There are many topics on which Fox News reporting can be more truthful than others. I remember this during the peak of BLM protests and riots, for example. They also tend to cover stories that others like Reuters ignore. So they have SOMETHING worth paying attention to even if some or most is not. But I don’t read them regularly so I can’t answer really. My feeling is Fox + a left leaning equivalent like Vox + a more neutral source (WSJ, Reuters, etc) would make for a decent news diet.
> The channel was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO.
Fox news was founded to support a specific worldview. People "want" neutral reporting. What they "pay" for is to be outraged (pay with their attention).
To be clear, you're not a port worker.. correct? You're just an outsider looking in, making a blanket judgement about how easy other people's jobs are; and how easy they are to replace?
To be clear, the question was explicitly asking what makes these port workers special to demand this. If it’s just, “we want more money and have the collective power to hold the port hostage”, that’s fine. It’s just not spelled out anywhere what the justification is
That's the beauty of being in a union. You don't have to be special to have the job. Having the job is the thing that is special. Scabs are always possible for any job. Even the NFL had scabs.
This is a foreign concept to tech workers, who have been fed a religion that they are special. Surprise, you’re closer to a blue collar worker than a billionaire. Belief systems are rigid and die hard.
You too can organize for better pay and working arrangements collectively. Or, you can live and die by the at will arrangement and how lucky you are wrt comp. But don’t be sour when other people make better choices that empower themselves while you don’t.
There is zero evidence that forming a tech union would be successful and result in more pay compared to non-union workers. The first thing to go when people unionize is RSU based comp, which makes up 50+% of income for high income tech workers.
Forming a union is an antagonistic action against a corporation. You’re literally forming a cartel controlling one of their critical supplies (labor). There better be significant upside to burn that goodwill because all comp changes going forward are going to be shitty tooth and nail negotiations for salary bumps and RSUs will be kept for management only.
People at the big tech companies are looking to make life altering money and that comes through RSU accumulation and appreciation. That means being aligned with shareholders, which is the opposite of a union. The only place you might have success drumming up support for unions are mid to low tier tech companies where people make a low 6 figure salary and next to no equity.
"To be clear, the question was explicitly asking what makes these port workers special to demand this."
And I answered. The employees are not special in and of themselves. They can be replaced. That's what a scab is. Who cares what the public supports. They are not involved in this. What's the public going to do to show their lack of support?
People supported the strikes from the Writer's Guild and the Actor's Guild. They didn't want AI automation to replace their jobs. This union doesn't want a similar bit of automation to replace theirs.
To me, unions are no longer the thing they were when they were first created. From a non-union person looking in (and based on my one personal experience of going through a union vote), the people in favor of unionizing were unwilling to adapt to new technologies and feared losing their jobs or doing something they didn't want. To them, the union was a way to just say no to change because some jobs will be at stake. Seems like that's what's going on here too.
Sure, but they don’t deserve automatic support from the public for doing it. Unions striking and successfully driving up the cost of their labor can very easily be bad for consumers.
this dispute is with wordpress though. “wordpress” is not a generic term. if i called my company “MSengine”, and described it as “the most trusted microsoft platform” (a phrase i copied straight from wpengine.com)… i would get a cease and desist almost immediately.
even in the open source community, there are dozens (probably more) linux distros that have been told by ubuntu to rename their projects from “ubuntu x” to something else, for example. there are no trademark grants contained in the gpl or any of the popular open source licenses.
the only mystery is why they’ve waited so long to enforce their trademark.. but matt says they’ve been working on a deal “for a while”.. and i guess we’ll have to wait until the court case to see what that means.
The WordPress trademark guides say explicitly that "WP" is allowed to be used by others. Several other parts of the wording the WP Engine uses are also explicitly allowed. So your whole first two paragraphs are mistaken.
It also explicitly says you can't use "Wordpress" in your product names, and WP Engine is doing that. I thought it might be common, but the other big providers do not use WordPress in their product names.
Come now, this seems to be a huge abuse of "trademark" of a term. Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move. I'm gonna start adding it to my list... OpenAI, Mozilla Foundation, Wordpress.
Edit. Side note:
I looked up the Linux trademark usage guidelines. Looks like half the internet is infringing on this one too if you squint. So maybe this all boils down to a case of "Don't be a jerk" that some entities adhere to when it comes to protecting their trademark, whilst others like Automattic use it to bully competitors.
