You’re right with respect to brand/product confusion, but wordpress.com doesn’t represent Trademark dilution in any legal sense, because it’s still under the Matt Mullenweg umbrella.

Also, I agree that the WordPress community (or at least the part of the community that is most intimately involved with the development of the project) can choose to employ an ethical structure around free-software philosophy, and based on that ethical structure, choose to accept or shun based on acceptance of/conformance to that philosophy.

But that’s not what’s being done; rather, Matt is attempting to use the force of law, via the GPL (which is a copyright license), to enforce use of the GPL. And therein lies the problem, because the GPL doesn’t give him the legal power that he claims it does. Themes and Plugins that do not incorporate actual core WordPress code are not WordPress-derivative works, period.

As for “using the law to justify being legally allowed to piss someone else off”: this type of thinking is where I become incredibly anti-hippie. Nobody has a right not to be pissed off. Part of encouraging the advancement of free-software philosophy is accepting that the freedoms you have given to others includes the freedom to use code in ways that you don’t like. Releasing code under GPL and then attempting through the power of persuasion, peer-pressure, and guilt-trips to restrict the freedoms and rights within the license is the epitome and height of hypocrisy.

As for GPL, I still think the best option is “not pissing in the pool” and do what the majority of people who commit code to WP core believe is the license.
The majority who do contribute significant amounts of code (those that are still with the project) seem to agree with Matt or “take the party line” thus any other interpretation is using the law to justify being legally allowed to piss someone else off.

What, exactly, are you attempting to contribute to the conversation? The bottom line is, Matt is incorrectly interpreting the GPL. Unless a Theme has actual WordPress code in it (as with what was found in Thesis 1.7), mere calling of functions and hooks does not constitute a derivative work. Precedent copyright case law is quite clear on this point.

I can quite easily turn your assertion back on you, and on Matt: if you don’t want people extending your GPL code with non-GPL code, then don’t (freaking) write extensible code.

What I really can’t understand is: why is Matt wasting so much time and energy attacking Thesis (and furthering his grudge against Chris Pearson – see Cutline/Coraline and PressRow/Pilcrow), while at the same time risking the loss of the WordPress trademark by failing to go after the hundreds of websites that use “wordpress” in their domain name, in direct violation of WPORG’s (or is it, WPF’s) domain-name policy.

Tell me: which poses the greater long-term risk to the health of the WordPress project, Chris Pearson or dilution and loss of the trademark?

And really, the solution is to do whatever the hell you want with WordPress since the WordPress Foundation doesn’t actually do anything about it.

Solution: Don’t freaking use WordPress then! Either you accept it as it comes, or you don’t. If you do, abide by it. If you don’t, use some other freaking software to develop upon.

There may not direct benefits for vendors going GPL, but there are for the clients and the WP community. Useful php code snippets can be reused, built upon, forked etc.

It’s obvious what Matt thinks of Thesis but there’s absolutely no reason to mention ThemeForest since they are GPL compliant even by Matt’s standards.

I think my interview series with several GPL theme dev’s illustrated that there really is very little benefit to complying to Matt’s standard, other than avoiding attacks from Matt.