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Fuzz, and fuzz again. Domain names and trademarks, licenses and patents, lawyers and law-suits, customers and communities. Here’s yet another point of view.
TL;DR: two guys with too much money at a too young age decide to fuck each other over in public, because they haven’t managed to square a matter back when it was due.
Dear community: don’t you give a shit.
It’s them. It’s not Automattic versus the rest of “us”. It’s not Mullenweg, the dictator, aiming to put any random WordPress-based company out of business. It’s not even DIYThemes versus Automattic if you ask me.
All it is is Chris versus Matt versus Chris versus Matt.
Just let them have it out and get back to business, FFS.
Where did the 100k come from for thesis.com?
Has it been disclosed yet? I don’t know. Was it really 100k, or less, or more? Dunno either. Does it even matter? To me it does not.
Buying a domain for thousands of dollars just to not have a competitor getting it, may be common business practice. In our context of an open-source project where hundreds of contributors donate real time out of their real life without compensation to help building the very software that then enables larger companies generate immense profits–in that context I’d argue falling back on the aforementioned business practice is not only highly inappropriate, but plainly obscene.