Or it's WP Engine being a jerk, and this is just a way to put some pressure on them.
Look at it this way - WordPress is the #1 platform for websites. It is a free, Open-source, and huge asset to the community. Are you going to shit on the guys who made it and gave it away because you have some sympathy for some overpriced, hosting company?
If the Wordpress team disappeared, it would be a tragedy. If WP Engine disappeared it would be nothing.
> Wordpress may be open source, but having the actual name of the "Opensource" thing be trademarked by a non-profit (that's also who-knows-how-much controlled by a for-profit entity) seems like such a dick move.
I get the "ick" factor here, but there doesn't really seem to be a better alternative. If "OpenSourceWare" isn't trademarked by non-profit "OpenSourceSoft", the options are either a) no trademark, and it's a free-for-all where the biggest marketing budget and SEO teams get the biggest return on mindshare and search results or b) Oracle gets the trademark and nobody else is allowed to use it.
The page you linked applies to trademarks owned by the Linux Foundation. The Linux trademark is actually owned by Linus Torvalds, not by the Linux Foundation; and different rules apply to it, as your link notes.
>For information regarding the Linux trademark, owned by Linus Torvalds, please see the Linux Mark Institute (administered by The Linux Foundation). Your use of the Linux trademark must be in accordance with the Linux Mark Institute’s policy.
Probably (the trademark equivalent of) fair use, because WordPress is what they are selling. If I have a basket of windows disks to sell, I can write Microsoft Windows on my price list because the thing I'm selling is called that.
This analogy came up recently when discussing Elasticsearch. It's flawed.
Free and open source software does not, and has never, required giving up trademark rights. I think the GPLv3 is even explicit about this.
In the Windows case it's fair use of the trademark because you're reselling something you previously bought. That's not applicable here.
WordPress is open source software, but a hosting service has a variety of characteristics unrelated to the nominal software. Besides, WP Engine are disabling key features of the product: of course that's misleading.
if we’re going by the trademark policy, it also says you can’t use the wordpress name in the name of your project or service.
and arguing that “wp” doesn’t mean “wordpress” and therefore is allowed, is exactly the same as me selling “msengine” for microsoft products, and telling everyone “ms” doesn’t mean microsoft. we all know what it stands for for, and if you weren’t sure, you can jut scan the page and see it’s clearly associated with wordpress. if that’s the basis of the legal defense wpengine wants to make in court, they are truly f’d.
Up until this dispute the WordPress trademark policy contained this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
Now it's been updated to say this:
> The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
It's pretty clear that WP Engine has been in compliance with the old trademark policy and that the new one is acknowledging that they don't have legal standing to demand anything about the WP abbreviation (not least because they waited so long to complain about the usage) so they're instead inserting a petulant and childish slight.
microsoft doesn’t have a trademark on “ms” either. like i said, if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
this is going to be just as flimsy of a defense as “mikerowesoft”
> if wpengine is hoping to go into court and explain that wp is not related to wordpress, while selling wordpress services… i dont think its going to go well for them.
Of course not. They will (if it goes that far) point out that their use of WP is explicitly in line with the trademark holder's public guidance on that exact point.
You can't tell everybody that it's fine to use wording like that and then sue them when they do it.
There's also "estoppel by laches", which boils down to "you waited too long". Guarantee that's going to be part of WPE's defense too. Then there's the fact that a8c actually invested in WPE while this supposed infringement was taking place.
Trademarks are largely (but not exclusively) about preventing consumer confusion. I can offer a course called "Learn how to use Excel like a pro" and not get sued by MS, as long as I'm not making it seem like I'm Microsoft.
Just like DigitalOcean can say "We will rent you an Ubuntu server". We can argue about whether calling something "Wordpress Hosting" or "Hosting a Wordpress site" is different, but I think WP Engine is being perfectly reasonable. "Wordpress Hosting" is as generic as Kleenex and Xerox at this point.
I've been thinking about this all week since this WP stuff kicked off. You know what's funny, as far as I know I was the first senior person to have a conversation with Ubuntu about that from the DO side, and as far as I recall it (granted it was a long time ago) it was basically them: "Uhm, you can't do that"- me: "maybe, not sure, but probably better to be friends tho yah?" them: "yah" me: "k" - dunno how it is today, but at least till I left, that was how it remained, always earned a shit load of respect in my book, not sure how it'd have gone for us if they decided to really get nasty, but either way, super grateful they didn't, good job Ubuntu people!!!!
