’t replaced, which is odd as Matt Mullenweg makes it sound like she running things on a day to day basis.)

Ownership of the WordPress trademark was transferred to WordPress Foundation in 2010 (whether it was donated as Matt Mullenweg has claimed is disputed). That would mean that if the license for the trademark was given to Matt Mullenweg in the first years after the transfer, the Matt Mullenweg would have been given himself the license. That would seem to create some serious legal questions.

Matt Mullenweg and or the WordPress Foundation could clear things up by releasing the trademark license agreement.