The legal battle for control of WordPress continues, and this time, hosting companies are the ones receiving the notices.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from January 27th to February 2nd, 2025.
The official community event sponsor review process receives a new notice, which began in November when the battle between Automattic and WP Engine was at its peak.
Automattic is using the WordPress brand and logo for commercial purposes, asking companies to pay the branding usage fee, and now this directly affects the Community.
As was already known, organizations like Newfold were paying for the usage rights for Bluehost to be one of the external WordPress Hosting providers outside of Automattic, and now it is doing the same with other companies, making it clear through the Community team that if you’re not on the official list of those using the logo and brand, you won’t be able to sponsor events.
Once again, the line between Open-Source WordPress and Automattic’s commercial WordPress is narrowing. This is happening with some changes in the sponsor review system, which will no longer depend on local teams as before but will be reviewed by the global Community team, with supervision once a week by the WordPress.org leadership.
This is not limited to WordPress usage but also to adhering to the GPL license, as Automattic has also been involved in several legal cases, such as the Festinger Vault case, which has led to the blocking of the use of the WooCommerce and WordPress brands, and which is also being extended to other sponsors.
The Training team has outlined its goals for 2025, focused on expanding and improving the educational offerings of the community. Key goals include improving content and creating new resources that address the needs of both beginners and advanced users.
Additionally, there is a plan for greater integration and collaboration with other areas of the community and with external partners, to align education with technological advancements and market demands.
The Openverse team has removed a watermark API endpoint that needed to be blocked for the security and stability of the platform. This endpoint had some unresolved vulnerabilities, returned 500 errors, and was practically unused.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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