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.
They changed the wording as of this dispute with WP Engine:
The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.
Trademarks need to be defended to be valid. If I started a website "YC Hacker News", Y Combinator would need to defend their trademark (if they think they have one over "YC Hacker News") or the fact that I'm using "YC Hacker News" means they don't have a trademark over that. WP Engine has been around for over a decade. Automattic and the WordPress foundation didn't have an issue with it for such a long time. If you think someone is infringing on your trademark, you can't just let them use it and come back a decade later and change your mind.
In this case, WordPress has even less argument. If Y Combinator said "you can use 'YC' and 'Hacker News' in any way you see fit," they couldn't later come back and say "nooooo, YC sounds like Y Combinator and people get confused!" The WordPress Foundation explicitly allowed everyone to use "WP" in any way they saw fit and disclaimed all trademark over "WP".
Yes, lots of companies/foundations wouldn't have allowed the generic use of "WP" for anyone to use. In this case, they explicitly allowed it and also didn't have a problem with WP Engine's use for well over a decade.
They waited so long to "enforce their trademark" because they don't have a trademark on "WP". They explicitly said so. Now they're trying to create a trademark on a term that's already been in generic use for a while - and explicitly blessed by the WordPress Foundation.
I certainly understand Automattic not liking the fact that they're doing (and paying for) the development work on WordPress while many WordPress users pay WP Engine instead of Automattic/WordPress.com. However, the ship has sailed on claiming that people aren't allowed to use "WP". From where I'm sitting, this feels similar to Elastic, Mongo and other open-source companies disliking it when third parties make money off their open-source code. Of course, WordPress (and Automattic's WordPress.com) wouldn't be the success it is without its open-source nature (just ask Movable Type).
>>>we ask if you’re going to start a site about WordPress or related to it that you not use “WordPress” in the domain name. Try using “wp” instead, or another variation...
Don't condone confusing ip policy if you don't want to end up with confusing product names, especially in a resurgence of 'the domain name is the product' of unlimited tlds.
Definitely bad IP advice, but I think it helps WP Engine to be able to say "look even all the various 'official' Wordpress sites said our name was fine for years".
You can chop up WordPress, because it's open source. But you cant chop it up and keep calling it the same thing. Only the vanilla WordPress gets to be called WordPress... because the project called WordPress has decided that the release they put out is what they want to attach their name to. Someone cant come along later, make a bunch of changes, and then attach someone elses name to it.. and then go around insisting that their version is the same thing.
Most large open source projects have a trademark policy that makes this explicit. Don't know if WP has one though.
> What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes:
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
Brazil is both richer and more powerful than Musk. It's one of the top-10 largest economies in the world. They have so much more money than Musk they can maintain exclusive control over land, raise a military, and enforce their own laws and regulations within their borders. Never seen Musk even attempt anything like that.
Brazil the country is, but Brazil the country is also made up of people, and none of them individually hold $250 billion of assets that they could use against someone - that's about 10% of Brazil's GDP (not that GDP/net worth is a particularly good comparison for a ton of reasons, but it gives a general indicator).
100 or 200 years ago someone with that kind of wealth could definitely have had a country strong-armed into doing what they want - someone like the owners of the United Fruit Company or the East India Company.
> none of them individually hold $250 billion of assets that they could use against someone
That's not what's happening here though. What's happening is the Brazilian state, through a Supreme Court justice, going against Musk. Not a single individual.
Setting aside if Brazil is richer than Musk, his wealth is his stock. He doesn’t have tens of billions in liquid assets and he most likely never will.
So let’s remember that when assuming that billionaires whose wealth is mostly tied up in their company are actually a lot less wealthy and are less able to extract their wealth then the news makes it out to be.
This is true, but neither can Brazil utilise their entire economy against him. Musk could definitely get a few billion out if he really tried (he got a $6b loan backed by Tesla stock and $20 billion in cash to buy Twitter), and the equivalent of that amount back in the day would have been enough to finance a military expedition - the Boer War was at the modern day cost of 25 billion pounds.
You should expand on that more if it's actually unreasonable.. because what you wrote sounds exactly the same as the US. The court can issue legal subpoenas, and if they aren't complied with by the deadline specified, the court has the right to enforce those orders, which can include jail time. That's an important tool for the rule of law and an independent judiciary.
If that's true, why is Fox News so much bigger than Reuters.