Automattic Going After Sites with Woo in Their Domain Name

Through a discussion in our comments section for the GPL post we recently got to know that Automattic is actively asking businesses having the word ‘woo’ in their domain name to change the domain name. This will no doubt affect GPL plugin resellers as many do have woo in their domain name. The first known site to bow to the pressure is WooGPL. The owner of that site, Billy Ablett, has in fact announced the closure of WooGPL and its reopening as GPLKit.

A quick search for Woo as a trademark brings up the JUSTIA website according to which the trademarking process seems to have been abandoned last year.

Apart from the GPL plugin resellers there are a number of other WooCommerce-related websites providing services and WooCommerce add-ons that might be affected by this action. Time will tell whether Automattic is only interested in protecting the sales of WooCommerce addons from the GPL plugin resellers or whether they will really go after anyone running a WordPress business from a domain containing the word ‘Woo’.

About Jean Galea

Jean Galea is a WordPress developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of WP Mayor and WP RSS Aggregator. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com and he also consults via Clarity.fm.

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