SpacePirate
TL;DR: Cofounder of open source project says super popular platform using their project needs to pay up for inane reasons. Chaos ensues.
In summary:
WP Engine is one of the most popular third party platforms built on top of WordPress.
They have a link and images on their webpage referencing that they are built on top of Wordpress (this is legal).
The former cofounder of Wordpress said that they are illegally using the Wordpress trademark.
WP Engine sends Cease and Desist.
WordPress Cofounder doubles down, blocks WP Engine and demanded WP Engine pay licensing fees for using their branding.
This pissed off a lot of people.
WP Engine sues. For a lot, including extortion, abuse of power, and asserts the cofounder of WordPress has criminally made false statements to the IRS.
The Executive Director for Wordpress resigns, presumably in solidarity with WP Engine and the community.
Actively encouraging people to toss perfectly good hardware to fuel their subscription bullshit… and these guys weren’t even recently bought by a VC firm or anything?
The best description I have seen for single store franchisees is, you’ve paid a lot to give yourself a job. They are not lucrative, and in fact, are capital intensive, and often predatory.
There is a very high up front cost, and you generally do not own the real estate. This means you are locked into 30 year leases, often with complicated terms that are solely beneficial to the land owner.
Next, with regards to liquidity, if you don’t own the real estate, you often can’t get multiple business loans with a single franchise, so you must secure the loan with your personal assets, which means you will go personally bankrupt if you hit a rough patch.
Then, after dealing with the complicated business to business transactions and legal work, you still have to deal with the corporate bullshit, taxes, and supervisory duties, particularly if you do not already have a strong business partner to do this for you.
Pretty much, unless you are independently wealthy, own the real estate in a high traffic location, or already have multiple other franchises, it’s a losing venture that will kill your soul and eat every dollar you have.
This is nothing new, other than that Chase has brought this capability in-house. Credit card companies have shared purchase information with second parties forever.
Chase Media Solutions follows from the integration of card-linked marketing platform Figg, which JPMorgan Chase & Co. acquired in 2022
MMORPGs are an easy example, where people form recognizable identities and communities in game. An extension of this would be Second Life, and somewhat more recently, VRChat.
So consider it from their position: fuck everyone else