Has Microsoft stolen WordPress’ tagline? (Note: I’m sure someone in 1970 probably said “Code is Poetry” at DEC or something. 
But it has been the WordPress tagline since day 1.) ¶
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Matt Mullenweg is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web. 
Roy Schestowitz | September 10th, 2005 @ 7:04 pm |
Nothing to see here, move along. Microsoft also stole many other ideas (they will never admit it): The Mac UI, Google Earth, Google personalised homepage (start dot com)…
Rich Schmidt | September 10th, 2005 @ 7:27 pm |
Hasn’t that phrase been around a lot longer than WordPress? A quick Google search, yes indeed, points repeatedly and often to WordPress and WordPress-powered sites… but you also see pre-WP sites, especially related to Perl programming, for some strange reason…
Just pointing out that WP doesn’t seem to have any special claim to the phrase, other than popularizing it a bit…
Dante | September 10th, 2005 @ 7:47 pm |
Kinda like copyrighting “Fair and Balanced”, isn’t it?
Besides, code != poetry, at least not by my definition.
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Kevin Cheng | September 10th, 2005 @ 8:40 pm |
While I agree that MS has copied lots of ideas, neither the Mac UI, nor Google personalise homepage are original. Mac UI -> NeXT and many other concepts from PARC. Personalised homepage has been done by so many companies it’s ludicrous to even bother mentioning Google.
JB | September 10th, 2005 @ 8:40 pm |
Not to mention BGates ‘borrowing’ the entire DOS thing that started the whole M$ monopoly
Roy Schestowitz | September 10th, 2005 @ 9:16 pm |
I agree, Kevin. Some would argue that start dot com and others inspired Google Personalised. I also think that Mac were inspired by Xerox and others.
Couldn’t Microsoft be more original and go with “C0de 1s P0etry”?
Curly | September 10th, 2005 @ 10:48 pm |
Looks like the event we’re talking about is “The Micro$oft Professional Developers Conference 2005″… have not found the t-shirt yet, might be home-made…
Guess that there will some juridical rule that states that after many years of use something become that highly affiliated that it becomes “property”… so sue them!
Yusuf Smith | September 11th, 2005 @ 3:04 am |
Mac UI -> NeXT
Well, Steve Jobs was behind both, wasn’t he? So you can’t really number that among borrowed ideas.
Carthik | September 11th, 2005 @ 6:04 am |
c0d3 15 p03try, right? Schestowitz?
Consistency is key.
Roy Schestowitz | September 11th, 2005 @ 8:26 am |
I had something else in mind, Carthik. Do you remember the same ol’ story about Gates patenting binary, i.e. 0’s and 1’s? That’s just what I had in mind…
I guess it’s too late for me to file a patent for that. The US Patents Office submission is MSIE-only.
Moe | September 11th, 2005 @ 8:32 am |
Matt, this is your opportunity to make some money the American way: Litigation!
Plus, rumor has it that MS will settle on most smaller cases.
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Ozzie | September 11th, 2005 @ 9:02 am |
Have you registered WP’s tagline as a trademark? If not, please do so immediately because who knows that in the future, Microsoft will sueing WP’s developer just because using a tagline they already registered?
Matt | September 11th, 2005 @ 10:44 am |
No need to bash Microsoft guys, I mostly pointed it out because it’s funny. In my mind the more the idea and concept of “code is poetry” can spread the better things will be. Programming is a craft and more people should treat it as such.
Steve | September 11th, 2005 @ 10:48 am |
It’s nice to see this has descended into a Microsoft bashing discussion. Very mature of the community guys, very mature.
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Dan Coulter | September 11th, 2005 @ 9:14 pm |
<quote>
Nothing to see here, move along. Microsoft also stole many other ideas (they will never admit it): The Mac UI, Google Earth, Google personalised homepage (start dot com)
<quote>
Actually, I saw Microsoft demo a product like Google Earth at a tech conference back in 2001. I don’t know what they called it then, but it was hardly a Google innovation. Also, personalized homepages have been around since I got my first email address back in the mid nineties. When things like that (or a windowed/layered GUI) make sense and work intuitively, people are going to use them, whether you’re talking about Microsoft or Apple or the other countless people who have designed products that have “stolen” the idea behind the Mac UI.
Nathan Weinberg | September 11th, 2005 @ 9:26 pm |
Worth pointing out that Start.com predates Google’s personalized home page. Not that either copied the other, since the last time I checked, major corporate product development takes more than a few days.
Roy Schestowitz | September 11th, 2005 @ 10:21 pm |
Yes, I pointed that out in comment #7. I did not know this until someone left a comment/correction in my site ( http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/08/03/imitation-at-microsoft/ ).
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Katie | September 12th, 2005 @ 2:04 pm |
Actually, having heard it before associated with Perl, etc. is different than having used it before to promote a product. Thereby potentially giving the phrase trademark status for WordPress. However, since WP is free, can’t really show monetary damages, eh? And is there the potential for anyone to be really confused into believing that WP and M$ are associated with each other? A great find though! Ha!
Scott | September 13th, 2005 @ 6:26 am |
Matt, the proper phrase is , “Has Microsoft Embraced and Extended the Wordpress tagline?”
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Will | September 13th, 2005 @ 5:14 pm |
Hmmm… let’s see:
if (thee.getDate(mon) >= 6 && thee.getDate(mon)
Will | September 13th, 2005 @ 5:19 pm |
Whoops… bad go. Sorry. Serves me right for attempting to get clever and translate Shakespeare into pseudocode. Anyway,if Microsoft gets serious about the whole code is poetry thing, does that mean they might soon try to patent poetry? And what happens if they decide to change the equivalency operator in a later version? Will poetry be backward compatible? Or will it just throw an error?
Jan! | September 16th, 2005 @ 9:47 am |
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/msg/67906c9d5da5bd91?dmode=source
Gustaf | September 18th, 2005 @ 12:03 am |
Dante is right, code != poetry. Code is Pottery.
Check it: http://forum.textpattern.com/#brdfooter
=)
A joke, a joke. Isn’t Dean clever?